The French Confection by Anthony Horowitz Read Free Book Online

“And we’d have been even luckier if you’d arrived a couple of hours before.”
    Moire shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. But his dark, empty eyes looked about as apologetic as two lumps of ice. “We had no idea you had been taken,” he went on.
    “Who are you?” Tim demanded. “You call yourself the Sûreté. But what exactly are you sure about?”
    “The Sûreté,” Moire repeated, “is the French police force. I am the head of a special unit fighting the traffic in …”
    “…drugs.” I completed the sentence.
    “
Exactement
. I have to say that you and your brother seem to have turned up in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I hadn’t been watching you…”
    “You were at the hotel,” I said. “I saw you outside. You had a camera…”
    “Is that your hobby?” Tim asked. “Photography?”
    Christien Moire stared at Tim through narrow eyes. He obviously hadn’t ever met anyone like him before. “Le Chat Gris has been under surveillance,” he said. “Perhaps I should explain…”
    “Perhaps you should,” I said.
    Moire lit a Gauloise. It’s a funny thing about the French. Not only do they all smoke, but they smoke the most horrible cigarettes in the world. Forget about the health warning on the packet. The smoke from Moire’s cigarette was so thick, you could have printed it on that.
    “For some time now,” he began, “we have been aware of a drug-smuggling operation. Somebody has been moving drugs to London … using the trains under the channel. We still don’t know how they’re doing it. We have searched the trains from top to bottom but we have found nothing. Worse still, we do not know who they are.”
    “Is there anything you
do
know?” I asked.
    Moire glanced at me with unfriendly eyes. “We know only the code-name of the man behind the operation,” he replied.
    “The Mad American,” I said.
    That surprised Moire, but he tried not to show it. “The drugs arrive from Marseilles,” he went on. “They are weighed and packaged somewhere in Paris. Then the Mad American arranges for them to be sent to London. We’ve been working with the English police to try to stop them. So far we have had no success in London. But in Paris we had one lucky break.”
    “Le Chat Gris,” I said.
    “Yes, we learned that the hotel is sometimes used by the Mad American. When dealers arrive from London to buy his drugs, that is where they stay. He meets them there. They pay him the money and then his two associates – Jacques Bastille and Luc Lavache – arrange for the drugs to be sent on the train.”
    “So
that’s
why you photographed us!” I said. “You thought we’d come to Paris to buy drugs!”
    “I know it sounds unlikely,” Moire said. “An English kid and his idiotic brother –”
    “Nick isn’t idiotic!” Tim protested.
    “We became interested in you the moment you reported that Bastille and Lavache had attempted to kill you,” Moire went on. “I ordered the photograph to be taken so that we could check you against our criminal files.”
    “But if you thought we were criminals, why did you let us go in the first place?” I asked. It had puzzled me at the time, the policeman suddenly changing his mind and telling us we could leave.
    “The answer to that is simple,” Moire said. “We still had no idea what part you had to play in all this, but you had mentioned Le Chat Gris and that was enough. It was important that the Mad American should not be aware that the police were involved. I personally ordered your release, and at the same time I made sure that we kept you under – how do you say? – surveillance. This was very lucky for you, considering how things turned out.”
    “You were following us.”
    “Yes. I saw you go back to the hotel, and minutes later I saw the van with the two men who knocked you out and kidnapped you. We followed the van but unfortunately lost it in traffic…”
    “…so you don’t know where we were taken.”
    “No. But I