I, Spy?

by Kate Johnson

  “Okay.” I took the prescription. “So we’re going to Boots?”

  “Yeah. I need toothpaste anyway.”

  Just to embarrass him a little more, I made him come with me to Mark’s and Spencer’s and help me pick out a sports bra. If I was going to be tumbling down any more baggage belts, I’d need proper support, right?

  We took all my new stuff home, Luke playing with my new phone and setting some numbers into it. He called Maria. “Does Macbeth have a phone yet?”

  “Half a dozen—” I heard her say in despair, “—none of them his.”

  I smiled at that. I think I was beginning to like Macbeth.

  My answering machine was flashing when we got in, and I listened to a message from Chalker. “Don’t you ever answer your bloody mobile?”

  I took it out. Network Search. Crap. I hoped the Nokia had a better network.

  The second was from my mother. “Are you coming home for tea? We’re having lasagne. Charlie’s bringing someone to eat with us,” she added with faint despair.

  My mother is the only person in the world who calls my brother Charlie (no one in the entire universe has ever called him Charles). He’s been Chalker ever since we were at school and he used to have to chalk out lines all over the blackboard every lunchtime for some new misdemeanour.

  Luke’s mobile rang as I was listening to my mother’s message, and he went into the bedroom to answer it. I called my brother back.

  “Vegetable lasagne?” I asked. “Or vegemince?”

  “Vegemince,” he said. “And garlic bread.”

  “The nice kind?”

  “We have dough balls…”

  “I’m there.”

  Luke came back in and abruptly took the phone from my hand and put it down.

  “Hey! I was talking to my brother—”

  “Don’t care.” He handed me my bag, his face stony. “Something’s come up. Get your pass.”

  I picked up my airport pass and followed him, confused. We drove in silence up to the airport, Luke tense and still in the passenger seat. We dropped the car outside the terminal, and when one of the traffic wardens started yelling, Luke showed him his warrant card and pulled me after him.

  “What is going on?” I asked as I was tugged into the terminal.

  “You’ll see,” Luke said, dragging me past the Ace desks as I tried to cover my face. Wasn’t I supposed to be off sick today?

  He pulled me up to VP9, one of the Validation Points where staff go through to airside, and I went towards the scanner, dumping my bag on the belt in a reflex action.

  Luke picked it back up again, showed his red pass to the BAA woman and pulled me through the gate without getting me scanned.

  I remembered the handcuffs in my pocket and was pretty glad he had.

  As we approached the lifts an announcement rang out, “We would like to apologise for the delay in baggage handling services. This is due to a technical problem. Thank you for your patience.”

  Was that why we were going down there? A baggage belt failure? Oh, crap. Don’t tell me it’s my fault.

  Usually whenever the main belt stops, it’s because something’s got stuck—a bag that was too big or something with too many trailing straps. We were supposed to spot things like this and sort them out before we sent the bags on their way, but sometimes there just wasn’t enough time to tie up every single strap on every single rucksack. I really hated rucksacks. So I sometimes, er, sent them down as they were. And they sometimes got stuck.

  Sometimes quite often, actually.

  So you can see why, if a rucksack would stop the belt, a person might sort of break it. Ahem.

  We went down to the undercroft in the noisiest lift on earth. I swear there was a small rodent in the mechanism getting the crap tortured out of it. It screeched and moaned and shuddered, and by the time we got to the bottom, I was traumatised. I never used that lift if I could help it. It sounded like it was dying.

  The undercroft was eerily silent, like it is late at night or early on a Sunday. We rounded the corner, past a still, silent baggage chute, and my skin burned as I remembered leaping out over it yesterday.

  “Is this about yesterday?” I asked Luke meekly.

  “I think so,” he replied, and I frowned. What was that supposed to mean?

  I found out when we came to the Ace chutes. Police tape cut off the whole area, and Luke and I ducked under it into a crowd of people in uniforms, a lot of them talking madly into their phones. I spied Maria and Macbeth talking to a guy in plain clothes. “She’s with me,” Luke said to the nearest copper, and the guy took one look at his badge and let us through.

