The Imposter

by Anna Wharton

  Chloe is silent. She thinks of losing Nan in the cemetery. But that was not the same. Nan didn’t die. But maybe neither did Angie. Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he just tell Maureen he wasn’t at the park?

  ‘I’d told Maureen that I was taking her to the park and, you’ve got to believe me, I wanted to tell her, I did, but . . . how could I break that woman’s heart twice over? She’d already lost her daughter . . . I’d already lost my daughter, I couldn’t lose my wife too.’

  He breaks down again, great big wracking sobs as Chloe sits beside him.

  ‘So I told them I was in the park with her. It was near enough, a stone’s throw away, and I was sure – I was so sure – they’d search a bit further, a bit wider. But Maureen’s probably told you about how the police cocked everything up? How they stopped searching when night started to fall. Ridiculous, right? But they were worried about trampling over evidence. So they searched for a few hours and then they gave up. You’ve got to remember this is more than twenty-five years ago. If it had happened today . . .’ He holds his head in his hands. ‘If it had happened today . . . I remember, there was a building site nearby, a waste area; I even pointed it out to them, I showed them myself, and they said they’d searched but . . . ah, how do you know? How do you know unless you get down on your hands and knees and . . . but I had Maureen, Chloe. And she could hardly function. She’d lost her daughter and I was the only thing she had to cling to and if I’d . . . if I’d told her . . .’ He turns to Chloe, pleading. ‘It would have destroyed her, Chloe. You’ve got to believe me.’

  ‘But . . . but how could you have let them look . . .?’ She’s still trying to piece it all together in her head.

  ‘I know . . .’ He rakes his hands through his hair, then bangs his fist on the steering wheel again. ‘I know, and don’t you think I’ve lived with it all of these years? Eh?’

  Chloe isn’t sure whether to answer.

  ‘At first I was so sure, so sure she would come back. You picture it, your girl found, you wrapping her in your arms, kissing her, snuggling into her neck and promising yourself you will never let her out of your sight for even a split second, ever again. Because you hear about people – you see it even – they lose their kids in the supermarket and you can hear the desperation in their voice and the absolute relief when . . . well, the relief when they get them back and they squeeze them . . .’ He makes as if he is squeezing a daughter that never returned. ‘I never thought she wouldn’t come back. Never. All these years, living like this. I never . . .’ His voice trails off. He stops and shakes his head, putting forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘In the end, it got so that I wanted them to find her dead. Can you believe that? I can’t stand to say it but I did. A dad who wanted the police to knock on his door and tell him that his daughter was found in a ditch somewhere. I wanted the nightmare to end for Maureen because she wasn’t good . . . she was hardly . . . I kept her alive, Chloe, in those early days. I was the only thing that Maureen had and I promised her that Angie would come back, day after day, then week after week, month after month, and then it was years and decades . . . and then you . . .’ His voice trails off. ‘It was a split-second mistake, one look away and she was gone. And I lied, I lied to the police, I lied to my wife, and I’ve lived with that little white lie ever since. It has killed me, Chloe, you’ve got to believe me.’

  But Chloe is only thinking of Angie. She doesn’t care what happened to Patrick. Does she believe him? She’s not sure. But this story, it’s too elaborate to be made up. And she thinks of Maureen, how broken she’s been by the whole thing, how she herself protected her. Is it possible he’s telling the truth?

  ‘In the end I realized that my punishment for what I’d done was this nothingness, this limbo, this bit trapped between living and dead, without answers. That was my punishment for my little white lie, and the only thing I could do to make anything right again was to devote myself absolutely to Maureen. To love her and keep on loving her, and try somehow to make up for what I had done.’

  He sighs. ‘So I went along with it all, I went along with the appeals in the newspaper, the certainty that our little girl would one day come home. Hell, I even went along with it when she was so convinced that you were her, but in here’ – he pats his chest – ‘I knew you weren’t her, and I had this anger, this utter resentment that not only had I suffered so much but now I was being goaded for it, and when you started saying you’d had a dream and I just realized how utterly stupid the whole thing . . . perhaps I did want to confess to you, I wanted you to know that I thought the whole fecking thing was crazy, because I’d tried telling Maureen and . . .’

