The Imposter Read online

  ‘I know, but it’s different – on a newspaper, I mean. Different rules apply; it’s like kitchens.’

  ‘What about kitchens?’

  ‘Well, chefs and stuff, nothing’s done by the book. You do something wrong once and you’re out. It’s the same in newsrooms.’

  ‘But there are procedures, Chloe, you need to speak to HR. You can’t just get sacked for taking time off, you’re meant to get warnings. And Nan was missing, for God’s sake, the police were involved, and it’s not like you didn’t let them know. How can they be so uncaring?’

  ‘I know but—’

  ‘It’s against the law. Do you want me to have a word?’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes quickly meet Hollie’s.

  Her friend looks affronted.

  ‘I mean, no, no thanks,’ Chloe adds.

  There’s a pot of brown sugar on the table between them, a silver spoon sticking out of it. On the end of the handle is a picture of a yellow beach and blue sea, Jersey written underneath. Chloe picks up the sugar on the spoon, letting the granules drop back into the pot, grains of sweet sand. She’s back on a Cornish beach, conjuring up a memory of sand pouring through her tiny fingers, building sandcastles with Granddad, Nan and Stella, just like in that photograph, shoulders turning pink in the sun, knees in warm sand, donkeys walking up and down the beach beside them. Is it any wonder people want to escape their lives every summer? Pretend to be someone else, if only for two weeks?

  She looks up at Hollie. ‘Can we talk about something else?’ Chloe says. She wonders whether Maureen and Patrick ever took a holiday with Angie. She can’t remember reading anything in the cuttings. If Hollie wasn’t sitting here, she would take out her notepad and pen and write down a reminder to have a look.

  ‘Of course, but I hope you’ve signed up with some job agencies. Even if you just got some temp work while they sort all this out, it’d be better than hanging around in ceme—’

  ‘Can you imagine it, though? Losing a child?’ Chloe interrupts.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I mean, just never knowing what had happened to her. It was OK for me, in a way, because even though Nan didn’t come home, I know where she is, I know she’s safe, that she’s alive, but the Kyles . . . they just have to live in this limbo, this not knowing.’

  Chloe picks more sugar up with the spoon, watching the granules fall slowly off the edge.

  Hollie dips her hazel eyes into Chloe’s eyeline and reaches for her hand. She lowers her voice when she speaks.

  ‘It’s awful, Chloe, it really is, but don’t go taking on the worries of the world right now, you’ve got other things to think about. Seriously. Like getting a new job.’

  Chloe nods in a way she hopes will reassure her friend. ‘I guess.’

  ‘So you’ll sign up with some job agencies? Today?’

  She nods again. Hollie starts putting on her coat and scarf.

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t got more time, but Phil’s taking me out tonight. It’s the anniversary of our first kiss.’

  ‘Do people celebrate that?’

  Hollie shrugs. ‘We do.’

  ‘I just can’t help thinking how empty their lives must have been all these years. I mean, imagine—’

  Chloe looks up towards her friend, but Hollie’s picking the skin around her thumb. When she looks up again, it’s like she never even heard Chloe.

  ‘Did I tell you we’re going to Lanzarote by the way?’

  Chloe looks up. ‘Wasn’t it Fuerteventura?’

  ‘Oh yes, it was, but you get more for your money in Lanzarote. We’re staying in a five-star spa hotel.’

  ‘Oh,’ Chloe says. But she’s looking at the teaspoon. She has never been to a spa hotel, and she would bet the Kyles haven’t either – it’s not really their style.

  ‘Chloe,’ Hollie says, putting her hand on her friend’s arm.

  She looks up.

  ‘Give up this silly fantasy. Please. Find yourself a job, that’s what you need right now, a healthy distraction.’

  Chloe puts the spoon down and starts pulling her coat on. She loves Hollie but sometimes she wishes she would mind her own business because all it does when she doesn’t is stir up all those old feelings.

  ‘Do you want a lift? I’m only parked down the road,’ Hollie asks.

  ‘It’s OK, I’ll walk. It’s not like I’m in a hurry anywhere.’

