Ugley Business by Kate Johnson Page A

Angel asked.
    “How do you feel about polite, burly Americans?” I asked.
    “In what kind of context?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Are your intentions honourable? I asked Harvey, but I didn’t wait for a reply, because we’d got to the top of the escalator and people were already starting to ask us things, all anxious that their plane wasn’t outside and waiting for them.
    We went over to the gate and did all the official things we have to do. Well, Angel did them, because it was a different flight system to the one I was used to, and I didn’t know how the computer programme worked. She went down to meet the inbound flight, and I sat there in the strangely bright satellite, looking around at the lounge where there was only one planeful of people left, their flight boarding in ten minutes, far away. I watched them all file through the gate and disappear down the escalator, then I looked out of the window and saw them all climbing up the steps to the little door in the plane, then the plane pushed back and trundled off to the runway.
    Still Angel hadn’t come back. I’d seen the passengers swarming past on their way to the transit and the terminal, to argue with customs and complain about their baggage, but Angel hadn’t come back up yet.
    Panic started to seep in. What if the stalker had been one of the passengers? What if he’d got her down there right now?
    I closed the little door on the gate, picked up my bag with my hand ready to whip out my gun, and crept down the still escalator. The hall at the bottom was empty. I looked out of both doors—the exit to the tarmac and the exit to the transit, where the inbound passengers would have gone—but Angel wasn’t in either direction.
    I made my choice, swiped through the door to the tarmac and crept down the tunnel.
    Well, tried to creep. The floor was hollow and really, really noisy. I have got to get some softer shoes.
    I made it all the way down outside where the steps were being pulled away from the aircraft and the doors were being snapped shut. No Angel.
    “Have you seen Angel?” I asked one of the ramp guys, who shook his head.
    “Followed ‘em all in. Should’ve gone back up by now.”
    Panic was thumping in my chest now. Where the hell was she? I raced back up the tunnel and paused at the door to the transit station. Should I try that or…
    No. I swiped open the door back up to the gate station and nearly fainted with relief when I saw Angel standing there, looking puzzled.
    “Where did you go?” she asked. “I couldn’t see you.”
    I pressed my hand to my heart, which was just beginning to slow down a little.
    “I could ask you the same thing,” I said, releasing my hold on the SIG in my bag. “I thought—”
    “I was helping someone with a pushchair,” Angel said, as I climbed back up the escalator. “Lady all on her own with twins.”
    “She went to Majorca on her own with twins?”
    “I didn’t ask.”
    I dropped my bag on the floor. “You scared the life out of me. From now on, we go down to meet planes together, and screw Air International guidelines.”
    It was a sentiment often expressed.
    There were two more planes to meet, one landing at ten and one at eleven, so we lounged around waiting for them. Angel tried to drag some more out of me about Luke, but I wasn’t biting. Instead I sat and thought about him.
    So, he wasn’t my boyfriend. But why not?
    Well, we hadn’t met each other’s parents or friends. I didn’t even know if Luke had any. The only friends of mine he’d ever met were Angel and Tom, the singer in my brother’s band who helped us out once with someone who tried to drug me. We told Tom it was date rape and I haven’t seen him since.
    But not meeting friends and family wasn’t a very good reason. Romeo and Juliet never met each other’s mates, but they still got married and became fiction’s most famous and romantic lovers. Not that I wanted to marry Luke. God, the thought terrified me.
    So what was