Mind the Gap (13 page)

“And there’s stuff you need to know,” Stevie said.

Jazz nodded.
Yeah,
she thought.
And you understand that, don’t you
?

“You ever think about later?” she asked.

“Later?”

“The future, I mean. I suppose it’s all right for Harry. He’s on in years, isn’t he? But d’you really think you’ll spend your whole life underground?”

Stevie frowned at that, but then his expression softened. “We’re not all hiding from killers, Jazz, but we’re all hiding from something. Not sayin’ I haven’t thought about it, though. I owe Harry a lot. For now that’s enough. But I don’t think I’ll be down there forever, no. Got to make a life, haven’t I?”

As though realizing he’d said too much, his gaze sharpened and he studied her. “You won’t say nothing, will you?”

Jazz shook her head. “Course not.”

He hesitated a moment, and she had the feeling he was weighing whether or not he could really trust her. Then he nodded, smiling at her in a way that gave her a pleasant squirm.

They finished their coffee and cakes without saying anything more, and when they left, nobody turned to watch them go. Outside, they split up, both of them heading back belowground. Stevie left Jazz and headed for an alternate station. He seemed reticent about letting her travel on her own, but she nodded and smiled and said that she’d be fine. In truth she’d have preferred if he
had
traveled with her, but Harry would have questions about that, because he drummed caution into them all the time. And right now she didn’t want Harry suspicious.

Besides, he was still on the mend. She didn’t want him to worry. The mayor’s men had done a good job on him, broken several ribs and cracked his wrist. For a day or two after the attack, he’d been coughing up blood, though only Hattie, Stevie, and Jazz had known about it. A rib had scraped his lung, he said, and however much they begged, he refused to go aboveground to find a doctor. It was almost as if, once he depended on someone other than himself again, his time down here would be finished.

Jazz descended out of the sunlight and into the station. She moved far along the platform and waited beside one of the chocolate vending machines that no one ever seemed to use, and when the train arrived she dashed on first. She was lucky to find a seat, and she stared down at her shoes as they rattled away into the tunnels.

As she traveled, she thought about what she had seen. Had that really been Mort? She had already decided it was, but there was always the possibility that she’d been mistaken. Her mother’s words about coincidence and chance came back to her, but her mother was dead, and it was up to Jazz now to translate events. If it was Mort, then he was connected to Mayor Bromwell somehow, and that meant the Uncles were as well. What
that
meant…she was not sure. But Harry had chosen this house—the third posh place they’d have hit in as many weeks—for a reason: revenge.

Maybe the time had come to double up on vengeance.

When she got off the train, she stood on the platform for a minute, fumbling in her pockets for change and pretending to use the chocolate machine. When the platform was empty, she dashed to the end, slipped over its edge, and headed into the tunnel.

The first time she’d come this way after the United Kingdom had moved, the first thirty yards had scared the crap out of her. She was very conscious of the train tracks close to her left foot, and she knew that if a train came along she’d be done for. Even if there was just room for her to press against the wall, the suction of the train’s passing would pull her into it, and she’d be battered between train and wall before being deposited on the tracks. Maybe people would see her, maybe they wouldn’t, but either way they’d never reach her before the next train came along to finish her off.

Timing,
Switch had said. He never spoke much, and after almost three months this was the first thing he’d said directly to Jazz.
Off the train, down, thirty yards to the door. Find it, get in, you’re okay. Miss it, you’re fucked.
He’d stared at her, grubby face revealed by ghostly torchlight.
Don’t miss it.

She walked quickly, running her right hand along the wall and counting her steps. She heard a sound in the distance, a screech and squeal, and for a second she feared it was the Hour of Screams coming in again. But then she remembered how close she was to the surface. The Hour only swept through the lower, more remote levels. Places, Marco had told her, where living people shouldn’t be.

She found the steel hatch, grabbed its edge, and pulled. Once through the gap in the wall, she closed the hatch and breathed out.

Away from the station, away from the line, she still had a long way to go. Their new home was deeper than before. She only hoped it would be safer.

