The Imposter

by Anna Wharton

  She leans over the side of the bed and fishes underneath for her archive. Her hand sweeps dusty floorboards, a pair of old trainers, nothing else. She leans further off the bed, waiting to feel her fingertips touch the box, but instead there is a space where it should be. She slides off the bed, looks underneath, all the way back to the wall. Her heart is gripped with panic. She is on her belly now, frantically pushing aside the trainers, a few discarded magazines. There is no box. She pulls herself out. Scans her room. Did she leave it out? Might it have been found? But the shoebox is nowhere to be seen. She stands, circling the floor. Her head is pounding now. She strides back to her bed, strips off the duvet. Has it become tangled inside it? She strips the bed all the way back to the mattress, but it isn’t there. She throws the pillow onto the floor. She opens the cupboard of the bedside table, nothing. She pulls out the bed. She looks down the gap between the bed and the window. The box is gone. Her archive is gone.

  Her archive is gone.

  Her heart is pounding as she reaches for the door handle. The sweat on her hands makes it turn inside her palm. She’s trapped, she thinks, just for an instant. But then the door releases and the air on the landing is cooler, and downstairs the same old sounds float back up to her.

  ‘Is everything all right, Chloe?’ Maureen says, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I heard some banging up there . . . ooh, you do look pale.’

  Chloe wipes her hands on her clothes. ‘No . . . no, everything is . . . I’m OK. I mean, it’s OK. There’s nothing.’

  She goes back into her room and closes the door. Inside the room is turned over. But she starts her search again, this time in places that she would never keep her archive. She checks the bottom of the wardrobe, among the spare blankets and the blouse Maureen made her. She even walks over to the door that connects her room to the spare one and tries it. But the padlock is still there, keeping it locked tight. She climbs on top of her bed and peers onto the top of the wardrobe. She checks behind the curtain. Then finally flops down onto the bare mattress. Her archive has gone. And there’s only one person she can think of who might have it.

  She stays up in her room that night. She doesn’t go down to dinner. Maureen brings her a plate of mince and potatoes up on a tray but she doesn’t touch a thing. She lets the room fall dark. She doesn’t switch on her own television. Instead she lies in the darkness, listening to the sounds that drift up through her floorboards: the chimes of the Nine O’Clock News, Maureen and Patrick chatting easily. There are no arguments to be overheard between the pair of them now. It’s as if everything has been settled. Chloe is Angie. Patrick has got away with murder.

  A few hours later, she hears Maureen come up to bed. She makes out the sound of the bathroom cabinet opening, of Maureen running the cold water tap and swallowing down the tablets that regulate her days, that keep everything normal. Chloe wants to laugh – what is normal anymore?

  She gets up and makes her bed in the darkness, then slips under the duvet. But she doesn’t sleep. Instead, she stares at her door, at the slit of light from the landing that casts a dull shine on the first few feet of floorboards inside her room. She can’t rest. Not when he’s downstairs. She imagines his hands all over her cuttings. Her cuttings . . . She wants to cry. So now they both keep a secret. And his only silences Chloe further.

  Half an hour later, Chloe hears Patrick’s footsteps on the stairs. A dull thud that comes closer. He stops at the top of the landing. Chloe grips the duvet underneath her chin as a pair of feet come to a standstill outside her door. The light dims. She hears his breath on the other side of the door frame. She stares at the door handle, praying not to see it turn but she’s sure it moves momentarily. Someone’s grip on the handle the other side. She freezes in bed. But a second later the footsteps move away, towards the bathroom. She listens to the sound of the toilet flushing, to the taps in the sink, the water whooshing past her down the creaking drainpipes. Every sense is alert in the darkness. And long after he closes their bedroom door, Chloe lies awake staring at her black ceiling.

  They say that at night, when the frontal lobes are least active, we are left with the more primeval parts of our personality. Intuition takes over from logic. So it makes sense that it is in the middle of the night, the early hours, when Chloe’s suspicions are strongest, when she rehearses in her head what she will say to Maureen come the morning, what she will reveal about the husband she adores. She practises over and over so she will get it right as the sun bleaches the black night blue behind her curtains. But by the morning, when she goes downstairs for breakfast, when the kitchen table is filled with bright packets of kids’ cereals, a plastic bowl and spoon for her, the world somehow looks more normal again. Normal, and at once strange.

