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

the flora and fauna because she so desperately wants Maureen to return to the same subject. She wants to hear her talk more about Angie.

‘Do you have any other family?’ Maureen says. ‘I’ve probably asked you before.’

Chloe shakes her head. ‘Just Nan,’ she says.

‘You have another grandmother still alive?’

Chloe looks back at her, then feels her cheeks sting with blood. She looks away. How had she slipped up like that?

‘Oh, sorry. I forgot for a second, I . . .’

Maureen puts her hand on Chloe’s.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘It’s so easily done, isn’t it? When you miss them so much, it feels like they’re still here. I know for a long time after Angie . . . well, sometimes I even let myself pretend she was just at school. Anything to ease the pain, although I know some people thought I was mad.’

Chloe is grateful that her slip-up has brought them back to Angie. Now she just needs to keep her here.

‘The day . . . the day Angie went . . . where were you?’ Chloe asks.

‘Me?’ Maureen says.

Chloe nods.

‘I was at home,’ she says, ‘in Chestnut Avenue, you know, our old house? Patrick had taken her out, to the park. He was with her when she . . . well, you know, when she disappeared.’

Chloe nods.

‘He was a broken man, Chloe. Truly broken by it. The police could have done more too, Patrick knew it. But we were in their hands, we had to rely on them that they were doing all they could but . . . well, they called off the search that first night when it got dark, can you believe it?’

Maureen shakes her head as Chloe thinks back to those terrible hours when Nan was missing. Yes, she could believe it, especially back then.

‘But Patrick, he had to be strong for me, see?’ Maureen continues.

‘Did you blame him? I mean, was it hard?’

‘Never,’ she says quickly.

Chloe looks at her sideways.

‘What was the use? Especially when I saw how it had torn him in two. We had to stick together. That kind of thing happening, it tears most couples apart. We needed each other. I needed him.’

Chloe thinks of the cuttings she’d read about his arrest. She’s surprised to hear Maureen criticising the police investigation – Patrick had praised them for looking at every line of inquiry so thoroughly. She hears his quotes again in her head.

‘But if it broke Patrick too, why did he think you were hanging on to the past? Why didn’t he want to hang on to things too?’

Maureen shrugs. ‘People deal with grief in different ways,’ she says. She looks up then, across the fields to the approaching crossroads. ‘It’s left back to the village, or right takes us all the way out on the Wisbech road,’ she says.

Chloe indicates left with her eyes and intuitively Maureen follows her. The road is busier and they’re forced to break off from one another to walk in single file as cars whizz by. Chloe watches Maureen from behind; the warmth of her still lingers, tucked in the curve of her elbow. Soon a grass verge curves up from the tarmac, a well-worn path within it. She thinks for a second of the carpet walkway to the archive at work and feels a longing for her old desk, the safety that office routine had offered. No wonder she still imitates it each day. She wonders how Alec is managing, whether the new computer systems have arrived, whether her beloved archive has lost its texture, whether it has turned yet from paper to metal to machine.

The two women walk in line on the single track. Chloe is grateful for a moment to think. She needs to keep Maureen talking while Patrick isn’t around. It’s obvious he doesn’t understand Maureen like she does. She looks out at this flat landscape, the isolation, trees standing hundreds of yards from their neighbours. How lonely it must have felt for Maureen to have carried the weight of her grief alone all these years.

They walk for another half a mile or so back to the village. By the time they arrive at the house, cloud has stolen the sun and the air is cooler than it had been when they set off. They come in the back door, breaking the stillness of a kitchen they hadn’t bothered to lock, and Maureen switches the heating on while they warm up beside the radiator.

‘Chloe, love, stick the kettle on while I go upstairs to the loo,’ she says.

Chloe does as she asks and listens to her footsteps disappear up the stairs. But five minutes go by, then ten, and she hears no footsteps returning back down. Their tea sits cooling, staining the rim of the mugs. Chloe walks to the bottom of the stairs in the hall. She listens out and hears a faint shuffling across the floorboards.

‘Tea’s ready,’ she calls.

But there’s no response. She puts her first foot on the step, waits. She takes another, then the next one, until she stands at the top of the stairs. She scans the landing. The padlock is missing from the spare room, the door slightly ajar. Inside, Chloe can just make out Maureen, moving around among cardboard boxes.

She steps onto the landing, walks slowly over to the door. How long has she waited to look inside? Maureen doesn’t hear her enter. She is heaving and emptying boxes.

‘Maureen?’ Chloe asks quietly.

Maureen stands still in the middle of the room, her back to Chloe.

‘Are you OK?’ Chloe asks.

Maureen’s head is bent forwards, her shoulders hunched. She’s clutching something to her chest, and all around her toys from the seventies spill out of boxes: Sindy dolls, spinning tops, wooden bricks, Ladybird books and hard plastic baby dolls clothed in hand-knitted jackets. In the middle of the chaos, Maureen turns slowly on the spot, clutching what looks like a rag at first, squashed between her cheek and her neck. She buries her nose into it, taking a deep inhale. Chloe gasps as she realizes what it is, she recognizes it from the newspaper cuttings – Angie’s cloth cat, Puss.