Mind the Gap

He hated the Blackwood Club.

"That makes him my ally, Mum," she said. She laughed again nervously, because talking to herself was the first sign of madness. But she was not mad. Lost maybe, and confused, and floundering in a stormy sea of secrets that seemed to get deeper and stormier the more she found out.

She lay on the bed and picked up the book. It was strange reading from where Terence had ended, as though she had for a moment taken over his life. She read four sen-tences before sleep took her.

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been.

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memo-rable day.

She dreamed of invisible stains of blood binding her mother to Josephine Blackwood, and daisy chains in the park.

****

She woke several times and stared at the door, and every time it remained closed. She had left the curtains half open so street light bathed the room yellow, a false dawn when-ever she opened her eyes.

When the true dawn came, ac-companied by the sounds of early-morning bustle from the street outside and Terence moving around in the kitchen, Jazz pulled the duvet up to her chin and sighed. She felt warm and cosseted, but she knew she had a decision to make.

Terence did not only want her help because he thought she was talented. That was part of it, she was sure, and. she felt an unavoidable pride in thinking that. But he was also aware that she had secrets.

What better way to reveal them than to keep her close and work with her?

But there were Harry and the others: Stevie, Hattie, Gob... She owed them a lot. They had taken her in when she most needed help, given her their food, let her stay with them in their secret underground lair, taught her their ways, and they had lived through the grief of losing Cadge to-gether. They trusted her, and now she had betrayed them by trying to change. Because that's what she had been doing, hadn't she?

Accepting those shoes from Terence, letting him pay for her haircut, accompanying him to Harrods? He of-fered her protection and a new life, but in truth she sought far more than that from him. She had been lured with things she had never seen while living with the United Kingdom. All the good things in life are in your mind, her mother had once told her, sitting in their small backyard and staring at the fence that badly needed painting. She had stared for a long time.

The United Kingdom seemed a million miles away from her right now. But there was someone much closer who could help her avenge her mother's death, and Cadge's death too.

"Maybe we can work together," she whispered. Her voice was startlingly loud, and she glanced at the old framed photo beside the bed, afraid that the dead magician would be staring at her. He was, but with the same expression he had worn the night before. Daylight changed nothing.

She sat up in bed, stretching. Then she shook her head. The idea of Terence and Harry working together seemed foolish —a waking thought that lost all clarity when the dregs of sleep melted away. We worked together, Terence had said, but she could not imagine that now. The men were just too different, and it had little to do with the places they chose to live.

There was a knock at the door. "Breakfast?" Terence asked.

"I'll be out in a minute." Jazz sat on the edge of the bed and listened, and for a moment she was certain that he was still standing outside the door, listening, hand on the handle. She stared at it, waiting for it to dip, as if she were a doomed twenty-something in some trashy horror movie. Then she heard a kettle boiling and Terence whistling in the kitchen. She sighed.

After dressing quickly, she walked along to the kitchen and watched him preparing breakfast. He must have known she was there, but he gave no sign, setting the table carefully, placing the full cafetiére in the center along with croissants and honey, grapefruit juice, and a selection of cold meats and cheeses.

He looked up at last and smiled. "So, did you sleep on it?"

Jazz frowned, images of thorns and flowers flashing across her mind. She nodded. "I just need a bit of fresh air," she said. "Do you mind if... ?" She nodded at the breakfast table.

"Not at all. But fresh air in London?"

She shrugged. "Just a walk. Stretch my limbs."

"I'll just lockup —"

"I'll be fine, Terence. Fifteen minutes, and when I re-turn we'll have breakfast. Just want to clear my head."

He nodded, his stance tense as though he had so much more to say. But he must have seen something in Jazz's expression that silenced him, because he walked past her to open the front door.

"Coffee's getting cold," was all he said as she breezed by.

Jazz turned, stretched up, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Even early in the morning, he smelled fresh and clean. "Thank you."

"Left here," he said. "Around the block. Some nice an-tique shops, but watch out for pavement pizzas."