  ‘OK, good idea, you’ll pass a couple of recruitment agencies on the way home. Pop in.’ She checks her watch. ‘It’s not even five yet.’ She rolls her coat sleeve back down, then leaves a kiss on the top of Chloe’s head. ‘Call me soon, yeah? And promise me you’ll speak to HR.’

  After she closes the door behind her, the waitress carries over a tray rattling with empty cups and takes theirs from the table.

  ‘Can I get another one of these?’ Chloe asks, pointing at her empty cup and beginning to remove her coat. She picks up the spoon again, studying the little beach on the end of it. She wonders if Maureen and Patrick ever took Angie to Jersey.

  THIRTEEN

  Everyone at Park House has lost something. For some it’s an item of jewellery. One lady, three doors down from Nan, has been searching for months for a pearl necklace she last wore in 1947. Chloe watches her sometimes, rifling through magazines, boxes of backgammon with torn corners, or down the backs of sofas, gathering nothing but crumbs under her fingernails. The other residents are used to her; they sweep their feet out of the way, or pick up their cups of tea and knitting without even breaking conversation. She mutters to herself while she’s searching, telling tales of the times she wore it to no one in particular, taking herself all the way back to pre-war dance halls and their parquet floors, and never catching sight of the beads. It’s an unwritten rule in the care home that everyone exists in their own time frame. Some residents sit alongside each other separated by decades, each as real to them as the year their neighbour finds themselves occupying in the seat next door.

  Another thing people lose is time – that’s very common. Yesterday, Chloe was making a cup of tea for Nan when a man started talking about politics; he was furious about something, gesticulating wildly, so much so that one of the nurses asked him to keep his voice down.

  ‘Well, of course it’s all the Prime Minister’s fault, it’s all down to Edward Heath,’ he protested, in case he could persuade the nurse that the ex-PM himself was the reason residents were struggling to hear Countdown.

  Nobody corrected him.

  Time is mostly misplaced, which often makes the communal area one big waiting room: for news; for a visit; for a loved one to return from a war that ended more than half a century ago. And that is the most painful thing that people lose – family. This morning Chloe heard one lady ask at least a dozen times where her husband was, the nursing staff gently reminding her he had died five months before. Every explanation wet her cheeks with fresh tears.

  ‘Terrible for these old folk,’ Nan says suddenly, looking round from their game of rummy. She leans in closer. ‘Some of them are a bit . . .’ Her finger draws circles at the side of her ear until she’s sure Chloe understands.

  Chloe nods – she is the cleaner today.

  ‘It’s marvellous they let you have a little break now and then,’ Nan smiles. She’s wearing a cerise pink blouse that Chloe doesn’t recognize.

  ‘That’s a nice colour on you,’ Chloe tells her.

  ‘It’s not mine, it’s Edna’s. She lent it to me because I haven’t got any of my own clothes here. I must have left them in my old house.’

  This happened the other day, when Nan couldn’t see the fitted cupboard doors in her room. She’d been wearing the same clothes for three days before anyone thought to show her the clothes hanging neatly inside her wardrobe. In the end one of the care assistants took a photograph of them and stuck it on the outside.

  ‘Do you not have a photo stuck on your wardrobe door anymore, Nan?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Do you—
’ she sighs. ‘Nothing.’

  Chloe also knows that we all have reasons for ignoring the truth sometimes, when a story we tell ourselves or others sounds better. The Kyles must have done it over the years, told themselves a story to make the truth more palatable. She wonders where they might have started.

  Chloe hasn’t been back to the cemetery for four days. She’s done what Hollie said. But she hasn’t been to the recruitment agencies either. Instead, she’s been here, hiding in this timeless no-man’s land.

  ‘It’s your move, dear,’ Nan says. ‘Dear?’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Chloe says.

