The Imposter

by Anna Wharton

No, Maureen doesn’t know anything about this. It is inconceivable to think she is complicit in his lie. Chloe shakes her head. She won’t have it. It is impossible to hold those two thoughts together. That woman, who has been so loyal in her grief all these years, who has trusted her husband implicitly. It would kill her to know he’s been lying to her. It would kill her to know that he has known all this time just what had happened to their daughter.

  Hollie is still speaking, but Chloe cuts her short.

  ‘Hollie, I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to go.’

  ‘What do you mean, go? Go where? Where are you?’

  ‘I can’t explain at the moment.’

  ‘Chloe, you’re worrying me . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll explain as soon as I can.’

  And she hangs up. However hard the truth may be to hear, Maureen deserves to know what really happened to her daughter, and Chloe will be the one to tell her.

  Chloe has decided to pretend she’s come home from work sick. She can already picture how Maureen will whittle, how she’ll reach a cold hand to her forehead to check her temperature, how she’ll insist Chloe needs to go straight up to her room and she’ll bring her a mug of hot steaming tea. Even this thought makes Chloe feel uneasy, of leaving Maureen down there with him, unknowing.

  The bus rumbles along the potholed Fen roads and her stomach pitches up and down in time with the tyres. It reminds her of the first time she came out here – just for a look, she had promised herself. She had no idea then how things would turn out.

  She stares out of the window, spotting the fields that are sown with sugar beet, the long straight lines of tiny lush green now competing with worms to push through the soil. Soon these fields will be thick with leaves, disguising the furrows that separate them by early summer. Chloe had thought she would still be here then, that she would watch this barren landscape turn technicolour with wild flowers, just as Maureen had described to her. But she knows that inside her coat she is carrying a bomb back to Low Drove. Information that will explode inside that house, maybe even further.

  The bus pulls into a stop, and Chloe’s racing head stills for the time it takes to let passengers off. The doors close and the bus moves on down the road and it’s only then that she realizes. Her head has been so busy with thoughts of Patrick, for Maureen’s safety, with exposing his lies, that she hasn’t stopped for a moment to consider herself in all this. She pictures again Maureen’s concerned face when she walks in the door. She is all that Maureen has now, and this information – this bomb that she can detonate – will destroy that too. A clammy coldness creeps across her skin.

  Patrick hadn’t told her as some kind of confession – why would he after all these years? No, he’d told her to make her as much of a liar as he is. He must feel confident she won’t tell Maureen. He knows that would compromise her own place in their house. She thinks he’s paid no attention to her all these weeks, but he knows her well enough to understand what she has come to mean to Maureen. What Maureen believes she could be to her. What she was convincing Chloe she may be. Now suddenly it makes perfect sense why Patrick had started to go along with it. Why he doesn’t call Maureen crazy anymore. Why he had welcomed Chloe into his home.

  She presses the bell on the bus. She stands up. Presses again. Again and again. The Bus Stopping sign flashes, but the driver continues. He looks up in the mirror as she makes her way to the front of the bus.

  ‘Ent no stop now til West Fen,’ he says into the rear-view mirror.

  Chloe clutches her stomach and heaves.

  ‘Stop the bus,’ she says.

  ‘Ent no stop—’

  ‘Stop the bus.’

  Finally, it slows. She feels the other passengers’ eyes on her as she makes for the front door. Her head is spinning. The doors open. Long grass disguises the step as the doors open. Chloe almost falls off the bus. She rights her balance as she lands in the soft mud. The doors close. The bus pulls away.

  The thought rises along with the bile. There is a reason that Patrick is allowing Maureen to think that she is Angie. Because if she does, it’ll mean keeping his own murderous secret.

  She stumbles forward a few feet, and then, alone, at the side of the road, she vomits.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Low Drove looks like a film set as she approaches. An unsuspecting, end-of-the-road village. Its isolation haunting. The sky presses down today, dark heavy clouds thick with rain. At the other end of the village, the red Wall’s ice cream sign flaps wildly in the wind.

