The Imposter Read online

  Chloe continues shopping, aware of the lone figure she cuts among all the others with their loaded trolleys. In the cosmetics aisle she is still thinking of the little girl. Distracted, she throws a tube of denture paste into her basket. It’s only when she finally reaches the checkout that she remembers she doesn’t need to buy it anymore.

  ‘I picked this up by mistake,’ she explains.

  The cashier nods without speaking.

  Chloe is about to tell her about Nan, to explain, but then she notices her name badge: Sharon Kyle.

  ‘Kyle,’ Chloe says. ‘That’s an unusual surname.’

  The woman looks up. ‘Is it?’

  Chloe can’t help herself.

  ‘Are you related to a Maureen and Patrick Kyle?’

  The woman puts a bunch of bananas on the scales and looks up to the ceiling. ‘Nope, no relation.’

  ‘Oh, OK, I just thought . . .’

  Chloe carries on packing her shopping in plastic orange bags.

  She tries again: ‘They had a daughter, Angela?’

  The woman shakes her head.

  Chloe pays and leaves, convincing herself that they must be related somehow. She asks herself again what might have happened if this were a detective show? She stops still on the pavement, even thinks of going back. Surely a detective wouldn’t have let a lead like that go? If she’d been a relative, Chloe could have told her that she was revisiting the case for new clues; the woman might even have offered to help, perhaps given her an interview.

  As she walks to the bus stop, she has a fantasy of her name appearing alongside a newspaper article. She goes over the headlines in her mind, before settling on a triumphant Angela Kyle reunited with parents. She’s smiling as she gets on the bus. She arranges her shopping at her feet, and wonders whether the police interviews of the time extended to wider family and friends. Aren’t most missing children taken by someone they know? She’s sure she’s heard that before. She takes out her notepad from her bag and makes a note to look up that statistic. She swaps her notepad and pen for a cutting from the Angie file. She opens it out on her lap.

  WE’RE STILL WAITING FOR ANGIE

  Below it two faces, weathered by a decade of grief, Patrick and Maureen sit holding a framed photograph of Angie between them.

  TEN years after the disappearance of their four-year-old daughter from a city park, Patrick and Maureen Kyle have revealed they will never give up hope that she will be returned to them.

  The devastated parents, of Chestnut Avenue, Dogsthorpe, told this newspaper they still believe Angela will be found.

  ‘Although the case was closed many years ago, the police never found Angela’s body,’ Mr Kyle said. ‘And without a body to bury there is every chance that Angela will walk back into our lives one day. As long as we live, we’ll never stop hoping that will happen. We’ll always be waiting for her.’

  Chloe pulls the cutting up closer to her nose, searching the eyes of Maureen and Patrick – for what, she isn’t sure. It’s obvious from this photograph that time has taken its toll on the two of them. Patrick’s once-black hair is now peppered with white around his ears; he’s grown a beard too which is filled in with grey. Two deep frown lines now fill the space between Maureen’s eyebrows, her hair not long and loose like it was when she was a young mother. It’s now cut more practically, less carefree. It must have broken her heart to trim off the locks that Angie herself had once touched.

  ‘Never trusted him,’ a voice behind her says.

  Chloe feels someone leaning over her left shoulder.

  She turns around. A middle-aged woman leans back in her seat once again.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Chloe asks.

  ‘Always thought he was hiding something.’

  ‘Like what?’ Chloe folds the cuttings, as if that small gesture will protect Maureen and Patrick’s ears.

  ‘Well, how many dads do you know who take their girls out to the park on the weekend?’

  She sniffs, and Chloe thinks, though resists the urge to say, she doesn’t know any dads.

  ‘That was it, wasn’t it?’ the woman continues. ‘He left her, didn’t he? Well, I always thought he looked a bit shifty. Leaving a little girl in the park like that, even for a second, he deserved everything he got if you ask me.’

  The woman pulls her handbag up under her large bosom. Sniffs again.

  ‘Well,’ Chloe starts, ‘it was only for a second . . .’

