The Imposter Page 10
Still, she walks through the church, her hand trailing on the backs of empty pews. She lights a candle for Angie and drops a pound coin into the tin. It rattles inside as it lands, breaking the silence. Chloe stares at the flame, knowing Maureen and Patrick well enough to understand how much this small gesture would please them.
It has definitely been easier to throw herself into this task since she photocopied the file. She’s waited, the last couple of days, for her phone to ring, for Alec to demand her security pass back. She has been terrified that she was spotted on CCTV, or that the reporter has been down to the archive to give her back her money. But as the days have gone by, she’s started to relax inside her own skin again. She even had a dream two nights ago that she solved the crime and brought Angie home and was given back her job at the paper as a reward. She’d not only solved the mystery but saved the archive, and the Kyles, how they had loved her for it.
She sinks down on a pew, picturing for a second a packed church, Maureen and Patrick doing the same, elbow to elbow with friends and neighbours. Then she sighs. It always comes back to Maureen and Patrick, every lead, every hunch, every new clue she finds among the photocopies tacked to her bedroom wall. She knows the real answers to what happened to Angie must lie with the Kyles. But how can she possibly get to speak to them?
She’s never completely trusted silence, but here in this church, she feels peaceful – she feels heard. There’s an effigy of Mary at the altar. Chloe walks towards it, she reaches out to touch the cool marble smoothness of it. Mary stares back at her, as if she knows, as if she sympathizes with the enormous task Chloe has in front of her. Are these the same eyes that Maureen and Patrick had stared into when they prayed for their daughter’s safe return? If only she knew. If only Chloe could have been the reporter who sat down and interviewed them. And that’s when it happens, a split-second moment that feels something close to divine intervention. Of course she needs to speak to the Kyles – there really is no other way. And it wouldn’t be such a stretch of the truth to interview them for their annual colour piece. But it would be a way into their house, a way to eke out the details detectives couldn’t, to discover the evidence others had missed. And by the time anyone realizes Chloe wasn’t strictly who she said she was, then Angie would be back and no one would mind. In fact, Chloe would be a heroine. Her dream of saving the archive would come true. She looks up to Mary, her gaze at once forgiving. The fact that this idea had come to her here – here, of all places – is surely a sign that it’s the right thing to do. That if God could forgive a little white lie, anybody could.
SIXTEEN
She wakes to find the sun streaming through her curtains, which already feels like a good omen. She spends longer choosing what to wear; it feels important to get it right. She settles on black trousers and a red silk blouse with a slit neck. She stands in front of the mirror as she tucks the top into her waistband. She pulls it out. Tries it again. It’s missing something.
In Nan’s room she rummages through her wardrobe, pushing aside hangers home to fur and felt and lamé that will never be worn again. She pauses at a drop-waist black and gold dress from the eighties. She saw this dress in a photograph inside the album she looked at on the night Nan was missing. Granddad’s arm resting on one of those padded shoulders. She pauses for a second, her hand running over the material, and then, when she sees what’s next to it, she pushes it aside. She pulls from the hanger a plain black blazer. She tries it on in the mirror. Her long dark hair falls over the padded shoulders; something doesn’t look right. She takes it off, pulls out the padding, and slips back into it. The arms are a little long, and it’s a bit wide for her frame. And – she sniffs it – it smells of mothballs. But then she remembers seeing a bulldog clip in Nan’s bureau and she runs downstairs to get it, cinching it in at the back. Now her reflection is perfect. She dots some of Nan’s Lily of the Valley perfume behind each ear and on her wrists. She tries on one long plastic beaded necklace and then another, leaving the jewellery scattered across Nan’s dressing table. No, this will do. She twirls one more time in front of the mirror and sees the bulldog clip again. She just needs to remember not to take her coat off once she gets inside the Kyles’. She’ll remember, of course she will.
