The Imposter Read online

  ‘But it does happen. The police officer told me seventy-nine per cent of missing people are found within twenty-four hours, but what about the other twenty-one per cent? What happens to them? To people like Angela Kyle?’

  Hollie sighs. ‘Oh Chloe, don’t go overthinking, you know what you’re like.’

  Chloe shifts in her seat.

  ‘Nothing like that is going to happen to Nan, OK? The police are going to find her any minute and bring her home and you’ll be back to slinging cans of rice pudding in the bin in no time.’

  Chloe smiles a little.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says.

  ‘Any time,’ Hollie smiles back.

  ‘Anyway, how are you? I’ve been talking about myself so much I—’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I couldn’t believe it when you texted. Phil’s just got a big promotion at work – huge pay rise – he’s taking us on holiday. Fuerteventura, can’t wait!’

  ‘Oh, lovely.’ Chloe feels hot; she glances around the cafe for an open window.

  ‘And the new place is looking good – we’ve painted the spare room. It’s tiny but it looks much better, you know, fresh lick of paint. You should come over, we’re having friends around on Satur—’

  ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ Chloe starts slipping her arms into her coat and winding her scarf around her neck. ‘At the moment I’d rather just . . . you know, what with Nan missing . . .’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Hollie looks away as she does up her coat.

  Chloe stands up from her chair. ‘I’d better get back to work, but I might go to the cemetery at lunchtime, you know, just in case . . .’

  ‘Oh Chloe, it’s far too cold for that, and anyway, she’s got more sense than to be hanging around there. If she’s anywhere, it’ll be back at home, won’t it? You’ll probably go home after work and find her sitting there with a cup of tea.’

  At the mention of tea, Chloe remembers the melted kettle she threw away. And then the fact she’s already ten minutes late for work.

  Hollie stands up to hug her goodbye. ‘Promise you’ll let me know when they find her?’

  SIX

  After work, Chloe leaves the office and heads for the shopping centre. She walks against the tide of shoppers, scanning the crowd as she does for a navy parka, white hair and a wobbly gait she would instantly recognize. A group of teenage schoolgirls, skirts rolled up above their knees, pass her going in the opposite direction. Chloe stares at the tight circle they make. One bumps Chloe with her bag. They walk on chattering.

  Chloe finds the department store and heads towards the electricals. Inside, she browses different models of kettles, walking alongside rows and rows of them. She watches the people around her, the couples taking time to choose; some pick up one kettle to test how it feels in their hand, how it feels to pour. Chloe copies them, testing kettles well out of her price range, before choosing one exactly the same as Nan’s last.

  Nan’s house is a museum of her life. It makes Chloe feel safe that Nan’s world moves more slowly than the outside one, the things and people take longer to change. Chloe can relax in there. Outside the doors, the world is less reliable. The people are too.

  When she was a child, she had a favourite teacher in year three. Her name was Miss Moore. Chloe had a book then, about a little girl who loved her teacher too, and when she read it she always thought of herself and Miss Moore. She once saw Miss Moore trimming a hedge outside her house. She often wished she could go into that house, that she could look behind her red front door. The teacher in the book left the school, and Chloe felt sure that Miss Moore would never do that to her. Then one morning she arrived at school and there was no Miss Moore in front of the blackboard. There was Mr Chadwick. The next time she walked past Miss Moore’s house she reached over the fence and pulled all the heads off her pink roses. It had made her feel better but only for a while. She feels safe with Nan, and she knows Nan feels safe with her, and that’s more than you can ask from a lot of people. In the electrical department, she feels wet tears on her cheeks. When will Nan be home?

  She looks up and sees someone watching her. She dries her eyes. Hollie is right: the first thing Nan will want when she comes home is a cup of tea. And she will come home. She has to.

  Chloe takes the kettle to the till. She waits in line to pay, gripping the box. A man and his daughter stand not far from her. The girl is about four, her hair in a plait, a navy pinafore peering from under her cerise woollen coat. She thinks of the missing girl in the news cuttings. Chloe watches her as she plays, balancing her shiny T-bar shoes on her dad’s giant ones and giggling as he walks her round in circles in his great big footsteps.

