Mind the Gap (8 page)

But then she saw what was happening.

“I’ll get her, mister!” Stevie said. And he took off after Hattie.

Cadge did not break pace at all. He slipped into the shop behind the man, casual but quiet, and Jazz followed him in a few seconds later. The man’s attention was focused wholly on the fleeing girl and the boy who had given chase, and he was thumbing a number into his mobile phone as he watched.

The law,
Jazz thought.
And they’ll not take long to get here.

Cadge was moving smoothly and confidently, and Jazz took a second to scope out the shop. Gob had already been here three days before and so they knew the layout: two island units, three aisles, one main counter. Jazz was pleased to see just one woman behind the counter and no other customers. The man remained outside.

Cadge walked right up to the counter and looked the flustered woman in the eye. “I’d like some condoms, please,” he said. “Ribbed.”

“Oh, well…er…” The woman lowered her eyes and moved along to the other end of the counter, pointing along the side aisle to Jazz’s right.

Jazz grabbed a handful of small boxes containing painkillers, two boxes of plasters, and some cough medicine, slipping them into her pockets as she browsed slowly along the shelves.

“Where?” Cadge asked from out of sight.

“Just there…er…past the aftershave.”

“Can’t see ’em.”

Jazz rounded the island unit, smiling in mock sympathy at the obviously embarrassed woman, and entered the central aisle. Cadge was beyond the second island unit, rustling boxes and dropping several of them to the floor.

“Hold on,” the woman said, and Jazz heard the sound she had been waiting for: the creak and bump of the counter hatch being opened and the woman coming to help. She heard her footsteps and Cadge mumbling something. The woman sighed.

Jazz took three paces to the counter, sat on it and rolled over, falling behind and remaining on the floor for a couple of terrifying seconds.

“Nah, I don’t like that make,” Cadge said, and Jazz grinned at the cheek in his voice. “Itchy.”

“Well, please make up your…we’ve just had a girl take some…Oh dear.”

Jazz crouched down and ducked behind the obscured glass screen that separated the pharmacy storage area from the rest of the shop. Harry had told her what to look for: amoxicillin. She scanned the drawer tags, looked at the bottles already full and half full on the stainless-steel counter, then saw the name just as she heard the man’s voice again.

“Little bitch took off like a bat out of hell,” he said. “Boy went after her; wouldn’t be surprised if he was part of it. Law are on their way. Jean?”

“Over here, Terry, just trying to help this young man.”

He’s back inside!
Jazz had hoped for at least another thirty seconds before the owner came back in. Maybe they were used to thefts. Just another part of life as a pharmacist.

She was suddenly terrified.
If I get caught and the police get me…

They’re all in it together,
her mother had said.
All tied up, dropping money in one another’s pockets, and information, and…other stuff. Promises. So promise me, Jazz, that you’ll never trust anyone.

If the police got her, the Uncles wouldn’t be too far behind.

“Johnnies!” Cadge suddenly shouted, wielding a packet of condoms, and Jazz heard rapid footsteps as he, too, ran from the shop.

“Wait!” the woman, Jean, shouted.

“Little bastard!” The man’s voice faded again as he went back outside, obviously chasing after Cadge.

Jazz snatched up the bottle marked
amoxicillin
and walked to the counter again, sliding across and heading straight down the central aisle. She pocketed the bottle just as she bumped into Jean emerging from the side aisle with a box of condoms still clasped in each hand.

“Busy day today!” Jazz said.

The woman rolled her eyes skyward. “I sometimes wonder why I stay working here,” she said. “Last year it was a man with a knife.”

“It’s only stuff,” Jazz said. “And I’m sure he’s insured. Bye!” She exited the shop and turned right, not walking too fast or slow, not looking around, trying to appear for all the world as though she belonged.

Jazz was amazed at how smoothly things had gone. Harry had told her that people were easily fooled because they were never prepared for things to go wrong and that confusion was the United Kingdom’s best tool when working on a nick. And now Jazz had seen how right he was. A bit of chaos, a bit of misdirection, and the man and woman in the chemist had been thrown off-kilter long enough for her to lift what needed lifting. It was a delightful ruse: get them concerned with Hattie taking a few minor items so that she, Jazz, could slip across the counter and take what they really wanted.

