The Imposter by Anna Wharton (i have read the book txt) 📕

cards Claire and Chloe unpack her things, hanging her clothes in the small wardrobe and putting photographs on her new bedside table.

When they’ve finished, they call Nan in to have a look. She wanders into her room with one of her new friends and picks up a photograph of Granddad taken just a few months before he died.

‘My Hughie,’ she says, holding up the picture frame. ‘You’ll meet him, of course, when he’s back from the war. Doesn’t he look handsome?’

Her blue eyes turn paler when she talks about him, as if they become a window back to her youth. What good does it do to pull her back into a world where they’re separated by death? Right now he’s as real to her as Chloe is standing in her doorway. Nan looks up and sees her.

‘Oh, hello, young lady,’ she says. ‘Are you here to take the drinks orders? I like a drop of Drambuie in the afternoon when I’m on holiday.’

Claire tries to comfort Chloe with clichés on the drive home. Chloe answers her by gazing out of the passenger window.

‘She’s in the best place, Chloe,’ Claire tells her.

Chloe wonders why she has to make it sound like Nan is dead already.

She starts pressing buttons on the door – she needs to get some air in the car. Claire sees and puts her window down by pressing a button on her steering wheel. Her hatred of Claire is only increased by this gesture, and the fact that Claire doesn’t seem to notice only irritates her more. But what does she expect? How would Claire like it if she had taken the one precious thing she has in the whole world? She’d seen it once, on her keyring, a boy – or girl – with ginger hair, around eight or nine. On the back of the keyring it read Best Mum Ever. Chloe doubted it. It didn’t seem fair that her kid was at home, waiting for Mummy to come and play house when she had spent her day destroying another. Not that Claire would understand her loneliness, her loss. For some reason it’s the photograph of Angela Kyle’s parents that pops into her head, and she feels that connection again, as if they are the only two people in the world who might understand how she feels.

Claire drops Chloe outside Nan’s house. She turns to wave until Claire has driven away. But she doesn’t go inside, not yet.

Instead she waits until she sees the car go round the bend and then she puts her keys back in her coat pocket and walks in the opposite direction.

Chestnut Avenue is a long, broad road curved at each end, disguising both where you came from and where you’re headed. Neat brown-brick semi-detached houses stand two-by-two and small front gardens peer out from behind short walls topped with privet hedges. Beside each house is a driveway, some still with the original garages; others have expanded and swollen, giving birth to extensions and extra bedrooms over the years. Between the pavement and the road there are grassy verges and planted occasionally within them, guarding each pair of houses, are the great trees that give this street its name. Throughout the decades, these trees will have seen it all. It is in many ways an unremarkable street, but to Chloe, its symmetry has a certain perfection to it.

Chloe walks towards the curve in the road, crossing a junction, onto the next part of the street. All the time she walks, she tries to picture it twenty-five years ago. She passes a Catholic church on a junction and peers inside the thick wooden door. In her mind’s eye she sees the younger versions of Maureen and Patrick, the ones in the black and white photographs that filled the newspapers that autumn back in 1979, and she imagines them just a few years before, filing into this very church each Sunday, a tiny Angie in their arms and a congregation made up of neighbours who cooed over the new baby while her parents took communion.

She counts the numbers down from the hundreds and finally she’s standing in front of number 48 – the address she’d checked in the earliest cuttings.

She looks up at what is still quite obviously a child’s bedroom – Angie’s bedroom? No, surely not after all these years? There isn’t much to see: a thin strip of what looks like pink curtains peers out from behind double glazing, and the outline of a light shade hanging from the middle of the room. She looks harder, tries tiptoes, but the reflection of the trees in the window blurs the lines, and she can only just make out the shape of the paper light shade in the shadows cast behind the glass. A car rushes by and when she looks back, the outline is gone.

There’s no movement behind the front door of number 48. There is no car on the drive either. Chloe steps forward, drawn to the house as if it were a magnet and she was metal. The Kyles know what it’s like to lose something, a family member, or have them snatched away. She doesn’t know why she came here to find comfort; instead she thinks of Angela Kyle and feels a pinch of guilt. At least she knows where Nan is now, even if it isn’t with her.

She looks up at the child’s bedroom again. A cloud has crossed the sky, obscuring the view through the glass with its reflection. Now she can’t even make out the light shade. She turns on her heels and heads home to Nan’s.

NINE

Chloe hasn’t been in the office for two days, so she arrives early, hoping to creep in and camouflage herself among the filing cabinets.

Alec is already there when she arrives, his nicotine-stained fingers working through a pile of brown envelopes. Her first thought is that one of them might be the Angela Kyle file, but no, it’s there waiting on her