It’s only a ten-minute walk from Nan’s house to Chestnut Avenue, but Chloe takes the long way round so she can stop at the newsagent’s on the way. Beside the till there’s a stationary section, a slim red ring-bound reporter’s notebook. She buys it and a biro, remembering to test it on the paper first. She hands over the money to pay and leaves the shop transformed.
As she comes out of the newsagent’s, a couple of teenage boys move their bikes from the pavement outside the doorway. She catches her reflection in the window as she walks away: notebook and pen in one hand, blazer, smart trousers. She even feels like a reporter. She pictures herself then, thirty minutes from now, perhaps Maureen making her a cup of tea while she sits on the sofa opposite Patrick, taking notes in her pad. She’ll glance around the room, jotting down detail to colour in the story; nothing will go undiscovered, no stone unturned. The cashier in the shop hadn’t even questioned her buying a shorthand pad. She stops still on the pavement – she doesn’t know shorthand. Can she fake it? After all, she’s seen what reporters scrawl in their notepads. Would the Kyles know the difference? But she doesn’t like the thought of deceiving them. She checks her watch, there isn’t time to buy a dictaphone. Yet the thought of abandoning her plan now when she is already so close, so prepared, is impossible.
‘Too late now,’ she whispers under her breath.
She carries on walking. Nerves collecting inside each step. For the first time ever she has sympathy for reporters sent out on door knocks. Is this how they feel? She’s never thought about their job outside of the office, just complained if they didn’t return files back to the archive. She puts her nerves aside. She’s doing this for Angie, for the Kyles, so they might finally get some peace, some answers. After all, someone needs to keep hope for the missing. She remembers her own visits to the police station. They were hardly dynamic in their approach; twenty-five years ago they were probably even worse. She’s got to remember to stay focused.
She arrives at the house and watches for a while from the other side of the road. She pictures Maureen and Patrick pottering behind the walls, busy in their permanent state of pretence and waiting. She imagines Angie’s absence as something they pull on each morning as routinely as their clothes.
Unlike some of the other houses in this street, this one hasn’t sprouted an extension from its side. The old wooden gate hasn’t been swapped for a wrought-iron one either. The only update appears to be the double glazing and the new front door, brown uPVC to match the colour of the brick. Chloe looks up at the bedroom window she’d glanced into two weeks before, but for some reason she can’t see the same light shade, and the curtains seem different too. She squints harder, makes a sun visor with her hand to see more clearly. She checks the number – 48. It’s definitely the right place and yet somehow it feels different. She puts that down to nerves too.
She heads towards the short gate. As she pushes it open she notices tiny flecks of blue paint flake off on her palm. She slips her hands into her coat pocket, enjoying the thought of them collecting inside. She’s surprised that Patrick hasn’t sanded this down and repainted it, but perhaps the Kyles prefer to keep everything as it was then – a blue that Angie would recognize if she came home. She pictures Angie as a tiny girl, racing ahead of her mum, pushing at the same paintwork that is now scattered over her hand. For a second, excitement replaces the nerves. Respectfully, she closes the gate back onto the latch.
At the door, her hand hovers over the knocker. A white rose is etched into the stained glass above it – perhaps this is some tribute to Angie? She remembers the type of detail included in the colour pieces she’s read on her wall and gets out her notepad and pen – this will all be useful. Then, before there’s time for the doubt to creep
in, she knocks and stands back from the front step. This is it. She clutches her reporter’s notebook to her chest as she hears footsteps beyond the door frame. She clears her throat. Shuffles from foot to foot. This is it. A figure appears behind the mottled glass, the blurry outline of a hand reaching for the door handle. This is it.
There’s the crunch of draught excluders as the door opens. Chloe takes a breath, shapes her face into a smile.
‘Can I help you?’
A woman stands there, but it’s not Maureen. Chloe feels her face fall. This woman is young, even younger than her. Her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, she wears dangly gold hoop earrings and grey jogging bottoms with fluffy pink slippers poking out the end.
‘Maureen?’ she says. She doesn’t know why because this woman looks nothing like her.
