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

speak, but he can’t find the words. Instead he sinks down onto his haunches in the middle of the road. He wipes his hands across his face, and sighs, defeated. Chloe is surprised to feel her back relaxing into the boot of the car. By instinct she knows she’s got him, that a confession will follow. He is so obviously undone by her accusation that this is surely over. She’s won. And now what? What does she do with him out here? In that moment she isn’t sure. All she does know is that the mystery is over. It has ended. She pictures Maureen at home, waiting innocently for fish and chips, naive to the fact that what will return home to her will blow her world apart. But what choice has Chloe had? She is not Angie. She never was, and once she knew Patrick only allowed Maureen to believe she was to hide his own crimes, how could she keep up the facade? There was no more fantasy, only the truth.

She stares at Patrick, almost as broken on the road as the hare he discarded. She has done this – Chloe has done this. It had taken her appearance in their home to show Patrick Kyle for who he was. Hadn’t she always vowed to find out the truth about Angie? Perhaps now, she was one step closer to that.

It seems to be a long time before either of them move. When Chloe looks up again, the sky has darkened and the pair of them are little more than shadows. Finally, Patrick gets up from the road. He holds up his arms as if in surrender.

‘I’m going to walk back to the car, Chloe,’ he says slowly, a resigned tone to his voice that she’s never heard before. ‘I don’t want you to be frightened. I’ve got my hands up, I’m not going to come anywhere near you. I’m just going to walk back towards the car, OK?’

Chloe nods, then realizes he can’t see her in the darkness. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘OK.’

He’s moving already, walking towards her. She sees the way he moves, his head bent, his shoulders slumped. Something in his stance tells her he’s not a danger now, he can’t hurt anyone ever again. Somehow, instinctively, she is no longer afraid.

Slowly, Patrick walks back to the driver’s door. They face each other, the car between them.

‘Get in,’ he says. Then more gently, ‘Get in and I’ll explain everything.’

She hesitates. Does she want to get into a car with a murderer? But she looks around her, at the deserted road, the two of them in utter blackness, too early for the moon to shine its torch. If he was going to kill her, wouldn’t he have done it by now? She looks across the fields for the house she saw, but it’s now lost in the blindness of dusk; there is no light to run towards.

Patrick indicates again for her to get in. Then, without waiting for her, he slips into the driver’s seat, leaving his door wide open. Slowly she moves back towards her side of the car. She glances in; he is staring at the steering wheel. She takes her place alongside him, but like him, keeps her door open. They sit like that for a while, both doors open, the air whistling through the open car. Finally, Patrick speaks.

‘I am guilty,’ he says, his voice shaken and small. ‘I am. But not in the way that you think I am.’

Chloe swallows beside him. She knows she needs to let him speak.

‘I couldn’t have killed Angie, she was the most’ – his voice breaks – ‘she was the most precious . . . she was . . .’ He clutches the steering wheel with both hands and leans his head in the middle of them.

Chloe looks over at him, the light in the car highlighting his hair.

‘She was everything.’ He starts to cry.

Chloe sits still beside him. She has never seen a man cry like this, she’s mesmerized – mesmerized and horrified. She watches him without making a sound. It’s a while before he recomposes himself. He wipes his face on the sleeve of his jumper and rubs his eyes. It’s a few more minutes before he can speak.

‘It is true that we weren’t at the swings the day that she disappeared and you . . . you were the first person I ever told in all those years. Can you believe that?’

Chloe shakes her head under the glow of the car’s interior light.

‘I don’t know why, why I chose to confess that to you, a perfect stranger, when I had carried that secret all that time.’

He stops talking to shake his head in disbelief.

‘Perhaps I felt so out of control,’ he says. ‘Maureen, she’s so convinced you . . . well, you know. And I’ve tried, all these years I’ve tried to make her . . .’

He drops his head down again and sobs.

Chloe waits. Her mind is ablaze with questions. But she has to let him tell her himself. She has, after all, waited this long.

‘OK . . . all right.’ He turns to her in his seat. ‘The truth is, I was having an affair. Can you believe it? I was the man who had everything. I had Maureen, I had my little girl, but like a lot of young men, it just wasn’t enough.’

Chloe tips her head back against the headrest. An affair? She hadn’t seen this coming. What? What is he saying?

He runs his hands through his hair, and bangs the steering wheel with both hands. Chloe jumps in her seat, and Patrick turns to her quickly, his hands out to calm her.

‘But it doesn’t make me a killer, Chloe. A fecking eejit, yes, but not a killer.’ He shakes his head. ‘Not a killer.’

Chloe moves a little towards the door, still nervous of being so close to him. Her mind was racing to join the dots, to understand what he was trying to tell her. What exactly had Patrick Kyle done if he had not murdered his daughter?

‘But I knew, though,