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

nearby the park at the time of Angela’s disappearance . . .’ the detective explains. Patrick and Chloe quickly exchange glances. ‘That building site is now a care home for the elderly.’ She stops to check her notebook. ‘Park House.’

Chloe looks up quickly at the mention of Park House.

‘Park House was under construction at the time of Angie’s disappearance, and recently they’ve been having some building work done. The ground was disturbed during those excavations at a copse at the back of the care home and so during our search for the other missing person, Angela’s body was found in a shallow grave.’

‘She was that close by all the time?’ Patrick says.

Chloe looks to the detective, as eager as these two parents for an explanation that will make sense right now.

‘There have been diggers and all sorts of building equipment raking over that earth recently while they were excavating footings for the new extension at Park House,’ the detective explains. ‘We deepened and extended the search area for the other missing person, and that’s when Angela’s remains were discovered.’

‘So no one . . .?’ Maureen can’t finish her sentence. But everyone in the room senses a mother’s need to write off the unthinkable after all these years.

The detective shakes her head. ‘No, it seems from what can be understood by forensics that her death was a very tragic accident. There’ll need to be a full post-mortem, of course, but we don’t suspect any foul play and at this stage, we’re not launching a murder investigation. I’m just so very sorry.’

‘But it doesn’t make sense . . . I mean, surely that building site was searched at the time . . .’ Maureen says.

‘We have no way of knowing how thoroughly it was searched all those years ago, perhaps resources were allocated elsewhere – it appears that mistakes could have been made and we can of course review the case if you—’

Maureen shakes her head and looks at Patrick. ‘I just want this over now, Pat. I just want Angie properly laid to rest.’

He nods and pulls her in closer.

The room falls silent, and Chloe – still holding the empty tea tray – shuffles from one foot to the other. She feels twitchy somehow at the mention of Park House. She needs air. She needs to breathe.

‘I’m just . . . I’m just going to find some biscuits in the kitchen,’ Chloe tells the room, but it’s only the detective that looks up and nods. Maureen and Patrick still cling on to one another as if they are each lifebuoys and they are trying desperately not to drown in this ocean of grief.

In the kitchen, the two uniformed officers look up when she walks past them to open the back door. The windows are filled with steam which quickly starts to shrink as the cool air rushes in. At the back door she inhales lungfuls of the cold Fen night. She thinks of the recreation room at Park House, of the residents who spend hours looking out onto the garden, all the way down to the copse at the end of the sloping lawn. She has looked out onto that copse herself. Could it really be true, that the whole time Nan has been in Park House, Chloe has been unknowingly watching over Angie’s grave?

From the kitchen, as she opens a cupboard to find the biscuit tin, she hears Maureen asking more questions and the detective answering her carefully.

‘And what about the other missing person?’

‘I’m sorry?’ the detective says.

‘You said that they found Angie when they were searching for someone else. Did they find them? God knows, I wouldn’t want someone else to suffer like we have all these years.’

Chloe finds the biscuit tin and takes out a small plate from the cupboard. On it she arranges bourbons, custard creams, digestives, fanning them out in a semi-circle. She can hear the detective consulting with her colleague about the other missing person.

‘I don’t think we have much information, except that she was found and taken to hospital. Is that right, Pete?’

When he speaks his voice is louder and clearer than his colleague’s, weaving its way across the living room, round the door frame and through to the kitchen where Chloe stands arranging the biscuits.

‘Yes, it was an elderly lady who went missing from Park House.’

Chloe stops as she returns the packets to the tin. She can hear him flicking through his notebook in the living room.

‘Yes, that’s right, IC1 female, eighty-five years old, taken to hospital suffering from hypothermia . . . I’m afraid we don’t have any update on her condition.’

Chloe’s heart beats hard in her chest, the packets of biscuits fall from her hand. She’s already out of the kitchen into the hall, running up the stairs. She hears Maureen and Patrick, the detectives in the living room, but she runs into her room, slamming the door shut behind her. She pulls her phone from her coat pocket. Switches it on. Waits for it to light up.

‘Come on, come on,’ she says as she clutches it in both hands.

Finally it is on. She waits for the signal – it’s there, but patchy. She curses this black spot as the signal wavers. Her phone blinks with voicemail messages. Three more missed calls from Park House, one from a blocked caller – please not the police. Her heart is beating so wildly, tremors reach her hands. She grips the phone, a split second when she is afraid of the news that it might bring. She stands beside the window, and tentatively presses the voicemail button. Perhaps everything will be fine, she tells herself, Nan can’t be the only eighty-five-year-old woman in Park House. She pleads inwardly for her phone to offer a connection that lasts – just this once. Yet, at the same time, she wants to delay her own heartbreak just that bit longer. But life chooses its own moments to send a meteor down to destroy your world. And so it is that, alone in this room, far out in the Fens, Chloe hears enough through the patchy phone signal to