Ugley Business Read Online Free PDF Page A

my doors and windows, including the metal shutters that turn the flat into a furnace, and left. Paranoid? No. Someone threw a firebomb through my window a couple of months ago.
    I drove up to the hospital and went straight to Maria’s ward. SO17 doesn’t stretch as far as private healthcare, so she was in a room with a teenager who had appendicitis, a woman swathed in bandages who had crashed her car while talking on a mobile phone, and an old lady who had something indefinable and distinctly smelly wrong with her.
    “Thank God you’re here,” Maria said loudly when I turned up. She hates hospitals and had got more and more belligerent since she woke up in ICU. She was dressed, lounging on her high bed, reading a magazine and looking horribly bored. “They wouldn’t let me go until someone came to collect me.”
    “Well, here I am.” I picked up her bag. “Ready?”
    “I’ve been ready for about a month,” she grumbled, swinging to her feet and only wincing slightly. She was hit with a bullet in the abdomen and had to have her wrecked appendix yanked out. She also had to have a patch of hair at the back of her head shaved off so they could sew up the bloody wounds she got when her head slammed into a wall.
    I, of course, have felt almost Catholic guilt ever since it happened, despite that I’m officially C of E. I still feel like it’s all my fault, even though Maria and Macbeth, the other agent involved, have repeatedly told me that they knew the risks when they took on the job.
    Sometimes I wonder who told them about these risks, because they didn’t tell me. The nearest I got was Luke telling me he’d have to kill me if I ever breathed a word of SO17’s existence to anyone.
    We wandered out of the hospital and Maria gratefully breathed in lungfuls of fresh air. “God, I hate hospital air,” she said. “It makes me feel ill, and I didn’t need to be ill on top of everything else.”
    Trying hard not to grovel, I put her bag in the back and asked if she needed a hand up to the high cab.
    “No,” she said with slight scorn, “I’ve been working out while they weren’t looking. I’m as fit as I was before. Well,” she amended, wincing, “nearly.”
    Ted is a rather basic model of car with no stereo, electric windows or alarm, but he has a ghetto blaster under the passenger seat, and Maria managed to get it tuned to something decent as we chugged on home. She lives in town in a huge old house that she bought before starting on her crippling SO17 salary. Maria used to be in the SBS and is as tough as they come.
    She is also really annoyingly beautiful. She has dark hair so glossy you can see your own, less glamorous reflection in it, huge dark eyes and skin that would make a makeup artist redundant. She has a perfect figure that must have prompted the invention of the word “svelte”, perfect teeth, hands, legs, everything.
    I glanced at her hands. Messy cuticles. Hah!
    Then I tried to hide my own nails. We can’t all be perfect, can we?
    “So,” Maria asked, after she’d settled on the beach towel that protected her from getting stuck to Ted’s vinyl seat in the summer heat, “what have I missed?”
    I shrugged. “Got a postage stamp? I’ll write it down for you.”
    “That quiet?”
    “Pretty much. I went to stay with my friend Angel last night and we thought there was an intruder, but Luke couldn’t find anyone.”
    The camera flash bugged me, though. I’d swear it wasn’t lightning.
    “Speaking of Luke…” Maria glanced sideways at me, and I refused to bite. “Sophie, what’s going on between you?”
    When did everyone get so nosy? When did my love life become so interesting?
    Oh, yes. When I finally got one.
    “Nothing,” I said, but I’m a terrible actress, I’ll never ever make a good spy, and Maria was shaking her head at me.
    “I’ve seen you two when you come to visit. All those little glances, can’t stop touching each other… You wouldn’t fool my grandmother,