Mind the Gap (2 page)

Mum!
she thought. And for the first time, the fear came in hard. The Uncles had always protected and helped them, even if her mother had little respect for them. But now they seemed dangerous. It was as if their surface veneer had been stripped away and her perception of them was becoming clear at last.

She glanced back up at the ceiling hatch, close enough to her desk that it would be easy to jump up and disappear again.

The voices startled her. There were two of them, seeming to come from directly outside her door. She slid beside her bed and lay there listening, expecting Mort to enter her room at any second. He would not see her straightaway, but he
would
see the open hatch. And then they’d have her.

“We could be waiting here forever,” one voice said. Mort.

“We won’t. She’ll be home soon.” This other voice was female.

The only time a woman had ever accompanied the Uncles was the day after their house had been broken into years before. Jazz had been young, but she could still remember some details about that day. The woman had tried to soothe and comfort her mother, while all around them the Uncles had been busy packing their belongings. By early evening they were in a brand-new house: this one. And the woman—whose voice was cold and uncaring, even then—had called herself Josephine Blackwood.

“What if she isn’t? What do we do then?”

“We stay calm and proceed,” the woman said. The same voice; the same coldness. “She’s just one girl.”

“She’s more than that,” Mort said.

“Shush!
Never
in public! Never outside!”

The Uncle sighed. “So, is she definitely…?” He trailed off, as though there was something he did not want to say.

“Of course,” the woman said. “I saw to it myself.”

The two fell silent again, their presence suddenly filling the house. Jazz lay there, turning over what they had said.
I saw to it myself,
the woman had said. Saw to what?

“I’m going downstairs,” the man said at last. “No need to guard this door anymore, at least.”

“All right. Let’s go down.”

Jazz listened to the man and woman slowly descending the stairs.

No need to guard this door anymore…

There were more voices from down there, subdued and indistinguishable.

Is she definitely…?

“Mum,” Jazz whispered, and the world seemed to sway.

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply several times, then stood and crept from her room. She moved fluidly, drifting rather than walking, feeling the air part around her and guide her along. She knew where every creaking floorboard was, and she didn’t make a sound.

Her mother’s bedroom door was closed, and there was a smear of blood on the handle.

It was small—half the size of the nail on her little finger—but she saw it instantly. Her heart thumped harder as she turned and glanced downstairs. There was no one at the bottom of the staircase looking up, but she could still hear their voices elsewhere in the house.

What have you done to my mother?
she thought, touching the handle, opening the door, stepping inside, and
seeing
what they had done. And also smelling and tasting it, because so much blood could not be avoided.

Her legs began to give way. She grasped the handle and locked her elbow so she did not fall. Then she closed her eyes.

But some things can never be unseen.

Her mother lay half on the bed, her upper body hanging down so that her head rested on the floor. A line had been slit across her throat, a dark grin gaping.

I saw to it myself,
the woman had said.

Jazz felt strangely numb. Her heart hammered in her chest, but her mind was quiet, logical, already plotting out the next few minutes. Back to her room, the phone, the police, up into the attic to await their arrival, listen to the Uncles and that Blackwood woman panicking as the sirens approached…

And then she saw the writing on the floor. At first she thought it was a spray of blood, but now she could see the words there, and she imagined the determination her mother must have had to write them while blood spewed from her throat.

Jazz hide forever.

She bit back a cry, steeled herself against the tears.

Her mother stared at her with glazed eyes.

Jazz looked at the words again, then glanced at the staircase to her left and started backing away.

As she reached her own door, she realized that she’d left her mother’s bedroom door open. They’d notice, know she’d been here.

She darted back across the landing and closed the door. Her last sight of her mother was bloodied and smudged with tears.

The words on the floor shouted at her even when the door was closed.

Jazz hide forever.

She had always listened to her mother.

Lifting herself back through the ceiling hatch in her bedroom, Jazz wondered what kind of life those words had doomed her to.