  She has no idea why she’s defending Patrick. Perhaps after this time spent within the story, she feels some kind of loyalty to Maureen and Patrick, like they’re friends. Yes, like she knows them. She sits up a bit taller then. After all, hadn’t it only taken a second for Nan to go missing?

  ‘Don’t matter how long, you don’t leave your kids,’ the woman says. ‘Not even for a moment. How she stuck with him all these years I don’t know. If my husband had come home without any of ours, I’d have strung him up myself.’

  Chloe turns back to the cutting and reopens it. She tries to see Patrick as this stranger does. But to her, Patrick looks shattered, the same as his wife beside him. Hadn’t he also welcomed the police enquiry, even when they arrested him? A guilty man wouldn’t do that. Her fingertips feel clammy where she’s clutching the cutting. How could anyone think they got what they deserved? No one deserves to lose a child. Especially not these two, not when they had clearly cherished her so much.

  ‘That little girl was about the same age as my Jessica at the time,’ the woman starts again, only this time Chloe doesn’t turn around. ‘We were all saying the same thing in the school playground: it had to be him involved, police just couldn’t pin anything to him. And they do these appeals every year – what do they say?’ She leans forward to read the headline, then mimics them, ‘“We’re still waiting for Angie.” Well, she ent coming home. She’s gone, ent she? Gone the minute he took his eyes off her. Wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t know where an’ all, you mark my words.’

  Chloe has heard enough. She pushes the cutting back into her bag and looks up for her stop. It’s not the next one, but she decides to get off anyway. She gathers up her shopping, and as she does, two oranges roll out and down the central aisle of the bus. The woman tuts. Chloe feels the anger burning inside, her temples throbbing. How could someone say that about Maureen and Patrick? No two parents are more devoted than they are. If only she had been lucky enough to have been their daughter. Chloe would have killed for parents like that.

  As the doors close she hears the woman say to the passenger sitting next to her, ‘Well, I was only saying.’

  ELEVEN

  There’s chaos in the newsroom when Chloe walks in on Monday morning. On days like these Chloe has learnt that it’s best to shuffle straight towards the archive, losing herself among the filing cabinets until tempers calm.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she whispers to Alec as they stand opposite each other in the archive, separated by metal, her filing B, him L.

  ‘No front page this morning,’ he says, slamming the L drawer shut. Chloe feels the reverberation of it inside the B drawer.

  Nothing causes more panic here than a Monday morning without a splash. Malc is a micro manager, very often calling reporters into the office to brief them on stories himself. The one day of the week that he’s forced to spend with his family is a constant source of anxiety to him. He must spend all Sunday hoping for a story to break, Chloe has often thought. Alec said he should have stayed as a news editor; some people just can’t let go.

  Malc’s office door slams open and shut throughout the morning until almost midday when the paper finally goes to press. It’s cost them money and he snaps at Sandra, his PA. She types faster outside his office. Alec and Chloe instinctively make their footsteps lighter inside the archive. But five minutes later, Sandra pops her head in among the piles of filing.

  ‘Malc wants to see you in his office,’ she says, and then, looking directly at Chloe, ‘Both of you.’

  Chloe a
nd Alec glance at each other, then shuffle back to their desks to collect notepads and pens. Perhaps Malc has a special project he needs them to work on, a nostalgia spread of city photographs for the centrefold, that sort of thing.

  Only when they step into his office, Sandra closes the door behind them. Chloe and Alec watch it shut, then turn to Malc. He’s leaning back on his executive chair, feet up on the desk. Nobody speaks at first, until Alec coughs.

  ‘You wanted to see us?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. His voice has a hard edge. ‘There’s a file missing from the archive – Angela Kyle. I want to know where it is.’

  Chloe swallows hard. Angela Kyle. She grips her notepad and waits for Alec to speak.

  He taps his chin with his pen and mutters, ‘Angela Kyle,’ to the ceiling.

  ‘You might have seen we were in dire straits this morning?’ Malc says.