  I glanced at the chute in front of me. It looked pretty normal, apart from the huge smears of blood and the mangled corpse lying on the still conveyor.

  I stared at it for quite a while. Blood doesn’t scare me, if you had a cat like Tammy you’d understand that. Many mornings I have woken up into a scene from The Godfather with a squirrel head beside me on the pillow. Hardly a day went by when I didn’t see the dismembered corpse of a rabbit, deer or fox on the side of the twisty little roads in and out of the village.

  But I’ve never seen a human body before. Not a real, battered cadaver. Bodies on TV aren’t the same. I’d never seen anything as…raw as this.

  “Went right through the mechanism,” the policeman was saying to Luke. “Take forever to clean it all out.”

  “You definitely have an ID?”

  The policeman nodded and went over to the body. It was still dressed in a ripped Ace uniform, complete with hi-vis, and in a pocket on the sleeve was his pass. All the ramp and baggage guys kept their passes on their sleeves so they didn’t get in the way.

  “Christopher Mansfield,” the copper read, smudging away some blood with a gloved finger. “Ramp operative.”

  I blinked. The name was familiar.

  “Chris Mansfield?” I tried to bring up a face and got him almost instantly. He was the guy who’d had Brown in a lock yesterday.

  All of a sudden I felt sick.

  “Oh, Christ.” I reached out for Luke, and he held me upright. “That was him, he helped me yesterday when I—when we—Jesus.”

  Luke pulled me over to a section of the belt where I could sit down and told me to put my head between my knees.

  “This your first body?”

  I nodded. “It’s not that, it’s… God, Luke, it’s…”

  “I know.” He stroked my hair. “I know.”

  Chapter Five

  He wouldn’t let me drive and, after a huge hot chocolate from Starbucks, eventually shepherded me down to my car and drove me back to the office, glaring at the harsh gearbox.

  “I heard.” Alexa was halfway around the desk when we walked in. “Jesus, sounded brutal.”

  “Yep,” Luke said. “Did you hear the extra dimension?”

  She shook her head, glancing at me. “Are you okay? You look really white.”

  I shrugged. “I’m fine. I always look white.”

  “She’s in shock,” Luke said. “The victim helped her apprehend Brown yesterday.”

  Alexa covered her mouth. “Oh, God, you think that’s why he was killed?”

  Luke shrugged. “Wouldn’t rule it out. In fact, I’d say that’s pretty much got to be it. The Browns have an ally on the outside. A very vicious ally. One who has access to at least the undercroft. That’s a green pass at least, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Green is most areas.”

  “Could even be red,” Alexa said. “Maria and Macbeth are going through the computer looking up everyone who’s gone through since last night. They reckon it must have happened this morning before the belts were started up, and he just worked through the system. Probably someone left him in the mechanism.”

  I shuddered, and Luke looked over at me.

  “Maybe it might be a good idea if you stayed at your parents’ tonight,” he said.

  I shook my head out of pride, although right now home seeme
d like a very good option. Lasagne and ice cream and football on the telly. Yeah. Home was good.

  I nodded, meekly.

  “Luke,” Alexa said, beckoning him over. She spoke in hushed tones, but I still heard. “Maybe you should rethink this thing. Look at the state of her.”

  Luke gave her a level look. “Lexy, the first time you saw a fresh body, you threw up.”

  She made a face. “I’m just saying. It could be that someone’s after her. From the reports I’m getting in, she was sort of high-profile yesterday.”

  Luke glanced at me. “You’re saying we should keep an eye on her?”

  Alexa nodded, and Luke sighed, like I was some big burden to him. Well, fine, but he got me into this.

  “Okay.” He looked at his watch, then at me. “Lunch?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not hungry. Besides, I’ve been up so long it’s really teatime tomorrow. Speaking of which, I said I’d go to my parents’.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. Do you think you can drive?”