They were sitting together in the park, watching as ducks drifted back and forth on the pond, squabbling over thrown bread and scolding the moorhens.

“Pity there aren’t any swans,” her mother said.

“I love swans,” Jazz said. “So graceful and beautiful.”

“They may look gentle, but they’re hard as nails.” Her mother shuffled closer to her on their picnic blanket. The remains of their lunch lay beside them on paper plates, already attracting unwanted attention from wasps and flies. “If there were swans here, we’d have a full hierarchy. Swans would be the rulers of the pond, ducks below them, moorhens below them. Then there’d be the scroungers, the little birds, like that wren over there.” She pointed to a tiny bird hopping from branch to branch in a bush that grew out over the water.

“So what are we?” Jazz asked. Even then she was a perceptive girl, and she knew that this conversation was edging toward something.

“We’re the little birds,” her mother said. She smiled, but it was sad.

“I think you’re a swan,” Jazz said, flooded by a sudden feeling of complete love.

Her mother shrugged. “Maybe you,” she said. “One day, maybe you.”

The wren dropped to the grass and hopped across to the edge of the pond. It started worrying at a lump of bread that the other birds seemed to have missed, but the movement brought it to the attention of the mallards. A duck splashed from the water and came at the wren, wings raised and head down, bill snapping. The wren turned and hopped away slowly, almost as though it was trying to maintain its dignity. The duck took the bread.

“Wise thing,” her mother said. “If you’re on the run, you
never
run unless you know they’re right behind you.”

“Why?”

“You never call attention to yourself.” Her mother lay back on the blanket, looking around the park as though waiting for someone.

Never run unless you know they’re right behind you.

Jazz was afraid that if she did start running, she’d brain herself on a lamppost. She was doing her best not to cry—that would draw attention—but the pressure and heat behind her face was immense.

For a minute or two, she had considered calling the police from Mr. Barker’s house and waiting until they arrived. But she had known that if she paused any longer, she would never move again. So she had left the way she arrived, walking the length of Barker’s garden, hurrying along the alleyway, emerging out onto the street, and putting more distance between her and her mother with every step she took.

She hated blinking, because whenever her eyes closed she saw the blood and that twisted, splayed body that had once been her mother.

That woman slit her throat. Cut her and left her to bleed to death!
And they had been waiting for Jazz to come home.

To do the same to her?

She walked past a coffee shop and glanced in the window. A man and woman sat turned to face the street. The woman was sipping from a cup, but the man stared straight out at Jazz. He wore a smart dark suit and sunglasses, and his lips twitched into what might have been a smile.

Jazz hurried on, turning into the next side road she came to, rushing through a lane between gardens and emerging onto another street. She passed an old woman walking her dog. The dog watched her go by.

It took Jazz ten minutes to realize she had no idea where she was going. Where could she hide? And how could she just leave her mother?

She emerged onto a busy shopping street. It was noisy and bustling and smelled of exhaust fumes and fast food. A cab pulled up just along the street and a tall, elegant woman stepped out. She brushed an errant strand of hair from her eyes, paid the cabbie, and walked away with her mobile phone glued to her ear.

And Jazz’s mother was dead.

She was dead, murdered, and now Jazz was more alone than she had ever been before.

They’ll be on the street
s, she thought, and the idea bore her mother’s voice.
Once they know you’re not coming home, they’ll be on the streets looking for you.

She stepped into the doorway of a music shop and scanned the sidewalk and the road. No big black Beamers, but that meant nothing. Maybe they’d be on foot. Maybe, like her mother had been telling her for the last couple of years, they had so many fingers in so many pies that none of them knew the true extent of their reach.

She wiped her eyes and looked both ways. A dozen people turned their heads away just as she looked at them. A dozen more looked up. In a crowd such as this, there was always someone watching her.

“Oh shit, oh fuck. What the hell am I going to do?” she whispered.

A black BMW cruised around the corner. Jazz pressed back into the door but it was locked, the damn shop was shut, and then the BMW passed and continued along the street.