Infections were common down in the beneath, and amoxicillin was essential to ward off illness caused by all the bacteria crawling around down there.

She walked confidently through the streets, aiming for the rendezvous she had arranged with Cadge. Stevie and Hattie would be long gone now, heading back belowground and through the Tube and tunnels to their home shelter. Though Jazz still felt exposed out here on the streets, she was enjoying the feeling of sunshine on her skin.

“Jazz.” The voice was low, called from the shadows of an alley, and Jazz froze in her tracks. Someone walked into her and uttered a curse under his breath, but then the crowd parted around her. She was as invisible to the crowds as she ever had been, but…

“Jazz, in here.”

An Uncle? She should run. She looked to her left and right without turning her head, spotting at least three escape routes, marking the side road thirty yards along the street as the most likely to lead her somewhere safe. The road was busy here, and she would dart across without checking for traffic. It moved slow; if something hit her, she’d just roll and keep running.

And then she realized how much she was fooling herself. This Uncle hidden down an alley wouldn’t be on his own, and soon they’d close in and—

“Fuck’s sake, girl, in here!”

Jazz looked into the shadows and saw the unmistakable outline of Stevie Sharpe. As she saw him, he stepped forward and grabbed her arm, guiding her into the alley and walking quickly away without saying anything. She assumed she had to follow.

They passed a pile of refuse with split bags spewing rotting food and alive with flies. Jazz held her breath and waved the flies away, but Stevie seemed unperturbed.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

Stevie stopped and turned, looked over Jazz’s shoulder, and then stared at her. His expression barely changed as he gave her a frank, shameless appraisal. He examined her face, her shoulders, arms, chest, down her body and legs, then back up again very, very slowly. It felt as though it went on forever. Her tingle of anticipation changed to one of discomfort, but then he spoke at last. She even thought she saw the ghost of a smile.

“Did good today,” he said. He looked down at her pockets and she tapped them, assuring him she had what they had come for. “Did good.” Then he gave her a casual wave, turned, and ran along the alley.

“Wait!” Jazz called.

“See you back home!” he shouted over his shoulder, and she was sure she heard a laugh as he disappeared around a corner.

Jazz hurried back onto the street, more ruffled than she had been since first emerging into the sunlight a couple of hours before. She was sure her expression would give her away—
Hi, I’m a thief and I’m on the run, but not just from people I’ve thieved from—
and she walked faster, head down as though to deflect attention.

What had that been about? There’d been no reason for Stevie to hold back and see her. Even the muttered
Did good today
was something that could have come much later, deep beneath the city. There had only been that look, examining her,
perusing
her, and, much as she liked Stevie, she still felt unsettled.

She turned a corner and a police siren suddenly blasted through the air. She gasped and almost stumbled back as the white car sped by, curious tourists staring after it, seasoned Londoners using the brief distraction to move that much faster toward their destination.

I’m getting way too damn twitchy now,
she thought. The boxes and bottle in her pockets felt heavier than ever, begging to attract attention even though they could not be seen. She was at least a mile from the chemist and there was no chance she’d be caught, but the sky was suddenly way too wide, the buildings too tall, and the people too likely to stop, turn to her, and say,
It’s her, there she is, take her!

She did not want to think about who would respond to such a call.

“Jazz?” Cadge said.

She jumped a little, then sighed. Jazz grabbed his shoulder and pulled him close, enjoying the contact as they hugged.

“Hey,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

“Bit spooked,” she said.

“You were late, so I started walking down this way.” He pulled away and looked into her eyes, but he did not spook her like Stevie. She could only find benevolence in Cadge. “I was getting worried.”

I should mention Stevie,
Jazz thought.
There’s no reason not to, is there?
But she simply shrugged and looked around, glancing up at the clear blue sky.

“Got you this.” He handed her a small box, blushing, turning away as she held out her hand and accepted whatever the gift might be.

It was a pink box with gold lettering:
Beautiful.

“Said you liked it,” he said.

Jazz felt tears threatening, but she held them back. She nodded, unable to speak for a few seconds, and the sharp reality of the box’s weight and corners pinned her to the world. “Thanks,” she said at last, and it came out husky and gruff.