The woman stands, one hand keeping the door pulled closed behind her, to stop the cold running amok down her hallway.
‘Maureen?’ the woman replies. ‘Is that what you said? She don’t live ’ere no more. It’s our place now.’
With that, the woman is nudged to one side as two small children wriggle into the space beside her legs. One of them, a girl with mousy hair, about six, looks from Chloe to her mother.
‘Who’s she?’ she asks her mother.
As she does, two more faces appear: toddlers, a boy and a girl, not twins but close in age; they have grubby food-stained mouths and are both wearing romper suits that are unbuttoned at the bottom, the fabric swinging between their chubby scuffed knees.
‘No one,’ their mum replies. ‘She’s after the old lady who used to live here. Now get in, it’s freezing out ’ere.’
The door is pushed shut, another crunch from the draught excluders and then, outside, everything is still. Chloe stands there for a moment. On the other side of the glass she hears the woman’s agitation at her kids; one starts to cry. No Maureen. No Patrick. No Angie. They’ve gone.
Chloe grips the reporter’s notebook as if it might steady her. She takes a step away from the door and then back again. It can’t be right. She goes to knock again, then decides against it. She steps back, checks the number – definitely 48. She heads back down the path slowly, through the flaking blue gate. She’s in such a hurry to leave, she forgets to close it after her. She takes another look back at the house and sees the woman watching her from the window. It can’t be right, something must be wrong. Patrick and Maureen wouldn’t have moved. They couldn’t have.
She walks home slowly, her shoes dragging on the pavement. She tries desperately to think of explanations. She passes a bin and dumps the notepad and pen into it. What if it had been Angie knocking on that door? What then? She can feel the ugliness rearing inside. And something else: anger, hurt. Hot black stones that burn inside her belly. After all these years of saying they’d wait for Angie how could they have just upped and left?
By the time she gets back to Nan’s she’s stumbling to get her key in the lock. When she does the hallway is blurred with angry tears. She slams it behind her, catching a bit of Nan’s curtain in it. She pulls it out, too hard, the top of it coming free from the rings, and it hangs there, limp, useless.
‘How could they just leave?’ she cries to an empty hallway. And then again louder, ‘How could they just leave?’
She runs up to her room, half expecting to open her door and the cuttings to be gone too, as if she had imagined the hurt and pain in Maureen and Patrick’s eyes. But the cuttings are there, waiting for her, mocking even. She scans them quickly, her finger tracing the lines, one after another, after another, until she finds what she’s looking for:
‘Angela is our life, our love, our everything. An open wound will be here in our hearts until the day she is returned to us. We will wait for the rest of our lives for the day we are reunited.’
Liars.
Her hand grips the top of the paper, she pulls and the whole page comes loose from the Blu-Tack. It hangs there, limply. She thinks of the curtain downstairs. She thinks of Nan in the home. She thinks of Claire Sanders taking Nan away. Now taking her house too. She thinks of Malc sacking her from the archive. She thinks of Maureen and Patrick – why had she ever trusted them? She pulls harder, the cuttings rip. She pulls the next and the next. It feels better. She uses both hands then, ripping at the cuttings with her fingers, feeling stronger with every tear. She goes faster and faster. She sees Maureen and Patrick’s faces tear in two, words split on the wall, on the floor. Fake words, lies. She stamps on them.
What’s the use in keeping them anyway?
She pulls again and tears and rips and all those fake words gather in a pile on the floor. She pulls again and again, snatches and slashes until the wall is bare and the woodchip shows through. Until just a few dots of pale blue putty or their greasy marks remain on the paper, and those smoky shadowy outlines of the pictures that once hung there. In places even the lining paper is torn. Not that Chloe cares. At her feet are the scattered remains of the cuttings, the stories, the headlines, the pictures, the quotes. All lies.
Then, among the rubble, the panic comes. She searches quickly from one article to another, to another, desperately trying to find one of the earliest. She picks it up with two hands, scans through the lines for the address. What if it was her fault? What if she had got the house number wrong? But there it is, unchangeable. 48. The same house she went to. Nothing had changed in black and white, yet in real life, everything had.
