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Back The Imposter Save as PDF
Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. ANNA WHARTON
  3. Dedication page
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. TWENTY
  24. TWENTY-ONE
  25. TWENTY-TWO
  26. TWENTY-THREE
  27. TWENTY-FOUR
  28. TWENTY-FIVE
  29. TWENTY-SIX
  30. TWENTY-SEVEN
  31. TWENTY-EIGHT
  32. TWENTY-NINE
  33. THIRTY
  34. THIRTY-ONE
  35. THIRTY-TWO
  36. THIRTY-THREE
  37. THIRTY-FOUR
  38. THIRTY-FIVE
  39. THIRTY-SIX
  40. THIRTY-SEVEN
  41. THIRTY-EIGHT
  42. THIRTY-NINE
  43. FORTY
  44. FORTY-ONE
  45. FORTY-TWO
  46. FORTY-THREE
  47. FORTY-FOUR
  48. FORTY-FIVE
  49. FORTY-SIX
  50. FORTY-SEVEN
  51. FORTY-EIGHT
  52. FORTY-NINE
  53. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  54. Praise
  55. THE IMPOSTER

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 realize that everything she has come to know as family has ended:

‘Been trying to call . . . police search . . . sorry to have to tell you . . . your grandmother passed away in hospital this afternoon.’

FORTY-NINE

It had taken a few weeks to release the body for the funeral. With it being a sudden death there were the inevitable tests that needed to be carried out. It was only once the authorities were satisfied that the death certificate was released. The coroner had recorded a verdict of death by misadventure.

So much time had passed that it was almost summer when a small crowd gathered in the city’s cemetery for the burial. The sun was shining so brightly that the usual black garb worn at funerals conducted the heat and everybody hoped – for more reasons than one – that the Rite of Committal would soon be over. No one likes to see a child go before an adult, except in this case, so many adults had gone before they had found her. The priest mentioned each of them by name during the church service, relatives of the Kyles who hadn’t lived to see little Angela returned to her parents, and even as he did, everybody thought again inwardly what a shame it was that she had been returned to them in death instead of in life. Some people, as ridiculous as it might have seemed, had never given up hope. Sometimes, in the face of so much despair, it really is all we’ve got.