Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1)

Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1) Page 19

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.

Chapter Twelve

intersection

The burglar alarm wailed like an air-raid signal. Jazz flew down the front steps, desperation mixing with a strange eu-phoria as she tucked the blade into her rucksack. She heard the thief shouting after her, but if he thought a harsh word would stop her, he was a fool. A black taxi cruised by and a courier scooter whipped past, but the streets around Willow Park had little traffic this time of day. That didn't mean there were no witnesses, though. An old woman out walking her dog stopped to stare. Two mothers picnicked in the park, one with a little girl playing on the grass beside her and the other with a baby sleeping in a pram.

The alarm woke the baby, who started to cry.

A well-dressed man stood on the far corner, a mobile phone clapped to his ear. He turned his back and covered his other ear, far too intent upon his conversation to be distracted by something as mundane as daylight robbery.

Jazz glanced back as she crossed the street. The thief shrugged on his jacket and stuffed something —gloves, perhaps—into his shoulder bag as he trotted along the side walk, appearing for all the world like a businessman in a hurry, no less ordinary than the self-important fool on his mobile half a block away. He'd shut the door behind him. The alarm still blared and he cast a casual, almost annoyed look back at the house he'd just tried to rob. Other than the handful of people who must have seen him emerge, no one would have thought him responsible.

"Fuck," Jazz whispered. One glance around revealed that everyone in the park and on the street had their eyes on her. Even the old woman's yappy dog focused on her, bark-ing madly.

She ought to have played it cool until she was out of sight, like the suave bastard stepping briskly along the side-walk parallel to her as she reached the other side of the street. But it was too late for subtlety. She leaped onto the sidewalk and kept running past a posh restaurant. Most of Mayfair consisted of luxury hotels, office space, and resi-dences that had once housed nobility or ministry officials. Some still did. But London was a rat's warren of alleys, even in Mayfair. She had to vanish as quickly as possible, before the police arrived.

A familiar whistle drew her attention. Jazz looked up and saw Hattie coming toward her, head adorned with a pink felt hat with fake flowers pinned to the brim. She ducked into a dress shop and Jazz followed.

"Annie, there you are, love!" Hattie said excitedly, em-bracing her for the benefit of the shopgirls.

Her hand clutched the strap of Jazz's bag, which was heavy with the strange blade and the other shiny bits she'd taken from Uncle Mort's house. "Give us the bag," she whispered.

"Lovely hat," Jazz said in reply. She snatched it off Hattie's head and plopped it on her own, then slipped out of her sweatshirt and handed it over. "Leave me the bag, go."

Hattie might have suffered a certain amount of brain slippage, but she wasn't daft. The girl nodded, pulled on the sweatshirt and zipped it, then hurried out of the shop. She turned back the way Jazz had come.

From inside, Jazz peered out of the shop windows. The thief had been marching toward the door, but now he al-tered course toward Hattie. Even as he reached her, another figure hurried along the sidewalk —Mr. Stevie Sharpe. As the thief reached for Hattie, Stevie purposely collided with him. The man ought to have fallen, but he spun away from the impact, reached out and grabbed Stevie by the wrist, and then cuffed him in the temple.

Stevie staggered backward. The thief —looking like a stockbroker or barrister—tried again to get hold of Hattie. This time Stevie didn't bother trying to make it look like an accident. He tackled the man, and the two of them spilled into the street. A screech of tires followed as a taxi skidded to a halt, slewing sideways.

"Can I help you, miss?" one of the shopgirls asked.

Jazz did not even glance at them, hoping they wouldn't be able to recognize her face if she managed to get nicked for this.

She went out the door, turned right, and hurried along past a jeweler's and a men's clothing store.

When she reached the corner, she turned right again and broke into a run, darted diagonally across the street, and slipped into the service alley behind the Grand Jubilee Hotel. Her trainers were nearly silent on the pavement. An enormous black Dumpster sat by the hotel's loading dock, and she had to fight the temptation to toss away Hattie's pink bonnet. The girl would never forgive her.

After the hotel, the alley went behind a pair of older buildings, lovely Georgian structures transformed into of-fices. The alley narrowed here, but she hurried on. Her tem-ples throbbed and her heart pounded, but a grin began to spread across her face as she switched her bag from one shoulder to the other. Things had not gone as planned. Things had, in fact, been completely bollixed by the arrival of that handsome thief.

Now that she was away and the ter-ror of capture had passed, she almost felt giddy. The bloke had been startlingly good-looking. Some of the girls she knew had been attracted to their teachers, but older men had never done a thing for her, save the occasional actor. This one, though... She'd liked the way his eyes flashed with anger.

Not that she wanted him to catch her. That was the very last thing she wanted. From the way he'd sought the sword that she now carried, and the fury in his voice when she'd stolen it right from under his nose, she thought he might do anything to get it back. That made him a very dangerous man, indeed.

She'd been damn lucky. Setting off the alarm hadn't bought her the head start she'd hoped. Stevie, Hattie, Gob, and Switch had been meant to take turns looking out for her with some of the others, but Jazz wasn't supposed to leave the house until the mark returned home in the early evening. If Hattie and Stevie hadn't been alert when the whole thing went tits up, she never would've gotten away from the guy.

Hope they're all right, she thought. Particularly, she hoped Stevie was all right. By now the police would have re-sponded to the alarm. The thief wouldn't have stayed be-hind to turn in her friends for fear of witnesses reporting him fleeing from the house. One way or another, they'd all be away by now.

The question was, how much damage had the thief done Stevie before taking off?

The alley ended ahead. Jazz clutched the strap of the bag tightly and stepped onto the street, turned right, and dropped into a brisk walk. Now would be a terrible time to draw attention to herself —though the pink flowered hat would be conspicuous enough.

No shouts greeted her emergence and no sirens blared.

At the next corner she crossed the street into a narrow arcade of trendy boutiques and gift shops. A small Italian restaurant and an antiquarian bookstore stood at the end of the arcade, where a fruit-seller had set up a cart on one side and another bloke sold flowers on the other. The arcade let out on a main road where traffic roared past in both direc-tions, belching exhaust fumes and snatches of music.

Jazz joined the bustle on the sidewalk and made her way to the light at the corner. Across the street was Green Park. Jazz caught a glimpse of a man in the crowd waiting to cross. Thin and dapperly dressed, he carried a shoulder bag much like the thief's. She hesitated, but then the light changed and the throng began to move, and she saw that this was a much older man with pug Irish features and glasses.