I, Spy? (Sophie Green Mysteries, No. 1) (Sophie Green Mystery)

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