The Imposter

by Anna Wharton

  Chloe’s heart is thumping. ‘Who’s Angie?’

  Immediately, she looks down into the milkiness of her tea, asking herself whether she made her question sound natural enough. But she’s got to get them talking, isn’t that why she’s here?

  ‘That’s our little girl, isn’t it, Pat?’ Maureen says.

  He looks up from the television at Maureen, and then at Angie. His face softens on cue.

  ‘What’s she up to now?’ Chloe asks, this time going for a breezy tone. She hates herself for having to do it this way.

  Maureen’s eyes dip; she takes a moment to compose herself. When she looks up it’s with an expression that appears mastered for moments like this.

  ‘We don’t know, love,’ she says. ‘She disappeared, when she was just a little girl.’

  Maureen gets up and takes the framed photograph down from the sideboard, holding it in both hands. She smiles at it, wipes away an invisible layer of dust, then walks back and passes it to Chloe on the sofa.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Chloe says, taking the picture. That’s not a lie. She holds the photograph in her hands and although she’s looked at it – studied it – many, many times before, even on her old bedroom wall, this time it’s different; the weight of the glass and frame in her hands, the specks of dust that cling to it, the volume turned up just that bit too loud on the TV, all of it adds to the picture, just like she knew it would.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Chloe says. ‘Do you have any more photographs?’

  ‘Of Angie?’

  Chloe swallows a little, then nods.

  ‘Oh, hundreds.’

  ‘Can I see them?’ Chloe asks.

  ‘You want to?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maureen says. ‘Yes, they’re all here.’

  Maureen keeps them in the same cupboard at the bottom of the sideboard where Nan keeps hers – like so many homes she’s been in do. Maureen carries the albums over to the sofa, places them down one on top of the other on the seat cushion between them. Chloe picks up a brown leather-bound one first, starts flicking through the pages, cellophane and static sticking them together. Maureen points out Angie’s baby photos as Chloe flicks slowly through: the ones of Angie lying naked on a sheepskin rug; sitting upright in the pram; holding up her cloth cat to the camera – the toy plumper then than the saggier version she’d come to know in the newspapers. Some of the photographs Chloe recognizes from the cuttings in the archive, not that she says anything. She can’t, not yet. Not until she has something more solid. She’s doing it for them really.

  Chloe makes the mistake of saying, ‘Look,’ once or twice when she turns a page and finds a photograph she knows, but Maureen just smiles and says, ‘Yes, Angie loved that little scooter,’ or, ‘Yes, that’s Puss,’ but of course Chloe already knew that.

  Patrick looks across at them from the TV every now and then, although Chloe noticed a while ago – even if Maureen didn’t – that he’d turned the volume up a couple of notches.

  ‘Don’t the police have any leads?’ Chloe asks.

  Maureen rolls her eyes, then shakes her head. ‘Don’t get me started on them.’

  ‘Oh?’ Chloe says. But she doesn’t elaborate.

  Maureen sits quietly for a moment, holding one particular photograph in her hand. It’s a faded polaroid; in it, Angie stands next to a Christmas tree, her face covered in chocolate.

  ‘What do they think happened to her?’ Chloe asks.

  Maureen puts the photo back in the album and fiddles with the cuffs of her jumper. ‘They don’t know, they . . . they say they’ll never close the case completely, you know, without a . . . without . . .’

  Chloe nods so she doesn’t have to say it.

  ‘But we don’t know, do we, Pat?’ Maureen says that last bit a little louder. ‘I say, do we, Patrick?’

  ‘Huh? What?’ He springs round in his armchair, muting the television.

  ‘Chloe was just asking what the police think might have happened to our Angie.’

  He looks at Chloe, then back at the TV. ‘If only we knew, eh, love . . .’ he says quietly to Maureen.

  He doesn’t put the sound on again for a minute or two; instead he just stares at the screen, while Maureen picks up a couple of loose photographs and turns them over in her hand. Chloe decides not to ask too many questions tonight, reminding herself that there’s plenty of time for that. She looks around the living room, still hardly believing this is her home now.

