Free Shadow Box by Peter Cocks Page B

– a little more cautious this time.
    At Vauxhall, I walked over the bridge, past the rows of Vespas and Suzukis outside the bike shop, to the Portuguese café under the railway arch. Sharpie and Anna were sitting outside in the sun, halfway through a couple of lattes.
    “Hello, handsome,” Anna said.
    Sharp laughed.
    “Deck it, you two,” I grunted. “I’m not feeling too handsome today.”
    “So… Hannah Connolly?’ Anna raised an eyebrow. “You don’t hang about, do you?”
    “She’s not my type,” I said. I ordered an espresso. Double shot.
    Sharp and Anna exchanged a glance.
    “She’s not,” I protested. “She’s deadly serious, really political. And she’s a bit goth. You know, all black clothes, tats and eyeliner.”
    Anna rolled her eyes.
    “Well, you’re going to have to get pretty political too,” Sharp said. “I think you’ll be seeing more of her.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yes. Let’s go to my office – I’ve got some stuff to show you.”
    I finished my coffee and caught Anna studying me. She cocked her head to one side.
    “Where did you get that hideous jacket?” she asked.
    We sat down in Sharp’s bright office in the modern fortress-like building by the river. Anna had recently decamped here too: her “model agency” cover in Denmark Street had been shut down a few months earlier, maybe because it was becoming suspicious or, more likely, because of government cuts. We ate cheese and ham panini that Anna had ordered from the café.
    Sharp took a memory stick from one of the desktop Macs that lined the room. He plugged it into another and opened some files.
    “Thanks to your swift work last night, we have all Hannah Connolly’s emails and a bit of conversation,” Sharp smiled.
    “She saw me,” I confessed.
    Anna stopped chewing.
    “Saw you what?” Sharp asked.
    “She caught me in her room,” I said. “But she didn’t see anything.”
    Sharp and Anna looked at one another.
    “That explains the row,” Sharp said.
    He clicked on the MP3 voice recording in the file and I could hear Hannah on the phone, voice muffled by the armchair where I had planted the bug.
    “He just went to the toilet,”
I could hear Hannah say.
    There was a pause as she listened.
    “Perhaps he had a shite and couldn’t find any bog roll because you didn’t leave me enough money.”
    Anna smirked at the exchange. Another pause.
    “He’s not my boyfriend,”
Hannah insisted.
“He’s just a guy from college, OK?”
    “Just a guy from college,” I repeated. “That’ll do me.”
    “Anyway,”
Hannah went on.
“I think he’s probably gay.”
    For the second time that day Anna and Sharp laughed out loud.
    “It’s fine, we know you’re a red-blooded het, don’t we, Anna?”
    Anna raised an eyebrow in agreement and they both laughed again. I started to get a bit huffy.
    “Who do you think she’s talking to, anyway?” I asked.
    “That’s what we hope to find out,” Sharp said. “We’re trying to trace the call, but no joy so far.”
    “Keep it up,” Anna said, exchanging another smile with Sharp as I left the office.
    “Piss off,” I growled.

In the absence of a real mission, I had little choice other than to “keep it up”. I was missing Tony already. I missed the feeling I always had that he was behind me, even when I suspected I was being used. I knew I had been ordered not to, but I tried to call him. His number was dead – just a long, monotonous tone. A flatline. The more I couldn’t get hold of him, the more I felt I needed to speak to him, just for reassurance. I tried another tack.
    “Mum?”
    “Hello, stranger!”
    I made excuses, like everybody does, for not calling the old girl more often, and we chatted about this and that for a bit. “You seen anything of Tony, Mum?”
    He often dropped in on Mum when he wasn’t too busy.
    “Tony? No, love. Why?”
    “Nothing, really. Did you know he’s been suspended?”
    “No. Oh, you know Tony, he’ll be fine. Nothing