  I was so shaky I had to hide my hands behind my back, but I nodded and we went outside. I got into Ted, and Luke said he’d follow in his car. He’d need to know where my parents lived, for quite a few reasons, he said, but mostly I suspect he wanted to check they weren’t ex-KGB or anything.

  I drove back home with my usual abandon, and it wasn’t until we were nearly at my house that I realised we’d gone the wrong way. Never mind. I parked up and went into the flat to get a few things.

  Most of the stuff I needed was at my parents’ house anyway, but I wasn’t about to let Luke see I’d gone the wrong way. I picked up my post and checked the answer phone. It was flashing one call, and with a sinking feeling I remembered getting cut off from Chalker that morning.

  I dug out my Siemens. Texts, missed calls, voice mails, the lot. I’d been concentrating so hard on learning about my new Nokia I’d forgotten all about my old phone.

  “Crap.” I took it out and read the messages. Chalker was pissed off with me for cutting the call, he’d heard Luke in the background and told me to stop shagging and get my arse over to Mum’s for tea.

  This was so stupid I started laughing. Luke read the message over my shoulder, and his face twitched with amusement.

  “Your brother is, er, colourful,” he said.

  “You have no idea.”

  “At least your parents are expecting you.”

  I nodded and listened to the voice mail. It was more of the same. “They’re expecting me to be bringing my new bloke,” I said with a grimace. “Chalker told them about you.”

  Luke bit his lip. “Is there any way of getting out of this?”

  I laughed. He looked so panicked. “Of course there is! Come on, Luke, they don’t really expect me to be bringing someone home. I think they’d probably faint if I did.”

  This was completely and very sadly true. I couldn’t even remember the last time I went on a date. Some time before Pete-the-philanderer, the one who was porking the tart at college. Actually, no, I think it was Pete-the-philanderer. There’d really been no one else. And to be honest, I still wasn’t entirely sure why there was him. He was a bit of a loser. I think I was just so overjoyed that someone wanted me and I wasn’t going to end up on the shelf at the tender age of nineteen that I said yes almost before he’d finished asking me out.

  God, now I sounded really sad. I mean, I met men. I liked men. I flirted with them all the time at work. But since Pete I’d had very high standards. Losers need not apply.

  Which did sort of rule out pretty much every bloke I meet, apart from the fantabulous ones who only looked at you if you’re rich, size six and so glossy they could see their own reflections.

  A bit like Angel, really, but she was a sweetheart and honestly hardly noticed men falling at her feet most of the time, plus she lent me her vintage jewellery so I couldn’t really fault her.

  Luke was still looking at me.

  “You keep your family and your love-life separate?”

  I cleared my throat. “Yeah, that’s it. The family is more important. Really important.”

  “So if you turn up alone and they ask where I am…?”

  “I’ll say you were the plumber or something.” I managed a little shrug and just for a second allowed myself the fantasy of letting Luke into my parents’ house. My mother would have a heart attack. Luke was all cheekbones and penetrating eyes and tight muscle. He was sort of lean-bodied, with long legs and a great arse.

  Not that I spent a lot of time looking, you understand. Just every second he was turned away from me.

  I threw some clean underwear in a bag and added my new secret agent extras…cuffs, defence spray, Kevlar, rape alarm…just overnight things, really. In case the psycho who mangled Chris happened to follow us.

  I walked past Tammy’s food bowl and was struck by a horrible thought.

  “What?” Luke said, looking impatient.

  “Tammy. Have you seen her?”

  “Who?”

  “The cat! Have you seen her since we got back?”

  My heart was beating in double time. Little Tammy! What if someone took her and hurt her? My poor little abused baby!

  “She’ll be out on the prowl somewhere,” Luke said. “You have a cat flap.”

  I nodded, trying to believe him. She was a rescue cat and people had done horrible things to her when she was a kitten. Even now she was terrified of strangers.

  “Actually, that’s sort of a security risk,” Luke began, but I gave him a death look. I ran to the door, box of Go-Cat in hand, shaking the biscuits and yelling Tammy’s name. What if she’d got run over? I knew I shouldn’t have brought her with me when I was moving so close to the main road. What if she was hurt?

