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

‘Hello, Chloe, love,’ Maureen calls to her. ‘Good day at work?’

Chloe gives her a generic response that seems to satisfy her, and Maureen turns back to supervising Patrick as he turns over earth and she bends to pick up the weeds he’s churned up.

Chloe lets herself into the kitchen, pausing to get a glass of water to take up to her room. She plans to read through the notes she’s taken today in the quiet of her room. Through the back door she watches Maureen and Patrick absorbed in their task. She walks into the hall, glancing into the front room and seeing the unopened boxes still stacked inside from their recent move. With so much to do inside the house, she’s surprised they’re working on the garden. Then, a thought occurs to her. She stops, looks back into the kitchen and down into the garden where Maureen and Patrick are still working. She puts her glass of water down by the high skirting on the parquet floor, and slowly pushes at the door to the front room.

The floorboards are exposed in here and dusty net curtains hang at the bay window. It is a dumping ground, just as Maureen had described, and along one of the walls, cardboard boxes balance on top of one another. Each is labelled with a different room, but the highest one, the lid of it sticking up, has a name on it: Patrick. Chloe pauses. From the garden she can hear Maureen giving Patrick instructions of where to dig and how deep. She takes her bag off her shoulder and places it gently on the floor, then tiptoes over towards the box. Stacked on top of two other boxes, it’s too high for her to look in without lifting it down. She reaches up and wraps her hands around the box; it’s surprisingly light, so she lifts it down onto the floor. Carefully, she opens it, and peers in at what appears to be nothing more than paperwork and other odds and ends. But at the bottom there is a shoebox, not too dissimilar to the one underneath her bed. She pulls it out, and as she does so the paperwork collapses into the space it leaves. She sees an old CV, yellowing certificates and what look like school reports. Nothing that she thinks will be significant to this investigation. But this shoebox . . . Carefully, she lifts the lid and peers inside. There is white tissue paper, and nestled within it is a pair of child’s T-bar school shoes. They are red, or once were, and scuffed at the toes. Chloe picks them up, and runs her hand along the soft leather, sliding her fingers inside and feeling indentations where each of Angie’s tiny toes once sat. But why are they here, deep in a box marked Patrick and covered over with paperwork? Does Maureen even know he has them? She lifts them up, turns them around in the light. There’s even still a little dried mud and a bit of sand on the sole. For some reason she thinks of the sandpit at the play park in Ferry Meadows.

Suddenly Chloe hears the back door open. Her heart starts thudding. She pushes the shoes back into the box as she hears Patrick cough in the kitchen, then footsteps, heading through the kitchen into the hall. She throws the shoebox back into the box, no time to cover it over with paperwork. She picks the whole thing up, quickly lifts it back into position on top of the other boxes. She’s balancing it in place when Patrick appears at the front room door.

She turns to him, her hands still on the sides of the box. He stares at her, and then up to the box.

‘Everything all right?’ he says. He’s holding the glass of water she left outside.

She follows his eyes then, up to the top of the box, the four sides of the lid still open.

She stares for a second into the blankness of the cardboard, her mind empty of excuses for why she’s in the front room. Then she realizes that the black marker writing with his name on it isn’t visible from this angle. She must have pushed it back on top the other way round. A small mercy.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she says. ‘I . . . I just heard a noise and I think maybe this box . . .’

He glances from her to the box and back again.

‘I think it might have tumbled onto the floor,’ she says. ‘Because when I looked inside . . . anyway, it’s fine now.’

She taps the side of the box. Patrick’s eyes narrow, just a little.

She picks up her bag from the floor, then goes to walk out, pausing beside him.

‘Oh, thank you,’ she says, taking the glass of water from his hand. And then, with a little bit more confidence, ‘I don’t know what would have made it fall down like that.’

‘No,’ Patrick says, quietly. ‘Neither do I.’

He stands there after she takes the glass and walks out of the room, but as she goes up the stairs – her heart still pounding – she sees him through the crack in the door, checking if anything has been disturbed inside.

When she comes downstairs later, the door is shut tight.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Chloe wakes on Saturday morning to sunshine burning through the curtains. Maureen had offered to line them with blackout material, but it had never felt necessary during the last dark mornings of winter. Now spring wakes her before her alarm.

She checks her watch and then picks up her phone. There is a text from Hollie: Hey, how are you? Sorry for late reply. We’re off to Lanzarote this weekend so I’ve been packing. How did the interview go? Let me know you’re ok xxx

She doesn’t reply but instead lies back in the warmth of the sun that stretches across her pillow. She likes waking up in Low Drove, she loves to lie back in bed and hear the noises from downstairs drift