Read Online The Body of a Woman by Clare Curzon - Free Book Online Page A

went through to the kitchen and put her face under the cold tap, letting water dribble over her hair. Her underlying fear was that she was too late. Perhaps the Frenchman already had the child submissive to him. Chloe seduced? But if so he would surely have been abroad with her now. No, maybe she was sent on ahead and he would be joining her later. There might be a chance yet to keep them apart.
    Certainly Chloe concealed secrets Leila had never suspected. It was vital she find out more. Perhaps upstairs Chloe had left behind a diary or an address book. There must surely be some way to get in touch and warn her off the man.
    Normally scatterbrain with her belongings, the girl had taken some pride in her new room. It was twice the size of the one in Caversham and she had chosen the decoration herself. One wall was painted bright yellow, one dark blue and the other two terracotta. Leila had gone with her to choose the bedcover and curtains of wildly patterned indigo.
    As a parent she had never invaded Chloë’s privacy and it shamed her to be reduced to it, but as she cautiously went through her stepdaughter’s clothes and papers she told herself it was for protection rather than invasive.
    The room’s tidiness seemed unnatural, although Leila knew the girl was almost obsessively meticulous when it came to her schoolwork. She’d be an academic perfectionist like her father, although still a scatty teenager.
    The written exercises, stacked and tied in subject bundles, were stored on the floor of her wardrobe behind the
four mirror-fronted sliding doors. There was no private correspondence there.
    She wasn’t on the internet but the work station for her word processor had been set up in the window’s bay so that she could sun herself over her revision. Floppy disks, all neatly docketed, were boxed on a lower shelf. Leila helped herself to the one labelled Personal. A quick skim through revealed no more than girlish correspondence with her friends.
    Chloë at only fifteen was bright enough to have tackled several GCSE subjects a year in advance, but these letters revealed a childish innocence only thinly masked by a pose of sophistication. Young and silly, her mild adventures would have been recounted with a superior smirk and read with giggles: childish opinions on adult eccentricities; the occasional snide poke at someone who’d briefly offended. But no passion; no angst; no real duplicity.
    Finally Leila went through the drawers of the tallboy. Again nothing unexpected, except that the lowest drawer jammed as she shut it. The runners were slightly warped and she had to force it back in place. That was perhaps why the drawer contained only leftover Christmas wrappings, glitzy paper, gift tags and satin ribbons provided by Leila herself from PARTY FUN stock.
    Slamming the drawer finally shut made the whole piece shake. The triptych mirror on top wobbled, threatening to fall. She reached out instinctively to save it and her fingertips closed on a lump behind one edge of the frame.
    She laid the mirror flat and peeled off the sticky tape which secured a small flat package wrapped in a white tissue. The contents yielded like granules of coffee sweetener.
    She held her breath and gently eased off the tape seal. The tissue tore but she could always replace it. No,of course she’d never replace it; not if inside there was what she suspected.
    In her hand lay a small plastic envelope containing white powder. One corner had been snipped off and a little eased out as she held it. Dear God, no!

    Pointless to try it on her tongue. What should it taste of? Shouldn’t taste of? And in any case she knew: she’d seen it so often on television, in films; little packages like this, and the knowing glance exchanged between investigating police. She knew the contents because she knew the cliché.
    But what had this to do with Chloe? It made her present disappearance more alarming. Supposedly visiting