Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1)

Footsteps passed by outside, very soft, as though bare-foot. Mort always wore expensive shoes. She remembered that of him; he'd prided himself on his appearance, and there was no way he'd have left the house in anything other than exquisite dress.

Jazz had still not moved, for fear that the detector was active —but if it was, then whoever was out there would have set it off. If Mort had returned, then he must have deacti-vated the alarm system without her hearing. Remote control, perhaps?

If it wasn't Mort, then she had to see who was out there.

Wincing, preparing herself for the shriek of the alarm, Jazz stood and backed down a couple of steps.

Nothing happened. She let out a sigh of relief, then a groan as pins and needles rushed into her leg.

Kneeling, she looked under the door, able to see right across the hallway. The dark-oak floor was highly polished, broken up here and there with rugs, and across the hall stood at least two closed doors. She turned and looked to the left, just in time to see a foot lift out of view onto the staircase. It had been wearing soft-looking shoes, like a dancer's. And now it was gone.

Jazz's heart thumped. Who could it be? Maid? Cleaner? But no, not if Mort had set the alarm on his way out.

She kept looking for a while, waiting for the foot's owner to come back down. But there was no more movement.

Another thief? What were the chances of that? But right then it was all she could think of. There would have been no reason for Mort to set the alarm if he knew there was going to be someone in the house; therefore, he did not know. So whoever owned that soft-shoed foot was not supposed to be here.

Jazz took a deep breath and considered her options. She could turn around and leave, pick up the others and go back down below, tell Harry that someone had beaten them to it. But that felt like failure, and it also meant that she would have no more opportunity to find out about Mort, his relationship with the mayor, and what it had to do with her and...

Mum. She shouldn't forget her mum. The owner of this house had been there when she was murdered —not in the same room perhaps, but certainly in the same house. Maybe he'd heard her fighting, heard her gurgling as her throat was slit and the air rushed from her lungs, blood spewed from her arteries...

No, if Jazz left now, it was not only knowledge that would elude her. It was some measure of revenge.

She held the door handle and gently turned it. When she felt the latch disengage, she opened the door an inch and peered through the crack. The hallway was large, hung with several expensive-looking paintings and adorned with four huge porcelain vases on their own metal stands. The porce-lain was cracked and chipped in a couple of places, which meant that they were old and probably worth a lot.

She'd save them for on the way out.

The staircase was wide and it curved up and to the left. Banister and newel posts were ornately carved from oak and polished to match the hall floor. The stairs ended with a wide landing that overlooked the hall, and there was no one in sight. Whoever had climbed the stairs was busy exploring the second floor.

He or she doesn't know I'm here, Jazz thought. Need to keep it that way. She slipped off her trainers, tied the laces, and slung them around her neck. Her socks left sweaty imprints on the floor as she walked across the hallway, but by the time she reached the stairs and looked back, they were already fading away. Like a ghost's, she thought, and smiled.

She stood on the lower stair. The whole first floor was available to her to explore. There could be a study down here, a drawing room, library, other places where she could find stuff worth taking and perhaps something that would tell her more about Mort. She fingered the short folding knife in her pocket and looked at the paintings, and the urge to destroy was great. She hoped that Mort loved this place, hoped that his parents had handed all these nice things down to him, because she was going to ruin them. Petty and basic, maybe, but it would make her feel a little bit better.

But upstairs called to her. Whoever the other person in the house was, they seemed to have forsaken the first floor to go up. Which led Jazz to believe that they knew something she did not.

She climbed the stairs quickly and quietly. The open landing at the top had one door at the end, which was closed, and beside this another, smaller staircase led up to the third floor. To her right, a corridor branched away, lit by open doors.

She peered around the corner, counting two doors on each side and another corridor at right angles at the end. Many places to hide, and many places from which the other intruder could emerge and surprise her.

She fingered the knife again. Considered opening it. Decided against it. If it was a man and he turned aggressive, her mum had told her often enough what to do. A swift kick to the balls, love, and then a knee in the face when they double up in pain. A blokes life is led by what's between his legs, so it follows that it'll hurt the most.