  He drops his head into his hands.

  ‘Does it sound strange to you? Does it? That perhaps I wanted you to put an end to it once and for all . . . I don’t know.’ He sweeps his hands over his face and sighs. ‘I don’t know.’

  Chloe sits alongside him. The road and the fields are completely black now. Not a single car has passed in all this time. It is cold and so she shuts her passenger door. Patrick does the same, then switches the interior light back on. He turns to her.

  Chloe swallows in the darkness, then tries to speak: ‘But I don’t understand . . . I mean, an affair? That was it? You could have told Maureen, people forgive people who—’

  ‘You don’t understand, Chloe.’

  ‘So tell me,’ she says. ‘Because whatever you’d done, whatever you said you—’

  ‘Because it was Josie, all right? Because the woman I was having an affair with was Maureen’s best friend. We were the two people who had to pick up the pieces after Angie disappeared. How was I meant to tell her what we’d done? The two people who she needed more than anyone.’

  ‘Josie?’ Chloe gasps. She’d convinced herself Josie hated Patrick, that perhaps she even suspected him like she did.

  ‘Did she know? Did she search for Angie with you?’

  Patrick shakes his head. ‘She’d left by the time I turned around and realized Angie was gone . . . I searched for her myself, and when I told everyone she’d disappeared from the park, well, Josie knew that’s where we were going afterwards . . . I lied to everyone, Chloe, just to keep my family together when it had already fallen apart.’

  He sinks back against his seat and stares at the roof of the car. Chloe has noticed that the windows have steamed up now. Nobody could see in, or out.

  ‘But Josie?’ Chloe says finally. ‘How could you?’

  Patrick turns to her quickly. ‘We all have secrets, Chloe,’ he says. ‘What about you and all those newspaper clippings?’

  Chloe looks at him quickly at the mention of her archive. So he had seen it.

  ‘Yes, I saw them,’ Patrick says. ‘You’re not so innocent yourself, are you, Chloe? None of us are, not if we’re really honest. Not one of us can get through this life without telling some lies, we just better hope the consequences aren’t too painful. But we’ve all got something to hide, Chloe.’

  ‘So why didn’t you tell Maureen? About the cuttings, I mean.’

  ‘And extinguish the only flicker of hope she’s had in twenty-five years? I’m a coward, Chloe, don’t you know that by now? Perhaps that’s another reason I told you we weren’t at the park. Maybe I knew by then that somehow we were bound in this together.’

  They sit there like that for a long time. Patrick broken by his confession, Chloe trying to take it all in – even her own culpability. Finally, he speaks.

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she says.

  ‘Well, are you going to tell Maureen? Are you going to be braver than I ever was? Are you going to be the one who breaks her heart? To tell her that her husband and her best friend . . .’

  Chloe looks out of the window. Patrick continues:

  ‘I mean, she’s sitting there at home, waiting for fish and chips, all this time thinking that you could be our Angie come back. So what are we going to do? What the hell
are we going to do?’

  She hates the way he says ‘we’. But he is right. She is complicit.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Chloe says. Where to start?

  Patrick sighs. ‘I thought she’d have given up this silly fantasy by now. I thought she would have woken up to the truth, but she’s talking about doing a piece in the paper, about informing the police, and what do we do then? I mean, it’s ridiculous, it’s all out of control, and all because I couldn’t break my wife’s heart nearly three decades ago. I’m a fucking coward.’

