Free I, Spy? by Kate Johnson Page A

little bugger. She was also a sharp-clawed little bugger. I doubt I could have inflicted more damage on myself if I’d gone down the baggage belt naked with someone throwing razorblades at me. By the time I’d got the lid locked shut with Tammy inside, I was hot, sweaty, messy and bleeding, and Tammy was regarding me like she’d have called the RSPCA if only we had a phone designed for cats.
    Throughout all this Luke stood and watched me with his usual expression of faint disbelief.
    “Can I just interrupt your swearing to ask why you’re doing this to her?” he asked.
    “Fuck off.”
    “Fair enough.” He jangled his car keys. “Are you nearly ready?”
    I flicked back my hair as coolly as I could and picked up my bag. “Sure. Let’s go.”
    Ted was waiting for me, still unlocked (honestly, no one’d ever steal him), and I put Tammy on the passenger seat. She glared at me malevolently and gave an abused-baby mew.
    “Not working,” I told her. “I’m saving your life here.”
    For a second or two, I wondered if someone was really out to get me. If they really were going to break into my house and try to kill me.
    Maybe they’d try to blow it up like in Stephanie Plum.
    Maybe I was overreacting. I put the car in gear and reversed out of my space.
    Luke followed me, sticking very close all the way. He was driving a three-year-old Vauxhall Vectra, and part of me (the very tiny part that wasn’t stressed and frightened and tired) made a note to make fun of him later. I mean, a Vectra? How secret agent is that? Bond never drove a Vectra. Bond probably doesn’t even know what a Vectra is.
    My parents used to live in a very ordinary Sixties house in the middle of the village that was so normal and boring I often drove right by it without realising. But after I moved out, they paid off the mortgage and seemed to decide they missed being in debt, because they bought a new, more expensive house.
    It was very pretty, with roses round the door and a stream and a big garden that my dad could potter around in. You knew your dad was getting old when he started pottering. It was up a longish drive from a narrow road, and my city-born parents thought it was marvellous.
    When it rained, you could hardly get up the drive.
    This meant that in every month, apart from sometimes July and August, I got distress calls from my parents begging me to come and tow their car out of the mud. My dad had a Saab, which was very cool but not so hot in the deep mud. In fact it’d been known to sink. My mum had a cute little Corsa, which ran away from all the mud. Really, it was car torture.
    Then there was Ted, who can climb every mountain, ford every stream (even the one at the bottom of the driveway that was so cute when they bought the house, and which my dad threatens daily with a bridge he would never, ever build). Chalker laughed at me when I bought Ted, he said I was like those sad soccer moms who drive massive Discoveries five hundred yards down the road to pick their kids up from ballet lessons. But he’d shut up a bit now on my choice of car. Now he generally picked on my driving skills instead.
    Luke, rather predictably, balked at the sight of the mud and when I was a couple of yards up the driveway, my new phone started ringing.
    “What?” I said, trying not to sound too smug.
    “You shouldn’t be answering that while you’re driving,” Luke said, so I ended the call and chucked the phone back in my bag. Super-citizen, that was me.
    The phone rang again, and I ignored it. If I stopped now I might get stuck. I ploughed on to the sound of the phone chirruping (I hadn’t set voice mail yet) and Tammy warbling along in distress.
    When I was parked safely on the paving outside the house, I picked up the phone.
    “Now who’s laughing at my car?”
    Luke sounded very pissed off. “If I go up there, will I get stuck?”
    “There’s that possibility.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
    “Why didn’t you get a decent