She hurried back out onto the pavement, resisting the temptation to keep her head down. She had to watch, had to know what was going on.

A tall man emerged from a fast-food joint, carrying something that looked like steaming road kill in a napkin. He was dressed in a sharp black suit, and as she paused six steps from him, he adjusted a lump beneath his jacket.

Gun,
Jazz thought.

He looked up, glanced around at her, and smiled. “Too hot to eat,” he said, raising the food toward her.

She ran. The man called after her, and even though he sounded friendly and alarmed, she could not afford to stop, not now that she’d started running, because she was drawing attention to herself. And if and when she did stop, she’d collapse into a heap, and the white-hot grief would start tearing her up.

The grief, and the loneliness.

She ducked into a Tube station, grateful for the shadows closing around her. The smell of the Underground seemed to welcome her in.

Jazz flew down the stairs two at a time, sure that she would trip and break an ankle but unable to stop herself. Images of her mother’s brutalized corpse—and the warning she’d painted on the floor in her own blood—flashed across her mind. But there was no going back. Over the years her mum had said a lot about running, but one refrain echoed in Jazz’s mind.

Once you start running, don’t stop ’til you’re well hidden.

A glance over her shoulder revealed several men descending after her, but they seemed in no hurry. Still, best to be sure. To be safe. The blood on the bed and floor could so easily have been her own, and if she slowed down it still might be, though now it would spill on the concrete stairs or tiled floor of the Tube station.

She hit the bottom of the stairs and sidestepped a bickering middle-aged couple with three tagalong children who huddled close to their parents, afraid of the world.
Wise little ones,
Jazz thought.

In her pocket she had a crumpled wad of notes—little more than forty pounds, she guessed—and her rail pass. Hurrying toward the turnstiles, she thought of simply vaulting them, both for speed and because her pursuers could not be so bold. But in the fugue of grief and fear that warped her thoughts, she knew that would attract attention she did not want. She pulled out the rail pass, stuffed her money back into her pocket, and fed the card through the slot on the turnstile.

Get lost in a crowd,
her mother’s voice whispered in her head.

All of the things she had told Jazz over the years, while tucking her into bed at night or sending her off to school in the morning, were the words of a ghost. Jazz had a ghost in her head now.

People milled about the platform, waiting for the train to arrive. The electronic sign above their heads declared the next was three minutes away.
Three minutes.
Jazz glanced over her shoulder at the men who had come onto the platform behind her, and she knew she did not have three minutes. These weren’t the Uncles, but she had seen the black BMW slide by on the street above. Dressed in dark suits, they seemed cut from the same cloth as the ugly-eyed men who had kept Jazz and her mother like pets and whose leader had put Mum down like a sick dog.

Bile rose into the back of her throat, and she had to breathe through her mouth to keep from throwing up. She tasted salty tears on her lips and wiped them away, plunging into the crowd of suited commuters, snaking through them, hiding among them on the platform.

Trembling, she stopped. Eyes on the advertisements across the tracks, she tried to blend as best she could, steadying her breathing.
Do You Know Who You Are?
one advert asked. She had no idea what it was trying to sell, and for a second she felt the whole world bearing down on her, pressing in from above and all around.

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. How many times had she taken the Tube in her life? Hundreds, surely. If she could be normal for two more minutes, pretend that all was well, perhaps she could truly become invisible in the crowd.

She squeezed her eyes tighter, trying to hold back the tears. A dreadful mistake, for on the backs of her eyelids she found the grotesque tableau of her mother’s bedroom. She opened them wide, staring across the tracks at the grubby tiles, the colorful advertisements, breathing too fast. The questions had begun—who were the Uncles, really, and why had they done it? But they were not new questions to Jazz. She had been asking versions of them for most of her life.

Someone shouted. She glanced along the platform. A mother held the hands of her two girls, twins about six years old. An old man with long silver hair and an enormous nose leaned with great dignity upon a cane. Beyond them, among a sea of tourists and business suits, she saw a flash of dark jacket, moving quickly.