  ‘Excuse me? Madam?’

  Chloe spins round. She hadn’t noticed the cashier calling her forward.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, smiling back at the little girl and her dad and placing the kettle on the counter.

  ‘They’re lovely at that age, aren’t they?’ the cashier says.

  At that moment, the father looks across to the tills and the cashier waves at the little girl. The man smiles back.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Chloe says, fishing inside her purse.

  The cashier rings up the kettle on the till.

  ‘Right, that’ll be twenty-five pounds, please,’ she says.

  Chloe pays as the man and the little girl start to head for the exit.

  The cashier presses her receipt into her hand.

  ‘Hold on to these moments,’ she says. ‘They grow up so fast.’

  And it’s only then that Chloe realizes what the cashier is seeing. She pauses before she takes the receipt and follows the man and his daughter out of the shop, imagining the cashier’s eyes on them, their perfect threesome. How easy it is to belong in another’s eyes. It’s only when she’s out of sight of the till that she turns back on herself, taking the escalator up to the first floor, watching the man and the little girl skipping at his side until they disappear from view.

  Chloe is soon outside again, the cold biting against her cheeks. She pushes her chin into her scarf, and her footsteps quicken towards home. She walks past the glow of shop windows until they become those of cosy front rooms. She can’t bear to look inside tonight at neat family scenes. All she can think about is getting home. She pictures turning into Nan’s street, seeing the house lit up from the inside, as if it has all been a bad dream. Cars filled with families pass her as she follows the path out of the city centre; small kids stare out at her from steamy back windows that they draw on while mum and dad ride up front. She stops for one at a junction, and when it turns right, she’s about to step out into the road when a faint orange glow from a street light illuminates the sign: Chestnut Avenue. This is the street mentioned in the cuttings, the one where the missing girl had lived – where her parents continue living, still waiting for her to come home.

  Chloe peers down the road as she crosses. The wide avenue curves after the first few homes, thwarting her curiosity. As she walks away she tries desperately to remember which number house they lived at. Was it 48? She can’t be sure. She’d only know from the very oldest cuttings when life was different and people didn’t need to worry about weirdos turning up on their doorstep.

  She carries on walking towards Nan’s house. She had no idea the Kyles lived so close by. She pictures their living room, just like the others she had walked past, yet in her mind’s eye theirs is colder, an emptiness that just won’t shift. She knows something of the pain of being stuck like that, although she’s only had twenty-four hours without Nan, not the twenty-five-year hell they have endured.

  Chloe opens the front door, hoping to find Nan behind it, standing confused in the kitchen, rummaging through cupboards. She’s even willing to be called Stella if only she is here. But the house is still and cold.

  She plugs in the new kettle and watches as it boils, steam rushing into the tiny kitchen. She makes a cup of tea and takes it into the living room. Inside, her eyes wander across the mahogany-stained sideboard and al
l the paraphernalia Nan has kept on it for years: the cut-glass fruit bowl filled with nothing but dust; the gold carriage clock Granddad got when he retired that ticked for years longer than his own heart. She pauses in front of a framed photograph of him and Stella. She puts down her tea and picks up the frame with both hands. Stella is a little girl, sitting on his lap; she’s wearing knee-high socks and a tartan skirt, her hair cut in a cute little bob that her curls refuse to obey. They are unmistakably father and daughter. How can it be possible to envy intimacy trapped inside a black and white photograph?

  She leaves the picture face down, and as she does, catches her own reflection in the leaded glass. Without Nan for context she looks like a stranger in this house.

  She kneels down and opens the bottom of the sideboard where she knows the family photo albums are kept. She pulls them out until they lie scattered across the busy patterned carpet. They smell musty, of decades trapped inside. Cross-legged, she sits down among them. She pulls out the giant red one first and hears a soft crackle from the waxy sheets as she turns the pages one by one. There’s Nan and Granddad on their wedding day, Granddad looking so handsome, so fresh from the war he’s still wearing his uniform. Nan, a woman much younger than Chloe is now, her hair cut into a similar bob to Stella’s. She roams through the pages of their lives together, fast-forwarding through their various homes, past baby photos, catching angles of houses and cars she’s sure she recognizes – photographs and memories blurring into one. It doesn’t take much to plant a story inside your head, then water it and watch it grow.

