The Imposter Anna Wharton (e novels to read .txt) 📖

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.

Her melamine desk has now become a dumping ground for boxes; even her swivel chair has three lever-arch files stacked on it. She stands, paying a moment’s respect to the graveyard of her working life. Suddenly, from the other end of the room, she hears a click, a rumble. She jumps, ducking down before realising it’s the coffee machine. But it reminds her, she needs to work quickly.

Chloe heads into the archive, quickly finding the drawer marked KR–LA. She pulls it open, the scratch of metal tearing through the silence. She finds the