  He leans his elbows on the steering wheel and covers his face with his hands. In the dimness of the interior light, Chloe sees his hands are still stained in places with the blood of the hare. She knows that will wash off, but some things cannot be undone. If this is really what happened, then she had got Patrick wrong. Perhaps he was right, perhaps it would have been crueller still to break Maureen’s heart all those years ago. The chances that it could have brought back Angie were still slim. He had weighed them up and decided to risk it, and he had lived with that decision every day since. In some ways, yes, he was responsible for his daughter’s death, but not in the way that Chloe had imagined. Patrick wasn’t a killer.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ Chloe says. She can’t think straight and they can’t spend all night on this road.

  ‘Yeah?’ Patrick says.

  She nods and slowly he sits forward and turns his keys inside the ignition.

  They don’t speak for the few miles that it takes to drive back to Low Drove. There is a solemnness inside the car, a silent undertaking that they will each keep the secret that has been revealed out on that lonely flat road. Just like Patrick all those years ago, Chloe doesn’t know if it is the right thing to do. For some reason she thinks of Nan, of all the times that she has pretended that Stella was coming home soon, or was just out shopping. Was it so different to let Maureen live with that little bit of hope if it made it easier for her to get through each day? Why should we keep forcing those who have lost to accept it and move on? Maybe there is no moving on when you have lost a child. Who knows if the decision she and Patrick have made will be the right one? We can only live the best way we know how, and that’s what Patrick has done all of these years. But he has suffered for it. Maybe even no one more than him.

  They arrive into Low Drove through the back way, down the lane that Chloe and Maureen had walked the day that she had broken down talking about her missing daughter. She remembers that day, how it had been so painful to watch, and as they drive closer to Elm House, Chloe feels sure she can’t bear witness to any more of Maureen’s pain.

  The road they take, unusually for the Fens, has a slight curve in it that hides Elm House from view from this direction, so they don’t see the police car on the drive until they are almost there and the car’s headlights reflect back the blue and yellow chequered pattern.

  ‘What the . . .’ Patrick says as he pulls up outside on the road, already tugging at his seatbelt.

  They are out of the car quickly, forgetting in an instant everything that has occurred in the last hour. As they hurry down the drive, Maureen must hear their footsteps on the pebbles because she comes flying out of the back door and straight into Patrick’s arms, followed quickly by two stony-faced uniformed police officers.

  ‘Maureen, thank God . . .’ Patrick says, wrapping her up inside his arms. ‘What on earth’s going on?’

  He holds her face in the same hands that had ended the life of that hare. Though it is not with tears of distress that she looks back at him, but relief.

  ‘It’s Angie, Pat,’ she says. ‘They’ve found our Angie.’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  It had taken a while for the driveway to empty. Maureen’s legs had gone from underneath her just moments after she had given Patrick the news, which had meant that everyone’s attention had been directed towards getting Maureen back inside and onto the sofa. She sits there now alongside her husband, whispering something over and over into a scrunched-up tissue in her hand. Chloe can’t quite make out what.

  The living room is more cramped than Chloe has ever known it. There are two detectives here – one who sits in Patrick’s chair, the other standing – and two uniformed officers. They are here only to keep the press away, and when they’d said this, Chloe’s stomach had turned underneath her clothes. But no journalists have turned up yet at Elm House.

  The uniformed officers turn down the volume on their radios, and Chloe sees one of the detectives nod at them. They leave the living room and go into the kitchen, offering to make tea.

  When they’ve left, the standing detective pulls up a pouffe in front of the sofa and sits down with Maureen and Patrick. She’s young, not much older than Chloe, she reckons. Her knees are almost touching Maureen’s as she sits on the pouffe. Her voice is gentle when she speaks.

  ‘Mr Kyle, I know this must be a huge shock—’

  ‘Wait, let me just stop you there,’ Patrick says. Since Maureen collapsed in his arms on the drive, he hasn’t taken a hand off her, he hasn’t said a word. Now he holds her, as if propping her up under his right arm, his left hand holding hers in his. Maureen leans into his chest – just like she did in those photographs in 1979 – the two of them immediately resuming the poses they’d assumed for the cameras back when Angie disappeared, some instinct to get through this the only way they know how, a muscle memory instantly flexed. Patrick drops Maureen’s hand for a second, though he keeps his other arm tight around her waist. He wipes his face and then, taking a deep breath, says to the detective, ‘What do you mean, Angela’s been found?’

