Mind the Gap (24 page)

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.

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 invisible 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 nothing 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 consider 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, stepping 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 accounting 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 tomorrow. 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 somewhere. Stevie would lock the money away and, if he followed 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 happened. 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 herself 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.

“Your hair looks lovely,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Bit of makeup, that expensive cut, you could be a television presenter or something, up in the world. Is that it, then? You think you can still return to the illusion they paint as normality? Steady pay, a husband, and a couple of kids? Probably want a dog too.”

She lost her appetite, let the fork fall to the plate, and pushed back from the table, glaring at him. “All I want are answers.”

Harry sighed. “And you think Terence can give you those? Poor girl. Bloke takes you to a posh salon, and in spite of everything you’ve learned about the way the world really works, you still think you can be a princess, live happily ever after.”

Jazz stared at him. The words cut her, and a part of her wanted to scream at him, tell him just how full of shit he was. But the tempest of her rage had been undone.

“How could you know that? Were you following us?”

“I didn’t have to follow you, pet. When you described the thief you met at Keating’s house, there was only one man it could be. Then you didn’t come back last night, which created two possibilities. The cops had you, or you’d seen Terence again. From the new hairstyle, the smell of perfumed soap, and the clothes you’re wearing, I surmise you haven’t spent the night behind bars.”

He waited for a response. As she stared at him, the idea of Harry Fowler as parent and herself as errant, prodigal child began to fester.

“You know what? That’ll be enough of that,” she said, pushing her plate away. She jabbed an accusing finger toward him. “I don’t owe you an explanation for anything. You’re the one with all the lies and secrets, Harry, and it’s time I had answers. You act like you’re this benevolent creature, some fucking shepherd, gathering your flock of lost lambs. But you’re not so innocent, are you? And it may’ve taken me a while, but I’ll tell you now: I’m no fucking sheep.”

Slowly, leaning back in his chair, Harry began to applaud.

“Bravo,” he said, rising to his feet and striding toward a cabinet set against the far wall. “Truly. A little ferocity will take you far, Jazz girl. Could keep you alive as well. Might be you’ll need it soon.”

Harry opened a drawer and began to slide something out. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

He returned to the table and she saw what he held in his hands, and for a moment words failed her. Harry set down the two photographs. The one of the Blackwood Club, whose frame she had accidentally shattered while retrieving the stolen piece of the apparatus, he placed on top. Her father’s face stared up at her from the group photo, and for the first time, she noticed that the photograph had been arranged so that her father was the focal point. The Uncles were all there—Mort and the rest of them—but James Towne was the center.

“Where did you get those?” she asked.

Harry studied them, not looking up. “I saw broken glass on the floor in the corridor upstairs, just below the door to the old service lift. I’ve walked that way dozens of times; would’ve seen it if it had been there before. So I had a look. Careless of you, really. But when I found these inside, I knew we’d be talking soon. There are things I wished you would never have to know. But it’s too late for that.”

Jazz uttered a small noise that sounded almost like a laugh. It was anything but.

“Who are you, exactly, to decide what I should and shouldn’t know?”

Harry began to reply, but she waved him to silence.

“No. It’s a rhetorical question. I’ve had a think, and I figure you can’t be working for the Blackwood Club or the mayor, ’cause they’d never have beat you like that, and you’d have served me up to them by now. Maybe you think that makes you some kind of hero. Well, I hate to shatter your illusions, but you’re not. You’re an old man who’s run away from something. I know plenty about hiding, Harry. And you can keep it up, for all I care. But this concerns me. My family’s all wrapped up in it, tangled in fucking barbed wire, and I want to know what
you
know. How you and Terence know each other, how you ended up photographing the Blackwood Club, what you know about the damn apparatus and London’s ghosts—all of it.”

She leaned over the table. “But the first question is this: was it all a setup, me finding you? We’re connected, Harry. You, me, Terence, and the damn Blackwood Club. But you didn’t find me. I came upon the old shelter by chance. Fucking stumbled into it. Seemed that way, at least, but I can’t believe in a coincidence like that, Harry. So tell me, how did you do it?”

For the first time since she’d entered the Palace this morning, Harry’s face lit up with a smile of real humor and mischief—the smile of the Harry Fowler she’d known.

“I didn’t do a thing, pet. Not a blessed thing. It’s magic, isn’t it? The entire history of England is constructed on the fates and destinies of people. Some of them were extraordinary, and some ordinary. Once upon a time, magic influenced everything. And with magic, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

Harry had been fascinated by magic his entire life, but not the sleight of hand that Terence Whitcomb’s father had enjoyed. He claimed to have had numerous encounters with magic during his childhood, and it had scarred him, both physically and emotionally.

“How did you meet Terence?” Jazz asked.

“Magic again. And thievery. The twin stories of my life,” Harry said. He wouldn’t look at her now. His gaze was fixed at some distant point, as though simply by speaking of these events he could see into the past.

“In another age, the Fowlers were fairly well-to-do. My father taught university, though his family had left him enough money that he could’ve retired at thirty. Instead, he taught until the day he died, at the age of sixty-four. I was just shy of forty when I returned home for his funeral. My sister, Anna, awaited me there. Hadn’t seen her in five years or more. Afterward, we went back to my father’s house to find that someone had broken in during the service. Oh, there was no damage. But there were things missing, including my mother’s wedding ring. She’d been dead five years by then, and the ring had been on my father’s nightstand ever since.

“It gutted Anna, losing that ring. Some of Mum’s other jewelry had been taken as well. My father had nothing of value for himself, save a library of antique books. While he lived, nothing had mattered to him but my mother’s things. A queer desperation struck me then. I felt he wouldn’t rest until I got them back. Anna was distraught. For her, and for my father, I did something I’d sworn to myself I never would do.” His eyes grew dark as he spoke, and his nostrils flared with self-loathing.

Jazz studied him a moment, and she knew. “You used magic to find the thief.”

Harry put his hands over his mouth and nose. His gaze seemed lost. “Yes.”

“But…magic. It’s all storybook stuff to me. You and Terence talk about it like it’s…like you could just reach out and touch it.”

“Not so simple as that, love. Oh, it’s here now, all around us. And some people—you and I included—can sense it at times. Those who dare, those who know the right words or gestures or symbols, can tap into it. But magic has faded, the same way the stories about it have.”

Jazz rolled that around in her brain for a few seconds. Once it would have seemed completely absurd to her, but she had witnessed the ghosts of old London and heard the Hour of Screams, and she knew there was more to the world than what the worker bees rushing around the city could see.

“And the thief? It was Terence?”

Harry clapped his hands together. “Precisely. One of my father’s students, in fact. Twenty years my junior. Yes, I’m afraid I’m not quite as old as I appear. Time has not been kind to me.

“As you surmise, I located the thief, but his reaction was not what I would have expected at such a discovery. Terence was so pleased that I’d been able to track him down that he gave me back everything he’d taken from the house without my even asking. He wanted to know how I’d done it, of course. Such things fascinated him. Thought there must be some trick to it and wanted to learn. I ought to have turned him in to the police, but I did not. I told Anna that I’d found a bag tossed aside in the garden and there would be no way to catch the thief. I said we ought to be content just to have gotten our things back.