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

she sees a child’s cup, some cartoon character etched onto the side. Patrick returns. He pulls out the chair next to her, then has a change of heart, sitting himself down on the one opposite. Maureen puts the tea in front of her.

‘Did you make me one of tho—’

‘You didn’t say you wa—’

She sighs, opening the cupboard again to get another mug. Chloe glances for the same cup but Maureen closes it so quickly she doesn’t see a thing. Patrick picks up the newspaper and flicks straight to the horse racing. Chloe scans the room but there’s nothing to see, it’s just an ordinary kitchen. What had made her think she could come in here and find a clue to Angie’s disappearance? But the truth is, she didn’t expect to be in here at all. Maureen brings her own tea to the table and pulls out the chair between Chloe and Patrick.

‘We haven’t been here long ourselves,’ Maureen says, taking a sip. ‘Ouch, too hot.’

‘No?’ Chloe asks. ‘What brought you out here?’

She sees the way Patrick looks at her quickly from under his eyebrows.

‘Fancied a change, didn’t we, Pat?’

He changes position in his chair as if that will do as substitute for answering her.

‘We got sick of the city in the end, tired, you know. We wanted some peace. It’s nice and quiet out here, see?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what about you? Young thing like yourself, what brings you to Low Drove?’

Chloe swallows her tea and feels it scald the back of her throat. She coughs.

‘I . . . er . . .’ She hasn’t thought about this. She coughs a little more. ‘I suppose I’m after peace, too. It’s just I lived with my Nan until recently and, well . . .’ Chloe pauses, she swallows. ‘She died, quite suddenly, and . . .’

‘. . . you just needed a change,’ Maureen says.

Chloe stops and looks up at her. A connection made across the table.

‘Yes,’ Chloe says, the heat of the lie still lingering inside her throat. Unsure whether it was really necessary to bury Nan to live with the Kyles. Perhaps it was just easier.

‘Yeah, well, we know what that’s like, don’t we, Pat?’

He grunts a little, moving the racing pages of his newspaper an inch or so.

‘Oh?’ Chloe asks, but Maureen doesn’t elaborate.

‘It’s isolated out here,’ Patrick says without looking up. ‘For a young girl on her own, like. You sure you wouldn’t rather be in the city, somewhere that’s got a bit more going for it?’

Is he trying to be helpful or put her off? She looks at Maureen.

‘Oh Pat, I’m sure that Chloe is old enough to know what she—’

‘Yeah, well, I’m just sayin—’

Maureen reaches out and puts her hand on the back of his. He stops talking.

‘How old are you, Chloe?’

‘Twenty-nine,’ she replies.

Maureen swallows her tea, not blinking. She seems unsure how to answer Chloe. Instead, she gets up from the table.

‘Well, I’d best be showing you the room then.’

Patrick doesn’t follow them upstairs but Chloe feels him watch them leave the kitchen. Maureen leads her through to a hallway with parquet flooring. She glances into two rooms. The back room seems to be the main living room, and the door to the front room is pulled to, open enough only for her to spy peeling wallpaper and dusty floorboards, boxes stacked inside. When she turns back, Maureen has stopped on the first step of the stairs.

‘Like I said, we haven’t been here long so we’re still getting the place together.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Chloe replies.

Chloe follows her up a grubby runner and, at the top, on the left, there’s a window, the sill covered with dead flies. Why haven’t they cleaned them up? It seems an easy thing to do.

‘Will be nice when you get it how you want it,’ she says, filling the silence, anything to make this situation feel natural. Still pinching herself inwardly that she is here, walking up and down the insides of the Kyles’ own home.

‘Yes, it’s got a lot of potential,’ Maureen says.

There are five rooms leading off the landing, each with closed doors. Maureen points to them in turn.

‘This is the bathroom.’ She opens the door and Chloe dutifully pokes her head inside. There’s a modern suite, navy and white tiles on the wall. She nods.

‘It’s got a good shower,’ Maureen says, as if to persuade her. ‘That’s our room there at the front, next to us is a box room. That’s the spare room, and this here is the room we’re renting out.’

On the wall just outside the room, a brass crucifix clings to the anaglypta. Chloe quickly looks away.

‘Here we go,’ Maureen says, stepping inside. ‘It’s a bit stuffy.’ She swats at tiny motes of dust as she crosses the room to open a narrow window at the top of a larger one overlooking the back garden. Chloe stands in front of it, staring out at miles of unbroken flat Fenland, now soaked in rain.

‘Nice view,’ she says, searching the landscape for a glimpse of another house on the horizon and finding nothing but fields.

‘We think so,’ Maureen says. ‘When we moved, we wanted somewhere quiet.’

Chloe turns back and smiles, trying to work out how she should be behaving, what she would say if she didn’t know what she already knows. In the end, she settles for ‘Where did you move from?’ It comes out naturally, she hopes.

‘Peterborough,’ Maureen says, without elaborating.

‘Right,’ she says, feeling the sting of duplicity. She thinks of the notepad she dumped in the bin, how she wishes she still had it. She couldn’t write here, in front of Maureen, of course not. But the minute she left, before she even got back to the top of the lane, she would be writing notes for her own archive.

Maureen wanders around the room. Chloe follows her. There is a single iron bedstead in the left-hand corner, made up with a white valance sheet that reaches down to the floor and a blue and green floral duvet. Opposite there’s a wardrobe so tall it looks like it might topple over onto the