She laughed at his use of such an unrefined term and de-cided not to look back. That would be too keen, too eager.

The main street was bustling. People of all shapes, sizes, and colors weaved around one another on their way to work, many of them jabbering into mobile phones, others lost in their own private iPod worlds.

A shop owner swept broken glass from the pavement, while two young men hammered boards across his smashed shop window. A policeman stood with his arms crossed, face set in stone as he was subjected to the shopkeeper's wife's fury. The policeman caught her eye and watched her pass by, and Jazz looked down at her feet. If that doesn't look guilty, I don't know what does.

She turned left, following Terence's directions, walking slowly so that she could think. She was not sure exactly what he was offering. He was twice her age, but sometimes there was a tension between them that she was certain was not only in her imagination. But he was a clever man, aware of his looks and confident of his abilities to play with percep-tions and emotions. He had proved that only too well in Harrods, and the more she thought about that nick yester-day afternoon, the more she realized how complex a test it had been.

Someone shouted on her right, a woman calling a good-natured greeting. Jazz looked up. Across the street, a tall black woman was waving with both hands, and Jazz turned to see who she was waving to.

Farther along the street, out-side a butcher's shop, a man waved back. He was smiling.

As Jazz went to turn back and start walking again, some-one stepped out in front of her. A policeman.

I don't look the same, she thought. New haircut, darker hair, new clothes I nicked only yesterday.. .It's all about appear-ance, confidence, style. She gave her dazzling smile up at him — he was very tall—and stepped sideways to move around.

"Excuse me," she said.

His arm closed around her wrist. "Hang on, miss."

"What is it, Shane?" his partner asked, emerging from a shop.

Jazz glanced sidelong at the second policeman, and there was nothing like recognition in his eyes.

"Bit of business," Shane said. Then he leaned down so that he could whisper into her ear. "Come with me." He punctuated the words with a quick, harsh squeeze that made her wince.

They walked along the street until an alley opened up between shops.

This could be something else, Jazz thought, but already she knew it was not. Maybe the copper recognized her from some CCTV footage from a shop the United Kingdom had done —careful though they always were, chance dictated that some of them would be filmed at some point.

"My mum's expecting me home," Jazz said, wide-eyed, innocent, and scared. The scared part didn't take much acting.

"Yeah, right," Shane said. He dug a mobile from his trousers, eschewing the radio clipped to his pocket, and flipped it open. "Mayor's offering a nice little reward for you, my love."

Nice little reward...

She had no choice.

Jazz mustered every bit of her strength and kicked Shane the policeman in the balls. She twisted her upper torso to follow through, adding weight and power, and the copper went down like a sack of shit, barely even able to gasp. His eyes were wide and glazed.

Jazz took a second to stamp on his dropped phone, then she ran.

"Hey!" Shane's partner called.

Don't look back! Jazz thought. Concentrate, run, focus!

The end of the street was ten seconds away. If she turned left she'd be heading back toward Terence's house, where she'd left the gear. But she'd give him away. She might not even reach his house before they caught her. Right, and three hundred yards along the road was Tooting Tube station, and a world she already knew so well.

She heard the sounds of pursuit —pounding footsteps, people shouting in surprise as they were shoved roughly aside.

Someone pushed a huge fruit-laden trolley from a shop doorway in front of her. She skipped right, stepped from the pavement, and ran across the street without looking back.

Decision made for her, she sprinted for the Tube station. The morning sun broke through the light cloud cover, and the heat on the side of her face seemed like a final good-bye.

Chapter Sixteen

china plates

Jazz descended the stairs that led down into the lair of the United Kingdom as carefully and quietly as she could. Opening the hatch door at the top of the steps ought to have brought a creak of metal hinges, but she moved slowly and opened it only wide enough to slip through. It wasn't that she planned to sneak up on Harry and the others. It was more that, after so many weeks learning to be a thief, stealth came naturally now. Her mother had raised her to be invisi-ble when she wished —unseen—and unwittingly gave her daughter the skills and philosophy to become an excellent thief.

