Ugley Business

by Kate Johnson

  But why? This is what I don’t understand. I sent a message that said I had to go into work so wouldn’t be home for tea. Simple. Clear. What was she clarifying?

  “They’re really short staffed,” I said. “There’s like, a, er, stomach bug going around the whole airport. So I’m going in with Angel. To help her out.” A thought occurred to me. My dad was a huge IC fan. “Mum, you know all those books Dad had on IC Winter?”

  “Yes,” she said doubtfully.

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “I think they’re in the conservatory. Or the loft.” Not much difference. “Why?”

  Oh, yeah. Why? What is it with my mother and “why?”?

  “Well, it’s just, it’s just…Angel wanted to have a look.”

  “Angel wants to look at books about her mother?”

  Not a good excuse. I don’t know how I haven’t got fired yet from SO17. “Yeah. A sort of objective point of view. You know Angel.”

  She didn’t, not really, but she still said, “Oh, okay. I’ll get them out for you. Will you be coming for tea tomorrow?”

  The first of four shifts. Six through six. “Not unless you start tea at about four,” I said. “I’m on nights now.”

  Like a nurse or a paramedic or something. Cool.

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed, and I suppose it has been quite a while since I went back there. Properly, I mean, not just to pick up a shirt or something. “Well, you’ll be getting overtime, won’t you?”

  Not a chance in hell. “Erm, yeah. Night shift pay. Look, Mum, I’ve got to go. Got to pick Angel up.”

  But when I got there, Angel shook her head at my car. “Vinyl seats and no air-con?”

  “You can open the window,” I said.

  “So what happened to a ‘neat and tidy appearance’?” she quoted from our uniform guidelines.

  “Sophie’s never been neat and tidy,” Luke said cheerfully, coming out of the church behind her and trying to ruffle my damp, pulled back hair. I ducked, and he grinned. “Got everything?”

  I had my gun and my warrant card and my red pass and my military ID. And a slightly illegal stun gun. And a loud defence alarm that shot green dye all over an attacker. I hadn’t yet found a use for it—maybe if I wanted to go into camouflage I could try it. Maybe not. The can says the dye lasts for seven days on the skin.

  “Have fun,” Luke said, kissing me lightly on the lips and stepping back quickly before either of us got carried away.

  “Doubtful,” I said gloomily, and he smiled.

  “You love your job, remember?”

  Right now it was hard to even remember saying that.

  Angel explained on the way to the airport that most of the overnight flights were not Ace, who never flew after eleven at night or before six in the morning, but chartered flights for holiday companies. Our actual employer was not Ace, but a handling company called Air International, who supplied PSAs like us, as well as ramp and dispatch and baggage services. Ace was their biggest client at Stansted, but there were others, like the charter airlines, who only had one or two flights a day. Mostly these were handled by the twelve-hour staff like Angel, who were there to greet the midnight arrivals from the Canary Islands or Tel-Aviv.

  This last one made me nervous. There were reasons why flights to the Middle East had their own gate with a separate scanner. I didn’t want to handle those flights.

  Look at me, a bloody secret agent and frightened of a planeful of people who have probably never been in the same country as Osama Bin Laden.

  I texted Maria on the way in to see if she’d found anything out yet. She replied, somewhat tersely, that she would find it a hell of a lot easier to investigate people if she knew who they were. Didn’t Angel have any suspicions?

  But Angel didn’t. I asked her repeatedly if she might have known who it was, but she shrugged and said she’d no idea. She was always getting weird fan-mail.

  We started on Ace flights, familiar territory, both of us on check-in, within easy sight of each other. I didn’t expect the stalker to turn up at the airport, but then you never knew.

  Things quietened down and the sun faded through the windows (Question: who thought it would be a good idea to build a south-facing terminal completely out of glass? It’s like working in a giant bloody greenhouse.), and Tem, my favourite supervisor, wandered over with the floorwalker’s clipboard for a chat.

