Mind the Gap (21 page)

“Lamb’s good,” she said. “I assume you know how to cook it properly?” Jazz herself had no idea, but she wanted to appeal to his vanity. Steer him away from trying to trip her up.

His only response was a smile.

The smell in the meat section was similarly heady, the tang of fresh blood blending with fresh fish to provide an aroma that reminded Jazz strangely of the makeup shop. It consumed the atmosphere of the place, and any amount of extract ducts and air-conditioning could not change that.

Jazz berated herself for glancing up at the ceiling. Air-conditioning, yes, and extravagant plasterwork, decorative light fittings, and hams hanging from heavy hooks. But, as Terence had said, there were cameras everywhere in here.

After Terence selected a cut of meat and added even more to his collection of bags, he touched her arm and gently guided her back through the fruit section—more heady smells, more glorious displays—and into the jewelry rooms.

Nothing too extravagant,
he had said.
Nothing too expensive. All the really pricey stuff is well protected, and much of it isn’t even on display. But we’ll not go through this for something cheap.
He told her that he’d leave it up to her what she decided to take. Another test.

They were the perfect happy couple as they passed into the fine-jewelry section. Jazz’s heart sped up at what was to come, and she could feel her senses heightened. It might well be that Terence was testing her. But this, she promised herself, was going to be fun.

“That one’s gorgeous.”

Jazz tapped her fingernail on the glass display cabinet above a tray of necklaces. It held five pieces of jewelry and she was indicating the most garish one, a heavy metal chain with bulky mountings for the five diamonds.

“Which one, madam?” the jewelry manager asked.

“That…Oh, that one’s nice too.”

“Can we see them all?” Terence asked.

Jazz rolled her eyes at the assistant. “Steve!”

Terence held out his hands in a what-can-I-do gesture. “Show her this one, she’ll like that one. Show her that one, she’ll like this one. By the time she chooses, her birthday will be over.” He frowned and leaned forward. “Oh my, that
is
a beautiful piece!” He was examining the assistant’s necklace, a subtle, thin chain with a single sapphire in a tasteful mount. The woman actually blushed, smiling at him just a little too long for comfort.

Jazz smiled inwardly.
Oh yes, she likes him.

“Don’t you think, Lucy?”

Jazz glanced at the woman’s neck and saw a nervous flush starting across her chest. “Quite,” she said.

Terence smiled at the assistant and nodded down at the display case. “Well, we’ll have a look at those,” he said.

Jazz wasn’t sure she liked this I’m-in-charge act from Terence, but it seemed to be working. The assistant barely saw her anymore, and even when she withdrew the tray, unclipped the necklace, and placed it around Jazz’s neck, it was Terence she looked at.

“Not bad,” Terence said.

The woman nodded. “It’s gorgeous. Catches her eyes.”

Her,
not
your.
Jazz batted her eyelids at Terence, knowing that the assistant would not see.

“How much is it?” Jazz asked.

The woman moved back slightly, taking the necklace from Jazz’s throat and laying it out across both of her hands. It caught the artificial lights and dazzled, throwing light a thousand different ways. “This piece is seven thousand pounds,” she said. “It’s quite unique, handmade, and there are matching earrings and a bracelet if you’re interested.”

“Seven thousand,” Jazz said, trying to sound disappointed.
Seven fucking thousand!
she was actually thinking, but she was delighted at her act. Her face did not actually drop, but she feigned sudden disinterest.

“This one looks glorious,” Terence said. “More similar to your own, madam.”

The woman blushed deeper, fussing around as if trying to hide it. “Sorry to say, mine isn’t quite the same quality.”

“Jewelry is given worth by its wearer, not its maker. That’s what I always say.” He was looking right at her and continued to do so until the woman met his gaze. She looked away again, and Jazz saw a brief, wry smile curl his lip.

He knows all about himself,
she thought. But there was a big difference between arrogance and confidence. And, anyway, it was all part of the job.

The woman swapped necklaces and held the second one to Jazz’s throat.

Terence hummed in appreciation.

Jazz asked how much this one was.

“This is nine thousand four hundred,” the woman said. “It really does catch your character, madam. So stylish and modern.”

“Nine thousand,” Jazz said. She reached up and held the necklace. She did not actually force the woman to let go, but still the assistant took one step back, keeping her eyes on the piece.

“Perhaps we should look more in the five-figure range,” Terence said.

