Max still didn’t feel right. Now that she was leaving Paris, she was all knotted up with a strange feeling – something a bit like being scared, and a bit like being sad, but not quite either of them. In her mind, Pierre rolled his eyes and said “I told you”; and Max tried imagining challenging him to a butter-knife duel across the dining-room table, but that made her think of home, and she felt even worse. She knew her maman was busy, but it would have been nice if she had been able to come and wave her off.

I just have to think about something else, she thought. Just to get through the hard part.

Sister Marguerite, meanwhile, had decided that now was a good time to fix her left shoe. She had produced a huge wood-handled leather needle and a bag of threads from her habit (along with two packets of crisps, a newspaper, a jar of jelly beans, and – Max tried not to stare – a houseplant for their table), selected a thick blue thread from the bag, taken off the shoe, and spent the last five minutes stabbing stitches through the leather and humming to herself. Max had a feeling that if she tapped her on the elbow and said, “I’m feeling a bit homesick,” Marguerite would stop stitching at once and say something cheerful. But if she said that out loud, then Pierre would be proved right.

So Max pressed her nose to the window, and didn’t say anything. The minutes rolled on, and on, and still the train waited in the station. Passengers who had come in twos or threes muttered complaints to their friends, and passengers who had come alone raised their eyebrows at each other over the tops of books and newspapers. The muttering and eyebrow-raising grew and grew, and still the train didn’t move. Back home it would be time for chocolat and notes, but Max couldn’t have any chocolat, so she just got out her notebook. And that did make her feel a bit better.

She saw her entry from the day before, and picked up Sister Marguerite’s newspaper, to see if she could solve the mystery of the police on the Avenue de la Pompe. She didn’t have to look far: it had made the front page. While people around her muttered more and more at the delay, and her stomach did strange jumbling-abouts, Max tried to ignore it all and concentrate on the paper:

“HEARTBREAK DIAMOND” STOLEN IN LATEST PHANTOM ATTACK

Police confirmed last night that they have discovered the theft of the so-called heartbreak diamond from a top-security vault in central Paris. A substitute “diamond” was left in the vault, and it is not known when the real diamond was removed. In a statement on behalf of the police force, Commandant Le Goff told the Paris Gazette that the theft is thought to be the work of the infamous “Phantoms”.