Cadge nodded, but he could not keep the smile from his face.

“Really,” Jazz said. She looked at the box again and remembered what these boxes had looked like on her mum’s dressing table, the way she’d always kept the perfume inside instead of disposing with the box and just keeping the bottle, the way she had liked the fact that however empty the bottle might be, the box always looked new. “Really, Cadge, thanks.”

He nodded, face flushed. “Pleasure,” he said. “Now it’s time to go. We’re not far from Oxford Circus here. And Harry’ll be waiting for us when we go down.”

“Harry?”

“Told me he’d meet us. He does that sometimes, especially with someone new.”

“Why?”

Cadge shrugged but looked away. “Sometimes Harry likes to talk in private.”

He would not be drawn out any more, so Jazz followed Cadge along the bustling streets and into Oxford Circus Tube station. As the shadows cooled around her, she felt a calm sense of relief closing in with them.

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Good. That’s good. But why?”

“Because you’re my mother, of course.” Jazz didn’t like the way her mum’s conversation was going this morning. They’d started out commenting on the architecture of Oxford Street, but now they sat in the back corner of a coffee shop and her mother had embarked on one of her lectures. At least Jazz thought it was likely to turn into a lecture. It had that feel: a difficult question, followed by a few moments of silence, and soon would come her mother’s sad expression and alert eyes as she started to speak of hidden dangers, covert groups, and the risks of trying to live a normal life.
Life for us can never be normal,
she’d said during one of these discussions a couple of years ago, and Jazz had never forgotten that. Out of all the advice her mother had given her, it was this statement that stuck most in her mind. Sometimes she hated her mum for telling her that. Surely such harsh truths were something a girl should find out on her own?

“That’s not good enough reason to trust me,” her mother said. “Lots of kids trust their parents and are inevitably betrayed by them. It’s a word bandied around too readily nowadays, like
love,
and
fate,
and
hate
. But it’s a precious thing. Analyze your trust, Jazz. Study it. Does it have rough edges, or is it thoughtless and complete? Because nature abhors sharp edges, so something with them can’t be natural.”

“You’d never betray me,” Jazz said firmly. She was starting to feel upset and anxious at the way this was going.
Mum was her bedrock! Her solid pedestal from which she was starting to live life as an adult!

Her mum smiled. “No, I wouldn’t. But if I was someone else, just because I never have betrayed you doesn’t mean I never would.”

“You’re scaring me, Mum.”

One of the coffee-shop staff paused by the next table, cleared away mugs and sandwich wrappers, and started polishing its surface. The silence was uncomfortable, and the young girl threw them a nervous glance and hurried away, the table still smeared and dirty.

“Don’t be scared,” she said. “Be warned. You’re the only person you can really, truly trust.
You.
The
only
one. You’ll need to be careful, Jazz, as you get older. Make sure you’re certain of people’s intentions toward you.”

“You mean boys?”

“I mean everyone.” Her mother looked suddenly sad then, and Jazz was mortified when she saw tears in the woman’s eyes. “You can never really know someone.”

“Mum?”

She shook her head and waved Jazz away, dabbing at her eyes. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” But she didn’t look fine. And that brief, intense conversation about trust stayed with Jazz for a long, long time.

Harry was waiting for them below the surface, behind the grubby wall and bulky grate at the end of the station platform. He was alone. He carried two heavy torches, and he gave them to Cadge and Jazz. He trusted them to light his way.

“A good nick today, Jazz girl?”

Jazz produced the boxes of painkillers, plasters, cough mixture, and antibiotics. She kept the Beautiful to herself.

“Nice!” Harry said. “Nice, my pets. I don’t like the thought of my kids being ill, not when they’re such an
honest
bunch.”

The word
honest
was a strange one, Jazz thought, as applied to a bunch of thieves. But it also made her proud. They might nick things, but they were all honest to one another. At least,
almost
all of them. The image of Stevie Sharpe hidden in the alley shadows had failed to leave her, and being down here in the dark only seemed to make it more solid.

“It went okay,” Jazz said. “Cadge had to do a runner too, but I had the stuff by then. And I left without them even suspecting me.”

