Todd Taylor Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Dash of Daring

eBook
ISBN: 978-1-83994-888-6
Verlag: Nosy Crow Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Alice Éclair

Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire will whisk you away on a fabulous adventure, full of daring action and delicious cakes! Baker by day, spy by night - Alice Éclair leads an exciting double life! At France's Olympics training camp, a brilliant young cyclist needs help. Her father has disappeared - along with the machine he invented that creates unbreakable codes. Alice goes to work undercover in the athletes' butter-free kitchen, desperate to crack the case. Armed with a light sponge mix and an airy disregard for danger, can Alice serve up a solution before it's too late? A Sprinkling of Danger is Alice's fourth adventure and can be read as a stand-alone novel, or enjoyed as part of the Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire series. Look out for Alice's other missions - A Recipe for Trouble, A Spoonful of Spying and A Sprinkling of Danger! Perfect for fans of Robin Stevens' Murder Most Unladylike series and M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman's Adventures on Trains series.

Sarah Todd Taylor was brought up in Yorkshire and Wales surrounded by books and cats. She discovered the theatre when she was a teenager and was instantly hooked, appearing in over 20 musicals in her hometown as well as helping out backstage. In her spare time she likes to sing opera in wonderful dresses, and she shares her home with her fabulous husband, two guinea pigs and a hamster.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Todd Taylor, Sarah

Weitere Mitwirkende

Castro, Beatriz

Leseproben

The Hotel Anise’s cable car creaked ominously as it made its way up the side of the mountain, past bearded goats clinging on to the craggy outcrops. Alice tried not to think of how old the cable car was or how many times it had hauled hotel guests from the lush valley below to the warm welcome of Monsieur Boucher’s luxury hotel at the top.

Sat beside her on the cushioned bench, rifling through the pile of books in her lap for the fiftieth time, was Alice’s mother, Madame Éclair. She was equally distracted, but not by the prospect of plummeting to the valley floor.

“Cheeses of the Auvergne, Pâtissière Exemplaire… Oh, where is it?” she muttered, her head buried in the pile of books. “Alice, did you bring that excellent book on quiche that I bought last week?”

Alice forced herself to stop thinking about how thick the cable from which they were dangling was and shook her head.

“You brought that cake book that Claude gave you though,” said Madame Éclair in a bemused tone. “I don’t know why. We won’t be making anything sweet all week.” She motioned to the flock of goats picking its way down one of the mountain paths and sighed happily. “This is the home of the best cheeses in France and Monsieur Boucher wants us to teach his chefs how to make croissants, quiches and gougères, not sweets. Oh, Alice, just think of how much extra business we could get from moving into teaching at France’s grand hotels! I wonder if we should consider taking on extra staff for Vive Comme L’Éclair.”

Madame Éclair sighed again and sank back on to the seat to think, leaving Alice to slip a hand into her bag to check that her cake book was there. Her mother was right that she wouldn’t need the book for cooking, but wrong that she wouldn’t need the book at all. Alice didn’t need it for recipes. It was a communication device.

“I know you know every recipe in here by heart,” her friend and fellow spy, Claude, had said as he handed it over to her a few months before. “But we need to both have the same book so that I can send you messages.”

They had been sipping hot chocolate by one of Paris’s bridges and, after ordering a plate of mille-feuille, which Claude assured her were not up to the standards of Vive Comme L’Éclair, he had shown her how the code would work.

“One-three-two, four point three,” Claude said. “The first number is the page, the second is the line and word.”

Alice had opened the book and turned to page 132. It was a recipe for vanilla scones.

Vanilla Scones

This recipe is one of my favourites. It was created for my grandmother’s hotel in Lausanne and is bound to meet with admiration whenever you use it…

“Line four, word three… Meet!”

“So now you know why we both need the same book,” Claude had said. “Oh, and if I send you a simple message like one-three-two you’ll understand it at once, won’t you?”

Alice frowned and shook her head.

“It will just mean I want some scones.” Claude grinned.

Alice patted the book in her pocket. Her mother was here to bake, but she was ready for spywork, the moment Claude gave her the signal.