The clank of metal doors, the dust of abandoned tunnels, the flicker of uncertain lights, scampering rats and the tickle of spiders, damp walls and leaking domed brick ceilings—all were becoming familiar to Jazz. Worst were the cockroaches, which always seemed to scuttle just at the edges of any light. Once she’d stepped into a nest of them; she’d become more careful since. The United Kingdom kept several torches hidden in an alcove close to the surface, and she took one now and made her way back down to their new shelter. It had been built for royalty, and so they’d started calling it the Palace.

As long as Jazz didn’t have to call it home, any name was fine with her.

The Palace was more comfortable than Deep Level Shelter 7-K, and sometimes when the air was right they could hear faint, unidentifiable music coming in from somewhere high above, down pipes perhaps, or through a fault in the ground.

But she was distracting herself. She was almost there, and she knew that soon she would have to pass the wall.

It wasn’t that it spooked her. Not really. But she was still getting used to the Underground, the nooks and crannies, and the idea of miles of abandoned tunnels and places never seen by anyone alive. The United Kingdom had made some of these places their homes and haunting grounds, and there were plenty of other people living under London, the homeless and disenfranchised and mad. They kept away from others as much as possible, keeping their own location secret to avoid the theft of food or supplies. When Jazz passed others in the Underground, she usually ignored them the way Harry had taught her, but sometimes she couldn’t help giving a smile or a wave or a quick hello, just to let those lost people know there were those who hadn’t forgotten them, who still saw them and acknowledged their existence.

They were harmless, mostly. But Harry often alluded to other, less normal inhabitants beneath the city. One night around a fire he’d told them all the story about a tribe of people who had lived down here since the 1800s, and how their descendants were born down here and had never seen daylight.
Hear a scratch,
he’d said,
see a face at the bottom of some unplumbed pit, and it’s likely one of them.
She’d asked him afterward whether he’d said it to scare them, and he’d paused for a while, looking at her. Then he’d smiled and nodded.
Of course, Jazz girl,
he’d said.

She’d believed him then because she needed to, but now she was not so sure.

She walked on, along a narrow access tunnel between a subterranean room and a shaft that housed an old metal ladder. She checked the shaft before descending—

(no pale face down there staring up with milky, sightless eyes)

—and then carefully lowered herself down.

And here it was. The bottom of the shaft widened in a bell shape, and its base was a dozen steps across. One quarter of it opened onto an old brick-lined cavern, its use long since lost to time. But opposite this opening was the bricked-in doorway.

Something back there,
Jazz thought.
Something not dead.
It was the same notion she’d had the very first time they’d come this way, all of them following Harry in those painful, confused hours after giving Cadge to the river. Then she’d not had time to pause but had turned away from the old opening and walked on. Now, as every time since, she stopped to look.

She remembered what Cadge had said about that other metal door that had held her fascination.
Never know what you’re gonna find behind a door down here.
Well, once there had been a doorway here, and somebody had seen fit to brick it up. They had brought all those materials down here—bricks, sand, cement—and worked in these cramped, uncomfortable conditions to fill the opening perfectly.

Jazz felt as if she could walk straight through the bricks. She tried, but they were solid and damp. Something scurried away up the wall, its many-limbed escape scratching at her hearing.

She turned her back on the wall and walked away. It wasn’t easy. Maybe it was just because it was a mystery, and sometimes mysteries can exert a powerful influence.

Jazz went on, leaving that strange place behind.

Ten minutes later she found the room of alcoves. It was a long, thin room, the ceiling blank concrete instead of the usual vaulted brick, and along the wall to her left were five alcoves. The door she wanted—the one that led to the back entrance of the Palace—was in the middle one.

It was open, of course. Harry and the others were expecting her and Stevie, eager to hear their report. If all was good—and she would make sure it was—there was a job for them to pull in less than twenty-four hours.

Harry said the Palace was an old nuclear shelter from the 1960s. There was a big steel door at the entrance that was wedged open, completely immovable. Inside were a series of rooms, a dozen in total, set in two levels around a round central space, which served as their main gathering area. The largest of these rooms was filled with a hundred shelves of inedible tinned and dried food. They’d opened a few of the tins out of curiosity and found a powdery substance inside, which perhaps had once been soup or beef stew or Spam. They hadn’t tried any more.

