Deceit by Deborah White Page B

down in bed, pulled up the covers and waited. How long before anything happened? She looked at her watch. After five minutes she still felt wide awake and she’d almost decided to risk it and take another one, but then her legs and arms started to feel really heavy and her eyelids closed. She was dimly aware of trying to lift an arm, move a leg. But she felt the resistance as if she were moving under water.
    She remembered nothing until she woke the next morning… Wednesday… late. Feeling like death, with her mouth dry and her brain struggling to function. Though she was telling her body to get out of bed, nothing much was happening. At first anyway. Slowly, slowly her muscles did as they were told. But they still felt as heavy, as if she were lifting ten kilo weights.
    She swung her legs out of the bed and pushed herself up. She staggered to the bathroom. Stood under the shower… making it as cold as she could bear. Shaking her head under the stream of waterin an effort to dislodge the white fluff filling up her head.
    One tablet and she felt terrible. What would happen when she took two? She shivered. She had to take enough… but not an overdose. She didn’t want to die. Dying would not be good.

    All the rest of that day she struggled to function. She drank a lot of coffee, sitting in cafés. Her mum and dad still thought she was at school. Every day she felt sure someone would ring home and ask where she was. But no one did. They made assumptions that she was at home looking after her mum and they didn’t want to intrude. Not yet anyway. But that was okay, because soon, with any luck, none of that would matter.
    She needed to check out that house in Paris. Make sure Matthew couldn’t possibly be there. Talking to Jacalyn was the obvious way, because she was in Paris right now. But her faith in Jacalyn had been dented. Could she really trust her?
    So instead Claire tried using her phone to check out the house on the Internet. No results. No, if she wanted to know quickly there was nothing else for it, she would
have
to ask Jacalyn.
    So she sent her a text:
    Found info abt Nicholas. Might have owned Maison Benoit, rue de Montmorency. Cd u check who owns now and all abt them?
    Then she took the tube to Tower Hill and walked down through St Katharine Docks and along Marble Quay, to the area where Nicholas’s warehouse would have been. She just needed to make sure it wasn’t there any more. And it wasn’t. There were some old buildings that had probably once been warehouses… but they were apartments now. And there was a mass of new buildings. All very smart with expensive boats moored up alongside them.
    It was two o’clock and she was starting to feel hungry. There was a café by the quay and so she went in and ordered a burger and
another
coffee and took them outside onto the deck overlooking the water. She was sitting there, her face tilted up to the sunshine, her head aching and her eyes feeling like they were full of grit, when she heard the sound of high heels clicking on the decking. She instinctively turned to look and saw a slim,dark-haired young woman about to go through the open door into the café.
    For a split second Claire didn’t register who it was. Why would Lindsay be here? Work? But wasn’t her office somewhere in north London?
    Lindsay hadn’t seen her and she mustn’t. Claire didn’t want anyone to know she was bunking off school, because that would ruin everything. She quietly pulled her sweater hood up so her hair was covered at least and turned her back to the café door.
    She heard Lindsay say, her voice floating out through the open door, “Oh I don’t know… I’ll look at the menu.” Then Lindsay laughed. She sounded relaxed and cheerful.
    That made Claire feel a bit odd. As if it wasn’t right that Lindsay should be out having lunch and enjoying herself when Matthew was still missing. But there wasn’t time to think about that now. The minute she was sure Lindsay wasn’t