‘No need to take it out on us, old girl,’ said Eggy. ‘A simple glance at that lot, you could tell that this place was not for them. They were hardly sophisticated. You should have told them where to go before you let them sit down.’

‘You were caught, love,’ interjected Phoo.

‘Candid Camera and all that.’ Eggy mimed taking a picture. ‘Gotcha!’

‘Taken in by some very common people. Taken in, my love, hook, line and stinker.’ Phoo laughed as she slurped her coffee. ‘But, poor old Salzy. As I recall, you always were a teeny bit slow on the uptake.’ She turned to Odile and cooed intimately, ‘Sally used to be our stage manager, Odile . . . but she never quite got the hang of it.’ She turned back to Sally. ‘And in those days Sally was rather pudgy. Weren’t you, darling? You’ve done ever so well, you know. All this rushing around, serving at tables, has taken off pounds.’

‘We’ll have la addition now, please, old girl,’ said Eggy, brushing the crumbs down his bulging shirt front. ‘Tempus fugit and all that. And we have an early start tomorrow.’

‘Sparrow’s fart,’ added Phoo. ‘Plus, I have a few frightfully important phone calls to make. Entre nous, I’m angling after a very juicy film role. And I’m pretty confident that I’ll be a shoo-in.’

Sally trudged back to the desk to print out their bill. She hoped that, once they’d paid, the Markhams and friend would quietly disappear never to be seen again.

But it was a good half hour before they left the restaurant. Odile queried every item on the bill, before finally agreeing to pay two-thirds of the actual cost.

‘So, I hear through the grapevine that this restaurant’s up for sale,’ she laughed. ‘And no wonder!’

Twelve

TWELVE

Take-off was delayed ‘due to staff shortages’, meaning that Theresa’s plane didn’t touch the runway at Nice Côte d’Azur airport till a few minutes before 1 a.m. Despite sitting squashed between a boy who spent the whole journey crunching his way through jumbo packs of crisps, and a woman listening to a beeping kind of electro-pop music through leaky headphones, for most of the flight Theresa managed to get some sleep, slightly relieved by the knowledge that it was not some fat, bald old paedophile who had lured Chloe away, just a boy at her school. But teenagers were unpredictable and the situation was far from over.

Bleary-eyed, she shuffled through customs, and went out on to the forecourt where she climbed into a cab to take her home to Bellevue-sur-Mer. She knew that a taxi ride of that distance would cost around 100 euros, but at this time of night what other way did she have to get home?

Chloe’s disappearance was turning out to be not only a disturbing but an expensive business, to be sure.