  Chloe had to wait almost another hour for a bus. She started walking but then pictured Patrick’s blue car driving along the road and finding her. Instead, she sat on the banks of the dyke, among the long grass, her back to the road, listening out for the heavy hum of the bus as it approached.

  Now in Low Drove, she walks across the road and passes through the fronds of the willow tree. She spins around as they close behind her, stopping for a moment as the leaf curtain flickers this way and that, obscuring her view back to the main road.

  She turns and continues towards Elm House. She’s relieved to see no car on the drive, and her gait quickens for a second as pictures flash into her mind: Maureen sitting at the kitchen table, a hurried explanation from Chloe, the two of them gathering their things. But she slows again as she remembers: to expose Patrick is to expose herself. She can only convince Maureen that he killed her daughter if she confesses that she can’t possibly be the missing girl herself. She can’t do that.

  It’s not as if Chloe hasn’t tried to look for an innocent explanation. She wondered perhaps if the police had deliberately thrown the public off the scent. Perhaps Maureen and Patrick were somehow complicit in a cat and mouse game between the police and the abductor? But she knows enough about searches for missing children from her time at the newspaper to know that information made public is the only way of ensuring their return. That is, if they are searching in the right place to start with.

  Chloe had also considered that it might have been an innocent mistake. Perhaps trauma had left Patrick with some kind of amnesia – you hear about these things, she figured. But whatever had impaired his thinking then had clearly worn off now. It didn’t add up; how could he play the devoted, heartbroken father and not tell the police something so vital that might bring back his child? She thinks about their friend Josie – did she have a hunch that he had been lying all these years? Is that why she didn’t seem to like him? Chloe wonders if she could speak to her, and then remembers how unfriendly she’d been to Chloe, too.

  Whatever way she looked at it, she was always left with the most sinister supposition of all: Patrick had lied to conceal his daughter’s murder. And he was allowing Chloe to pretend to be her in order to cover up the truth.

  Elm House slowly comes closer. Chloe swallows. Once, twice. Her mouth feels dry. She has tried to run through the conversation she could have with Maureen, of course she has. But what’s to say Maureen would even believe her? After Angie disappeared, Patrick was her rock. Why would she believe Chloe over a man she’s been married to for nearly four decades? Chloe tells herself that if she truly believes she is her missing daughter, then she will. She has to. And then she ties herself up in knots all over again because of course she won’t, not if Chloe tells her what she’s really thinking.

  Her hatred for Patrick swells inside each step. He’s done this. If she keeps his secret, he will make her as guilty as he is. She hates him for that. Hates him and fears him because if these thoughts – these suspicions – are correct, Patrick is guilty of infanticide. He is his own daughter’s killer.

  Chloe reaches the house, but it feels different now. Every one of her senses is alert to a new sound, a new smell. She arrives at the back door. Through the glass panel, she can see Maureen sitting at the table, head bowed, lost in a book. If only she could keep her that way, locked in innocence. Chloe doesn’t want to blow her world apart – has this woman not suffered enough? – but she needs to know. She deser
ves to know. Chloe pushes her hand down on the handle. She thought she’d come here to find out the truth – just not this truth.

  ‘What are you doing home at this time, Chloe, love?’ Maureen says, looking up, double-checking the clock as she does.

  Chloe had forgotten for a moment that she was going to feign illness. If Patrick had been there, she would have needed an excuse for coming home early. For a split second she is unsure whether to reach for her head or her stomach. She goes for her head.

  ‘Oh lovey,’ Maureen says, getting up from her chair and rushing to her side. She puts her hand out to her forehead just as Chloe knew she would. She holds it there, and Chloe presses her head forward, as if Maureen’s palm could take away not just this fictional pain, but all of it. All of it always. Why is it that nothing can stay the same forever? Chloe feels like she might cry.

  ‘Well, you haven’t got a temperature, so that’s a good thing,’ Maureen says.

  She guides her by her elbow to a chair at the table, pulling it out and encouraging Chloe into it. On the draining board, upside down, there are six pink plastic beakers, the kind you might find in a school or a nursery. Maureen sees her staring at them.

  ‘Let me get you a glass of water,’ she says. ‘These are new – for you.’