As she neared the door at the bottom of the stairs, she. caught the smell of frying sausages, and her stomach growled. Terence had made her breakfast. He'd been noth-ing but a gentleman to her, and now he'd be thinking she had lied to him and run off, even though she had left the gear behind. He seemed so sincere that she had been tempted to trust him, had wanted to take a walk and con-sider how much of her own life and her own theories she would reveal to him over breakfast. Now the question had become moot.

Harry liked his sausages burned, the same as Jazz. The aroma made her mouth water. God, she was ravenous. But she had a feeling Harry wouldn't be in the mood to cook her breakfast.

Not that she cared about Harry's mood.

As she closed her fingers around the door handle, she paused to listen. She heard muffled voices; Harry wasn't alone. It had taken her nearly an hour to get to the Palace from Terence's, taking the Tube and then navigating the labyrinth of the Underground on foot. It had to be half past nine at least, which meant the United Kingdom would be out for their first shift of the day, some of them searching for pockets to pick, others for goods to nick from shops and street vendors. The rest would be doing errands, including picking up Harry's newspaper.

Jazz had no difficulty hazarding a guess as to who might have stayed behind.

She turned the handle and pushed open the door, step-ping into the Palace. Harry stood at the stove with a frying pan. Stevie sat at the table, cutting a sausage on his plate. A strongbox lay open on the table, stacks of pound notes bound in rubber bands inside. Towers of one- and two-pound coins stood beside the metal box. Doing their ac-counting over breakfast.

Their conversation halted and they stared at Jazz. For a moment she only stared back, but then she closed the door behind her, crossed her arms, and raised her chin to fix her gaze on Harry.

"You and I need to talk."

Harry did not smile. His eyes were hard. "I suppose we ! do." He turned his back and stuck a long toasting fork into each sausage, flipping them over. "Stevie, we'll finish tomor-row. Eat up, then put the box away. I've been thinking about teaching Hattie to play the guitar. Go and see if you can't manage one, would you?"

Jazz raised an eyebrow at the incongruity, then glanced at Stevie. He forked another piece of sausage into his mouth and chewed slowly, staring at her as he might have a strange insect. The frisson of attraction that had existed between them before had evaporated. Suddenly, they were strangers again.

"I'll see what I can do," Stevie said, standing up from the table.

He scooped the coins into one hand and dumped them into the strongbox, then locked it. Without glancing at Jazz again, he went through the room to a door at the back and disappeared. She guessed they had a safe down here some-where. Stevie would lock the money away and, if he fol-lowed Harry's bidding, go topside in search of a guitar, of all things. Harry, playing father to the kids in his United Kingdom, giving Hattie guitar lessons. Stevie was the big brother, half the time searching for Father's approval and the other half desperate to start a life of his own.

So what does that make me? Jazz thought.

"Sit down," Harry said, turning off the stove and taking the pan to the table. "Will you have some sausage?"

Pleasant as anything, as though nothing at all had hap-pened. Jazz had the answer to her question then. If Harry was the father and Stevie the eldest brother, she was the prodigal.

"I'm famished, actually," she confessed, despising her-self for it.

He put a couple of sausages onto the plate that had been Stevie's, taking it for himself, and put the other two on the clean plate he'd intended to use. "There you are."

The pan went back onto the stove. Harry sat down at the table while Jazz only stood and watched him. At length he glanced up. "Well? Don't let 'em go to waste, Jazz girl. I actually paid money for those, and they came dear."

Something seemed off. Yes, she'd been gone all night, and all the previous day, and that accounted for the cold shoulder Stevie had given her. But the edge in Harry's voice and demeanor spoke of more than that.

Jazz slid into a chair, picked up the knife and fork Harry had originally set out for himself, and cut herself a piece of sausage. She'd come to confront him, but his behavior made her curious, and hunger persuaded her to eat a little. Halfway through the first of the sausages, she caught him staring at her, but instead of the suspicion or even malice she might have expected, his gaze contained only sadness.