Shadow Box Read Online Free Page A

Gadd has a place tucked away there. He can’t use it, so Cheryl and Sophie holed up there for a month or so.”
    “Where’s Terry now?” I asked.
    “Good question,” Sharp said. “He’s slipped off the radar. We suspect Turkish Cyprus. Easy to get lost, no extradition treaty.”
    “What about Sophie and Cheryl – when did you lose track of them?”
    “Someone else watched them in Ibiza. For me to have followed them there would have been too obvious. Then I got the nod when they packed their bags and left Gadd’s place.”
    I picked at the plate of whitebait I had ordered and resisted the urge to turn the photos back over.
    “They got on a yacht from Ibiza, registered to a Russian company that we think is an offshoot of a larger firm owned by an oligarch called Alexei Bashmakov. Ring a bell?”
    “I’ve met him,” I said. Sharp nodded; it must have been on my file. I had been there when Tommy Kelly hooked up with him in Croatia. Tommy had sold him a moody Francis Bacon painting for a fortune, plus a huge consignment of cocaine disguised in wax champagne bottles.
    “Anyway,” he said. “I chartered a small boat from a holiday company out of Palma and picked up a sighting of the Kelly girls as they crossed south of Majorca. It’s difficult to keep track of a boat when you’re out in the open water because you’re easy to spot, so we kept half a day behind them, relying on satellite surveillance. Our last report was in a marina on the south coast of Sardinia. We kept an eye on the boat, but by the time we got an agent down there the boat was all locked up and there wasn’t a trace of Sophie or Cheryl.
    “Where do you think they’ve gone?” I asked. I lost interest in the cold plate of small fish in front of me.
    “Anyone’s guess,” Sharp said. “They could have been driven overland, then gone up to Italy. They could have found somewhere pretty and isolated there. Puglia, Tuscany… Italy’s so rural and full of Brits they could easily have hunkered down. Or they could have gone to Rome and flown almost anywhere in the world. Or they could have changed boats and headed off towards Greece via Cyprus, and up the coast to eastern Europe.”
    Suddenly I wanted to find Sophie.
    “Do you have a clue?” I asked. “Are you putting me on her case?”
    Sharp pursed his lips and signalled for the bill.
    “Probably,” he said. We’ll talk to Tony, see if he has one of his hunches.”
    Simon Sharp picked up the photos again and cast his eyes over them before putting them back in the envelope.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling and handing it to me. “She’s not really my type.”
    I looked around at the rest of the restaurant’s clientele and realized that she probably wasn’t his type at all.

Tony Morris always played shit music.
    I picked up a scuffed CD cover from the car’s footwell and looked at the tracklist. It was a
Now That’s What I Call Music
compilation from a couple of years back, already way out of date. They were either poppy urban acts – Rihanna, Alesha Dixon – or winners and runners-up from one TV talent show or other – Olly Murs, Leona Lewis, One Direction. They were names that had barely registered on my psyche. The background to my life had been flamenco and Spanish club music for a while, and since I’d come back I’d found it hard to even listen to my iPod for fear of igniting unwelcome memories.
    “Spoken to your mum recently?” Tony asked.
    I hadn’t for a while. Calling the old girl always made me feel an awkward mixture of guilt and a longing for one of her roast dinners. It was my brother’s and my fault that she’d had to move so far away. But she was settled in the Midlands and I didn’t want to rock the boat. I found it easier to lock off the needy emotions I felt when I thought about her.
    “Not for a bit,” I said. I stared at the CD cover and pretended to read it.
    “You should,” he said. “She misses you. Worries about you.”
    Sensing my