  “You working nights now then, baby?”

  I shrugged and nodded. I’ve got pretty good at this move. “Just for a while. See how I go.”

  “That’s nice of them. Letting you try it out.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m keeping this company going.”

  “Thought you’d gone down to part-time?”

  “For a while. Had, you know, family things to sort out.” A complete lie, but Tem was never going to meet my family. He nodded understandingly.

  “Are you coming out to Sheila’s leaving thing next week?”

  I blinked. I didn’t even know who Sheila was.

  “Dispatch, darlin’,” Tem smiled. “She’s buggering off to Stansted Fuel.”

  “So not really leaving, then?” I glanced over at Angel, who was checking in a businessman for the last flight to Belfast. Normal man, normal suit, normal, normal, normal. Even the way he blatantly checked Angel out was normal. “Tem, do you think Angel’s pretty?”

  “Angel?” He glanced at her. “She’s stunning, babe. Not like you.”

  “Oh, cheers.”

  “No, I mean not stunning like you. You’ve got the build, you know?”

  Yeah. I knew. I mean, I’m tall and everything, but would it kill a man to drag his eyes up to my face?

  “People are always watching Angel.”

  “She looks like that film-star. The, er,” he clicked his fingers, “you know. Sixties. Bond girl.”

  If I said IC’s name out loud, he’d make the connection. Angel doesn’t tell many people who her parents were.

  “I’m not big on Bond films,” I lied, because I’d watched them all when I was trying to figure this spy thing out.

  “Yeah. Well. She does the cute and helpless thing. You’re all kind of…”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. Statuesque? Amazonian. Nice words, but they usually meant only one thing: I’m too polite to say I think you’re fat.

  But listen, I’m not. Well, mostly not. I have natural curves. I’m rounded. I have big bone structure.

  I hate tiny girls like Angel.

  “Anyway,” Tem tried to recover the conversation, “your boyfriend’s a lucky bugger.”

  “Don’t have one,” I said automatically.

  “What about that blond guy I saw you with?”

  “When?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Last week. Picked you up. Outside Enterprise House.”

  I almost asked what car, but I didn’t want to highlight the fact that I was sleeping with someone who drove a Vectra. So I said, “Oh, yeah, that was my brother.”

  “So you’re single?” Tem shook his head. “Jesus.”

  How sweet.

  As check-in closed down, Angel and I made out way over to the gate to meet the inbound charter flights full of sleepy tanned tourists fresh from Ayia Napa and the Costa Del Sol. Bastards. I never damn well tan.

  We got to VP9 and Angel automatically swung her bag up onto the scanner, walked through without bleeping and handed her pass to the BAA official. I rummaged in my bag for my red pass and warrant card, and they let me through without being scanned. The validation point—or VP as we call it—is there to act like security for staff in exactly the way that passengers go through main security. They scan your bag and you, and if either bleep then they get searched.

  Except for me. And Luke. I have things in my bag that don’t bear scrutiny. And right now, with a pair of handcuffs tucked down my bra, I could have done without a full body search, too.

  Angel was impressed. “So is this part of the—” she began, and my eyes widened in alar
m. “The thing you were telling me about?” she finished, mouthing, “Sorry.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s hell trying to get through there normally. I have to pick my moment so there’s no one else there. Most of the BAA guys recognise me, but the other day I went through with Vallie and had to pretend I’d forgotten something so she could go on ahead.”

  Angel nodded. “Sophie…” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “That thing with the crutches. Was that real?”

  I nodded. “Very real. Very painful. You saw the scar. But I—I can’t tell you about it.”

  She nodded mournfully. “That’s what my dad always used to say.”

  Jesus. Poor Angel, having to live with the knowledge that her parents were doing something so horribly dangerous and that one day, they might just simply not come back.

  A thought occurred to me and I got out my Nokia. How did Greg Winter die? I texted Maria.

  She replied in seconds. Motorbike accident. Cut & dried. Found him in a ditch. Why?

