The French Confection, Page 3

  “We have no record of these men. It is our view that they do not exist!”

  “What?”

  “You jump off the bridge for a joke or maybe as a game and you make up the story of the killers to explain your actions. That is the view of my Superintendent.”

  “Well, he can’t be as super as all that,” I growled.

  But there was no point arguing. For whatever their reasons, the French police had decided to let us go. As far as I was concerned, I just wanted to get out of jail. And out of Paris too, for that matter. I’d only been there for a day but so far our visit had been less fun than a French lesson – and twice as dangerous.

  “Let’s go, Tim,” I said.

  And we went.

  It was almost eleven o’clock by the time we got back to the Latin quarter, but the night wasn’t over yet. Tim wanted to stop for a beer and I was still anxious to open the packet of sugar that was burning a hole in my back pocket. We looked for a café and quite by coincidence found ourselves outside an old-fashioned, artistic sort of place whose name I knew. It was La Palette, the very same café where the train steward, Marc Chabrol, had asked us to meet.

  He wasn’t there, of course. Right now, if Chabrol was sipping coffee, it was with two wings and a halo. But there was someone there that we recognized. He was sitting out in the front, smoking a cigar, gazing into the night sky. There was no way I’d forget the hat. It was Jed Mathis, the businessman we had met on the train.

  Tim saw him. “It’s Ned,” he said.

  “You mean Jed,” I said.

  “Why don’t we join him?”

  “Forget it!” I grabbed Tim and we walked forward, continuing towards our hotel.

  “But Nick! He paid for the drinks on the train. Maybe he’d buy me a beer.”

  “Yes, Tim. But think for a minute. What’s he doing at La Palette?” I looked at my watch. It was eleven o’clock exactly. “It could just be a coincidence. But maybe he’s waiting for someone. Maybe he’s waiting for us! Don’t you remember what Marc Chabrol said?”

  “He asked us if we wanted to buy a KitKat.”

  “Yes. But after that. In the station, he warned us about someone who he called ‘the mad American’. Jed Mathis is American! He said he was from Texas.”

  “You think Mathis killed Chabrol?”

  “Mathis was on the train. And Chabrol ended up underneath it. I don’t know. But I don’t think we should hang around and have drinks with him. I think we should go home!”

  We hurried on. Le Chat Gris loomed up ahead of us, but before we got there I noticed something else.

  There was a man standing opposite the hotel. It was hard to recognize him because he was holding a camera up to his face, taking a picture. I heard the click of the button and the whir as the film wound on automatically. He wasn’t a tourist. That much was certain. Not unless his idea of a holiday snap was two English tourists about to check out. Because the photograph he had taken had been of us. There could be no doubt about it. I could feel the telephoto lens halfway up my nose.

  He lowered the camera and now I recognized the man. He had been standing in the reception area that morning when we left: a dark-haired man in a grey suit.

  Marc Chabrol, the steward.

  Bastille and Lavache.

  And now this.

  Just what was happening in Paris and why did it all have to happen to us?

  A car suddenly drew up, a blue Citroën. The man with the camera got in and a moment later they were roaring past us. I just caught a glimpse of the driver, smoking a cigarette with one hand, steering with the other. Then they were gone.

  Tim had already walked into the hotel. Feeling increasingly uneasy, I followed him in.

  We took the key from the squinting receptionist and took the stairs back to the top of the hotel. There were a lot of them and the stairway was so narrow that the walls brushed both my shoulders as I climbed. Finally we got to the last floor. Tim stopped for breath. Then he unlocked our door.

  Our room had been torn apart. The sheets had been pulled off the bed and the mattress slashed open, springs and enough hair to cover a horse tumbling out onto the floor. Every drawer had been opened, upturned and smashed. The carpet had been pulled up and the curtains down. Tim’s jackets and trousers had been scattered all over the room. And I mean scattered. We found one arm on a window-sill, one leg in the shower, a single pocket under what was left of the bed. Our suitcases had been cut open and turned inside out. We’d need another suitcase just to carry the old ones down to the bin.

