The French Confection Read Online Free PDF

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