  I wasn’t sure why. Just a suspicion. Can you access the report?

  Bugger all else to do, she replied, and Angel asked, “Who’re you texting?”

  “Luke,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, and we boarded the transit train in silence. Then, just as the doors opened and we stepped out onto the little platform in a swirl of passengers, my phone bleeped again. Several passengers glared at me, and Angel grinned. We’re supposed to have our phones switched off at work. But then we’re also supposed to have a neat and tidy appearance, and that’s not likely to happen any time soon, either.

  I opened the message, thinking Maria was working fast, but instead it was from Harvey. Did you get my message? Who is that girl?

  I smiled. A client. Why?

  She’s amazing. I saw you with her at Lakeside. PS you were right the other girl was awful.

  “Now what?” Angel asked.

  “How do you feel about polite, burly Americans?” I asked.

  “In what kind of context?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Are your intentions honourable? I asked Harvey, but I didn’t wait for a reply, because we’d got to the top of the escalator and people were already starting to ask us things, all anxious that their plane wasn’t outside and waiting for them.

  We went over to the gate and did all the official things we have to do. Well, Angel did them, because it was a different flight system to the one I was used to, and I didn’t know how the computer programme worked. She went down to meet the inbound flight, and I sat there in the strangely bright satellite, looking around at the lounge where there was only one planeful of people left, their flight boarding in ten minutes, far away. I watched them all file through the gate and disappear down the escalator, then I looked out of the window and saw them all climbing up the steps to the little door in the plane, then the plane pushed back and trundled off to the runway.

  Still Angel hadn’t come back. I’d seen the passengers swarming past on their way to the transit and the terminal, to argue with customs and complain about their baggage, but Angel hadn’t come back up yet.

  Panic started to seep in. What if the stalker had been one of the passengers? What if he’d got her down there right now?

  I closed the little door on the gate, picked up my bag with my hand ready to whip out my gun, and crept down the still escalator. The hall at the bottom was empty. I looked out of both doors—the exit to the tarmac and the exit to the transit, where the inbound passengers would have gone—but Angel wasn’t in either direction.

  I made my choice, swiped through the door to the tarmac and crept down the tunnel.

  Well, tried to creep. The floor was hollow and really, really noisy. I have got to get some softer shoes.

  I made it all the way down outside where the steps were being pulled away from the aircraft and the doors were being snapped shut. No Angel.

  “Have you seen Angel?” I asked one of the ramp guys, who shook his head.

  “Followed ‘em all in. Should’ve gone back up by now.”

  Panic was thumping in my chest now. Where the hell was she? I raced back up the tunnel and paused at the door to the transit station. Should I try that or…

  No. I swiped open the door back up to the gate station and nearly fainted with relief when I saw Angel standing there, looking puzzled.

  “Where did you go?” she asked. “I couldn’t see you.”

  I pressed my hand to my heart, which was just beginning to slow down a little.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I said, releasing my hold on the SIG in my bag. “I thought—”

  “I was helping someone with a pushchair,” Angel said, as I climbed back up the escalator. “Lady all on her own with twins.”

  “She went to Majorca on her own with twins?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  I dropped my bag on the floor. “You scared the life out of me. From now on, we go down to meet planes together, and screw Air International guidelines.”

  It was a sentiment often expressed.

  There were two more planes to meet, one landing at ten and one at eleven, so we lounged around waiting for them. Angel tried to drag some more out of me about Luke, but I wasn’t biting. Instead I sat and thought about him.

  So, he wasn’t my boyfriend. But why not?

  Well, we hadn’t met each other’s parents or friends. I didn’t even know if Luke had any. The only friends of mine he’d ever met were Angel and Tom, the singer in my brother’s band who helped us out once with someone who tried to drug me. We told Tom it was date rape and I haven’t seen him since.

  But not meeting friends and family wasn’t a very good reason. Romeo and Juliet never met each other’s mates, but they still got married and became fiction’s most famous and romantic lovers. Not that I wanted to marry Luke. God, the thought terrified me.