  Tim gazed at the destruction. “I can’t say I think too much of room service, Nick,” he said.

  “This isn’t room service, Tim!” I exploded. “The room’s been searched!”

  “What do you think they were looking for?”

  “This!” I took out the packet of sugar. Once again I was tempted to open it – but this wasn’t the right time. “This is the only thing Chabrol gave us back at the station. It must be the object that Bastille was talking about.” I slid it back into my pocket, then thought again. It seemed that Bastille was determined to get his hands on the sugar. I wouldn’t be safe carrying it. It was better to leave it in the hotel room. After all, they’d already searched the place once. It was unlikely they’d think of coming back.

  I looked around, then slid the sugar into the toilet-roll in the bathroom, inside the cardboard tube. Nobody would notice it there and the police could pick it up later. Because that was the next step.

  “We’ve got to call the police,” I said.

  “We’ve just come from the police,” Tim reminded me.

  “I know. But if they see our room, they’ve got to believe us. And as soon as they’re here, I’ll show them the packet. Maybe they’ll be able to work the whole thing out.”

  I looked for the telephone and eventually found it – or what was left of it. You’d have to be an expert at electronics or at least very good at jigsaws to use it again.

  “Why don’t we talk to the man downstairs?” Tim asked.

  I thought of the squinting receptionist. Only that morning he’d been talking to the man in the grey suit, the one who’d just taken our photograph.

  “I don’t trust him,” I said. At that moment I wouldn’t have trusted my own mother.

  Tim held up a short-sleeved shirt. It had been a long-sleeved shirt when he had packed it. He looked as if he was going to burst into tears. At least he could use the rest of the shirt as a handkerchief if he did.

  “Let’s go back down, Tim,” I said. “We can call the police from the lobby. I noticed a phone booth.”

  “What’s the French for 999?” Tim asked.

  “17,” I replied. I’d seen it written next to the phone.

  But the phone in the hotel was out of order. There was a sign on the window reading “Hors de service”. I translated for Tim and he went over to the receptionist. “We want to call the police,” he said.

  “Please?” The receptionist narrowed his eye. I think he would have liked to have narrowed both his eyes, but the one on the left wasn’t working.

  “No,” Tim explained. “Police.” He saluted and bent his knees, doing an imitation of a policeman. The receptionist stared at him as if he had gone mad.

  “Les flics,” I said.

  “Ah!” The receptionist nodded. Then he leant forward and pointed. “You go out the door. You turn left. Then you take the first turning left again,” he growled. He actually spoke pretty good English even if the words had trouble getting past his throat. “There’s a police station just at the next corner.”

  We left the hotel, turned left and then immediately left again. We found ourselves in a narrow alleyway that twisted its way through the shadows before coming to a brick wall.

  “This is wrong,” I said.

  “You don’t want to go to the police anymore?” Tim asked.

  “No, Tim. I still want to go to the police but this is the wrong way. It’s a dead-end.”

  “
Maybe we have to climb over the wall.”

  “I don’t think so…”

  I was getting worried. After everything that had happened to us so far, the last place I wanted to be was a dead-end … or anywhere else with the word “dead” in it. And I was right. There was a sudden squeal as a van appeared racing towards us. The squeal, incidentally, came from Tim. The van was reversing. For a moment I thought it was going to crush us, but it stopped, just centimetres away. The back doors flew open. Two men got out.

  Everything was happening too quickly. I couldn’t even tell who the men were or if I had seen them before. I saw one of them lash out and Tim spun round, crumpling to the ground. Then it was my turn. Something hard hit me on the back of the head. My legs buckled. I fell forward and one of the men must have caught me as I felt myself being half-pushed, half-carried into the back of the van.

  Tim was next to me. “Some holiday!” he said.

  Then either they hit me again or they hit him. Or maybe they hit both of us. Either way, I was out cold.