  They both nod.

  ‘Well, that’s because our splash fell through. That was meant to be it, an update from the parents about this missing kid.’ Chloe tightens her grip on her pen. ‘But the Sunday reporter – he’s new – he couldn’t find the file in the archive and so he cancelled the bloody interview.’

  Malc leans forward on the chair, resting his hands on the desk and lowering his voice. ‘So I’d like to know where the fuck it is.’

  He stares at them, and in the space it takes for his eyes to flicker from Alec to Chloe, the heat burns inside her cheeks.

  ‘Chloe?’ Alec says. ‘Didn’t I see you scanning that file in on Friday?’

  She pauses for a second, glancing between their faces, trying to weigh up the best way out of this. She’s usually good at this, but the words she needs aren’t coming today, instead – just like Nan’s – they’re stuck inside some roadblock in her brain. She stumbles, not knowing what to say. And she knows what’s coming, the panic, and then anything could happen. She wants to keep silent, but both men are looking at her.

  ‘It’s just the file . . . well, it broke, and I took it home to fix—’

  But she doesn’t make it to the end of her sentence. Malc stands up behind his desk, taking a deep breath in, and beside her she feels Alec shaking his head slowly.

  ‘You,’ Malc says, jabbing at the air between them, ‘you’re the reason I have some shitty story about council bins on my front page this morning.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Weren’t you just in here last week? Didn’t I just give you a written warning, in fact?’ He rustles through the paperwork on his desk, finally holding up a piece of paper. ‘Yes, here it is. The ink isn’t even dry and yet you’re in here again.’

  She nods, unsure if that’s the best response.

  ‘So no more warnings, that’s it. Taking files off company property, that’s an instantly sackable offence, isn’t it, Alec?’

  Alec suddenly looks startled. ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Alec, see her out of this building this second.’ He pauses to jab the air towards her again. ‘And make sure you get that file first.’

  Malc steps out from behind his desk then, and Chloe jumps back as he storms out the office, the cool air he leaves behind him changing everything.

  She and Alec stand there, side by side. It’s a moment before he speaks.

  ‘Chloe,’ he says sadly, ‘you know so much better than this.’

  Alec had been kinder than she’d imagined, promising her he’d speak to Malc again and make an appeal on her behalf. But the word ‘sacked’ is zigzagging around inside her head as she pushes out of the glass doors of the building. She stands on the pavement alone now, watching traffic rush past, people filled with purpose, a box in her arms, a hard lump inside her throat.

  She looks up at the third floor of the building, barely able to take in what has just happened. Was she really up there just a few moments ago? And ten minutes before that, wasn’t she in her beloved archive, filing away envelopes like she’s done every day since she left school? She stands for longer, the white noise of the traffic rushing by hardly registering. It’s only the feel of her phone vibrating from inside the box, inside her handbag, that snaps her back into full consciousness. Could it be Alec? Has Malc admitted he acted too hastily?

  She answers it quickly. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Chloe, hi, Claire Sanders here. How are you? It’s not a bad time, is it?’

  She glances inside the box. She’d told Alec there was nothing she needed. But by the time he’d found a box, emptied it, tested its endurance, she felt she needed to find things to put in it. She looks down at the pathetic contents that sum up thirteen years at the newspaper: a few pens, an old diary she hadn’t even filled in, a calendar from two years ago, small change she’d found in her drawer and a tampon. As she gathered up her things she was already calculating how long she could afford to live without a job. With no social life, she’d accumulated decent savings, and at least she had a roof over her head.

  ‘I’m fine. No, not a bad time at all.’ Chloe tries to keep the emotion from her voice.

  She balances the phone and the box as she listens, the phone slipping from under her ear every now and then, the traffic whizzing past, but she picks up the gist of the conversation.

  ‘. . . so to fund your grandmother’s care, we’re going to have to sell the house . . . Chloe? Chloe, are you still there?’

