“It’s just the French way,” I said. Even so, I made sure I shook hands with Moire. I didn’t want him getting too close.

“I wish you a good journey, my friends,” Moire said. “And this time, perhaps you will be careful what you say while you are on the ship!”

“We won’t be saying anything,” I promised. I’d bought Tim a Tintin comic book at the harbor bookstall. He could read that on the way home.

Moire smiled. “Au revoir,” he said.

“Where?” Tim asked. I’d have to translate it for him later.

We were about halfway home, this time chopping up and down on the Channel, when Tim suddenly looked up from the Tintin book. “You know,” he said. “We never did find out how Erica Nice was smuggling the drugs on the train.”

“Haven’t you guessed?” I sighed and pulled out the blue sugar packet that had started the whole thing. It was the packet Tim had been given at the Gare du Nord. Somehow I’d never quite gotten around to opening it. I did so now.

There was a spoonful of white powder inside.

“Sugar?” Tim muttered.

“I don’t think so, Tim,” I replied. “This is just one packet. But Erica Nice was transporting thousands of them every day on the train. A little parcel of drugs. One dose, already weighed and perfectly concealed.” I tore open the packet and held it up. The powder was caught in the wind and snatched away. I watched it go, a brief flurry of white as it skimmed over the handrail and disappeared into the gray water of the English Channel.

“Do you think we ought to tell Moire?” Tim asked.

“I expect he’s worked it out for himself,” I said.

In the distance I could see the white cliffs of Dover looming up. We had only been away for a week but somehow it seemed a lot longer. I was glad to be home.

Tim was still holding the packed lunch that Moire had given us. Now he opened it. The first thing he took out was a strawberry yogurt.

“Very funny,” I said.

The yogurt followed the drugs into the Channel. Then we went downstairs to order fish and chips.

I KNOW WHAT
YOU DID LAST
WEDNESDAY

AN INVITATION

I like horror stories—but not when they happen to me. If you’ve read my other adventures, you’ll know that I’ve been smothered in concrete, thrown in jail with a dangerous lunatic, tied to a railway line, almost blown up, chased through a cornfield dodging machine-gun bullets, poisoned in Paris . . . and all this before my fourteenth birthday. It’s not fair. I do my homework. I brush my teeth twice a day. Why does everyone want to kill me?