  She flicks through and watches as Nan ages. There are photos of her in cone-cupped bikinis sunbathing on the rocks in Ibiza, and others of her as a young mum, a baby on one hip as she poses proudly beside their new VW Beetle.

  She flicks through the albums quickly, like a flip book, watching the lines deepen on Nan’s face as first her daughter and then her husband disappear from her side. The photographs stop abruptly then, a few pages short of the end. Instead a large blank fills the space.

  Chloe closes the album, and sits with it in her lap in the dim light of the living room. A whole life contained in these albums. But what use are they to Nan now when the memories, the captions for each of those photographs, have already bid her brain farewell?

  Chloe puts everything away. She heats up a can of rice pudding for supper, then sits in Nan’s chair, looking out of the living room window. She watches the street, hoping to see a familiar figure appear under the orange glow of the street lamps. Instead it’s just a fox that scuttles by.

  Chloe watches TV for a while, skipping channels when she can’t focus on any one programme. She looks outside again. It has now been twenty-eight hours since Nan went missing. Chloe knows her chances of being found are falling with each hour that passes. In a newspaper story a reporter would describe her as clinging to hope. She thinks of the Kyles, how they first feasted on it, until even hope became famine. She settles down in Nan’s chair. The standard lamp in the window a beacon to return Nan home. Its long fringe shade casting shadows across Chloe’s face.

  SEVEN

  Chloe has an uncomfortable night on the sofa, twisting and turning in half-dreams the way she often does. She wakes throughout the night to check her phone, the living room close enough to hear if there were a knock at the front door. At some point she must drift off into a deep sleep because her ringing phone jolts her awake.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Chloe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘PC Bains here from Acton police station.’

  She tries to stem her fear of what they might say. ‘Acton?’

  ‘Yes, in west London. The reason I’m calling is because I have a Mrs Grace Hudson here at the station and . . .’

  Chloe sits up quickly, on the edge of the sofa cushion.

  ‘. . . she’s a little disorientated and dehydrated, but otherwise well.’

  ‘Oh, thank God.’

  She presses the phone to her chest because it feels like the right thing to do. She composes herself and takes instructions from the police officer, promising her she’s already on her way.

  Nan is OK. Disorientated, but OK.

  She’s home. Or not quite. She’s in Acton. Chloe sieves back through the photo albums in her mind. Nan and Granddad’s first home was in west London; they’d both been born there and had only moved up here when Grandad got a job at the brick factory. Nan had gone home.

  Chloe takes the fast train to London even though it’s more expensive – she refuses to be slowed by twice as many stops. It is still early morning and the train is filled with commuters, and the scent of pressed shirts, fresh aftershave and plastic cups of hot tea. She calls her own office and leaves a garbled message for Alec. She knows it will be greeted with more eye-rolling, but right now – this minute – she needs to get Nan back.

  She texts Hollie too: Nan ok, in Acton. Not sure why. On train to get her. So relieved. xx

  Chloe sits upright in her seat, willing the scenery to flash past faster at the windows. Even two inches closer to the edge of her seat will mean she pulls in to London quicker. When the trolley comes around she buys a KitKat and a Diet Coke. It fizzes as she pours it into a beige plastic cup.

  The train heads out to the edges of Fenland. There is still frost on the ground and birds stand on the woolly backs of sheep to keep their feet warm. Everyone is useful to someone.

  Takeaways and betting shops lead Chloe to Acton police station from the tube, and like a trail of breadcrumbs these garish signs will lead her back the way she came. When she reaches the counter she’s panting, as if she had been holding her breath all the way from Peterborough.

  ‘My nan . . . Grace Hudson . . . she’s h— I mean, she’s been found. She’s here.’

