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

minutes earlier. One, I might add, had done little all day but read the papers, check my horoscope for me, make a phone call or two to people called Bunty and Monty and Toffee (I think, although it may have been Tuffy) and ask me if I understood any of this computer crap. Alexa had long since wandered back to her own desk.
    Luke stood behind me as I found the time segment I wanted and played it on the big screen. The time index said 0236, and I played it through to 0237.
    “Did you get that?” I asked, rewinding, and Luke gave me a quizzical look.
    “Help me out here.”
    “There,” I pointed to a shadow skidding across the floor. “A mouse, maybe a rat.”
    “So? Could have got in anywhere, the undercroft is open all across the back. There are mice in the Ace staff room, Sophie.”
    “I know,” I said. “I found one in the kettle once.” I opened another clip, this one from three months ago. It had taken me bloody hours to find, hours of endless downloads and Please Waits from the computer, time I had utilised trying to explain to One why texting was a valid form of communication. He hadn’t got it.
    The three-month-old footage was the same footage, the same mouse, the same route across the deserted concrete floor. Even the time index was the same, 0236 to 0237.
    “You see?” I said excitedly. “It’s just been spliced in! Someone has copied and pasted this bit of footage into the archives.”
    Luke was silent, just as One had been a few minutes ago. I expect they were trying to think of suitable words of awe for my achievement. Maybe I’d get a medal or something. An OBE. Maybe I’d be a dame.
    No, they always sound really old. Or transsexual.
    “Sophie,” Luke said eventually, pinching the bridge of his nose, “it’s live footage.”
    “No, this is archived—”
    “I mean, it’s transmitted live. There’s a big room under the terminal where people sit and watch these monitors all day long. It can’t have been spliced.”
    “Well, then, it was looped in or something! Like on Speed . This is the same footage. Someone has played this over what we were supposed to see. They’re trying to cover up the actual time-frame when Chris was killed.”
    Come on. I thought I’d been pretty clever. But Luke and One didn’t look convinced.
    “It could just be coincidence,” One said. “I mean, looping footage? No one does that any more.”
    “Which is precisely why someone might have done it this time,” I said. “You know, like on The Sting , where they use the wire because it’s so old fashioned no one will suspect it?”
    Another silence.
    “Seriously, Sophie,” Luke said, “do you really sit around watching films all day?”
    I made a face and saved the files. “No, I get up at three-thirty in the morning because the TV’s really good,” I said, standing up. “Come on. At least admit it’s a possibility?”
    Luke and One exchanged glances.
    “It’s a possibility,” Luke said eventually. “Now come on. We have to go and see Ana Rodriguez.”
    “Now?”
    “Yes. Now.”
    I ripped off a salute, which Luke seemed to think was funny, and stomped out to my car.
    “We’re taking mine,” Luke said.
    “No.”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because yours sticks out like an ostrich in an aquarium. Time you thought about changing that car.”
    “No!” I wailed, throwing my arms over Ted’s scabby green bonnet. “Ted’s family.”
    For a few seconds Luke just stared. “You named your car?”
    “Of course. You don’t name yours?”
    We both looked at the Vectra. You could never get attached to a car like that.
    “I don’t keep my cars that long,” Luke said as I gave in and opened the Vectra’s silver door.
    “Get bored easily?”
    “No, they’re just…sort of expendable.”
    I didn’t ask what he meant by that. I had a feeling I didn’t really want to know.
    Ana Rodriguez, like a lot of airport workers, especially the foreign nationals who didn’t have cars or UK driving licences, lived in town where there was a semi-regular train and bus service to the airport. We parked on a busy road outside the little house she apparently used to share with Chris, and stood on the pavement for a while, looking at it.
    There was a To Let sign outside. I almost welled up at the sight of it. God, poor Ana. Stuck in a foreign country, boyfriend murdered, and now getting evicted ’cos she couldn’t pay the rent by herself.
    Then sense kicked in. He died less than forty-eight hours