  Nan doesn’t look up from her cards. She has a look of concentration on her face, the same, Chloe decides, as she had when she studied her word-search book while Chloe sat cross-legged at her feet as a child, gazing up at her cartoons until her neck ached and she switched to lying on her front. Stella must have been out working then; she had a job in a local pub so Chloe stayed with Nan and Granddad on those nights. She’d sometimes hear her come in late at night, whispers from the hall floating up the stairs. ‘Has she been OK?’ she’d ask, and then, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mum.’ Then a few moments later, a perfumed kiss in the dark.

  Or that’s how Chloe likes to remember it.

  She puts down a card and looks up at Nan again.

  ‘I’ve been working on a story at the office recently,’ she says, forgetting for a second she’s meant to be the cleaner.

  ‘Remind me, what is it you do, Chloe, dear?’

  Chloe is relieved to realize Nan has forgotten too.

  ‘The newspaper,’ she says.

  ‘Oh yes, a reporter.’

  ‘Yes, and I . . . I’ve been working on a new story.’

  ‘What’s that about then, dear?’

  ‘It’s quite sad really, a little girl who went missing.’

  ‘Oh, how dreadful.’

  ‘Yes, she was only four.’

  ‘Where did they lose her?’

  ‘At a park. Not far from here actually.’

  She looks up. ‘London?’

  ‘No, Nan, we’re in Peterborough.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Are you going to help them find her?’ Nan looks up from her hand of cards and Chloe feels that seed of an idea that she’s been tending unfurl a little further. Nan’s blue eyes are bright. She thinks of Maureen and Patrick Kyle, and wonders whether a disease like dementia would grant them the gift of living in a world where Angie is still alive.

  ‘Do you think I should?’ Chloe asks.

  Nan breaks into a great big smile. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, reaching out and taking her hand in hers, cards fluttering down to the floor. ‘Those poor parents.’

  ‘OK then,’ she says, ‘I’ll find her.’

  Nan smiles.

  ‘It’ll mean I’ll be busy at the office, I won’t be able to visit so often.’

  Nan looks up. ‘What could be more important than finding a lost child?’ she says.

  Nan studies her then, for that second longer until Chloe looks away. Then, suddenly Nan looks down at the floor.

  ‘Oh, I’ve dropped all my cards,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘How are we going to finish our game now?’

  ‘It’s OK, Nan,’ she says, ‘you’d won already.’

  Her cheeks pinken, complementing her blouse.

  ‘Had I?’ she says, clasping her hands together. ‘How wonderful.’

  Chloe puts the cards away in the packet as Nan chats to one of her new friends. She walks across the room to place them back in a drawer when the view from the window catches her eye. She wanders over and stands in front of the huge window; another resident is sitting in a recliner beside it, her wrinkly hands on the lace doilies that cover the arms of the chair.

  ‘I took my Sarah there the other day,’ the old woman says, seemingly to the glass.

  ‘Sorry?’ Chloe says.

  ‘Ferry Meadows,’ she says. ‘My little girl. She did have a lovely time on the swings.’

  Chloe smiles at her. Someone else trapped inside a memory.

  ‘Oh, right, lovely.’ She starts towards Nan but then she has an idea. She glances back out the window; it’s a nice day, the sun dipping in and out of the clouds, casting shadows across the lake. It’s windy, crisp, spring starting its annual and inevitable tussle with winter.

  When she reaches Nan she puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘I tell you what, Nan, I’m just going for a quick walk. I’ll leave you with your friend and see you back here in half an hour.’

  ‘OK, dear,’ she replies.

  As Chloe walks away, she hears Nan say to her new friend, ‘What a nice young lady.’

  A short path leads from the back of the care home directly into the park itself. There’s a quiet bit of road to cross where drivers are warned with a bright triangular sign of elderly people crossing, but there’s no traffic today and so within a few minutes Chloe is standing in front of the lake she could see from the window of the recreational room. It’s a park she’s been to many times before, and in that instant a thousand sunny days come back to her: picnics with egg and salad cream sandwiches; school trips canoeing on the lake; a spring walk searching for ducklings. Always making a special guest appearance in other people’s families. But never during any of those times had she known what else this place represented. On cue, as if she were part of a film set, a gust of wind picks up, and there’s a sudden chill sent across the air. It feels wrong now, she thinks, that life went on for everyone else, while they swam and sunbathed and tore up bread for ducks, and yet in this very same place it stopped still for the Kyles.