  What if someone had taken her and was torturing her?

  Oh God, what if…?

  And then I heard the most marvellous sound, a fabulous, magical sound. I heard the gentle tinkle of the bell on Tammy’s collar that was supposed to warn squirrels that she was coming, but of course never did.

  “Tammy! Hello, baby.” I dropped the Go-Cat and made a grab for her but Tammy, the wriggly little thing, escaped and started capturing stray biscuits.

  I straightened up and turned to see Luke standing in the middle of the sitting room, shaking his head at me.

  “Somehow I don’t think your cat is going to be an easy target,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “She just ran away from you.”

  I scowled and opened the hall cupboard for Tammy’s travelling basket. She absolutely hated the thing, and I didn’t blame her, because I probably wouldn’t like to be locked into a wire cage only three inches bigger than me (and Tammy was a really tiny tabby). I lined it with an old towel and went back outside to pick her up.

  I just said she was a wriggly little bugger. She was also a sharp-clawed little bugger. I doubt I could have inflicted more damage on myself if I’d gone down the baggage belt naked with someone throwing razorblades at me. By the time I’d got the lid locked shut with Tammy inside, I was hot, sweaty, messy and bleeding, and Tammy was regarding me like she’d have called the RSPCA if only we had a phone designed for cats.

  Throughout all this Luke stood and watched me with his usual expression of faint disbelief.

  “Can I just interrupt your swearing to ask why you’re doing this to her?” he asked.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Fair enough.” He jangled his car keys. “Are you nearly ready?”

  I flicked back my hair as coolly as I could and picked up my bag. “Sure. Let’s go.”

  Ted was waiting for me, still unlocked (honestly, no one’d ever steal him), and I put Tammy on the passenger seat. She glared at me malevolently and gave an abused-baby mew.

  “Not working,” I told her. “I’m saving your life here.”

  For a second or two, I wondered if someone was really out to get me. If they really were going to break into my house and try to kill me.

 
Maybe they’d try to blow it up like in Stephanie Plum.

  Maybe I was overreacting. I put the car in gear and reversed out of my space.

  Luke followed me, sticking very close all the way. He was driving a three-year-old Vauxhall Vectra, and part of me (the very tiny part that wasn’t stressed and frightened and tired) made a note to make fun of him later. I mean, a Vectra? How secret agent is that? Bond never drove a Vectra. Bond probably doesn’t even know what a Vectra is.

  My parents used to live in a very ordinary sixties house in the middle of the village that was so normal and boring I often drove right by it without realising. But after I moved out, they paid off the mortgage and seemed to decide they missed being in debt, because they bought a new, more expensive house.

  It was very pretty, with roses round the door and a stream and a big garden that my dad could potter around in. You knew your dad was getting old when he started pottering. It was up a longish drive from a narrow road, and my city-born parents thought it was marvellous.

  When it rained, you could hardly get up the drive.

  This meant that in every month, apart from sometimes July and August, I got distress calls from my parents begging me to come and tow their car out of the mud. My dad had a Saab, which was very cool but not so hot in the deep mud. In fact it’d been known to sink. My mum had a cute little Corsa, which ran away from all the mud. Really, it was car torture.

  Then there was Ted, who can climb every mountain, ford every stream (even the one at the bottom of the driveway that was so cute when they bought the house, and which my dad threatens daily with a bridge he would never, ever build). Chalker laughed at me when I bought Ted, he said I was like those sad soccer moms who drive massive Discoveries five hundred yards down the road to pick their kids up from ballet lessons. But he’d shut up a bit now on my choice of car. Now he generally picked on my driving skills instead.

  Luke, rather predictably, balked at the sight of the mud and when I was a couple of yards up the driveway, my new phone started ringing.

  “What?” I said, trying not to sound too smug.

  “You shouldn’t be answering that while you’re driving,” Luke said, so I ended the call and chucked the phone back in my bag. Super-citizen, that was me.