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

Chloe makes the mistake of saying, ‘Look,’ once or twice when she turns a page and finds a photograph she knows, but Maureen just smiles and says, ‘Yes, Angie loved that little scooter,’ or, ‘Yes, that’s Puss,’ but of course Chloe already knew that.

Patrick looks across at them from the TV every now and then, although Chloe noticed a while ago – even if Maureen didn’t – that he’d turned the volume up a couple of notches.

‘Don’t the police have any leads?’ Chloe asks.

Maureen rolls her eyes, then shakes her head. ‘Don’t get me started on them.’

‘Oh?’ Chloe says. But she doesn’t elaborate.

Maureen sits quietly for a moment, holding one particular photograph in her hand. It’s a faded polaroid; in it, Angie stands next to a Christmas tree, her face covered in chocolate.

‘What do they think happened to her?’ Chloe asks.

Maureen puts the photo back in the album and fiddles with the cuffs of her jumper. ‘They don’t know, they . . . they say they’ll never close the case completely, you know, without a . . . without . . .’

Chloe nods so she doesn’t have to say it.

‘But we don’t know, do we, Pat?’ Maureen says that last bit a little louder. ‘I say, do we, Patrick?’

‘Huh? What?’ He springs round in his armchair, muting the television.

‘Chloe was just asking what the police think might have happened to our Angie.’

He looks at Chloe, then back at the TV. ‘If only we knew, eh, love . . .’ he says quietly to Maureen.

He doesn’t put the sound on again for a minute or two; instead he just stares at the screen, while Maureen picks up a couple of loose photographs and turns them over in her hand. Chloe decides not to ask too many questions tonight, reminding herself that there’s plenty of time for that. She looks around the living room, still hardly believing this is her home now.

‘Look, Pat, this one is from Hunstanton,’ Maureen says. ‘Our Angie loved it there, didn’t she? Remember her on that carousel at the little fair they had at the end of the promenade?’

Patrick smiles to himself, then lifts the volume on the television again, the spirit of the room inflated once again by a happy memory. Chloe is always amazed how that happens.

Maureen hands the photograph to her. It’s of Angie, aged around three, buried deep in the Hunstanton sand, only her head and her right hand poking out. She waves at the camera with her tiny fingers. Beside her sits Maureen, the pair of them giggling away. And behind them, on the sunbed, a shadow, a darker, more serious face, just out of focus.

‘You’re not cold are you, love?’ Maureen says. ‘You’ve got goosebumps.’

Chloe shakes her head quickly, while Maureen goes back to the picture.

‘There’s Patrick in his younger days,’ Maureen says, her fingernail hovering over the face Chloe noticed behind them. She looks up at Patrick in his armchair – of course it’s him. How strange that she hadn’t recognized him, but the camera has a funny way of capturing people sometimes. Maureen holds her palm out and Chloe hands the photograph back to her, then she puts away the rest of the albums and goes into the kitchen for a packet of garibaldis she forgot she’d bought.

TWENTY-FOUR

Chloe opens her eyes, blinking in the blackness of the room. She can’t sleep.

It’s quiet, much quieter than Nan’s. It’s dark too. When she wakes in the middle of the night at Nan’s, her bedroom is a dull orange colour, the light from the street lamp outside streaking through her curtains. But here, there are no street lights, she is surrounded by nothing but the whistle of the wind at her windows. On cue, the glass rattles slightly next to her bed. She pushes her covers back and dips her head behind the curtains, feeling the cold of the glass and a thin, freezing draught on her skin. Chloe searches the sky for the moon but tonight, there aren’t even stars. Her breath soon fogs up the glass and she dips back under the curtains.

She checks the time on her watch. 1.21 a.m. It’s only been two hours since she went to bed. Patrick had filled her and Maureen in on the show he was watching, so the three of them had sat in silence for the last hour of the evening to see the killer finally caught. Chloe had felt a small thrill when the mystery was solved, the idea of a resolution sitting far closer to the surface of her skin these days. Her attention had dipped in and out as she examined the room and the two people she sat beside. She’d filled two pages of her notebook before she fell asleep: Maureen has a habit of twiddling her feet at the ankles while she watches TV, and Patrick makes a groaning sound each time he gets up out of his chair. Every detail has to go into her book.

She’d come up to bed first, carrying her toothbrush, toothpaste and towel through to the bathroom like she was staying in a bed and breakfast rather than her new home. She still finds it hard to believe she’s here. She can’t say she feels she’s deceiving the Kyles, not when her motivations are so genuine and her focus so fixed. How could she? She is here to help.

In the black of the night, she scans the room, only just making out the shapes of the furniture. Chloe knows it’s going to take some getting used to; it usually does. It’s not just the look of the place, it’s the sounds too, or rather the lack of them. She’d got used to the noises Nan’s house made after dark, the click and whoosh of the central heating, the slow tap of the radiator in her room that they never got round to bleeding. Here she has a whole other after-dark language to learn. And it’s not just the noises, either. There are the smells in other people’s homes, too. We forget each