Jazz wasn’t convinced. Search though they had, they had not found any sign of a plant room to draw in or process fresh air. The atmosphere down here was heavy and damp at best, but surely in a nuclear war they’d rely on more than the depth of this place to ensure the air was uncontaminated? Neither was there a control or communications center, which she’d seen in documentaries about the shelters built by the government through the late fifties and sixties. She’d asked her mum about who would go down there if there was a war.

The government,
she’d said.
Politicians, their assistants, soldiers to guard them, doctors to look after them. And the royals.

Lucky them,
Jazz had said.

Her mother, in one of her darker but more humorous moments, had laughed out loud and changed channels to
The Simpsons. Yes, lucky them! Survive Armageddon, and when they come out there’s no one to rule over, no one to canvass for votes, and no one to print stories about your latest indiscretion with your secretary!

Maybe it
was
a shelter of some sort, but Jazz believed it more of a retreat than anything else. It could have been government, could have been private, but whatever the case one thing was sure: it was long forgotten now.

When she stepped through the rear entrance of the Palace and walked along the corridor into the central area, Stevie was already there. Damn, he was fast! They locked eyes, she frowned, he shook his head slightly. Good. He hadn’t said a word.

“Jazz girl!” Harry gushed. He stood and came to her, wrapping his wounded arm around her shoulder. “It’s good to see you safe and sound,” he said, quieter. “So come and sit with us, have a drink and a bite, because now that you’re back we’re all together again. And I’ve got something to read to you all.”

Jazz nodded greetings and took a cup of tea offered by Marco. Hattie brought a plate of sandwiches and a huge bag of potato chips, and Jazz helped herself to a generous portion. The shock of that morning and the effort of her descent had made her hungry, and they’d not had time for breakfast.

“So Gob was up early this morning, lifting wallets on Oxford Street, and, bless him, he knows how much I like to read a paper. He brought down the
Times
—the only true paper for a gentleman, as I’m sure you all know. And lo and behold, at the bottom of page eleven, we get a mention!”

Cadge!
Jazz thought. But no, that was more than two weeks ago. His memory was precious, and she would not want it sullied by some impersonal newspaper report.

Bill tapped his plate with his mug and held his hands out, shoulder up.
What is it?
Nobody had ever heard him talk when he was awake. Sleeping, he sometimes cried out words that none of them could quite make out, as though he spoke in a long-forgotten language. And then only when he had nightmares. Jazz felt sorry for him, but she also couldn’t help finding him a little spooky.

“Patience, Bill!” Harry said. He rustled the paper, trying to pretend it wasn’t already open and folded at the correct page. He coughed several times, made himself comfortable on his chair, and began.

“
Bromwell Crisis of Control
is the headline.
Piers Taylor, a longtime friend and supporter of London’s Mayor Leslie Bromwell, has spoken out against the mayor at a vital point in his campaign for reelection. Taylor’s London home was broken into ten days ago by a gang of professional thieves, who made away with family jewelry and an undisclosed sum of cash.
”

“They called us professional!” Hattie said.

“Of course, my girl!” Harry said. “We’ve got the talented Jazz on our team. There are cat burglars aplenty, but in just a couple of months she’s become a shadow burglar, for sure. Got an aptitude for stealing and a heart for hiding. Now, listen:
In a statement read by his public assistant, Taylor, an industrialist who made his fortune in oil and diamond mining in South Africa, said, ‘Mayor Bromwell’s avowed aim is to clean up London’s streets, ridding us of the plague of violent crime and robbery that blights this nation’s proud capital. He has been less than efficient in succeeding in this task, which is self-evident from the number of burglaries and street crimes still reported every day. Even if I had not been a victim of such a crime, I would be speaking out now, because I believe the mayor is a man who has been distracted from his path.’ Asked by this reporter what the distraction entailed, Mr. Taylor’s assistant refused to comment. Efforts to contact Mr. Taylor for an interview have met with silence, but it is telling that someone once so close to Mayor Bromwell is now speaking out against him.”
Harry sat back in his chair, rested his head, and looked at the ceiling. “Ah, my pets, what a fine vintage is revenge.”