She sinks down among the paper on the floor, kicking one cutting off her shoe, and feels her throat constrict with hot tears.
Maureen and Patrick were meant to be different from all the rest. What a fool she’s been. They are exactly the same.
SEVENTEEN
It’s the afternoon before Chloe finally pulls herself up from the floor of her own shattered archive. She only does because she’d promised to visit Nan. Not that Nan will remember. But the staff will. She walks out of her bedroom with cuttings stuck to the soles of her shoes. One trails out of the house after her. She peels it off her shoe and allows the wind carry it off up the street.
It’s just after 3.30 p.m. when she boards the bus. She changes twice and watches children in various school uniforms walking home, skipping alongside Mum or Dad. She plays a game from her seat by the window, trying to spot the parents who would move away from their kids should they disappear. She doesn’t find a single one.
Chloe arrives at Park House just after the residents have had afternoon tea.
‘There’s a few muffins left in a dish in the communal room if you’re peckish,’ one of the care assistants tells her.
She shakes her head. She has lost her appetite.
‘Your grandma has been really looking forward to seeing you.’
They both know she’s lying.
Chloe walks past the communal room on her way to find Nan. From the circular walkway she sees the backs of half a dozen white heads waiting patiently for their own visitors. She feels something akin to one jigsaw piece fitting into another inside her. At least here she is needed and she feels a tiny flame reignite. She longs to be needed by somebody, and for a while she had forgotten that that person is Nan.
Nan is lying on her bed when Chloe arrives at her room.
‘Oh nurse, thank goodness you’re here.’
‘It’s me, Nan,’ she says, approaching the bed. ‘It’s Chloe.’
Her brow crinkles. ‘I don’t know a Chloe.’
Not today. She can’t take it. Not today of all days.
Chloe reaches for her hand. ‘You do, Nan.’
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know a Chloe. Nurse!’
Chloe sighs, she lets go of her hand, she steps back. What should she do? Go all the way back home? She makes for the door, and then when she gets there, she closes it. Not today. Not today of all days. She turns around.
‘Nan,’ she says. ‘Please, you do know me.’
She pleads with her. She can do this. She can make her remember. She’s s
o determined she doesn’t see the way the old woman flinches, how she huddles herself up to the wall.
‘Nurse!’ Nan cries.
‘No,’ Chloe snaps, going back to make sure the door is shut tight. ‘We don’t need a nurse, you know who I am. Don’t say you don’t.’
She walks back to the bed where Nan is cowering. She switches quickly to a calm voice and tries again: ‘You do know me, Nan, I’m Chloe.’
‘I don’t!’
‘Nan.’
‘Stop, I don’t. Nurse!’
‘Nan!’
‘Nurse!’
Nan reaches for a red button next to her bedside table. She presses it furiously, over and over, as Chloe tries to stop her. The two women grapple, Nan trying to hit the button, Chloe fighting against her. She grabs her wrist, too hard. Nan cries out.
‘We don’t need a nurse,’ Chloe says through her teeth. ‘We don’t need anybody.’
The next thing she knows, the door flies open. The matron appears in the doorway, her eyes wide.
‘What on earth is going on?’ the matron asks.
Chloe looks from the matron to Nan, seeing for the first time the scene as she does. Nan is trembling against the wall, her arms covering her face. Chloe’s hand flies up to her mouth, as Miriam crosses the room and Nan clings to her like a frightened child.
‘I . . . I’m sorry,’ Chloe says, backing towards the door, watching as the matron sits down beside Nan and puts an arm around her. She sees her notice Nan’s wrist, now pinky purple, the colour already setting in her skin.
Nan is crying now, telling the matron over and over, ‘I don’t know anyone called Chloe.’
The matron speaks gently to her. ‘OK, Grace,’ she says. ‘It’s OK. This is your granddaughter, she’s come to see you.’