  Maureen pours her water into one of the beakers and Chloe takes it in two hands. She takes a sip as Maureen sits down opposite her.

  ‘Patrick not here?’ Chloe asks.

  ‘Hmm? No,’ Maureen says, ‘though he shouldn’t be too long. Why? You’re not thinking you need running to the doctor’s, are you? I mean, I’m sure he would – of course he would – but you don’t feel that poorly, do you, love?’

  Chloe shakes her head. ‘I’ll be fine, I just need some rest. There’s been something going round at work, it’s probably that.’

  Maureen sighs. ‘Probably . . . I remember when you . . .’ She stops.

  ‘When I what?’ Chloe asks.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Maureen says, looking down at the tablecloth and running the seam of it round her index finger. ‘Well, I was going to say, I remember when you . . . well . . . I remember when Angie started school, there wasn’t a day when she didn’t come home with something – when you didn’t come home with something.’ She says the last bit as if it’s a new dress that she’s still trying on for size.

  Chloe looks down into her lap. All she can see, all she can hear, is him. She looks up again quickly, into Maureen’s trusting face, just inches from hers. She wants to tell herself that there is enough between them, that even if Maureen knew for sure that she wasn’t Angie, that she would still keep her, that they’d still have each other.

  ‘What is it, love?’ Maureen says suddenly. ‘You really don’t seem yourself.’

  Chloe reaches for Maureen’s hand. The two parts of her heart pulling away from each other. Had she come here to deceive? That wasn’t what she had thought she was doing. And yet, she can’t tell the truth.

  ‘It’s just . . . it’s just . . .’

  Maureen takes her hand and holds it.

  ‘What is it, Chloe, love? Has something come back to you, is this what it is? Have you remembered? Is that why your head is hurting?’

  Chloe clutches her temples, because now it really is hurting. She flashes back for a moment, to the car, to the conversation with Patrick. Snapshots race through her mind. She has to tell her. She has to tell her. But Chloe’s uncertainty – or perhaps hope – that she’s still got something wrong nags at her. Worse is a fear that Maureen hasn’t been honest either, that she knows Patrick wasn’t at the park that day. But hadn’t she run through that thought earlier? Hadn’t she discarded it as impossible?

  ‘It’s just I was telling Patrick this morning, about a dream I had.’

  Maureen shuffles closer; she’s on the edge of her chair.

  ‘It was different – to others, I mean.’

  Maureen nods. She feels her squeeze her hand, as if to help her go on.

  ‘It felt . . . it felt like I’d been there before, and, well . . .’

  ‘Been where, love?’

  ‘A park.’

  Maureen blanches. Chloe tries to read what she can from the look on her face, but it’s blank. Why? Because she knows nothing, or she wants to make it look like she does? Chloe reaches for her head again.

  ‘I was in a park, and it was only me and Patrick, and the grass, it was long . . .’

  Maureen sits straighter. ‘What length?’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The grass. I mean, here?’ She points to ankle height. ‘Here?’ She moves up to over her knees.

  Chloe thinks of the picture, the one she had studied that morning back at Nan’s. Thank God.

  Her hand hovers just around her own knee.

  ‘Well, it would be here now, but then . . .’

  ‘When?’ Maureen says, quickly. ‘Try and remember, Chloe.’

  Chloe hears a car on the road outside; her eyes flicker to the window – not that she’d be able to see – but Maureen remains bolt upright in her chair, pleading with her eyes for more. Chloe starts speaking faster, in case it is Patrick arriving home.

  ‘I was little. The grass, then, it was . . . it was almost to here.’ She shows Maureen by making a line right across the middle of her neck. ‘And there were swings, yellow ones.’

  Maureen lets go of Chloe’s hands just in time for the pair of them to hear for sure Patrick’s tyres crunching on the pebble drive. A little gasp escapes Maureen’s mouth.

  The car door slams.

  ‘Well, Patrick . . . he was there one minute and then the next . . .’

  ‘Gone?’ Maureen asks.

  ‘Well, yeah, gone . . . I, I don’t know . . .’