“And what did
you
fetch, Cadge lad?”

“Nuthin’.”

Jazz frowned—she remembered him running with a box of condoms in his hand. But she kept walking and did not look at the boy.

“Nothing at all?” Harry asked.

“Dropped it,” Cadge said.
And I wonder how scarlet he is right now?
Jazz thought.
These shadows are good for hiding a lot.

They veered left into a disused tunnel, walked for a hundred yards, and came to an abandoned station platform. From there they made their way down an old maintenance staircase, hearing the rustle of rats retreating before the wash of their flashlights. Cockroaches scurried out of sight. In the drier tunnels, they were rarer, but in the damp, rotting places, cockroaches and other bugs were plentiful. Jazz forced herself not to take much notice of them.

The stairs were slippery here, layered with a thin green slime, and at the bottom of the staircase a curtain of water fell in a continuous waterfall. Harry produced a small retracting umbrella from his pocket, opened it up, and diverted the water far enough for Jazz and Cadge to step through. “One of the oldest water-distribution systems in the world, down here,” he said as he stepped through. “More water leaks into the ground than reaches Londoners’ taps.” He brushed a few droplets of water from his coat shoulders. “Lucky for us, eh? Free water whenever we want it. I only wish they could heat some of it for us. Then life would be grander than grand, eh, Cadge?”

“Life’s grand as it is, Mr. F.”

“It has its moments, for sure.”

Something rattled in the distance and Cadge spun around. They were at one end of a short brick-lined tunnel, and the steel door at the other end was twisted open. The noise came from beyond.

Rats?
Jazz wondered.
A train in the distance?
She was already becoming familiar with how strange the noises were down here.

“It’s nothing,” Harry said.

Cadge glanced at Jazz and smiled. “Really was a good nick,” he said. “You’re becoming an expert.”

“I think she has the light hands and gentle touch of a thief, for sure,” Harry said. He squeezed Jazz’s shoulder. “I think you’ll go far.”

“I’m still not sure…” she said, but she trailed off.

“Still not sure you want to stay,” Harry finished for her. “That’s to be expected, and I honor that, Jazz girl. Honor it completely. If ever it’s time for you to go, you’ll go with our blessing. I tell that to all my kids, and I mean it.”

Cadge walked ahead of them, pretending to check out the open doorway.

“I’m certainly not going yet,” she said. Cadge turned around and smiled.

Something screeched in the distance. It seemed to come in from a long way off. Jazz was already learning to judge sound down here, and this one had lost many of its lower frequencies, swallowed by concrete, brickwork, and the solid rock of London’s legs.

The smile froze on Cadge’s face. Harry cocked his head and frowned. “Mr. F.?”

The screech came again and Harry shook his head. “No, Cadge. I think it’s just metal on metal. Something collapsing somewhere far off, maybe. Or perhaps someone else taking a secret tunnel to somewhere we don’t know.”

“Collapsing?” Jazz asked.

Harry nodded. “Old places down here, Jazz. And some bits are older than you believe. Sometimes it’s just time to fade away.”

“Sounded like a scream to me,” Cadge said. “And comin’ closer.”

Harry shook his head again. “I’ve heard it often enough,” he said.

“Heard what?” Jazz felt scared and excluded, and she looked back and forth from Harry to Cadge.

“Hour of Screams,” Cadge said.

The phrase chilled her, the echo of Cadge’s voice fading away to nothing in her ears.

“You mentioned that the other day,” she said, then turned to Harry. “Cadge told me I should ask you about it, but I’d forgotten. Is that what we just heard?”

Harry frowned at Cadge. “Not at all.” Then he turned to Jazz again. “Walk with us. Let’s get back to the kingdom. I wanted to tell you about this in my own time, in my own way. But it seems young Cadge has preempted me.”

“Sorry, Harry,” Cadge said.

“Don’t apologize, lad. It’s good to be worried about the Hour of Screams. Good to be scared. It’s something not to be trusted.”

Jazz thought of her mother’s advice on trust, and how precious it was, and how easily it was given out nowadays.
I trust Cadge,
she thought. And the idea gave her great comfort.

