Mind the Gap

chapter Eleven

thieving the thief

Jazz chose her moment well. Between traffic passing along the street, front doors closing, curtains

being drawn open, the postman passing by, and pedestrians clicking their expen-sive shoes and high heels as

they hurried to work, she walked across the street from the park, through the front gate, and down the

several steps to the house's basement entrance.

She looked back across the street at Switch. He was read-ing on a bench in the park, and though he

had his back to her and the house, she knew he'd been watching her. If there was any sign that she'd been

seen, he'd let her know.

He turned a page, rubbed a hand through his hair, and carried on reading.

Jazz checked her watch. Five minutes. She was hidden from the road by the bulk of the steps leading

up to the main door, and the basement door was set into the steps' side wall. The only way she would be

seen was if Mort decided to visit his basement in the few minutes before leaving.

They'd decided that Jazz would be the only one to go in-side. Too many cooks, Harry had said, and

he was right. The more who went in, the greater the chance of being caught. But the others were here,

providing what Harry had called protection and distraction. Switch sat reading in the park, Gob and Hattie

walked up and down a neighboring street, Marco did as his namesake and explored alleys, back streets, and

service roads in the area. Stevie had taken one of the most dangerous jobs —scruffing himself up and

sitting at the corner of Mort's street, begging. They all knew that he'd be moved on by the police soon, but

that was one more distrac-tion for the local beat bobbies while Jazz did her thing.

Switch looked at his watch and closed his book. That was the signal that the time had come. Jazz had

already inserted the skeleton key into the door's lock, and now she started turning and probing, feeling the

tumblers click back as the key found its way in. Still listening for the sound of the front door opening above

her, she concentrated hard.

If Mort opened the door, set the alarm, and came out be-fore she had this one open, it was all over.

Even if he didn't see her —and the chance of him missing her was close to zero, by her estimation—they

would have missed their best opportunity to get inside. There were other ways, of course, but with an alarm

system like this, it was best to fool it right at the start.

There! The lock snicked open and she grabbed the han-dle, ready to go inside.

The front door opened above her. She turned the han-dle, pushed the basement door open, and

started counting.

One, two...

She slipped through, turned, and pushed the door shut behind her. She eased the handle closed with

her hand, not wanting to risk its springs snapping it back into place. She had no idea of the layout of the

house, no inkling of how sound could carry.

Three, four...

Jazz paused for a heartbeat to get her bearings. The basement had once been a well-appointed room,

perhaps a separate dwelling in its own right, but now it was crammed full of old furniture, boxes sealed with

packing tape, and a huge bookcase packed solid with old hardback books. Her route across this space

would be slow, and the far door was closed, perhaps locked.

Five, six...

There was a motion detector in one corner of the room, flashing red where it was fixed just below

the ceiling. Once the alarm was set and the flashing stopped, it would be active.

Jazz moved. Over an old sofa, clouds of dust puffing up around her and tickling her nose. Through a

forest of dining chairs, upright and upside down, and her rucksack caught on one of the legs. She paused

and spun around, catching the chair just before it hit the ground.

Seven, eight...

She stepped around a pile of small sealed boxes, wonder-ing what they contained.

Footsteps came from above as Mort hurried along his hallway, needing to set the alarm and close the

front door by the count of thirty. After that, he'd set it off himself and have to explain to the police what had

happened.

Nine, ten...

From her rucksack, she pulled a canvas cozy Hattie had made, elastic band sewn into the edges.

Stretching it with her fingers, she slipped it over the motion detector, let it snap into place, and then ran on.



Thirteen, fourteen...

She made the far door and tried the handle. She sighed when it opened, then stepped out into a dimly

lit corridor, the only light bleeding through a glass-block wall at one end. There were two doors on each

side, and any one of them could be the one leading upstairs.

A motion detector watched the corridor as well. This house was well protected.

Seventeen, eighteen...

She snapped another cozy over the detector in the hall. When the alarm activated, the motion

detector would be ef-fectively blind. She tried the door five steps along from the basement door. It opened

onto a blank space, a basement that had never been completed. Bare concrete walls and ex-posed ceiling

joists were swathed in spiderwebs and dust. She closed it and crossed the corridor to the door immediately

opposite.

Twenty-two, twenty-three...

Last chance. She'd have to stop soon, because she couldn't trust counting in her head. Three seconds

off and everything would be ruined.

I'm in his house! I'm in Mort's house, and if the alarm goes and he comes in, catches me, he

could kill me here and now. Or knock me out, tell the police it was a false alarm became he didn't set

it in time, see them on their way with a cup of tea and a friendly wave, come back down to where he

left me, slit my throat. Kill me when I'm unconscious.

Twenty-five, twenty-six...

Jazz opened the door and saw the short staircase leading up. Here, too, a motion detector flashed its

readiness. She closed the door gently behind her, hurried to the top step, and pressed her ear against the

door. A third canvas cozy was clutched in her right hand.

Twenty-eight.. .

She heard hurried footsteps, the front door slamming shut, and then a few seconds later the alarm let

out one long beep. That was it. Set.