  She walks slowly around the lake, slowing her footsteps to a more respectful pace. On a small island in the middle of the water, Canada Geese collect lichen and moss to line the nests they’re building ready for spring. She comes to a little wooden bridge that leads to the back of the park; in the summer, white plumes from steam engines form clouds that sit above the treetops here. She follows the path to the left, out towards a place she knows she’ll recognize from pictures. Here the grasses grow tall, the terrain is wilder, the flat landscape somehow more rugged, surrounded by tall trees that sway more savagely than they do around the lake. It’s more remote here, cut off from the joggers and their puff-panting, and even the dog walkers weaving this way and that with their extendable leads.

  Chloe spins around on the spot, scanning the tops of the trees for where she came from and just making out the apex of the roof of Park House in the distance and the scaffolding that towers over it for the new extension. She thinks then of what that matron had said on their first visit and realizes that Park House wouldn’t have been part of the landscape back then, it wouldn’t even have been built; perhaps it was still foundations and rubble, yet to be hauled up from the ground. But who could have guessed it was just a stone’s throw away from where Angie disappeared.

  She carries on walking until she spots it: an area where woodchip covers the ground. She recognizes it by the car park it backs on to – the play park where Angie disappeared.

  The playground is still, the swings hang limply on their chains. The newly installed slides here didn’t know this place in 1979; they weren’t witness to what occurred here that day twenty-five years before. Chloe opens the short yellow gate; she goes inside, feeling the woodchip beneath her leather soles, the soft shutting of the gate behind her, the creak of its hinges. She sits down on a swing and pushes at the ground with her feet. After a few pushes, she takes to the air, her figure cutting through the quiet eeriness of the day. She closes her eyes, envying Nan’s ability to time travel. She thinks of her playing backgammon with her new friends, enjoying a conversation that can run on loop unhindered.

  And then it happens again, a flash of something, like the wrong photo slide loaded into a projector. A split-second memory of this same place, but not now – then. Chloe opens her eyes quickly, her feet skidding abruptly on the ground, woodchip scuffing at her soles. The swing comes to a wobbly halt. She
looks around. At once everything is the same again. She blinks, but it’s gone, like the echo left over from a dream. The car park is empty, but she knows another car once filled a place in there – Patrick’s blue Ford Escort. She pictures him, popping back to lock it while Angie played on swings like these. Just like when she lost Nan, he had turned his back for a split second. And then what? Maureen was right, how can a child just disappear? What exactly had happened to Angela Kyle?

  FOURTEEN

  It’s almost midnight when Chloe arrives at the office. As she approaches the glass doors in the darkness, a sudden thought hits her – what if they’ve changed the keycode since she left? She lingers outside a moment, biting her nails, trying to avoid an obvious search for the CCTV cameras, instead turning her head and momentarily allowing her eyes to flicker up to check the angle of them. Behind her, the odd car drives by on the black road. One slows and she quickly turns her face back to the door, keeping it down to avoid recognition. Her fingers hover on top of the keypad as if, for a second, unsure whether to go through with this plan. But there’s no going back now. She punches in the code, wincing as each number she presses sounds its own tune, and then she hits the lit key symbol. A second later and she is inside.

  She takes the stairs two at time, keeping her head down to avoid the security cameras nestled in the top corners of each floor.

  On the third floor, at the double doors to the newsroom, she takes her keycard out of her coat pocket. She stares at it in her hand. Slowly, she draws it up to the sensor. She’s amazed to see the light turn green. There’s a beep and the door handle releases into her hand. She crosses the threshold.

  The newsroom is in darkness except for the odd desk lamp left on, a tiny flash here and there from a sleeping printer.

  She walks down the blue carpet path, forgetting as she does that each light disguised in the suspended ceiling above her will blink into life, lighting her way. Either side of her, the windows instantly turn to mirrors. She watches herself in them as she walks – an intruder. She looks away and moves quickly, purposefully. She doesn’t intend to stay long.