  The officer behind the counter gestures for her to slow down.

  ‘OK, let’s start at the beginni—’

  ‘It was PC Bains who called me, she . . . she said Nan was here, that she was fine. Dehydrated. Please, I just need to see her.’

  ‘OK, OK . . .’ the officer says, more sympathetic than impatient. He taps something into his computer. ‘Can you tell me your grandmother’s name?’

  ‘Grace. Grace Hudson.’

  Chloe scans his face for recognition while he studies his computer screen. She learnt a long time ago to read faces for the bits people don’t tell you.

  ‘Would you like to take a seat and I’ll let PC Bains know you’re here.’

  ‘Is she here? Nan, I mean.’

  ‘If you could just take a seat,’ he says. He indicates towards the bench behind her, blue and shiny, matching the Met Police logo.

  Chloe waits in reception – just like on the train – on the very edge of her seat. She scans each person in uniform who walks by in case she can identify PC Bains. She distracts herself by picking the dry skin around her nails until red bleeds into her cuticles.

  She hears a voice down the corridor. Nan’s voice. She looks up. PC Bains is walking along the corridor towards her, her arm hooked around Nan’s elbow, talking to her as if they’re old friends. Chloe stands up and rushes towards them like she knows for sure they’d do in films.

  ‘Nan,’ she says.

  Nan looks at her like they saw each other just five minutes before.

  ‘Chloe, whatever’s happened, dear? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  PC Bains pats her arm. She has a Brummie accent when she speaks. ‘She’s been worried about you, Grace. You went wandering, didn’t you? You’ve caused your poor granddaughter all sorts of worry.’

  ‘I don’t have a granddaughter.’

  PC Bains gives Chloe a sympathetic look.

  ‘Yes, you do, Grace. She’s here to take you home. You’ve been missing for two days.’

  Nan looks at her. ‘Have I?’

  Chloe puts an arm around Nan. ‘Why did you come to Acton, Nan?’

  ‘I was lost,’ she says. ‘I wanted to come home.’

  ‘But you don
’t live here, Nan.’

  ‘Well, that’s what they keep saying. But my house is there. I tried telling them it was my house.’

  Chloe glances at PC Bains for some kind of explanation.

  ‘It turns out it’s where she lived when she was a little girl,’ she says. ‘She stowed away on a train from Peterborough apparently, managed to slip through the barriers, even onto the tube, didn’t you, Grace? The owners of the house found her inside their shed this morning. You gave them quite the fright, Grace.’

  ‘Twenty-three Rothschild Road,’ Nan says, ‘but who were those people? Where are Mother and Father?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that now, Nan,’ Chloe says. ‘The most important thing is that you’re home. Or nearly anyway, we need to get the train back—’ She looks up and around inside the station, as if to get her bearings.

  ‘Oh, it’s OK, I think that’s all sorted,’ PC Bains interrupts, and as she does a figure appears walking down the corridor behind her, clutching paperwork. ‘I believe you and Claire have met before?’

  Claire Sanders, Nan’s social worker. Her blunt bob swings around her cheeks. The jubilation Chloe felt at seeing Nan is instantly replaced with a dread that surely shows on her face. The mask slips. She feels it.

  ‘Oh, Claire’s been ever so nice, Chloe,’ Nan says. ‘She says she’ll give us a lift home to . . .’ She turns to PC Bains. ‘Where are we going again?’

  ‘Peterborough,’ Chloe and Claire answer in unison. The social worker has her car keys in her hand, her handbag tucked under her arm.

  ‘Shall we?’ Claire asks. Nan and Chloe follow her out of the station.

  EIGHT

  From the outside, the new place for Nan looks more like a hotel than a care home. There is a shiny sign reading Park House Care Home, sprinkled at the corners with illustrations of spring flowers.

  Chloe takes Nan’s arm to lead her inside.

  ‘Do we know someone who lives here?’ Nan asks.

  ‘Come on, Nan,’ Chloe replies, ‘let’s go inside and have a look around.’