  Chloe rubs her eyes. She has hardly slept.

  ‘Let me get the milk for you, Chloe, love,’ Maureen says, as she tucks her chair under the table.

  Patrick sits across from her. She doesn’t look up. Instead she feels his eyes on her. She thinks of her archive. She has no appetite.

  Maureen fusses around her as usual, trailing a hand down the back of her hair as she moves between the table and the sink. Chloe shivers a little.

  ‘Any more dreams?’ Maureen says.

  She has asked her this the last three mornings.

  Chloe shakes her head. Maureen looks disappointed, as she has every other day.

  ‘We’ll have to be feeding you cheese before bed,’ she laughs.

  Patrick laughs too.

  ‘Pat’s got some business in town later, so he’s offered to pick you up from work.’

  Chloe looks up quickly.

  ‘Oh, I—’

  ‘It’s no bother, Chloe, love. Is it, Pat?’ Maureen says.

  ‘No, no bother at all,’ he smiles at her, and underneath the table, Chloe presses crescent shapes into her palm with her nails.

  ‘It’ll save you getting the bus, and they say there might be rain later,’ Maureen says.

  Maureen shakes some Frosties into Chloe’s bowl, as she looks out of the window. Bright sunlight fills the kitchen.

  Chloe nods as Maureen hands her Angie’s spoon.

  Chloe eats slowly, the cereal sticking in her throat. She’s thinking of Patrick’s gun. Is that what business he has in town today? Is that why he hasn’t told Maureen? She’s picturing it lying in the back of the car later as they drive along isolated roads in the dark, back towards Low Drove. Not a soul around.

  Chloe swallows her cereal too quickly. She coughs.

  ‘I was going to meet a friend later,’ she says, trying to clear her throat.

  Both Maureen and Patrick look up.

  ‘A friend?’ Maureen says. She looks at Patrick quickly. ‘What friend, Chloe, love? We didn’t know Chloe had a friend, did we, Pat?’

  Patrick shakes his head and leans forward on the table.

  ‘Hollie,’ Chloe says.

  ‘Hollie?’

  ‘Yes, Hollie.’

  Maureen sits down slowly in the chair. She picks up a tea towel on the table and starts winding it around her hand.

  ‘You haven’t mentioned Hollie before, has she, Pat?’

  Patrick shakes his head. Chloe looks between them, wondering why Maureen had found it necessary to check with him.

  ‘I’ve known Hollie my whole life,’ Chloe says.

  Maureen lets out a little laugh. ‘Well, you can’t have known her your whole life . . .’ she says. ‘We’ve never heard of a Hollie, have we, Pat?’

  Again, he shakes his head.

  ‘Can’t say we have,’ he says.

  ‘Oh . . . no, well, maybe not my whole life,’ Chloe says, suddenly backtracking. ‘But since, well, we were in foster care together.’

  Maureen’s shoulders sink.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. Then again, ‘Oh. She doesn’t have parents either then?’

  Chloe sees how she glances at Patrick. She quickly looks down into her cereal bowl.

  ‘Well, she does but . . . we
ll, they couldn’t look after her, or at least they did but not how social services thought they should so . . . yeah. But she got a new family, Dave and Rita. They’re nice. And then yeah, we stayed friends afterwards. We’ve always looked out for each other, I guess. We tell each other everything.’

  She looks at Patrick when she says that last bit.

  ‘Hmm,’ Maureen says, and looks down at the tea towel in her lap. ‘You should bring her here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hollie. Is that what you said her name was? Shouldn’t she, Pat? Wouldn’t it be nice to meet Chloe’s friend?’

  Patrick pauses.

  ‘Well, Mo, I . . .’

  ‘Whyever not, Patrick?’

  ‘Well, it’s not that I . . .’ he starts.

  Chloe sees how he squirms in his seat.

