“It was a strawberry yogurt!” Tim burbled. “Bestlé yogurts. They’re only eighty calories each . . .”

“We don’t know anything!” I said.

Bastille and Lavache moved closer to each other and began to mutter in low, dark voices. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but somehow I didn’t like the sound of it. I tried to break free from the chair but it was useless. Things weren’t looking good. By now they must have realized that they were wrong about us, that we were exactly what we said. But they weren’t just going to order us a taxi and pretend the whole thing had never happened. As they’re always saying in the old movies . . . we knew too much. I still had no idea who they were or what they were doing, but we knew their names and had seen their faces. That was enough.

The two men straightened up. “We have decided that we believe you,” Bastille said.

“That’s terrific!” Tim exclaimed.

“So now we are going to kill you.”

“Oh!” His face fell.

Lavache walked to the far side of the room and I strained my neck to watch him. He reached out with both hands and suddenly a whole section of the wall slid to one side. I realized now that it wasn’t a wall at all but a set of floor-to-ceiling doors. There was another room on the other side, filled with activity, and at that moment I realized what this was all about. Perhaps I should have guessed from the start.

Drugs.

The other room was a laboratory. I could see metal tables piled high with white powder. More white powder being weighed on complicated electronic scales. White powder being spooned into plastic bags. There were about half a dozen people working there, young men and women with dirty faces but pristine laboratory coats. They were handling the white powder in complete silence, as if they knew that it was death they were carrying in their hands and that if it heard them it would somehow find them out.

Lavache lumbered into the room, vanishing from sight. When he reappeared, he was holding something that he handed to Bastille. Right then I was more scared than I’ve ever been in my life, and you know me . . . I don’t scare easily. But suddenly I remembered that I was thirteen years old, that I hadn’t started shaving yet, and that my mother (who’d been shaving for years) was thousands of miles away. I was so scared I almost wanted to cry.

Bastille was holding a bottle of pills.

He approached Tim first. “These are superstrength,” he said. “I think five of them will be enough.”

“No, thank you,” Tim said. “I haven’t got a headache.”

“They’re not headache pills, Tim,” I said.