Jazz froze. She turned her eyes up and to the side and saw the steady LED of the motion detector.

Now was when the long, slow, fun part began. She'd hoped to avoid it, but no such luck.

Harry had told her that motion detectors used in domes-tic house alarms were only so sensitive. They

could be fooled, but it took someone with a steady nerve and grace of movement to do so. He'd said that if

Jazz moved as slowly as she could, she would be able to cross a room covered by a de-tector. It would take

a while. And any slight jerk, sneeze, or slip could set it off. But it was possible.

Jazz reached up slowly and closed her hand around the door handle. She shut her eyes

—slowly—and willed it to be unlocked.

It was an old-fashioned round brass handle, similar to those on the basement doors, and she had to

grip it tight to provide enough friction to turn it. She moved her hand clockwise, hearing the lock squeal

slightly, amazed at how tensed her muscles had become in her efforts not to move.

She was crouched on the top step and her right leg was below her, already aching and burning where

it took her weight.

She could not ease up, stretch her leg, or shift position. Every movement now had to be relevant and

necessary. Surely only the main corridors would have motion sensors, and even then perhaps only on the

lower floors.

It was going to be a long, slow journey through the house, but she had all day.

The handle slipped in her palm, all the way back to the closed position.

"Shit!" Tempted though she was to slap the door, she could not.

She turned her eyes again, looking up at the red eye of the motion detector and silently cursing its

electrical pa-tience.

It turned off.

Jazz gasped. It was no trick of the light or a fault of her eyes. Did this happen once the alarm system

was set? It had been maybe five minutes. Did all the detectors sud-denly switch off the LEDs even though

they were still ac-tive? She thought it unlikely —they were there for a reason, after all, and it seemed

strange that they would no longer dis-play their alertness.

She heard a sound beyond the door. It was a light metal-lic click, like a tool snapping shut or a door

latch finding its home.

Mort! He hadn't gone to work after all. He must have forgotten something, returned home, and...

But she had not heard the front door open, nor the beep-ing of the alarm that would count down the

period he had to get inside, enter the code, and disable it. She'd have heard all that. She had been

concentrating on the handle, true, and the beaded sweat on her forehead attested to that. But she would



have heard Mort coming home.

Footsteps passed by outside, very soft, as though bare-foot. Mort always wore expensive shoes. She

remembered that of him; he'd prided himself on his appearance, and there was no way he'd have left the

house in anything other than exquisite dress.

Jazz had still not moved, for fear that the detector was active —but if it was, then whoever was out

there would have set it off. If Mort had returned, then he must have deacti-vated the alarm system without

her hearing. Remote control, perhaps?

If it wasn't Mort, then she had to see who was out there.

Wincing, preparing herself for the shriek of the alarm, Jazz stood and backed down a couple of

steps.

Nothing happened. She let out a sigh of relief, then a groan as pins and needles rushed into her leg.

Kneeling, she looked under the door, able to see right across the hallway. The dark-oak floor was highly

polished, broken up here and there with rugs, and across the hall stood at least two closed doors. She turned

and looked to the left, just in time to see a foot lift out of view onto the staircase. It had been wearing

soft-looking shoes, like a dancer's. And now it was gone.

Jazz's heart thumped. Who could it be? Maid? Cleaner? But no, not if Mort had set the alarm on his

way out.

She kept looking for a while, waiting for the foot's owner to come back down. But there was no

more movement.

Another thief? What were the chances of that? But right then it was all she could think of. There

would have been no reason for Mort to set the alarm if he knew there was going to be someone in the

house; therefore, he did not know. So whoever owned that soft-shoed foot was not supposed to be here.

Jazz took a deep breath and considered her options. She could turn around and leave, pick up the

others and go back down below, tell Harry that someone had beaten them to it. But that felt like failure, and

it also meant that she would have no more opportunity to find out about Mort, his relationship with the

mayor, and what it had to do with her and...

Mum. She shouldn't forget her mum. The owner of this house had been there when she was

murdered —not in the same room perhaps, but certainly in the same house. Maybe he'd heard her fighting,

heard her gurgling as her throat was slit and the air rushed from her lungs, blood spewed from her

arteries...

No, if Jazz left now, it was not only knowledge that would elude her. It was some measure of

revenge.

She held the door handle and gently turned it. When she felt the latch disengage, she opened the door

an inch and peered through the crack. The hallway was large, hung with several expensive-looking

paintings and adorned with four huge porcelain vases on their own metal stands. The porce-lain was

cracked and chipped in a couple of places, which meant that they were old and probably worth a lot.

She'd save them for on the way out.

The staircase was wide and it curved up and to the left. Banister and newel posts were ornately

carved from oak and polished to match the hall floor. The stairs ended with a wide landing that overlooked

the hall, and there was no one in sight. Whoever had climbed the stairs was busy exploring the second

floor.

He or she doesn't know I'm here, Jazz thought. Need to keep it that way. She slipped off her

trainers, tied the laces, and slung them around her neck. Her socks left sweaty imprints on the floor as she

walked across the hallway, but by the time she reached the stairs and looked back, they were already

fading away. Like a ghost's, she thought, and smiled.

