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

there. But she finds the footwell empty. Her imagination is getting carried away. She looks up at Patrick again behind four or five other people. Just an ordinary man.

She sighs inside the car. The windows are still steamy. She watches him, though she knows he’d struggle to see her. And that’s when she notices the glove compartment in front of her. It has a tiny lock on it, one that fits a tiny key. She looks up at Patrick, still stuck in the queue, tapping the side of his leg with his keys. Chloe leans forward, restricted a little by her seat belt, but enough to try the tiny door – it opens. Inside, there is the usual paraphernalia you find in cars. She takes each item out in turn: screen wipes, a log book, a small first aid kit. And then, pressed tight against the bottom, something that seems unusual. Her fingers feel for it, fishing it out, and then there it is, exposed in her hand – a newspaper cutting she recognizes from her own collection at Low Drove:

ANGIE’S FATHER IN SHOCK ARREST

Her heart stops still in her chest. Her hands start to shake as she reads the words she knows so well, the ones she’s already committed to memory, the quotes from Patrick that had once put her mind at rest. She looks from the cutting to Patrick in the queue. He took this from her archive. She knows this because she recognizes the same biro writing down the side of it: Patrick angry. Maureen frightened into silence. And the date, just a few weeks before.

The cutting flutters in her hands. She looks up. Patrick is paying at the till. He turns around, heading out of the petrol station, back across the forecourt. She takes the cutting, pushing it into her coat pocket, feeling it tear as she does so. Quickly, she shoves everything else back into the glove compartment, closing the door tight just as Patrick gets back in the car beside her. He stops for a moment and looks at her, as if sensing a shift in atmosphere. He looks down at her hands in her lap. She places one over the other, so he doesn’t see how they’re shaking.

‘Bloody queues,’ he says, heaving the car door shut behind him. Then he pulls on his seat belt and puts his key in the ignition. And as he does, Chloe closes her eyes and longs for the safety of home. Nan’s home.

They continue on the road towards the Fens. Inside, the car is filled with the white noise of tyres on the dual carriageway. Chloe’s head is spinning beside Patrick. He taps the steering wheel, humming along to the radio. She watches his hands as he changes gear; the rest of the time, she focuses on the dull grey of the road in front of them, pictures swimming in front of her eyes. She is still in her seat, but her heart thumps behind her ribs and hot blood spins in her ears.

Then Patrick turns off the dual carriageway onto a single track they haven’t taken before. Chloe grips the sides of her seat as he pushes his foot down on the accelerator. In the wing mirror she sees dust kicked up by the tyres. Her feet press into the footwell.

It is early evening out in the Fens and the big sky is turning pink, dyeing silhouettes of the trees an inky blue. She would usually see beauty here, but not tonight. She doesn’t recognize this road. She has never been here before. She pictures the boot of the car. Patrick’s gun. Maureen at home waiting for fish and chips.

‘Would you look at that?’ Patrick says.

Suddenly he lunges towards her. She flinches, squeezing her eyes shut. But when she opens them, out of the window, at exactly the same level and even speed, a barn owl flies alongside them. Its beautiful white plumage streaks across the dark green of the fields, its black eyes fixed straight ahead. It moves as if it flies in slow motion.

‘Ent that a sight, eh?’ Patrick says.

For a moment the pair of them are mesmerized by the sight: the bird’s round moon face, its dangling feathered legs, within them a mouse, or perhaps a vole.

A bump underneath the wheels jolts them out of the moment. For a second, black tyres tear across the road. Patrick clutches hold of the wheel, which spins under his grip, and he slams on the brakes. Chloe grips the upholstery harder as she jolts in her seat. A moment later and the car is still, the only thing moving a cloud of dust chewed up from the road behind them.

Patrick checks the rear-view mirror. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he says, quickly undoing his seat belt. Then again: ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’

He’s out of the car before Chloe has time to turn around. He leaves the driver’s door open. Chloe thinks of the cutting crumpled in her pocket and looks quickly at the keys hanging in the ignition. She glances through the back windscreen, and sees Patrick striding swiftly back the way they came. She turns further in her seat to see why. Not too far in front of him, there is something unidentifiable writhing in the road.

Chloe unfastens her seat belt and opens her own car door. Out on the open road, Patrick marches closer to the figure on the tarmac. Chloe follows him. He looks up.

‘Stay back,’ he says, holding his hand up to stop her.

She jumps slightly, but obeys him.

He turns back to the creature, and she hears him say again, ‘Oh Jesus.’

A hare lies on the road, its deep brown eyes bulging in pain. Even from this distance, Chloe can see the whites of its eyes. The terror in them as Patrick approaches. She can feel it. The hare makes a pathetic attempt to run, but its hind leg is stuck fast to the road, a mass of pink and red seeping into the tarmac.

Patrick kneels