  * See Public Enemy Number Two

  PARIS BY NIGHT

  I knew I was in trouble before I even opened my eyes. For a start, I was sitting up. If everything that had happened up until now had been a horrible dream – which it should have been – I would be lying in my nice warm bed in Camden with the kettle whistling in the kitchen and maybe Tim doing the same in the bath. But not only was I sitting in a hard, wooden chair, my feet were tied together with something that felt suspiciously like parcel tape and my hands were similarly bound behind my back. When I did finally open my eyes, it only got worse. Tim was next to me looking pale and confused … by which I mean even more confused than usual. And Bastille and Lavache were sitting opposite us, both of them smoking.

  The four of us were in a large, empty room that might once have been the dining-room of a grand château but was now empty and dilapidated. The floor was wooden and the walls white plaster, with no pictures or decorations. A broken chandelier hung from the ceiling. In fact quite a lot of the ceiling was hanging from the ceiling. Half of it seemed to be peeling off.

  I had no idea how much time had passed since they’d knocked us out and bundled us into the back of a delivery van. An hour? A week? I couldn’t see my watch – it was pinned somewhere behind me, along with the wrist it was on – so I twisted round and looked out of the window. The glass was so dust-covered that I could barely see outside, but from the light I would have said it was early evening. If so, we had been unconscious for about fifteen hours! I wondered where we were. Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard singing, the sound of a choir. But the music was foreign – and not French. It sounded vaguely religious, which made me think of churches. And that made me think of funerals. I just hoped they weren’t singing for us.

  “Good evening,” Bastille muttered. He hadn’t changed out of the dirty linen suit he had been wearing when we met him the day before. It was so crumpled now that I wondered if he had slept in it.

  “What time is it?” Tim asked.

  “It is time for you to talk!” Bastille blew a cloud of smoke into Tim’s face.

  Tim coughed. “You know those things can damage your health!” he remarked.

  Not quickly enough, I thought. But I said nothing.

  “It is your health that should concern you, my friend,” Bastille replied.

  “I’m perfectly well, thank you,” Tim said.

  “I mean – your health if you fail to tell us what we want to know!” Bastille’s green eyes flared. He was even uglier when he was angry. “You have put us to a great deal of trouble,” he went on. “We’ve searched you and this morning we searched your room. Are you going to tell us where it is?”

  “It’s on the top floor of the hotel!” Tim exclaimed.

  “Not the room!” Bastille swore and choked on his cigarette. “I am talking about the packet that you were given by Marc Chabrol.”

  “The ex-steward,” Lavache added. He giggled, and, looking at his ape-like hands, I suddenly knew how Chabrol had managed to “fall” under a train.

  I’d said nothing throughout all this. I was just glad that I’d decided not to bring the packet with us. The two men must have searched Tim and me while we were unconscious. They had found nothing and it looked like they weren’t going to go back and search the hotel room a second time.

  “He gave us a cup of coffee,” Tim was saying. “But we drank it. Unless you’re talking about … wait a minute…”

  “Who are you people?” I cut in. I didn’t want him to say any more. So long as we had the sachet, they wouldn’t kill us. They needed to know where it was. But the moment they heard it was hidden in the toilet, we were dead. That much was certain. I would just have to keep them talking and hope for the best. “Look…” I went on. “The steward didn’t give us anything. We’re just here on holiday.”

  “Non, non, non!” Bastille shook his head. “Do not try lying to me, mon petit ami. I know that your brother is a private detective. I also know that he was sent to Paris by Interpol. I know that he is working on a special assignment.” His face turned ugly, which, with his face, wasn’t difficult. “Now I want you to tell me how much you know and who gave you your information.”

  “But I don’t know anything!” Tim wailed.

  He’d never spoken a truer word in his life. Tim knew nothing about any special assignment. He’d have had trouble telling anyone his own shoe size. And he also hadn’t realized that this was all his fault. If only he’d kept his mouth shut on the train! He’d told Jed Mathis and the old woman that he was working for Interpol. Could one of them have passed it on? Jed Mathis…?