The cable car shuddered and slowed as it neared the station at the top of the mountain. Alice’s mother began to gather their luggage together and Alice pulled her coat a little more tightly around her neck. She hoped she had packed enough jumpers. Back home, Paris was in the middle of one of its heatwaves, but it was cold up here at the top of the mountain in spite of the brightness of the sun. They stepped out of the car on to firm ground and turned to see the Hotel Anise.

Modelled on France’s beautiful châteaux, the hotel had hundreds of windows, around which the stonework had been so intricately carved that it looked as though it had been piped on to the hotel’s façade. There were circular towers on each end of the building, and a row of chimneys billowing smoke indicated that, however cold it was outside, the hotel would be welcomingly cosy.

“Excellent,” murmured Madame Éclair. “A cup of coffee first, I think, and then we can explore.” And she set off up the path towards the entrance.

Alice smiled. After a busy Easter season, a relaxing week in the mountains was just what both of them needed.

At the end of their first afternoon in the hotel kitchen, Alice’s mother declared that Monsieur Boucher’s staff had a lot to learn.

“I caught them using margarine to make croissants!” she exclaimed. “A croissant is meant to melt in the mouth. I doubt theirs would melt in a vat of hot acid. I expected better. This is meant to be a luxury hotel!”

Alice had hoped that they would spend their mornings sharing their skills with the staff in the kitchen and the afternoons exploring the mountains or even enjoying some of the activities on offer at the hotel, but there was no time for such frivolities. Her mother was on a mission to teach Monsieur Boucher’s staff everything she knew about savoury pastries. And Madame Éclair knew a lot!

By the fourth day, Alice could not help but feel disappointed. There was a huge indoor swimming pool to enjoy, a gymnasium, a vast library and even a row of hang-gliders moored by one of the ornamental gardens. Alice had enjoyed none of them. She had spent the morning with the taciturn young delivery boy from the village, updating the list of ingredients required to ensure that only the best quality entered the hotel kitchens.

Alice took small pleasure in noting that the guests did not seem to be enjoying themselves any more than she was. Instead of relaxing on the terrace with its beautiful view of the mountains, they spent most of their time in their rooms or huddled miserably in the lounges. She was not sure she had seen a smile since they arrived, and nobody talked to one another. There were no couples or families chattering over breakfast, and what conversations did take place were short and unfriendly. Some guests even hid in their rooms, taking dinner from trays left outside the door.

Nobody seems to trust anyone else here, thought Alice as she carried a plate of gougères bulging with cheese through to one of the lounges. She placed them on a low table next to two young men playing chess. One of them looked up at her and, with a weak smile, nodded thanks. In the corner, a woman threw her newspaper to the floor and leaned back in her chair with a huff of frustration.

“Have you finished with that?” asked a man by the window.

The woman shrugged. “Feel free,” she said. “It’s last month’s news anyway. Oh, it’s so annoying not being able to know anything that’s going on.”

“What I wouldn’t give to be able to listen to the radio,” sighed one of the men at the chess table.

This was all very peculiar. Alice knew that the hotel received regular deliveries of food from the valley below, so why did they not bring up the daily newspaper too? And why was there no radio? Was it too difficult to get a signal high up here in the mountains?

She pondered this while she made her way back to the kitchen and was so engrossed by the puzzle that she ran straight into the delivery boy at the bottom of the library stairs. The collision sent the pile of books he’d been carrying flying across the hall.

“I’m so sorry!” Alice cried, helping him up off the ground and hurrying to retrieve the books. It was an odd collection, she thought. A book on gardening, one on ancient Greek history, a Christie novel and a book on keeping guinea pigs. The boy clearly had eclectic tastes – and rather grubby overalls, she noted.

“I think that’s all of them,” she said, passing the guinea pig book over to the startled-looking boy. He leaned over, picked up a slip of paper from the floor, tucked it inside the cover of one of the books and, without even saying thank you, ran out of the hotel’s front door. Alice stared after him.

Two days later, Alice found a note in the kitchen. It was waiting for her, tucked underneath a pudding bowl.

132, 4.3, 5.7, 8.1, 20.4, 29.8.

Alice gasped. It was from Claude. She reached into her pocket, took out her recipe book and turned to the very page he had shown her, knowing that the first word of the message would be “meet”. She found “me” on line five of the recipe, word seven. “One” was next to vanilla pods in the ingredients list. “Coffee” was found in...