Mind the Gap (15 page)

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 bloke’s 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 backpack filled with stuff to sell. But she would also find something 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 lacking 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 expression. Her smile was never quite a smile, reminding Jazz of the
Mona Lisa.
Some of the settings she recognized because 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 photographs—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 understand any of this.

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

She began to doubt, thinking maybe she’d been mistaken. 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 programmed 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 carpet, and then a man stepped into view, silently, gracefully, almost 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 landing. 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 furnishings 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 pursuit 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 electronic 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, listened, 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. Crouching down at landing level, she peered around the doorjamb. She was expecting to see another corridor, narrower perhaps, with further doors heading off left and right. What she was not expecting was one large room.

It must have been forty feet square. It had an open ceiling and a front wall lined with windows. Close to the doorway, a small electronic device hung on three wires from a fitting in the wall, and spaced around the room just above floor level she saw dozens of sensors. Lasers, perhaps? That certainly was heavy-duty protection, but this man had disabled it with barely a pause.

In the sloping ceiling was a skylight—the one she had seen from the street, assuming an attic room—and it made this the brightest room in the house.

It was also the strangest.

The floor was carpeted, and spaced irregularly around the room were timber pedestals, all of them bearing display cases or racks of some kind. Every case and rack carried an item, and many of them were unknown to Jazz. In one case sat what looked like a human skull, but there were curious protrusions at either temple that could have been the roots of horns.

Another pedestal held a water-filled tank, murky with algae, and there was a bare suggestion of movement inside. She saw a stuffed duck-billed platypus with a head and beak at both ends, and an old Hessian sack, tied closed at the mouth, stained with what could have been dried blood. One stand held a simple top hat, and she had a sudden flashback to the ghostly conjurer she had seen twice now down in the Underground. The hat had a small hole in it halfway down. Nothing jumped out.

Jazz was so amazed that she almost forgot caution, and it was only when the intruder darted out from behind a high, wide display of dried rushes that she ducked back from the door. For a second she thought she’d been seen, but he was dashing about the room, going from one arcane exhibit to the next as if searching for something very particular.

He tipped a suitcase from a timber stand, fiddled with the locks, and broke it open. Something inside hissed and he slammed the lid again, but not in panic, not in fear. It simply was not what he was looking for.

Jazz was petrified and fascinated. Part of her almost wanted to rush into the room herself, because there was a globe she could see that glowed from inside and a huge closed book with a very tempting bookmark. But she could not be seen. She did not know who this man was, why he was here, or what he was after. And if his burglary of Mort’s house was intentional, it could mean that he was just as dangerous as the Uncles, if not more so.

The man grunted, then gasped. He stood still, suddenly as motionless as the exhibits he had been examining. He was partly blocking what he was looking at from view, and Jazz resisted the temptation to lean farther into the doorway to see what it was.

“And here it is,” he whispered. “At last, here it is.” He leaned forward, reaching with both hands, then hesitated. He wiped his hands on his trousers—his first sign of nerves, the first indication that he was anything other than completely composed—and reached forward again. Once more he paused. “Blast.” He shook his head, looked around, and headed for the rear of the room.

Jazz stretched around and saw that there were three doors there, all closed. The man opened the middle one and disappeared inside.

And at last she could see what had enraptured the man so. It looked like a short wide sword, one curved edge serrated, and close to its tip was a hole through the blade the width of her wrist. Its handle was metal as well, rounded and textured for grip.

The man was still gone.
Looking for something to wrap it in,
Jazz thought.
Something to pick it up.

Jazz didn’t think about what she did next. It was almost as if someone was guiding her, and as she stood and walked into the room, she had a momentary whiff of her mother’s perfume. It was from her own slightly perspiring skin, of course. She’d worn Beautiful every day since Cadge had presented her with a bottle. But still…