The Imposter, Anna Wharton [romantic story to read TXT] 📗

might have something to add to her investigation. Only when she’d arrived, the noticeboard read that the priest’s name was Father Matthew Purcell. And inside the church, as she scanned the lists of priests’ names scored in gold on the ornate board on the wall, it turned out Father Purcell had only been at St Gregory’s for the last two years. She could see from a photo of him that he was young – a child himself when Angie had disappeared. There was no point in interviewing him.

Still, she walks through the church, her hand trailing on the backs of empty pews. She lights a candle for Angie and drops a pound coin into the tin. It rattles inside as it lands, breaking the silence. Chloe stares at the flame, knowing Maureen and Patrick well enough to understand how much this small gesture would please them.

It has definitely been easier to throw herself into this task since she photocopied the file. She’s waited, the last couple of days, for her phone to ring, for Alec to demand her security pass back. She has been terrified that she was spotted on CCTV, or that the reporter has been down to the archive to give her back her money. But as the days have gone by, she’s started to relax inside her own skin again. She even had a dream two nights ago that she solved the crime and brought Angie home and was given back her job at the paper as a reward. She’d not only solved the mystery but saved the archive, and the Kyles, how they had loved her for it.

She sinks down on a pew, picturing for a second a packed church, Maureen and Patrick doing the same, elbow to elbow with friends and neighbours. Then she sighs. It always comes back to Maureen and Patrick, every lead, every hunch, every new clue she finds among the photocopies tacked to her bedroom wall. She knows the real answers to what happened to Angie must lie with the Kyles. But how can she possibly get to speak to them?

She’s never completely trusted silence, but here in this church, she feels peaceful – she feels heard. There’s an effigy of Mary at the altar. Chloe walks towards it, she reaches out to touch the cool marble smoothness of it. Mary stares back at her, as if she knows, as if she sympathizes with the enormous task Chloe has in front of her. Are these the same eyes that Maureen and Patrick had stared into when they prayed for their daughter’s safe return? If only she knew. If only Chloe could have been the reporter who sat down and interviewed them. And that’s when it happens, a split-second moment that feels something close to divine intervention. Of course she needs to speak to the Kyles – there really is no other way. And it wouldn’t be such a stretch of the truth to interview them for their annual colour piece. But it would be a way into their house, a way to eke out the details detectives couldn’t, to discover the evidence others had missed. And by the time anyone realizes Chloe wasn’t strictly who she said she was, then Angie would be back and no one would mind. In fact, Chloe would be a heroine. Her dream of saving the archive would come true. She looks up to Mary, her gaze at once forgiving. The fact that this idea had come to her here – here, of all places – is surely a sign that it’s the right thing to do. That if God could forgive a little white lie, anybody could.

SIXTEEN

She wakes to find the sun streaming through her curtains, which already feels like a good omen. She spends longer choosing what to wear; it feels important to get it right. She settles on black trousers and a red silk blouse with a slit neck. She stands in front of the mirror as she tucks the top into her waistband. She pulls it out. Tries it again. It’s missing something.

In Nan’s room she rummages through her wardrobe, pushing aside hangers home to fur and felt and lamé that will never be worn again. She pauses at a drop-waist black and gold dress from the eighties. She saw this dress in a photograph inside the album she looked at on the night Nan was missing. Granddad’s arm resting on one of those padded shoulders. She pauses for a second, her hand running over the material, and then, when she sees what’s next to it, she pushes it aside. She pulls from the hanger a plain black blazer. She tries it on in the mirror. Her long dark hair falls over the padded shoulders; something doesn’t look right. She takes it off, pulls out the padding, and slips back into it. The arms are a little long, and it’s a bit wide for her frame. And – she sniffs it – it smells of mothballs. But then she remembers seeing a bulldog clip in Nan’s bureau and she runs downstairs to get it, cinching it in at the back. Now her reflection is perfect. She dots some of Nan’s Lily of the Valley perfume behind each ear and on her wrists. She tries on one long plastic beaded necklace and then another, leaving the jewellery scattered across Nan’s dressing table. No, this will do. She twirls one more time in front of the mirror and sees the bulldog clip again. She just needs to remember not to take her coat off once she gets inside the Kyles’. She’ll remember, of course she will.

It’s only a ten-minute walk from Nan’s house to Chestnut Avenue, but Chloe takes the long way round so she can stop at the newsagent’s on the way. Beside the till there’s a stationary section, a slim red ring-bound reporter’s notebook. She buys it and a biro, remembering to test it on the paper first. She hands