Mind the Gap (23 page)

“You’re driven,” Jazz said.

“Yes,” he said, without turning. He leaned on the worktop and looked down at his hands. “Absolutely, resolutely driven. And that’s why I never let anyone come close.”

“What about me?”

“What
about
you?” He turned around and looked at her, as though she had all the answers.

“Am I close?”

“Are you?”

“Stop
fucking
with me, Terence!” She stood from the table, knocking it with one leg and setting her wineglass swaying. A splash of rosé hit the tablecloth, spreading like thin blood.

“Help me steal the battery,” he said. He looked suddenly exposed, his expression betraying the risk he must believe he was taking.

“Last part of the apparatus?”

“Yes. And I’m thinking, my dear Jasmine, that you have issues with the Blackwood Club that are as intense and personal as my own. Help me steal this last piece, and between us we can destroy everything they’ve been striving for.”

“Issues,” Jazz said. She nodded slowly, not looking at Terence, because she was sure he’d read in her eyes what she was thinking.
Mum,
she thought.
Dad. Cadge.
“Yes, I have issues.”

“So help me.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re very good. And because I can give you back your life. Harry Fowler is a gentleman who has turned into a rat. And now he lives with them.”

Jazz bristled and stood up straighter, pressing her lips together.

Terence crossed his arms and leaned back against the worktop.

“Where’s the apparatus?” Jazz asked.

He smiled. That assured man had returned, suave and confident and forever posing questions. “That,” he said, “is a secret.”

Jazz finished her wine in one gulp. “I’ll sleep on it,” she said. “If you’ll show me to my room, Terence, I’d be most grateful.”

He smiled, bowed, and waved his hand at the door. “After you.”

She walked by him and started along the corridor, aware that he was following a few steps behind. “By the way,” she said, “fantastic meal.”

Jazz had never believed that she could kill someone.

During those dark weeks following her mother’s death, she had mentally put herself in the position where murder was possible: holding the Blackwood woman down with a knife at her throat, perhaps the very same knife used to kill her mother. Kneeling on the woman’s chest. Pressing down on the handle. Seeing the first dark dribble of blood when the skin was pierced, the woman’s eyes opening wider as dreaded realization hit home, then slashing hard right to left, pushing forward at the same time to open her throat to the spine.

She had imagined the scenario, but each time she became more and more certain that she could never do it.

Yet revenge was not exclusively about murder. There were other ways to destroy people than killing them. As Jazz closed the bedroom door behind her and surveyed the room, she wondered whether Terence had offered the best chance for revenge she would ever have.

At first glance, the room looked as sparse and unassuming as the downstairs, but after a quick look around, Jazz saw that this was far from the case. The rug on the polished oak floor was of a very fine weave, and when she lifted one corner she found a cloth tag imprinted in a language she did not know. The double bed sat on carved hardwood legs, columns of wood with snakes and other creatures curled around them. The bed’s headboard was inlaid with a complex leather design—a series of symbols that perhaps meant something in another unknown language.
Maybe it’s the language of magic,
she thought. The idea appealed to her.

The room was small but beautifully decorated, with several delicately framed photographs hanging on two of the four walls. Any one of them could have been a prizewinner. There was a morning scene with sun burning through mist, a street scene from New Orleans, a bee buzzing a flower, and an old, rusted car in a field, home to a spread of flowers and shrubs.

Beside the bed was a bedside table, with a glass half full of water and a book open and facedown. The book was Dickens’s
Great Expectations.
Jazz realized that Terence had given her his bedroom.

Behind the book and glass sat a tabletop picture frame. In that frame, a ghost.

Jazz clasped her hands to her mouth, holding herself steady as the world seemed to spin around her.
The eyes are the same,
she thought. The man in the picture did not wear a top hat or white gloves, but the eyes were the same.

“The magician,” she whispered, watching the photograph for any sign of movement. She had seen him three times belowground, and each time he appeared, he seemed more and more real. She’d thought he was a random manifestation among the many wraiths she had witnessed, but seeing him here made her feel even more a part of something over which she had no real control.
The magician, and I’m so bloody stupid because I didn’t recognize those eyes.

The photograph was black and white—of course, because it was maybe a hundred years old—but the similarity between the man in the frame and the man who had just guided her along the corridor to his own bedroom was startling.

She sat on the edge of the bed for some time, attempting to piece together the extra pieces to the puzzle. Maybe it was shock, or maybe the quantity of food and wine she had consumed, but the disparate pieces refused to fit. She could concentrate on one point at a time—Terence’s murdered father, or the apparatus, or the Blackwood Club and the corrupt organization they had turned into—but any attempt to see her place in all of this led only to confusion. Her eyelids were drooping. She was not sure whether she wanted to laugh, cry, or sleep.

“Shouldn’t have had so much to drink, eh, Mum?” she said, laughing quietly. She looked at the door, crossed the room, and pushed it gently until the latch closed. There was no lock. Those piercing eyes stared at her from the picture on the bedside cabinet. No, not quite the same as Terence’s. Very similar, but this man had something missing from his gaze that Terence, in those dark moments when his guard came down, could not help displaying: hatred.

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 sentences 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 memorable 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 whenever she opened her eyes. When the true dawn came, accompanied 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 together. 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 offered 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
cafetière
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 lock up—”

“I’ll be fine, Terence. Fifteen minutes, and when I return 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 antique shops, but watch out for pavement pizzas.”

She laughed at his use of such an unrefined term and decided 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 perceptions and emotions. He had proved that only too well in Harrods, and the more she thought about that nick yesterday 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, outside a butcher’s shop, a man waved back. He was smiling.

As Jazz went to turn back and start walking again, someone 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 appearance, 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.”