Jazz threw him a smile, making sure the woman saw.

“There.” Terence leaned across the glass display case and tapped its top, indicating a piece a couple of trays along from the first.

Jazz placed the second necklace back on the tray with her right hand.

For a second the woman looked away, eyes flitting across Terence’s athletic form, then down to the tray he was pointing to.

Jazz lifted her right hand to her face, scratching an imaginary itch on the side of her nose. The movement caught the woman’s attention, Jazz smiled at her and rolled her eyes again, and with the index and middle fingers of her left hand she lifted another necklace from the first tray.

“Now
this
is the one, Lucy. This is definitely the one.”

Jazz moved to Terence’s side, pocketing the necklace and then clasping her hands in front of her chest, all in the same movement.

“That one?” she said. “Yeah…s’pose…”

The assistant hurriedly locked the first tray away and moved along to them, standing primly while “Steve” and “Lucy” played out their act.

They looked at several more necklaces, and when Terence saw another couple waiting to be served he shrugged, held Jazz’s arms, and looked at her as though she were an unruly child. “What am I going to do with you?” he asked.

What indeed?
Jazz thought, and for a beat he actually scared her again.

“I’m sorry,” Terence said. “If I could have persuaded her to follow your taste…” He pointed at the assistant’s neck again, bringing out more of her flush. “But perhaps next time.”

“I certainly hope so,” the woman said.

Jazz was already walking away, completing the act by leaving first, unfulfilled and petulant. When she glanced back, the woman had moved on to the next couple, standing by while they perused a display of outlandishly priced bracelets.

As Terence approached Jazz, the woman took a long, frank look at his ass. She glanced up and caught Jazz’s eyes, looking away quickly. But there’d been no shame in her expression.
She thinks I’m a spoiled little tramp,
Jazz thought.
Well, fuck her.

They left through the candy shop and bakery, Terence pausing only to buy some floured bread rolls.

Sleight of hand,
Jazz thought.
I magicked it away.
She remembered that vision she had seen several times in the Underground, the Victorian magician who seemed to be looking more intently at her every time she saw him. Sleight of hand, that’s how the greatest tricks were done. Misdirection, skill, confidence. None of the other ghosts paid her any attention at all. None of the others saw her.

Maybe next time, Jazz could show
him
a thing or two.

At the security desk, Terence picked up Jazz’s shoulder bag with a brief but polite thanks. He turned and handed it to Jazz, waiting while she shrugged it back on. Then he invited her to link arms as they exited into the busy streets of London.

A black BMW stopped at the curb. Jazz barely flinched. A tall young woman climbed out, followed by a scruffy man dressed in jeans and T-shirt. He seemed drunk.

Right then, Jazz felt invincible.

“Dinner?” Terence said.

“Of course.” She walked with him, this mysterious stranger who seemed so keen to help change her life. And she realized with a jolt that a sense of invincibility was the surest way to fail his test.

But she could not shed the buzz, nor temper her excitement.

“Are you dangerous?” she asked, relishing the risk inherent in such a question.

He looked at her sidelong. “Deadly.”

“Yeah,” Jazz said. “Pussycat.”

Terence said nothing else all the way home.

Terence’s home was not what Jazz had expected. She’d been thinking of an apartment in the Docklands, a posh flat in Chelsea, or a maisonette in Kensington. Or if not that, then perhaps a big pad somewhere in the country, an easy commute into London but remote enough to be set within a dozen acres, with its own private woodland and lake and a keeper’s house rented out to one of the locals. The country-squire look wouldn’t suit him, but Jazz knew there would be much more to his choice of home than style and location. He had his profession to think about. Wherever he lived would be a big part of his cover.

When they got off the Tube in Tooting and began weaving through a maze of streets, Jazz thought perhaps he was teasing her. Maybe he’d just left his car here (a Porsche? No, too tacky. Mercedes, perhaps). They passed the police station, turned left, and Terence approached a paint-peeled front door.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” he said, slipping in his key and opening the door. An alarm buzzed inside, and he fumbled in his pocket, switching it off with some remote device.

Jazz looked either way along the street. At one end, a white transit van sat on two wheels, the missing two with concrete blocks in their place. At the other end, children played football in the street, shouting and laughing, screeching in startled delight whenever a car came along.

“This isn’t you,” Jazz said, instantly regretting her words.

“Oh?” he asked. “And what exactly
is
me?”

Jazz shrugged.