“Here, love.” A hand landed on her shoulder. “Everything all right?”

Jazz opened her mouth to scream but no sound emerged. She stood paralyzed for a few frantic seconds, and then she bolted to the right, toward the end of the platform. Colliding with an old biddy in a frumpy dress, she didn’t wait to apologize. A teenage boy got in her way, one hand out as though he might try to stop her. She shot him an elbow to the chest and kept going.

“Mad fucking cow!” he called after her.

Her face flushed with heat as her heart thundered in her chest. She darted in and out of the crowd, knocking over shopping bags and bumping briefcases.

“What’s happening?” someone shouted.

“Who is that?”

“Don’t
push,
don’t
shove
!”

Jazz felt the ripples of unease spread across the platform, all originating from her.
A fine way to stay hidden,
she thought, but she could not help running. She thought of shouting
Bomb!
but people would panic and some would get hurt, and she could not bear that on her conscience.

She burst from the crowd to find herself alone at the end of the platform, tile walls to her right and straight ahead and the train tracks to her left. If the Uncles really had come down here after her, they would be on her in seconds. Her skin prickled with the attention of strangers’ eyes, as though the tiles themselves observed her.

A ledge jutted twelve inches from the wall, a lip of concrete that continued past the end of the platform as though the wall had not always been there. Desperation drove her forward. The cry of metal upon metal and the screech of brakes approached from behind, and a great gust of wind blew along the tracks. The train’s arrival imminent, she put one hand on the wall and hung her head out over the tracks. In the gloom of the tunnel, she saw that the wall went on perhaps six feet and then there was an opening where the platform seemed to continue. In the darkness, she thought she could make out some kind of metal grate—the sort of thing they used to partition off unused areas of the Underground.

“Here, girl, what do you think you’re up to?” a voice called.

Jazz pressed herself against the wall and moved around onto the ledge. The shriek of the slowing train grated along her spine. The light of its headlamps picked her out on the ledge as it bulleted into the station from behind her, slowing, slowing…

Face sliding against filthy tiles, Jazz shuffled swiftly along the ledge, forcing herself not to imagine falling backward or being blown off by the wind of the passing train. If she fell beneath it, her mother would never forgive her.

The train hissed as it slowed, the front car coming toward the end of the platform, nearly adjacent to her now. The conductor would see her. Someone would be called. More people would chase her into the darkness, and then where would she hide?

Her left hand suddenly pressed against nothing. She slipped around the end of the wall onto a stretch of forgotten platform. On the track, the train hissed a final puff as though frustrated by her survival, and then she heard the sounds of disgorging passengers and others climbing aboard. A recorded voice announced the time of the next expected train and advised those getting on and off to mind the gap.

It seemed she had already been forgotten.

Jazz laughed softly and without humor. Mind the gap, indeed. Never knew when you’d find yourself falling into one of the cracks in the world. Here she was, living proof. Alice down the rabbit hole.

The train hissed again, doors closing, and started forward. In the light from its headlamp eyes, she stared at the iron grating before her. Beyond it lay another stretch of platform, eight feet deep and perhaps twenty long. A rusted, padlocked chain locked the gate. Some cinema action hero might have been able to snap the rust-eaten chain, but not Jasmine Towne. The train rattled past, gaining speed, and with it her pulse began to race again.

She saw the shapes of people at first, and the occasional blur of a face, but the faster it went the more those people seemed to blur into one.

The illumination from the train’s interior flickered off the black iron grate, but at the upper edge of her vision was a rectangle of darkness that seemed to swallow the light. Jazz studied it, blinking at the realization that either a section of the grate had been broken away or whoever had installed it had left a transom window above.