  ‘Look, Pat, this one is from Hunstanton,’ Maureen says. ‘Our Angie loved it there, didn’t she? Remember her on that carousel at the little fair they had at the end of the promenade?’

  Patrick smiles to himself, then lifts the volume on the television again, the spirit of the room inflated once again by a happy memory. Chloe is always amazed how that happens.

  Maureen hands the photograph to her. It’s of Angie, aged around three, buried deep in the Hunstanton sand, only her head and her right hand poking out. She waves at the camera with her tiny fingers. Beside her sits Maureen, the pair of them giggling away. And behind them, on the sunbed, a shadow, a darker, more serious face, just out of focus.

  ‘You’re not cold are you, love?’ Maureen says. ‘You’ve got goosebumps.’

  Chloe shakes her head quickly, while Maureen goes back to the picture.

  ‘There’s Patrick in his younger days,’ Maureen says, her fingernail hovering over the face Chloe noticed behind them. She looks up at Patrick in his armchair – of course it’s him. How strange that she hadn’t recognized him, but the camera has a funny way of capturing people sometimes. Maureen holds her palm out and Chloe hands the photograph back to her, then she puts away the rest of the albums and goes into the kitchen for a packet of garibaldis she forgot she’d bought.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Chloe opens her eyes, blinking in the blackness of the room. She can’t sleep.

  It’s quiet, much quieter than Nan’s. It’s dark too. When she wakes in the middle of the night at Nan’s, her bedroom is a dull orange colour, the light from the street lamp outside streaking through her curtains. But here, there are no street lights, she is surrounded by nothing but the whistle of the wind at her windows. On cue, the glass rattles slightly next to her bed. She pushes her covers back and dips her head behind the curtains, feeling the cold of the glass and a thin, freezing draught on her skin. Chloe searches the sky for the moon but tonight, there aren’t even stars. Her breath soon fogs up the glass and she dips back under the curtains.

  She checks the time on her watch. 1.21 a.m. It’s only been two hours since she went to bed. Patrick had filled her and Maureen in on the show he was watching, so the three of them had sat in silence for the last hour of the evening to see the killer finally caught. Chloe had felt a small thrill when the mystery was solved, the idea of a resolution sitting far closer to the surface of her skin these days. Her attention had dipped in and out as she examined the room and the two people she sat beside. She’d filled two pages of her notebook before she fell asleep: Maureen has a habit of twiddling her feet at the ankles while she watches TV, and Patrick makes a groaning sound each time he gets up out of his chair. Every detail has to go into her book.

  She’d come up to bed first, carrying her toothbrush, toothpaste and towel through to the bathroom like she was staying in a bed and breakfast rather than her new home. She still finds it hard to believe she’s here. She can’t say she feels she’s deceiving the Kyles, not when her motivations are so genuine and her focus so fixed. How could she? She is here to help.

  In the black of the night, she scans the room, only just making out the shapes of the furniture. Chloe knows it’s going to take some getting used to; it usually does. It’s not just the look of the place, it’s the sounds too, or rather the lack of them. She’d got used to the noises Nan’s house made after dark, the click and whoosh of the central heating, the slow tap of the radiator in her room that they never got round to bleeding. Here she has a whole o
ther after-dark language to learn. And it’s not just the noises, either. There are the smells in other people’s homes, too. We forget each place has its individual notes. Ones we quickly become accustomed to; an infusion of dust and washing powder, perfume and aerosols, cleaning products, human skin. So far she’s been struck by an old-fashioned potpourri smell about the Kyles’ home, that and another bottom note, one she can’t quite put a name to, some kind of earthy, damp scent. She casts her mind back and wonders how she would have once described Nan’s house. Mothballs and old-lady perfume? There had been the cat then, too.

  Suddenly light fills her room. Enough to define the shape of the wardrobe, the bed, a pile of her clothes on the floor. She scrambles up on the mattress, folding up her knees and wrapping her arms around them. A strip of light illuminates under the door. She sits on her pillow, holding her breath.