  TWELVE

  Chloe doesn’t go back to Park House the next day. Or the next. Instead she phones them to see how Nan is and a cheery nurse tells her she’d enjoyed bingo that morning. Nan hates bingo, not that she tells him that. In Park House Nan is different; she’s reinvented into someone who wears coral lipstick and dabs at her bingo card.

  ‘Would you like us to see if she’s around to speak to you?’ the nurse, Sam, asks.

  Chloe is aware of the pause that stretches between them down the phone line. Is there any point? Will Nan even know who she is today?

  ‘No, it’s OK, just let her know I called.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She thanks him, trying to imitate his cheeriness as she hangs up, then returns to the quiet of her empty bedroom.

  She checks the time; she’s arranged to meet Hollie this afternoon. But she has time to drop in on one other person before she’s due to meet Hollie.

  There are a few people in the cemetery when she arrives, mostly those kitted out with gardening gloves and secateurs – a routine to fill the empty days retirement leaves.

  She enters via the gate on the far side today and walks beside a freshly dug grave, earth churned up, waiting patiently for a new guest to lie in its soil bed. From this entrance she turns right towards Stella’s grave and from the path she can just make out her headstone and the daffodils she’d left here two weeks ago, their dull heads bent solemnly now. She walks over and crouches down towards Stella, feeling the coolness of the earth rush to greet her.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ she says to the air, and then looks around, but of course there’s no one there to hear. This isn’t a TV drama, she reminds herself, no one is watching.

  She touches the stone and feels its cold penetrate her palm, then she leans back into the ground and reads the headstones either side of Stella’s: son, father, brother, sister, mother, daughter. Labels. Who really are we if we don’t belong to someone else? She feels guilty then. She puts it down to the daffodils, their browning petals making this grave feel unloved, enough space made for guilt to slip in. She pulls them from the short vase and hears her knee crack as she gets up off the grass. She regrets now not bringing more flowers to replace these.

  She takes the path down towards the watering shed and inside dumps the daffodils in the compost bin. But as she turns to leave, she sees it, the same black granite stone she’d come across the other day, and the same matching single daffodil standing up in the vase. That one needs replacing too. Only as she goes to take it, she has a closer look at the stone, and this time she notices the name – it can’t be. She blinks, making sure her eyes aren’t playing tricks on her. But it’s
there, for all to see: Angela Kyle. She can barely believe it.

  Slowly, she crouches down, removing the old daffodil and laying it down on the gravel path beside her. She takes her thumb and rubs it across every bronzed letter scored into the stone, still incredulous at her discovery.

  Angela Rose Kyle, aged four,

  taken from us 27 October 1979.

  Always loved, never forgotten.

  We pray for the day when we will meet again.

  Mummy and Daddy

  She pulls her hand away from the stone and examines it, as if somehow it had provided a direct link between her and the Kyles. As if somehow this shared touch was all the confirmation she needed that fate was at that moment encouraging them towards one another. And somewhere deep inside, the emptiness she had been feeling since she had packed that pathetic box in her office lifts ever so slightly.

  She steps back from the stone and checks her watch. She’d better leave now otherwise she will be late for Hollie. But as she walks further away, she is aware that she’s actually nudging closer – although to what, she doesn’t know.

  ‘So you just stumbled across the grave?’ Hollie says, stirring her coffee and frowning into her cup. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Well, it is a cemetery, Hollie. I just feel so sorry for the parents.’

  Hollie nods, but Chloe knows this look. She’d expected it. Chloe doesn’t understand why Hollie doesn’t feel more sorry for them. She had hoped she might ask more questions. But she can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it, and now inside Chloe feels that familiar sting of shame for even mentioning it.

  ‘And that’s all you’ve been up to?’ Hollie says.

  Chloe tries not to sound too disappointed at the change of subject. ‘Oh . . . well, this and that.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Well, like I said . . .’

  Hollie nods and puts down her teaspoon. Chloe hopes she’ll ask her more about them now.

  ‘Isn’t there something you can do? Appeal or something? Have you contacted HR? I mean, they can’t just fire you.’