She stood on the lower stair. The whole first floor was available to her to explore. There could be a

study down here, a drawing room, library, other places where she could find stuff worth taking and perhaps

something that would tell her more about Mort. She fingered the short folding knife in her pocket and looked

at the paintings, and the urge to destroy was great. She hoped that Mort loved this place, hoped that his

parents had handed all these nice things down to him, because she was going to ruin them. Petty and basic,

maybe, but it would make her feel a little bit better.

But upstairs called to her. Whoever the other person in the house was, they seemed to have forsaken

the first floor to go up. Which led Jazz to believe that they knew something she did not.

She climbed the stairs quickly and quietly. The open landing at the top had one door at the end, which

was closed, and beside this another, smaller staircase led up to the third floor. To her right, a corridor

branched away, lit by open doors.

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 blokes 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 back-pack filled with stuff to sell. But she would

also find some-thing 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 lack-ing 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 ex-pression. Her smile was never quite a smile, reminding Jazz of the Mona

Lisa. Some of the settings she recognized be-cause 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 f*ck 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 photo-graphs—but because there was

no way he could be there. No way!

"F*ck," she whispered. "F*ck, f*ck, f*ck..."

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. "F*ck," she said again. She shouldn't be talking, should be moving, but she

didn't under-stand any of this.

Carefully, she lifted the picture from the wall, slipped the rucksack from her shoulder, and dropped it

inside. On im-pulse she walked down the corridor and took another framed photograph of the Uncles. This

one did not contain her fa-ther.

She began to doubt, thinking maybe she'd been mis-taken. 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 pro-grammed 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 car-pet, and then a man stepped into view,

silently, gracefully, al-most 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 land-ing. 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 furnish-ings 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 pur-suit 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 elec-tronic

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, lis-tened, 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 ex-pecting to see another

corridor, narrower perhaps, with fur-ther 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 ceil-ing and a front wall lined with windows.

Close to the door-way, 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 dis-abled 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 al-gae, 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 dan-gerous

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 com-pletely 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 ser-rated, 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 pre-sented her with a

bottle. But still...

She moved quickly, dodging around display pedestals, careful not to nudge them as she passed but

unable to tear her eyes away from the sword. There was something about it... something almost familiar,



yet alien and unsettling. As she reached out and grabbed it with both hands, she knew what that feeling

was.

Here was something powerful, something calling to her like whatever lay behind that metal door and

the blocked-in doorway belowground. There was intense mystery here and* the threat of more things she

could not possibly hope to un-derstand. And there was also the promise of many revelations.

It was as if there were a hundred ghosts crowding her, unseen and unheard yet struggling to

communicate, and it was all she could to do to prevent herself from talking to them there and then. Yes, she

thought, I want to hear you, but not here and not now.

She lifted the sword from its rack. It came easily, almost gratefully, and she turned and hurried back

across the room to the staircase.

Jazz didn't stop to think about what she had done. She had come into this house to thieve, and she

was now leaving with two great mysteries; the photos in her backpack, and this thing nestled in her arms.

She reached the staircase, glanced back at the door the man had disappeared through, and headed

down.

He's still in there, she thought. / might really get away with this.

Down the stairs, onto the landing, and then she heard a sound from above her. A gasp perhaps,

closely followed by one muttered word: "No."

She did not wait to see if he had anything else to say. She ran, all pretense of secrecy thrown to the

wind, holding the sword in both hands as she trotted down the curving stair-case. Soon he would be there at

the corner of her eye, emerg-ing onto the landing and shouting at her to stop, to give him what he had come

for.

When she reached the hallway, she saw the paintings and vases, but any idea she'd had to smash and

slash them now seemed puerile and ineffective. She had the definite feeling that the loss of what she

carried from this house would hurt Mort much more than a shattered pot and a ripped painting.

"Stop," a voice said. She froze in her tracks halfway across the hall to the basement door. The voice

was so re-fined, calm, and commanding that she could do nothing else.

Her heart thumped, pulsing in her ears.

She turned around.

"That's mine," the man said. He was standing up on the landing, leaning on the handrail and looking

down at her with soft, mournful eyes.

Basement? Jazz thought. Then she had a better idea. Risky, but it would give her more of a chance

to get away. There'd be lots of running, lots of trouble, but she thought if she went out the front door, things

might still go her way.

"It's mine now," she said. Then she ran for the door.

She searched for the alarm box and found it next to a row of coat hooks, one of them bearing a

smart jacket. A small gadget hung below it, suspended by stripped wires protrud-ing from a break in the

bottom of the unit. She reached out with the sword and pulled the wires free, and as the deafen-ing shriek

of the alarm cut in, she heard the man shouting one more time.

"No!"

His voice was suddenly filled with agony, as though he'd just seen his nearest and dearest killed.

Jazz glanced back one more time to see him running for the stairs. Then she unlocked the front door,

flung it wide, and ran out into the blazing sunlight.