  Outside on the landing, she hears the soft padding of footsteps. One or two floorboards creak underfoot. Perhaps Maureen or Patrick has got up to use the bathroom? But there’s something different about the creak of the door that opens, as if the sound is contained in the wall beside her. And there’s something else – it’s not followed by the soft ping of the pulley light in the bathroom, the stir of the electric air vent. Just a dull click that could almost be coming from inside her own room.

  She gets up, tiptoeing across the floorboards. She presses her ear up to the door. She tries desperately to still her breath or at least slow it down so she can listen, but instead the rush of her own blood pounds inside her ears. Her hand reaches for the brass doorknob; she turns it, feeling it click underneath her grasp. The latch breaks free of the frame, and Chloe opens the door slowly, peering out onto the landing. All is still, all is dark. The moon beams through the small window at the top of the stairs, falling on Christ on the wall inches from her own head. Each door is still closed. No light shines out from underneath the bathroom door.

  Perhaps she had imagined it. Perhaps what she thought were footsteps was actually the soft tap-tapping of the radiators, of the copper expanding and contracting between the joists. There would be a simple explanation. Only she’s about to return to the warmth of her sleepy duvet when she sees another slit of light. It is shining out from the room next to hers – the room Maureen told her is for storage. She stops still – something about the door is different. She realizes the shiny padlock has gone, and in the exact same second a shadow passes underneath the door. Someone is in there. Someone is in the padlocked room. And then, as quickly as that thought occurs, the light inside goes off. As if whoever it is knows she is watching.

  Chloe stands once again in the darkness, the moon making her nightie shine whiter. She holds her breath, listens for another sound. But there is nothing. No one moving inside, no footsteps. All is absolutely still again.

  Why would anyone be in there at this time of night?

  She wraps her body around her own door frame as if it might offer something more solid. Now her mind really is racing. Her toes wriggle against the grain of the wood under her bare feet, a soft draught wraps itself around her ankles. She shivers.

  She takes one step back into her room and closes the door, wincing as it clicks into place. Back in bed she peers out from under her duvet, once again unable to make out a thing in her room. She doesn’t hear another sound, as if it had all been a dream.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Chloe times her arrival at Park House for just after the staff have finished clearing away lunch.

  ‘Hello, Chloe, we haven’t seen you in a while,’ says one of the care assistants as they buzz her in.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Work.’ She shrugs her shoulders and the woman nods like she understands.

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard to fit it all in, isn’t it?’ she says, throwing a tea towel casually over her arm. It’s a generic line Chloe is sure she’s used to rolling out here, but she nods as if it was meant especially for her.

  ‘Is Nan around?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, she’s in her room, I think, but she usually has a nap after lunch.’

  ‘Oh,’ Chloe says.

  ‘Pop along anyway, she wouldn’t want to miss you.’

  ‘Thanks, yeah,’ Chloe replies. But she has no intention of waking Nan up.

  Her door is closed when Chloe arrives at it. She doesn’t knock. Instead she lingers for a while in the corridor, wasting a few moments looking at the watercolours of bland fields that line the walls, the same kind you’d see in any care home. What is so attractive about this one-size-fits-all approach? As if people find safety in keeping things the same. It’s always been the opposite for her.

  Chloe lets a few more minutes pass before she takes the circular corridor back round to the office.

  ‘No luck?’ the same carer says.

  Chloe sighs. ‘Never mind. Will you let her know I popped by?’

  ‘Of course, no problem at all. Just sorry you had a wasted journey.’

  Chloe heads out through the double doors. It’s a sunny day. Spring is starting to coax daffodils to reveal their faces and birds flit here and there happily. Chloe takes the short path around the back of Park House into Ferry Meadows. She comforts herself with the fact that at least she has tried to see Nan today.

  Nan had recovered quickly after her fall, and Miriam had assured Chloe on the phone that what she needed was more rest, not to be exhausted with visitors. At least that’s how Chloe had interpreted it. Although, in truth, she only has one visitor, and that is her. But Chloe knows Nan finds it tiring to have someone sitting there, prodding at her with 2004 when she’s far happier back in the fifties with Stella. She’ll leave her there for another day – after all, she’s not hurting anyone.