  The detective moves an inch closer. When she speaks, her voice is almost a whisper.

  ‘We’re sorry to inform you that a body believed to be that of a four-year-old girl was discovered in some undergrowth this morning.’

  A body? Chloe leans against the sideboard to steady herself. She feels Angie looking down from the shelf, witnessing this whole scene unfold, but she can’t turn around and face her. She can’t bear to meet her eyes. A body means Angie is dead.

  Inside Patrick’s arms, Maureen makes a wounded crying sound, almost animal-like, and her husband dips his head to meet hers. They sit like that for a while, the other people in the living room fading away. They are back where they started, just the two of them. When Patrick looks up, Chloe sees that his eyes are filled with tears. He looks at the detective.

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, is it definitely her?’

  ‘Obviously, due to the length of time and . . . well, and decay’ – the detective speaks slowly – ‘there will need to be a formal identification, but from initial records it does seem that . . . that yes, it is the body of your daughter, Angela Kyle. I’m so sorry, Mr Kyle.’

  The detective reaches out and touches a hand to his shoulder, just for a second. Patrick glances at it, unsure how to respond. Instead his attention falls again to his wife under his arm. He wraps her up tighter as she sobs quietly into his chest. Her right hand clutches the wool of his jumper. It’s only then that Chloe makes out what Maureen has been whispering on repeat.

  ‘It’s over, Patrick,’ Maureen cries softly. ‘Angie’s come home.’

  Chloe stands in the kitchen now, stirring milk into seven cups of sweet tea. She’d gone out there to help the uniformed officers find their way around the kitchen. Somehow it had felt wrong to hear them raking through the contents of Maureen’s kitchen cupboards; she didn’t want them judging Maureen for the plastic pink beakers she keeps just for Chloe, or the Bunnykins cutlery they would find in the drawer. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t comprehend a mother’s pain, why she has desperately clung on to these things of Angie’s all these years.

  To be honest, Chloe is glad for the breathing space. The air is thin in the living room and after a while her head had started to spin. Whatever she has been doing here in the Kyles’ house these last fourteen weeks, something about the rawness of emotion she had just seen had made her feel uncomfortable –
guilty even – about bearing witness to Maureen and Patrick’s pain. After twenty-five years this was a moment that belonged to no one but them. Chloe needs to give them time to take it all in.

  She stirs the tea and listens out. There is no sound coming from the living room now. In the kitchen, the uniformed officers’ radios crackle quietly as they sit at the small pine table.

  ‘Have you been renting a room here long?’ one of the officers asks her.

  She stops stirring the tea. Her back to both officers. They make it sound so impersonal. Chloe takes a split second to remind herself that she has done nothing wrong, that these police officers are not here to interrogate her. They’ve come to tell Maureen and Patrick that Angie has been found. She still can’t quite believe it.

  ‘A few months,’ Chloe says, turning round and pressing two hot mugs into their hands as if she hopes it might distract them from too much questioning. It seems to work.

  The officers nod and thank her for the tea. She suddenly would rather be in the living room with Angie watching from the sideboard, the solemn faces of the two detectives and all of Maureen and Patrick’s pain.

  Chloe turns and faces her reflection in the black kitchen window, realising that in all the commotion she is yet to remove her coat. It’s over for her here now – with this news, Maureen’s fantasy must come to an end. She’s known that since that moment on the drive; her mind had leapt two steps forward in an instant to know what this news meant for her. She doesn’t know yet how it will all play out, when they might ask her to leave, but she’s surprised to find that she doesn’t care. Tonight is about Maureen and Patrick. Hadn’t she always planned to bring Angie home? And now that was done, her reason for being here was gone.