Read Online I, Spy? by Kate Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

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