  Patrick stands up, goes to the sink. He taps the side of the worktop with his signet ring as he searches the big Fen sky for something.

  Maureen turns to Chloe.

  ‘So you’ll bring her tonight?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Chloe says.

  ‘Hollie. You’ll bring her home, here?’

  ‘Tonight?’ Chloe says, one eye still watching Patrick at the sink. His head is bowed now. Even the back of him looks guilty. She thinks of her archive and her stomach twists inside. ‘Oh, I think she’s busy tonight.’

  ‘But you said—’ Maureen starts.

  ‘Actually, I’ve just remembered’ – Chloe mimes slapping her forehead – ‘she text last night to say she’s going out for dinner with her boyfriend.’

  ‘She’s got a boyfriend, has she?’

  ‘Yes, Phil.’

  ‘That might be you some day, bringing a boyfriend home to meet Mum and Dad.’ She nudges Chloe’s elbow. ‘Still, we wouldn’t want you to leave us here, would we, Pat?’

  ‘Hmm?’ He turns round from the sink.

  Maureen rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, men, no point talking to them about this stuff. Anyway, that settles it, Pat’ll bring you home tonight. It’s five you finish, isn’t it, love?’

  Chloe nods as Maureen stands up and clasps her hands together.

  ‘Why don’t you two bring fish and chips home with you? We haven’t had them in ages.’

  Chloe makes her excuses after a while, and mounts the stairs, saying she needs to get ready for work. Only when she gets to the top of the landing, something feels different. The door to her room is slightly ajar – she hadn’t left it like that, she never leaves it like that. Slowly, she pushes it open, the door creaking a little as she does. Inside, everything looks the same. For some reason, her eyes fall under the bed. She closes the door and gets down on her hands and knees. She slides one arm underneath, into the darkness, and feels her fingertips hit something familiar – her archive.

  She squeezes herself under the bed, pulling it out with both hands. Tentatively she takes off the lid. It’s all there, just as she had kept it. She feels relief and fear, because she knows it wasn’t here last night. Someone had removed it. The box has been returned, but perhaps everything has changed now – maybe whoever has looked inside now suspects her. She leans back against the bed, her fingers feeling for each cutting in turn, each small brown envelope. She holds the archive to her chest as her heart beats against it.

  FORTY-SIX

  Chloe arrives at the glass building that houses the insurance company an hour before Patrick is due to collect her that afternoon. The last thing she wants is for him to catch her getting off the bus and hurrying across the road towards the office. When she walked by the other day, she noticed that there was a small cafe in the atrium on the ground floor, complete with a couple of chairs and tables spilling out of it. She arrives early and goes inside. She had worried, of course, about bumping into Phil again, but she figured the chances were slim and, anyway, she could always say she had a second interview.

  At reception, a woman dressed like an air hostess with a silk scarf round her neck asks if she can help. Chloe points towards the cafe, and she nods, smiles and waves her forward.

  Chloe buys a KitKat and a can of Diet Coke then sits there, in her winter coat, in the atrium, her bag at her side. A copy of the local newspaper peers out the top of her bag, but she resists reading it and instead sits staring out at the road, waiting for the first flash of Patrick’s blue car.

  Chloe doesn’t want to get in that car. She hasn’t wanted to get into it all day. Not tonight, not on her own. Not without Maureen. Chloe has a thought that maybe Maureen has changed her mind and come along with him for the ride. How relieved she would be if they pulled up and Maureen was sitting alongside him in the front, ready to collect her. And then she stops and ponders on that image, how happy it would have made her not so long ago to have a mum and dad driving to pick her up from work. She always promised herself she wouldn’t take a proper family for granted.

  Her phone vibrates in her pocket, making her stomach turn inside the padding of her coat. She pulls the phone out in case it’s Patrick and is filled with relief when she sees it’s Park House. But she can’t answer, not now. And so that same relief turns to guilt. She turns her phone off, as if that might dilute the unease. She has missed a few calls from Park House in the last few days. She’s deleted the voicemails without listening. Claire Sanders has called, too. Twice. Chloe knows what about. The house, the paperwork, the fees, but Chloe is not in that headspace now. Not when she’s living with a killer. She’s shocked even at her mind’s ability to use that word. A child killer. A man capable of murdering his own daughter, then lying to the police – to his wife – for decades. This is not the time to be filling out paperwork for social services. She shakes her head and takes another sip of her drink, then pulls her coat around her. She doesn’t want to get in that car.