  So what was it? The total and utter lack of emotional commitment?

  Yeah. That was it. We had sex, and we had fun. There wasn’t even the thought of “I love you” hanging around to frighten us. I didn’t know where the relationship was going. Should I? Would that spoil it?

  We wandered over to the domestic satellite where everything was utterly silent. There are no overnight domestic flights, in or outbound, and Angel said to me, “This is nap-time.”

  “It’s what?”

  “You didn’t think we were going to stay up all night, did you?”

  The thought had crossed my mind. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “Pick a seat,” she gestured to the rows of hard blue chairs, “and take a nap. The Fuerteventura is delayed so it’ll be in around three. Jo’s going to ring me when it’s approaching.” She held up her phone. Jo was in Ops and very helpful. “Sweet dreams.”

  I lay awake on the uncomfortable chairs for what felt like hours after Angel had dropped off into instant, picturesque sleep. I thought about Angel and her parents, about the person who had flashed a camera through the window last night, about Karen Hanson and her new steel rule, and about Luke.

  And then I must have fallen off to sleep, because I was suddenly woken up by a voice in my ear, “So this is what you get paid for.”

  My eyes jolted open and I found myself staring at a pair of very amused baby blues.

  “Luke?” I croaked. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been thinking.” He was hunkered down in front of the row of chairs, his face level with mine.

  “About?”

  He brushed a strand of hair back from my face. “This isn’t going to work.”

  Now I was fully awake. “What?” I said in alarm. Was he breaking up with me?

  “This. You working nights. Me working days.”

  Oh God, he was breaking up with me. Except that you had to have a relationship to break up. He was cutting me off.

  “What are you saying?” I squeaked, trying to keep my voice down so Angel wouldn’t wake up. It was still only just pas
t one in the morning.

  “That something has to change. Either you stop shadowing Angel, or I do.”

  I stared. He wasn’t breaking up with me. He was mutinying for me!

  “But we can’t,” I said. “We can’t let her out of our sight.”

  “I spoke to Karen,” Luke said. “She’s willing to employ outside agents.”

  I frowned. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, sweetheart,” Luke smiled, “we can get someone else in. And I know someone.”

  Harvey! He already had a thing for Angel. He’d stick to her like Bostick. I opened my mouth to suggest it, but Luke had other ideas. He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me.

  “Mmm,” I said. “So who’s this ‘outside agent’?”

  “Just someone I know. Very trustworthy. I’ll call him in the morning.”

  I nodded. That sounded like a plan to me. “Have you found out any more about—” I began, but Luke put a finger over my lips, and then he slipped it into my mouth, and then he was kissing me again and then somehow my shirt came undone and I pushed Luke away.

  “Not here,” I gasped, “not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Angel,” I jerked my head at her. She was still sleeping peacefully.

  “She won’t—”

  “She might,” I said firmly. “And I’m not big on discovery fantasies.”

  Luke sighed and looked around for inspiration. “The bathroom,” he said, and before I could protest, he dragged me to my cramped feet and pulled me into the ladies. He pushed me back against the bank of sinks and started kissing me again, working on getting more than my shirt undone. And I, uncomplaining, happily joined in, popping all the buttons on his shirt and running my hands over all those lovely muscles. And then running my hands over—never mind. Luke found the handcuffs and got pretty excited, locking my wrists behind his neck.

  We were getting along very well, in fact, until we heard the scream.

  “Angel,” I said, and Luke pulled his jeans back up, grabbed the gun he’d left in one of the sinks and dashed out. I followed, limping on one shoe, terrified because I’d left my bag and my gun and everything out there with Angel, all unguarded, and anything could have happened.

  Angel was sitting huddled up on the hard blue chairs, a large envelope in her hands, staring at some large, glossy photos. And Luke was crouched in front of her, trying to wipe away the tears that were falling down her face.