Terence sighed and looked around. “So are you going to come in? We don’t want my neighbors to think I’m forcing you inside, do we?”

Keep your cool, Jazz,
she thought. She glanced up at the second floor of the house and saw a woman looking down at her, hands resting on the window jambs, net curtains hanging on either side of her face like a funeral veil. The woman did not seem to blink.

“It’s a maisonette,” Terence said. “Mine’s the ground floor.”

Jazz nodded and walked through the door. “Who lives upstairs?” she asked.
No one,
she expected to hear.
Young woman lived there a year ago, but she disappeared and no one’s ever seen her since.

“That’s Janine,” he said. “Did you see her?”

Jazz nodded.

Terence smiled. “She does that. Scares people. Spends hours at that window.”

“She didn’t scare me,” Jazz said, a little too hastily.

“Right.” Terence closed the front door behind him and put his array of carrier bags down in the hallway. “Look, Jasmine, this is my home, and I want you to feel welcome here. You’re on edge. I’m going to cook you a nice meal, and while I do that maybe you’d like to use the bath? I have spare shirts and jeans you can borrow.”

“You want me to have a bath in your place?”

“No…” he said, drawing out the word. “I’m offering you a bath if
you
want one.”

Jazz relaxed then, a loosening of her tensed shoulders that brought a sigh and then a yawn.

Terence breezed by her, passing two doors on his left before entering a small dining room along the corridor. “Bathroom’s back here,” he said. “Shall I start a bath running?”

“Can do,” Jazz said, noncommittal.

She stood in Terence’s hallway, looking at the simple decor—tasteful rugs on the quarry-tiled floor and the pictures on the walls. There was a landscape of somewhere that looked like Cornwall, then a series of prints that reminded her of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of mechanical devices, all cogs and wheels, struts and engines. There was something almost animal-like about them, as if each image was an X-ray vision through something living.

Jazz slipped the bag from her shoulder and set it down at her feet.

“I have some wine,” Terence called.

“No thanks.”

He appeared at the end of the corridor and offered her a gentle smile. “Look…let’s eat. Be at home, really. I promise you, I’m a good guy. No date-rape drugs here, no ulterior motives. And after you’ve rested, and you
believe
that, it’ll be time for us to talk.”

“Talk about what?”

Terence glanced down at Jazz’s bag, then back at her face. “Lots of things.”

The bath was sumptuous—hot, bubbling with foam that gave off the scent of pine and lavender—and the bathroom filled with steam, clouding the mirrors and condensing on tiles and window.

Jazz stood at its center for a moment, looking around at the small, sparse space and wondering whether she really knew anything about Terence at all. He was involved, that much was certain, and he had spoken of some “apparatus” as though Jazz should know about it. Her mother had taught her never to believe in coincidences; there was something about that blade, Mort’s house, and Harry’s involvement with the Blackwood woman that Terence must know.

She looked at the door. There was no lock on it, and that made her anxious, but she also felt a thrill, because she knew what this was. “Another test,” she whispered, and the steam swirled before her like dancing ghosts. So she stripped off the new clothes she’d nicked that morning, dropped them in a pile beside the bath, and stepped in.

Jazz sank down into the hot water and bubbles, sighing as she was enveloped in pure luxury. How long since she’d had a bath? She’d almost lost track. She lay there for a while with her eyes closed and mouth slightly open, leaning her head back against the bath and hearing the whisper of bubbles bursting all around her. She imagined each bubble having a story, all trying to tell her their tales.

From along the corridor she heard the steady sound of Terence chopping ingredients for their meal. He started whistling, then broke into a song, immediately cutting off after two lines. Maybe he’d forgotten she was here.

“You can carry on!” she called.

She heard him laugh. “I’m no Pavarotti.”

“Sing me a song.”

He was silent for a while but for the chop and scrape of his meal preparation. A saucepan lid rattled, she heard the click-roar of a gas flame being lit, and then water ran into a metal container.

“I really can’t sing,” he said at last.

Jazz felt strangely disappointed. But as she drifted into a light doze, buoyed by the beautifully warm water, there was something comfortable about the continuing silence.

“Men,” her mother said. She stared at her daughter, sitting across from her in the restaurant. Jazz was fourteen at the time. She picked at her food. She’d never been a fan of pasta, but her mother loved Italian, so Jazz never complained.

“What about them?” Jazz asked after a while. Her mother had muttered the word and left it hanging there, as though it would expound on itself.

