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know details about the Kelly family business. He quizzed me all the way into town, not stopping until we arrived outside a fish restaurant in Soho.
    “Lunch?” he asked. Sharp ran a long finger down the dishes on the menu, settled for scallops with black pudding and a grilled Dover sole. Then he took out his briefcase and opened a dossier of photos. “Tony thought you might like to see these,” he said.
    They were of Sophie Kelly – surveillance pictures taken on a long lens. They looked like paparazzi shots from a celeb magazine: Sophie and her mum sitting outside a restaurant; Sophie in a white bikini, sunbathing on a yacht and putting on sun cream; Sophie walking out of the waves, topless. I felt a pang of protective indignation, they were like those “snooper” pics you see of footballers’ wives on the front of tabloid newspapers.
    I swallowed hard and placed the pictures face down on the envelope.
    “Where were these taken?” I asked Sharp.
    “Miss Kelly’s been travelling quite a lot,” he said. “Once the guvnor got nabbed, she and her mum went straight to Majorca to the family villa. It was the obvious choice. Probably where the card came from.”
    It crossed my mind that while I had been in the south of Spain infiltrating the circle of the
other
Kelly brother, her Uncle Patsy, Sophie might have only been a short boat trip away.
    “That’s where the first of the pictures were taken, about a year ago. I was assigned to keep an eye on them. I was out there anyway, keeping tabs on one of the nightclub syndicates.”
    “Tough gig?” I asked.
    Sharp shrugged. “Bit like being on the night shift. You start about 6 p.m. round the bars, and then you hop from club to club, keeping an eye on who’s selling what to whom. Have a few drinks, chat to people. You know the score.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Tiring. It messes with your body clock, doesn’t it?”
    “I’m pretty much a night owl anyway,” Sharp said. “But those places aren’t really my scene. I’m sure you know the ones I mean.”
    I did. It took me back to 24-Hour Square in Benalmádena, and the clubs: the endless house music and drunken girls staggering around – and worse – in the street. It reminded me of hanging out with Gav Taylor. Took me back to the bar in Benalmádena where I’d stabbed him in self-defence, notching up my first killing. I’d “done my one” and didn’t feel too proud about it.
    “I’d start a bit earlier in the day,” Sharp continued. “Keeping the Kelly villa under surveillance, following Sophie and Cheryl if they went out to a restaurant.”
    “Did they know they were being watched?” I asked.
    “I’m sure they did, eventually. They’d committed no crime themselves but they were paranoid that with Tommy out of the way someone might have a pop at them, so they moved on pretty quick.”
    “How did they seem?” I asked, eager for information about Sophie.
    “Edgy, obviously. I managed to get close enough to them for a bit of small talk. I said I was a designer doing up some apartments for Russian clients.”
    “Didn’t that make them suspicious? They have quite a few Russian friends, or at least Tommy does.”
    “If it did, they didn’t bat an eyelid. The Russians are everywhere now; they’re taking over. Of course, I was hoping they might have been a bit more forthcoming and dropped a name or two, but they’re cagier than that. They became a little more relaxed with the wine, and once Cheryl could see I wasn’t trying to hit on her daughter.”
    A defensive instinct rose in me.
    “Lovely, isn’t she?” he said. “A real warm, classy girl.”
    I nodded. Whatever might have happened between me and Sophie, I still had a soft spot for her. Very soft.
    “Then one day they didn’t turn up.”
    “Where did they go?”
    “It’s more a case of where didn’t they go,” Sharp said. “They sailed out of Palma Majorca, then stopped in Ibiza. That’s where the bikini shots were taken. Terry