  She’d forgotten her watch that morning, so now her phone is off she can’t check the time. She looks around, towards the glass lift and the open staircase which criss-crosses the atrium. A wall of plants rises the entire way up to a few square metres of blue sky above them. Chloe can’t help thinking they must attract flies in the summer. When she pictures Phil coming here every day, she thinks of her own desk back at the newspaper. She still catches herself sometimes, walking through the archive in her mind, mapping the aisles made up of metal filing cabinets; she can even feel the old blue carpet tiles underneath her feet. She pauses to pull open drawers. She can still conjure up the scratch and squeak of their runners, see the spines of envelopes that lie inside. That had been home, among those files, those people. She had been happy there. Perhaps she’d even imagined a file being opened up for her if she’d solved this case. She’d even thought for a while that by bringing Angie back she could save the archive, that it would be a huge news story that she had reinvestigated the files – bigger even than the local news – and then perhaps it wouldn’t just be her archive that would be saved, but so many others at newspapers up and down the country, that people would see just how vital that human touch is to a story, just how seriously archivists take their jobs, that they’re not just caretakers of stories, but vital gatekeepers of them. But that’s all fantasy now.

  She’s startled by a voice at the top of the staircase. A navy suit begins its descent down the steps. Chloe is sure she recognizes the same dark hair. She can’t risk bumping into Phil again. She grabs the newspaper from her bag, opens the page at random and buries her head in the stories. She takes a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the newsprint which instantly calms her. She has missed this.

  A few moments later, she peers over the top of the newspaper. It is another man, not Phil. She replaces the paper in her bag, and looks up in time to see Patrick’s blue car rounding through the car park. She gathers up her bag and leaves the KitKat wrapper and can of Coke on the table. She’s aware of the receptionist watching her as she walks across the atrium and out through the revolving doors.

  Patrick leans across the empty passenger seat to open the door for her.

  ‘Good day?’ he asks when she gets
in. She puts her bag between her feet and turns around to check the back seat. She’s relieved to see there is no gun.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ she says, pulling on her seat belt and plugging it in at her side. ‘Busy.’

  She checks the seat again, and then her eyes flicker further back – could it be in the boot?

  ‘All set?’ Patrick asks. ‘Better not forget those fish and chips on the way, Maureen would murder us.’

  They don’t speak as they leave the city; instead the radio fills the space between them in the car. The DJ makes cheesy jokes and Patrick laughs quietly, adjusting his hands on the steering wheel. When Chloe feels him look at her, she smiles back, though in reality she has no idea what the DJ just said. When Patrick watches the road, she watches him, his big hands on the wheel.

  Traffic queues to get out of the city at rush hour. She taps her feet, aware of the extra time she’ll have to spend trapped in the car with him. She reassures herself that the A47 becomes a dual carriageway at the next roundabout, but still she sinks a little into her seat. In her lap, she picks the skin around her fingernails, not watching the road, willing this journey over.

  Patrick drums his hands on the steering wheel and turns up the sound on the radio. But at the next roundabout, Chloe feels them take a left. She looks up – they’re heading away from the traffic that’s starting to move up ahead. This isn’t the usual route home. She looks at Patrick quickly, but he doesn’t return her gaze. Instead he pushes his foot on the accelerator, and as she feels herself pressing into the passenger seat, she grips the sides of the leather upholstery with both hands. Patrick’s eyes flicker down to the handbrake. Chloe moves her hand back into her lap.

  ‘Bloody traffic,’ he sighs.

  She looks straight ahead. The windows have started to steam. Chloe looks to her left, but the fields beyond them are hazy. She skips ahead on their route – one mile, two – then remembers they are picking up fish and chips.