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

about half an hour. Or she’d been late. Neither of us had thought to ask her if she’d been on time.
    But what Chris hadn’t known was that the undercroft wasn’t empty. Someone had been using it for a meeting. In the Ace staff room. Which was supposed to be empty. Which was why Chris walked in there. And why he was killed.
    And then they took his body and put it in the belt mechanism. I didn’t know why. Maybe they were coming back for it later. Maybe they wanted to make a point.
    They were long gone by the time Ana made her appearance. I’d even watched them clean up the blood.
    I sat back in my chair. Probably I ought to tell Luke about this. But there was something else I had to do first.
    I got out my phone and called Macbeth, hoping he’d be in. It was well after midnight, although I wasn’t sure why that bothered me.
    “Hey, babe,” he answered. “You locked in again?”
    “Locked out,” I said. “You know the lab under the office?”
    “I know it,” he said.
    “Can you get in?”
    “I can get in anywhere.”
    Ten minutes later he strolled through the door. “What you wanna do down there you don’t want Luke to know about?”
    “It’s what I want to say that I don’t want him to know.”
    Macbeth shrugged. “Can I know?”
    “You can watch.”
    He looked excited at the prospect and quickly pulled the files off the bookshelf to find the hidden keypad. The door swooshed open and we stepped into the lift.
    “You do know how to get through this lock, right?” I asked nervously. “I mean, it’s not going to fill up with poisonous gas or something if you don’t put the right code in in thirty seconds?”
    Macbeth was looking at me like I’d grown another head. “Girl, you watch too much TV,” he said, and swiped his pass on the machine. He keyed in a code, spoke his name—sadly, not his real name—and the lift started moving.
    “How come you get access and I don’t?”
    “I didn’t get blind drunk this afternoon,” he replied, grinning.
    “God, does everyone know about that?”
    He shrugged and grinned some more.
    The lift doors opened and I could see Sven slumped in the corner of his cage, a dark lump in the shadowy corner. “Hey,” I yelled, “wake up. I need to talk to you.”
    But then Macbeth switched on the light, and my blood suddenly froze in my veins, because it wasn’t Sven lying in the corner of the cell. It was One. And he was dead.

Chapter Seventeen
     
    “Jesus fucking Christ,” Macbeth said.
    “I know,” I said.
    “That dude is dead.”
    “I know,” I said.
    We both stood and stared. In other circumstances we might have opened up the cell and checked for a pulse or something. But that seemed rather ridiculous when we could both see, quite clearly, a tiny bullet hole on one side of One’s head. And a giant bloody hole on the other side.
    “He ain’t the guy was down here earlier.”
    I concentrated on breathing. “When did you come down here?”
    “This afternoon. ’Bout four.”
    “Was there a formerly cute Norwegian guy in here then?”
    “Formerly cute?”
    “I changed my mind after he tried to drug me.”
    “Blue shirt, vomit in his hair?”
    “That’s the bunny.”
    “You reckon he killed Albert?”
    “Well, I think I just saw footage of him killing Chris Mansfield,” I said, “so I wouldn’t rule it out.”
    Macbeth walked over and ran his hands over the door of the cell. “But he couldn’t’ve broken out,” he muttered. “No one could. I made this thing everything-proof. This here is the only door I can’t break through.”
    I believed him.
    “But if Sven didn’t break out, then someone must have let him out,” I said.
    “Maybe Albert went in there and this Sven guy killed him,” Macbeth said.
    It was weird to hear One called Albert. “No—” I began, and he cut me off.
    “No, ’cos you need to swipe it shut. And this dude still has his pass,” he peered through the glass.
    “Plus, isn’t it voice activated?”
    “Sure is.” Macbeth turned back to look at me. “Which means only five people could’ve done it.”
    “Four,” I said. “I never got my voice activation activated.” To prove it, I swiped my card in the slot and keyed in my code. There flashed a green light to say the code was accepted.
    “Sophie Green,” I said, and the light turned red. Denied.
    “Which leaves Alexa, Maria, Luke and me,” Macbeth said. “And I know I did not do it. Albert had my respect.”
    I wasn’t going to argue