As they shone their torches ahead and Harry began to talk, Jazz reached out and held the boy’s hand.

“It’s something we’ve learned to live with,” Harry said, “though no one was meant to live with it. I would’ve told you about it earlier but, truth be told, it’s been months since we’ve had the Hour of Screams come through. I should’ve warned you sooner, Jazz. I’ve been meaning to. Just didn’t want to scare you off.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s a dead thing, the Hour. An old, dead thing.”

“I don’t understand,” Jazz said. “Is this about the…echoes?”

Harry frowned, shot a glance at Cadge, and then refocused on Jazz. “You hear them too, do you, or has Cadge just been speaking out of school?”

“I hear them,” she said, thinking how strange it was to be speaking so normally about something she would have thought impossible not long ago. But her perception of the possible and the impossible had changed radically of late. “Sometimes I
see
things too.”

He studied her. “What things?”

“Like silhouettes. Just flickers, really,” she lied, though she wasn’t sure why she withheld the truth. It felt personal to her. Intimate. “I thought they were ghosts.”

“Perhaps they are. But either way, they’re old things, whispering down here the way the beams and boards in an old house will creak when the wind blows. Nothing to concern yourself with.”

Jazz hesitated a moment, then forged ahead. “You’ve seen them too?”

“A glimpse now and again,” Harry admitted, still watching her curiously. Then the moment passed and he waved a hand as though to erase the conversation. “Nothing to worry about, though. I don’t talk about the echoes with the others. They’ve enough superstition among them already. But everyone knows what I’ll be telling you now, Jazz girl. It’s the Hour you’ve got to be careful of. Just because things have been quiet down here doesn’t mean they’ll
stay
quiet.”

Cadge led the way through the twisted steel door and into a huge circular tunnel, which had been ground into the rock and unlined. There were not even any supports built here for line and platform. It was unfinished rather than abandoned; this place had never formed a true part of the Tube. Perhaps a plan had been drawn wrong, or money had run out, but this was a route that led nowhere. There was graffitti on one wall, but it had faded with time, washed away by a continuous trickle of water penetrating the tunnel at its highest point and following the curve.

“We call it the Hour of Screams,” Harry said. “Though it doesn’t last an hour, and sometimes it’s more a long sigh than a scream. It echoes through the Underground—at least, through all those places hidden away, where people aren’t supposed to be or even know about. Or where there are people like us. Because in a way, I suppose some of us are as lost as the spirits that make the scream.”

“Spirits?” Jazz asked. “But you said you didn’t think—”

“It’s old London that cries out, young Jazz. You know the saying,
If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make any noise at all?
The Hour of Screams is a bit like that falling tree. It happens whether there’s anyone to hear it or not, because it’s just a part of how things must be. Trees grow, age, and die, and then they fall. So it is with history. History’s all about rise and fall, you know that, girl?”

Jazz did not respond, because she thought it was a question that did not call for an answer.

“Everyone knows about the Hour of Screams,” Cadge said from ahead, as if anticipating her thoughts.

“True,” Harry said. “But not everyone knows not to listen. To hear it is…painful. Perhaps damaging. I’ve seen people driven mad, and some of them never get better, Jazz. It touches them and leaves something of itself in them; living people shouldn’t bear the burdens of the dead. When I first came down here—before the United Kingdom came together, when I was on my own—the Hour screamed through one day. The lady I’d hooked up with for a while, Kathryn, she refused to cover her ears, refused to sing her song. Said she was proud. Well, proud she may have been, but after the screams she was mad as well. She ran. Tried to catch her, but she ran faster than I. She went deeper than I ever had or have since, and for all I know she’s still running and still going deeper.”

“You said she’d be dead by now,” Cadge said.

Harry nodded and sighed again. “And I’m sure she is. But still I wonder, and hope.”

“But what
is
the Hour of Screams?” Jazz asked. “You say spirits, but what spirits?”

“Old London,” Harry said. “The restless spirit of the old city, wailing in grief. In pain too. No one knows for sure, not even I. But perhaps it’s the remnants of London’s past not yet at rest: people, places, events, dark deeds, and there are plenty of those. The tiring soul of one of the world’s oldest cities.”