  Beware the mad American…

  It was too late to worry about that. I realized that Tim was still talking. He had told them everything. The competition on the yoghurt pot. The free weekend. The truth.

  “He’s right,” I admitted. “We’re just tourists. We’re not working for anyone.”

  “It was a strawberry yoghurt!” Tim burbled. “Bestlé yoghurts. They’re only eighty calories each…”

  “We don’t know anything!” I said.

  Bastille and Lavache moved closer to each other and began to mutter in low, dark voices. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but somehow I didn’t like the sound of it. I tried to break free from the chair but it was useless. Things weren’t looking good. By now they must have realized that they were wrong about us, that we were exactly what we said. But they weren’t just going to order us a taxi and pretend the whole thing had never happened. As they’re always saying in the old movies … we knew too much. I still had no idea who they were or what they were doing, but we knew their names and had seen their faces. That was enough.

  The two men straightened up. “We have decided that we believe you,” Bastille said.

  “That’s terrific!” Tim exclaimed.

  “So now we are going to kill you.”

  “Oh!” His face fell.

  Lavache walked to the far side of the room and I strained my neck to watch him. He reached out with both hands and suddenly a whole section of the wall slid to one side. I realized now that it wasn’t a wall at all but a set of floor-to-ceiling doors. There was another room on the other side, filled with activity, and at that moment I realized what this was all about. Perhaps I should have guessed from the start.

  Drugs.

  The other room was a laboratory. I could see metal tables piled high with white powder. More white powder being weighed on complicated electronic scales. White powder being spooned into plastic bags. There were about half-a-dozen people working there, young men and women with dirty faces but pristine laboratory coats. They were handling the white powder in complete silence, as if they knew that it was death they were carrying in their hands and that if it heard them it would somehow find them out.

  Lavache lumbered into the room, vanishing from sight. When he reappeared, he was holding something which he handed to Bastille. Right then I was more scared tha
n I’ve ever been in my life, and you know me … I don’t scare easily. But suddenly I remembered that I was thirteen years old, that I hadn’t started shaving yet and that my mother (who’d been shaving for years) was thousands of miles away. I was so scared I almost wanted to cry.

  Bastille was holding a bottle of pills.

  He approached Tim first. “These are super-strength,” he said. “I think five of them will be enough.”

  “No, thank you,” Tim said. “I haven’t got a headache.”

  “They’re not headache pills, Tim,” I said.

  Bastille grabbed hold of Tim and forced his mouth open. He had counted five pills into the palm of his hand and I watched, powerless, as he forced them down Tim’s throat. Then he turned and began to walk towards me.

  “They don’t taste very nice!” I heard Tim say, but then I’d gone crazy, rocking back and forth, yelling, kicking with my feet, trying to tear apart the parcel tape around my wrists. It was useless. I felt Lavache grab hold of my shoulders while at the same time, Bastille took hold of my chin. I don’t know what was worse. Feeling his bony fingers against my face or knowing there was nothing I could do as he forced my mouth open. His right hand came up and the next moment there were four or five pills on my tongue. They had an evil taste. I drew a breath, meaning to spit them out, but his hand was already over my mouth, almost suffocating me. I screamed silently and felt the pills trickle down the back of my throat. I almost felt them drop into the pit of my stomach. Then Bastille pulled his hand clear and my head sunk forward. I said nothing. I thought I was dead. I thought he had killed me.

  Things happened very quickly after that. It seemed to me that the lights in the room had brightened and that somebody had turned up the heating. My eyes were hurting. And then the walls began to revolve, slowly at first, like the start of a ride at a funfair. But there was nothing fun about this. Drugs are poison and I was sure I had just been given a lethal overdose. I was sweating. I tried to speak but my tongue refused to move; anyway, my mouth was too dry.

  I heard the parcel tape being ripped off and felt my hands come free. Lavache was standing behind me. I tried to look at him, but my head lolled uselessly. He pulled me off the chair and carried me outside. Bastille followed with Tim.