She gripped the iron bars, propped the rubber sole of one trainer against the metal, then hauled herself up. If Jazz could be said to be gifted at anything, it was climbing. Her mother had often called her a monkey for her love of scampering up trees and rocks and the way she could always manage to break into their town house if her mum had lost her keys. She’d thought, once upon a time, of becoming a dancer. But little girls always wanted to be ballerinas or princesses, and people like her weren’t allowed dreams for very long.

Her foot slipped, but her hands found a grip on the transom. One knee banged painfully against the gate, rattling the chain and sending a shower of rust flaking to the platform. But she pulled herself up across the bottom bar of the transom and through to the other side like a gymnast.

She landed in a crouch and paused for a moment, listening to the roar of the train fading into the distance. Light from the station reflected off the tiles on the other side of the tunnel, giving her just enough illumination to see. Voices came from beyond the wall: bored commuters talking into phones and excited tourists nattering in a mixture of languages.

She stood frozen, like a rabbit caught in oncoming headlights. And when someone shouted, Jazz bolted. As the train passed, its light had shown her the outline of a tall door, and she guessed it to be an old exit up to street level. The Underground was rife with such things, she’d read, coming up into the storage rooms and basements of chemists, markets, and pubs that had once been Tube stations or buildings associated with them.

Dark shapes scurried and squealed around her feet: rats. As long as they ran away from her, not toward her, she could put up with that.

The door stood open a few inches, the frame corroded. Whatever lock had once sealed it had been broken, leaving a hole where the knob ought to be. Jazz had a strange feeling that the door had been forced closed, not open.

She reached out. The metal felt warm to the touch and pulsed with the thrum of the Underground, like a beating heart. Jazz leaned her weight against it, and it scraped open across the concrete floor.

Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust. The stairwell ought to have been pitch black, but a dim blue glow provided light enough to see that she had been wrong. The spiral metal staircase did not lead toward the surface. Rather, it led deeper into the ethereal gloom.

She could go back. For a moment she considered it. But to what? The Uncles and her mother’s corpse, and the murderous woman with Jazz on her mind? No. There would be no going back now. If she returned to the surface, it had to be far from here. If she got onto a train, it could not be at this station. Somewhere in the underground labyrinth, there would be another way up.

The spiral staircase created an echo chamber, and the sound of her breathing surrounded her as Jazz started down. Such evidence of her panic forced her to calm down, to slow her breath, and soon her pulse slowed as well. Still, she heard her heartbeat much too loudly in her head.

It was at least thirty feet until the staircase ended. The blue glow brightened into silvery splashes of light from several caged bulbs, metal-wrapped cables bolted to the curved stone walls. She wondered who would come down here to replace these bulbs when they blew.

More hesitant now, Jazz stepped away from the bottom of the stairs and along a short tunnel. It emerged into a vast space that made her catch her breath. Above her was a ventilation shaft that led up to a louvered grille. Daylight filtered down, a splash of light in the false underground night. Like distant streetlamps, other vents served the same purpose in the otherwise enduring darkness of that long-abandoned station. The platform had been removed, and beneath her feet there was only dirt and broken concrete. In a far-off puddle of light, a short set of steps led up to where the platform had once been, but now they were stairs to nowhere. Without the platform, she noticed for the first time how round the tunnels were—long cylinders bored through the city’s innards.

Peering along the throat of the tunnel, past the farthest splash of light, she saw only darkness. But somewhere down there, where the platform had once ended, there must be another door.

Jazz started in that direction, but as she moved beyond the first pool of light, the dirt and broken ground underfoot disappeared in the dark. She moved to the tracks and crouched to place a hand on the cold metal. Once it had been a working artery, pumping blood to the city’s heart. Now it was dead. She stepped over the rail and between the tracks. Simple enough to match her stride to the carefully placed sleepers.

The sound of her movement echoed around her: scraping stones, sharp breath, footsteps.

Walking into the darkness did not make her feel lost. A pool of light waited ahead and another remained behind her. She could see those areas of the tunnel well enough. Yet when she looked down at her feet she saw nothing, and even her arms seemed spectral things.