  Chloe takes a familiar path. She knows both the curve and the camber by now. When she reaches the park she pushes through the short yellow metal gate and it whines a greeting back. She sits down on an empty bench, surprised to feel the cold through her coat. A mother watching her little boy on the slide looks over at her. From her bag Chloe pulls a Tupperware box; inside are two cheese sandwiches. She smiles as she remembers Maureen handing them to her this morning.

  ‘Well, I was making them anyway for Patrick,’ she’d said, excusing her fussing.

  ‘I could get used to this,’ Chloe said, and they’d laughed. She and Maureen had anyway. Patrick had taken his clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches from the worktop without saying a word. Maureen hadn’t seemed to notice.

  Chloe takes a bite of her sandwich – nothing tastes better than a sandwich made by someone else and Maureen has a particular way of spreading the mayonnaise on the top slice that makes it really perfect.

  Chloe smiles to herself and the woman moves her child over to the swings.

  The park is quieter than usual. Chloe has watched the toddlers playing in here while eating her lunch before. They race around with their wobbly gait, often falling onto their knees, their mums rushing to pick them up and wipe them down, sending them off again with a kiss in their ear. Chloe has pictured Maureen doing the same with Angie many times. She must miss having someone to make a fuss of. Perhaps that’s why she’s been making fewer and fewer excuses for fussing around Chloe. She’s stopped pretending she’d made too much food by accident and now just serves up Chloe a plate of whatever they’re having each night. Chloe and Maureen take their time at the small kitchen table, chatting about this and that. Patrick eats faster now, excusing himself to the television. Maureen notices less and less. Chloe helps her tidy up – she washes while Maureen dries – her small way of saying thanks. She likes to be extra particular about washing dishes, especially as it buys them more time together. Anyway, she knows Maureen enjoys the company, it must have been lonely for her with it just being the two of them all these years. She’s often looked up from the soap suds and caught Maureen’s eye in the glass that is made a mirror by the black night.

  As she takes a bite of her sandwich, the child cries out from the swings, his fingers twisted in the cold metal.

 
Chloe finishes her sandwich and puts the Tupperware away. She pulls a packet of ready salted crisps from her lunch box – she’d only had to mention to Maureen once that she liked them – and opens the bag. She watches as the mother kisses her son’s fat little fingers. Before Low Drove, Chloe would have felt lonely sitting here. She wonders if this mother knows what happened in this park all those years ago. People forget about Angie now. Perhaps they’ve never even heard of her. Or Maureen and Patrick. School teachers, neighbours, priests, public, people quoted in the newspaper articles Chloe’s read – they cared once but then life moved on. Not for Maureen and Patrick. Not for Chloe. Not now.

  She walks across the playground and puts the empty crisp packet in the bin. On the way back she sees the woman with the toddler watching her. Chloe checks her watch – it’s almost three. She’ll have a slow walk back to town and then it’ll be time to get the bus home with all the other commuters.

  Chloe arrives back to an empty house.

  ‘Hello?’ she calls. Then remembers Maureen telling her they always go supermarket shopping on a Thursday afternoon.

  She’s got used to their routines in the last week or so. Patrick has a part-time job at a local seed factory. He works on the production line there – just for pocket money, Maureen says. Some weeks he works days, others evenings. Chloe likes those shifts the best, the nights when she and Maureen get to eat alone at the little kitchen table and then chat in the living room until they hear his car pull up on the drive, his headlights illuminating the back garden. Then Maureen will get up and leave her sitting in the living room, and Chloe will listen as she dishes up Patrick’s dinner and sits with him at the table while he eats. She goes up to her room then and from underneath her bed, buried way back behind a short pile of magazines and a pair of trainers, she’ll pull out the shoebox in which she keeps a selection of the original cuttings from her bedroom wall and, of course, her pale blue notebook. She’ll write everything down in there. And when she looks at those cuttings, she barely recognizes the Maureen she sees in the pictures. She is sure some of those frown lines have been ironed out already, and she has wondered how much of that she could put that down to her own arrival.