And if it was a woman... ? Then perhaps they could share notes.

Jazz glanced once more at the closed door at the end of the landing. She went to it, put her ear against the wood, then pressed the handle. The door clicked open and she peered through. A clean, spartan bedroom: one bed and a chair, a small window, and little else. She left the door open slightly and turned back to the corridor leading deeper into the house.

She feared creaking floorboards, yet found none. Though the outside presented a different picture, the inside of this house was well kept. It was old, yes, but it reeked of care and of money well spent. The wallpaper in this corridor probably cost more per roll than some people earned in a month. She could almost smell the money seeping from walls and rising from expensive carpets. And that made her think: What can you steal from someone who has so much, to make it really hurt?

Jazz would return to the United Kingdom with a back-pack filled with stuff to sell. But she would also find some-thing special. A trophy, something priceless beyond money. She knew that it would be here, and she was confident it could be found.

There were picture frames lining the walls, photographs of people and places that must be personal to the owner. She paused to look at a couple that showed Mort smiling on some exotic seafront. She wondered who had taken the picture, and the thought of someone intimate in his life came as a shock.

Whoever it might be, would they know what he was? Would they understand?

She moved on and paused beside the first two open doors, directly opposite each other. The one on the left smelled like a bathroom, damp from a recent shower and loaded with aftershave aromas. The door on the right led into another bedroom, and as she edged a few more inches forward, she saw the messed-up bed, open wardrobe, and clothes strewn across a chaise longue. There was a magazine open on the bed, and even from here she could see the pale spread of naked flesh.

Charming.

The next two doors, standing half open, led into further bedrooms, both of them smart and well presented but lack-ing any touches that indicated they were used. There was no sign of the intruder.

At the junction with the next corridor, Jazz paused and listened hard. She must be nearing the rear of the house now, and every room she looked in, every corner she turned, took her closer to the other intruder.

Unless they're upstairs! It was possible. But she could hear nothing —no footsteps, no flexing floors, no doors creaking open or closed. Maybe whoever it was knew she was here and they were waiting for her to pass by—or until she was close enough for them to attack.

For a crazy moment she considered calling out, asking who and where they were and telling them she wasn't here to hurt them. But no thief was likely to share their loot with her, and giving away her position would be madness.

Jazz glanced around the corner into the new corridor. It ran in both directions, finishing at both ends with a large stained-glass window. Four doors were spaced evenly along the far wall, two in either leg of the corridor. They were all closed.

More bedrooms? she wondered. That'll make eight, for a house occupied by one man and his porno mags.

There were also more photographs on the walls here, a lot more, and as she turned the corner she peered closely at them. Most of them were of Mort, usually on his own or with a tall, beautiful woman with dark hair and a melancholy ex-pression. Her smile was never quite a smile, reminding Jazz of the Mona Lisa. Some of the settings she recognized be-cause they were famous —Pompeii, Paris, New York, other places in America, Edinburgh. Still listening for any sign of the other person, she walked along the corridor, mindful of the closed doors. If one starts to open, I'll be back around to the landing, she thought. And if they see me and call out, I'm out the front door, and fuck the alarm.

Then she saw a picture of a group of people lined up in front of a building she did not recognize. It was London, she was sure of that, but there was no way to say where. Still, she recognized them. The Uncles. Mort was standing on the left, the others strung out to his right, with Josephine Blackwood among them, her face stern yet powerful, and if Jazz had ever had any doubt about who was in control, it now vanished.

Next to her, at the center of the group, stood...

Stood...

Jazz looked closer. For a mad moment she couldn't quite place the face, not because she didn't know it —she knew it well, so well, not from life but from a hundred other photo-graphs—but because there was no way he could be there. No way!

"Fuck," she whispered. "Fuck, fuck, fuck..."

Her father. He looked sad and vulnerable, as though he knew he should not be there, but other than the Uncles and the Blackwood woman, he was the only other person in the photo.