  Maureen gets up from her chair and almost floats across the kitchen just in time to see Patrick heading from the car past the window by the sink.

  ‘I don’t know what it means,’ Chloe says.

  ‘What it means?’ asks Maureen, her face a wide and brilliant smile that takes two decades off the woman standing before Chloe. ‘What it means is that your memory is coming back. Don’t you see? The park is where Angie disappeared from. I can still see it that day: long grass – just like you said – yellow swings. That’s where you were with Dad when . . . when . . . oh Chloe! Oh Angie!’

  ‘So I did disappear from the park?’ Chloe asks.

  ‘Yes! Yes,’ Maureen says. Half laughs, half cries. She’s wiping those same tears away when Patrick comes through the back door. He stops when he sees Chloe there. He hesitates, one foot suspended above the step. He puts it down slowly, then steps into the kitchen, looking between Chloe and his wife.

  ‘Oh Patrick,’ Maureen says, going over and wrapping her arms around him. He pats his wife’s back, looking straight at Chloe as he does. She looks away.

  ‘Oh Patrick, you’re not going to believe this . . . come in, come in, sit down . . .’

  She directs him to his chair; he sits down opposite Chloe. He looks again, between them.

  ‘What’s going on, Mo?’ he says.

  ‘It’s Angie, Pat – Chloe . . . oh, whatever.’ She tosses her hands up, offering them to the air. ‘She’s remembering, it’s working, it’s . . . it’s all coming back to her.’

  Chloe glances up at Patrick in time, she’s sure, to see his eyes narrow a bit.

  ‘Don’t you see? She’s remembering, Pat, it’s all coming back. She had a dream, she said she was at the park, with you. She described it, she . . . she described it just as it was that day. Oh Pat, our Angie.’ She squeezes his hand inside hers. ‘We’re getting our girl back.’

  Patrick smiles at his wife. Chloe sees how he squeezes her hand in his fist. He reaches down, kisses it. He strokes the top of her head and gets up.

  ‘You always knew it, didn’t you, love?’ he says, and she swells under his touch.

  Half of Chloe expects he might put Maureen right then, if there had been a genuine mistake. Wasn’t this the time to fi
nally say it? But instead he stands next to the sink and shakes his head, smiling.

  ‘Well, if she remembers the park,’ he says.

  Maureen nods enthusiastically, and then playfully stands up and taps him. ‘And you thought we needed DNA tests,’ she laughs. ‘You watch too many of those CSI programmes, that’s your problem.’

  He laughs. The two of them laugh. And Chloe sits at the kitchen table alone.

  Inside she is screaming.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Chloe watches Patrick. This is her life now. She watches the way he holds the knife if Maureen asks him to help her peel spuds for dinner. She notices how comfortable the blade looks in his hand, how natural his grip is on the handle. Is this how he did it?

  When he puffs up the cushions on his chair before sitting down to watch one of his CSI programmes, Chloe looks up from the sofa. She notices the way he grips the cushions, with two hands. Her eyes flicker to his face, searching for a moment of recognition, but it is so hard to tell. People like him are experts in deceit.

  When Maureen and Patrick are out of the house, she has searched – and searched – for where he keeps his gun. But she has found nothing, which doesn’t make any sense at all. Yet again, wouldn’t he need to be a master of deceit to have kept it hidden all these years?

  She can’t say she feels uncomfortable in the Kyles’ house now, not all the time. In the daylight, when the kitchen is filled with the sound of the radio, when Maureen is humming as she wipes down the worktops, when the sound of the horse racing on the TV floats up the stairs, Chloe can almost pretend that nothing has changed. And yet, everything is different.

  She lies on her bed in the evening light. Maureen has left Puss on her pillow again. The clocks went forward last weekend and hope lingers at the end of each day now. Not for Chloe anymore. She could leave, she knows she could. She could just pack up her things and go. But – she looks out of the window, across the tops of the trees that disguise the garden in these desolated fields – something keeps her here. Maureen? Her unwavering belief that Chloe is her missing daughter? Or is it what had pulled her to Elm House in the first place: a search for truth? Everything is so blurred now, it’s impossible to tell.