‘Well, uh . . . It was very nice of you to lock me up in the wardrobe and . . . and all the rest. Of course if you had taken the trouble to mention at an earlier point in time that Mary was one of the gang and a closet sadist, none of this would have happened.’

‘Oh, well done,’ John said. ‘For a moment there, I feared that the Vicky I know and love had gone soft.’ He fumbled in his pant pocket. His hands were still numb; he managed to extract a small tin, but it slipped through his fingers when he tried to open it.

‘Let me.’ I picked it up. ‘Though I think you need something a little stronger than aspirin.’

‘That is something a little stronger than aspirin. One of the white and two of the yellow, please.’

I didn’t like the look of those pills. If they weren’t illegal they were dangerous. Maybe both. This didn’t seem an appropriate time for a lecture on drugs, however. ‘Can you swallow them without water?’

‘I’ll have to, won’t I?’

After he had forced them down I said, ‘Maybe we’d better get moving.’

‘I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps we ought first to discuss the method of escape you have in mind. I trust you do have a method in mind?’

‘I hadn’t gotten that far,’ I admitted.

‘Hadn’t you?’

We were both kneeling. When he turned his head his eyes were on a level with mine.

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said, ‘Unless you were planning to tuck me under one arm and make a break for it, you’ll have to contain yourself for . . . say, ten minutes. It will take that long for those pills to kick in. Until they do I might manage a slow crawl.’

‘Did they say when they’d be back?’

‘No, they were not so considerate as that. Have you been here all this time? Not in the wardrobe, surely.’

‘No, I left. Thanks to Max. He knew I was in the wardrobe.’

That shocked him into relative alertness. ‘What? How do you know?’

‘We had a long talk. He sent Hans and Rudi out of the room before he spoke to me, and he obviously meant to let me get away, but he refused to tell me where they were taking you even after I . . . I . . . uh.’

‘You seem to be suffering from a speech disability,’ John remarked. ‘You, uh, what?’

‘Are you ready to – ’