"Dad," Jazz whispered. "Fuck," she said again. She shouldn't be talking, should be moving, but she didn't under-stand any of this.

Carefully, she lifted the picture from the wall, slipped the rucksack from her shoulder, and dropped it inside. On im-pulse she walked down the corridor and took another framed photograph of the Uncles. This one did not contain her fa-ther.

She began to doubt, thinking maybe she'd been mis-taken. She was tense and wired, and perhaps she'd seen something dredged from her subconscious. But no. She did not have to look again, because she knew what she had seen. Her mother had made Jazz a strong girl, certain of herself, and she had never been one to check the keys in her pocket a dozen times or wonder whether she'd actually locked a door.

Jazz was in control.

"I know what I saw," she whispered, and the door at the far end of the corridor opened.

Jazz didn't think. The instinct for survival was pro-grammed into her. She turned across the corridor, grabbed the handle of the door next to the stained-glass window, turned it quietly, and pushed the door open with her body. There was no time for caution or stealth, she simply had to hide. Once inside, she swung around and pushed the door until it was almost closed. She squatted down and pressed her face to the crack, waiting to see who would emerge from the far room.

The pictures! Their absence on the opposite wall was obvious to her, but then, she had taken them.

Thankfully, there were no lighter patches of wallpaper where they had been, but the hooks were prominent and cast shadows both ways from the two windows. If the intruder was observant enough —had looked around the corridor before entering the far door—he or she would notice.

Jazz breathed lightly through her mouth, trying not to pant.

She heard the door along the corridor close, but she could not yet see whoever had emerged.

She watched. A shadow shifted toward her along the car-pet, and then a man stepped into view, silently, gracefully, al-most floating. He stood at the junction of the two corridors for a second, head tilted to one side as if listening. She could see him only in profile: tall, thin, long-limbed. He wore a suit and tie, and over his right shoulder he carried a small bag.

Don't look this way, Jazz thought. Don't see me.

Even when he was standing still, she could sense the strength in him, and when he moved away he was nimble and elegant.

He walked along the corridor and back toward the land-ing. Jazz opened the door another inch and listened for other doors opening, but there was nothing. She guessed he was heading for the next floor. His bag had looked empty, so whatever he'd come here for, perhaps he had yet to find it.

She cast a quick glance at the room behind her. Not a bedroom, as she had suspected. The large room contained a long, expensive-looking table surrounded by a dozen chairs. The walls were unadorned, and there were no other furnish-ings apart from heavy curtains hanging on either side of the two floor-to-ceiling windows. A meeting room. And only twelve chairs, so when the Uncles met here, they met alone.

Spooked, Jazz left the room to follow the man. The pur-suit excited her. She had to be completely silent, watching every shadow, every breath, ensuring that he could not hear her, see her, smell her. She felt like a great cat stalking its prey, but if he was a cat burglar, then what did that make her? A hunter, she thought. And that felt good. Too many times since her mother's murder, she had felt like the hunted.

Back at the landing, she looked down into the hallway first, just to make sure he had not gone downstairs. Then she heard a sound above, a footfall perhaps, or something being lowered to the floor.

There were more sounds: the snick of wires being cut, low metallic noises, then a single soft elec-tronic beep.

She took the opportunity to dash quickly into two of the rooms on that floor —one a sort of office or library and the other Mort's bedroom—nicking small items and dropping them quickly into her rucksack. In the bedroom, a hurried glance through Mort's sock drawer turned up a wedge of cash, which went into the bag as well. More footfalls above, and she knew she was risking too much. She went back into the hall.

At the foot of the second staircase Jazz looked up, lis-tened, watched for movement. This was not quite so grand as the stairs from the first to the second floor, and she guessed perhaps the floor above had once been servants' quarters. But what was up there now? Surely not more bedrooms?

She started to ascend. Her heart was beating so rapidly that she feared he would hear, but even in such a silent house there was traffic noise from outside.

The stairs ended with a small landing, only one door leading off to the left. It was wide open.