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

of mother, she can tell from the way she fusses, the way she brings up a cup of tea for her in the morning while she’s still in bed, how she’s happy to mix Chloe’s washing in with her own.

How different life might have been.

Back in the library, the mother has tempted her daughter onto her lap. They lie on two big red beanbags in the children’s section, reading about a hungry caterpillar whose appetite was never sated despite how much he ate. Chloe knows that feeling, that hope that the next meal might be enough to turn her into a beautiful butterfly. The little girl kicks her red shoes off and her mother strokes her leg, as if the world was meant just for the two of them. Chloe had always had to share. Nan had Stella. Hollie had Phil. All the other people had someone, and when no one was left, then Chloe competed with memories of the ones that hung around to haunt them. She thinks of the cemetery, the flowers left week in, week out. She’d often wished she was loved with the same loyalty as a dead person.

She turns back to the screen and types in a particular date. She knows most of them by heart now, all the anniversaries that were revisited.

WE’RE STILL WAITING FOR ANGIE.

She reaches out and puts a hand up to the screen. She covers the last word in the headline and whispers her own name.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Chloe spends more than two hours reading over old cuttings in the library. All the ones she’s read before, so they don’t turn up anything new, but she likes to refamiliarize herself with the case. After all, she can’t go over the facts too many times. Perhaps that’s how some detectives get lazy. One of the more recent articles she found had a sidebar on police procedure in cases of potential child abduction and how the first forty-eight hours are the most crucial. It included some terrifying statistic that if an abductor intends to kill the child, most do it within the first five hours after capture. That thought alone makes a mockery of the reminders of hope Maureen has dotted around Elm House and Chloe’s heart aches for her. She must redouble her efforts.

She opens an internet browser and types ‘missing children investigation’ into the search bar. A whole list of articles comes up and she devours each and every one in turn, writing notes in biro in her pale blue book as she goes. In one article from an American newspaper an expert from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children talks about how important it is to interview people who live near to the site where the child disappeared. Not once, but over and over in the hope that extra – even tiny – details might resurface with every interview. She writes that down in her book. Then wonders who she might be able to talk to. Ferry Meadows is a park, there are no houses nearby. Even the ones that back onto it now wouldn’t have been there twenty-five years ago. It’s strange to think that Park House was probably the nearest building to the play park where Angie was last seen, but even that was just a building site then. She reads on carefully, scouring for interview techniques, the expert saying that it’s not a case of asking witnesses if they noticed anything strange; even the seemingly normal, even a parked car, might be a significant detail. She writes that down too.

At lunchtime she walks to Central Park to eat her sandwiches. On a bench not too far from her own sits a homeless man watching the birds hop across the grass. Twenty-five years ago, Ferry Meadows might not have been surrounded by houses, but it could have been home to vagrants. She wonders if police interviewed any of them, or would they have gone as unnoticed then as they do now, slipping through the cracks of a society they don’t choose or appear to fit into? She gets up and crosses the grass to him, offering the cheese and mayonnaise sandwich that Maureen had left out for her beside Patrick’s. He takes it in both hands and thanks her. Chloe notices as he does the dirt that has accumulated under his fingernails, his messy beard and weather-beaten skin. She understands how he would prefer to drift from place to place. Not everyone needs to cast an anchor into one house, one home, one family.

She returns to the library and spends a couple more hours scanning through articles, but when she fails to fill her notebook with anything new, she knows it’s time to go home. Only then she remembers the last thing she wanted to check. She flicks back a few pages in her book and types the name of the drugs she’d found in the bathroom cabinet into the search bar. She checks sertraline first and the results spring up. She clicks on the one at the top:

. . . often used to treat depression, and sometimes panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . . .

She checks the next one. The same comes up:

. . . depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety . . .

She double-checks diazepam and, as she suspected, among the answers is that it helps those with difficulty sleeping. Chloe can’t imagine Maureen has slept easily these last twenty-five years.

She notes everything down, then packs her notebook away in her bag and heads back towards the bus station. She will arrive home early, but luckily she’s already told Maureen her boss is away, so it won’t raise too many eyebrows.

On the bus home she sends Hollie a message telling her she has an interview, knowing that it will please her to read that. Then she sinks back against the window and waits for the big sky of the Fens to open up as they leave the city.

Patrick beats her home from work; he and Maureen are working in the back garden