Her mum sighed. “I suppose I need to talk to you about them.”

Jazz laughed. She couldn’t help it.

“Mum,” she said, “I know all about
that
!”

Her mother ate another mouthful of lasagne. As she chewed she looked at Jazz, examining her face, her hair, her mouth and neck. “You’re such a beauty,” she said.

Jazz posed prettily and fluttered her eyelashes. “Follow my mum.”

“Of course you do.” Her mum put her fork down and glanced around, her expression neutral. It was like a nervous tic her mother had developed. Jazz hoped she never ended up that paranoid, that afraid.

“You may know about
that,
but not what leads to it. There’s sex and there’s seduction. One is an act and one an art, and you need to be able to identify and deal with the artist.”

“Okay,” Jazz said. “Let me have a guess. A Dali would woo me with his intellect, a Picasso would make me see things in a different way, and a Warhol would just show me his dick.”

“Jasmine!” her mum said, but she was smiling.

“I have an appreciation of art, Mother.”

“You’ve done it at school, you mean. There’s lots more to it, sweetie. You can learn about geography sitting in the classroom, but there’s nothing like actually going places to get a true understanding.”

“Fine. So…men?”

Her mother sighed, and for an instant her eyes were taken with that wretched look of sadness that filled them from time to time. She truly scared Jazz then, because she thought her mother was seeing the future, visualizing where this strange life of theirs would someday lead. “Trust is hard to come by,” she said.

“You tell me that all the—”

“I mean it! Trust
no
one, Jazz!”

“What,
ever?
”

“Never! You can’t, sweetie. They’ll tell you you’re beautiful and buy you such things, sing to you and take you places. But you can’t put your fate in anyone else’s hands. That’s especially true of men. And more so when the men are trying to seduce you.”

Terence knocked on the bathroom door. “You awake in there?”

“Am now.” Jazz sat up, startled, and her eyes flicked to the unlocked door.

“Dinner’s bubbling away nicely. You’ve got about fifteen minutes.”

“Right.” She wiped her hands across her face.
Damn, that was stupid of me!

As she climbed from the bath, dried, and dressed in the clothes Terence had laid out for her, Jazz smelled the mouthwatering scents of dinner drifting under the door. Cooking meat, spices, and baking bread. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. With the United Kingdom she usually ate food that could be cooked in a microwave. On rare occasions, Harry fried sausages or steaks under a vent. They never went hungry, but when Harry was in one of his more paranoid moments, he made them eat cold, afraid that the smells of cooking would give them away to someone higher up. Meal times had been quiet, the food eaten quickly and from necessity rather than any real desire.

She guessed that now things would be different.

Dried and dressed, she exited the bathroom and walked through into the kitchen. Terence was at the cooker, stirring something in a large frying pan and whistling softly again.

“Nice bath?”

“Very, thank you.”

“No problem.” He glanced up at her and smiled, looking her fleetingly up and down, taking in the rolled-up jeans and shirtsleeves. “They look better on you.”

“More my sort of clothes anyway. I don’t usually dress up. What’s the apparatus?”

“Oh,” he said. He continued stirring, bobbing pieces of meat beneath the surface of the thick, aromatic sauce. “I had rather thought we could chat over dinner.”

“Okay,” Jazz said. “I’ll help you serve it up. I’ve done everything you wanted today, and I think I’ve passed the tests pretty well.”

“Tests?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Don’t piss me around, Terence.”

He blinked. “I hoped you would emerge from the bath calmed and laid back.”

“I am calm. But ever since meeting you, I’ve felt like I’m in the middle of something huge, and it’s all rotating around me. Does that make sense?”

Terence nodded and sighed, a sad sound that reminded Jazz of her mother. “It does. Pass me that spoon, would you?”

Jazz removed two plates that had been warming in the oven and watched Terence serve their meal. He did it without any arty flourishes, yet he had created a dish that would not have looked out of place in any restaurant Jazz had ever been to. Bowls of saffron rice, ladles of curried lamb, its sauce containing red peppers and roughly chopped shallots, and on the side, dishes of onion bhajis splashed with mint sauce. Jazz helped him carry the plates to the table, then he returned to the kitchen and emerged with several jars of chutneys.

“You don’t make your own?” Jazz asked, making a big point of examining the label on one of the jars.

Terence shook his head. “I know my limitations. Making chutney is an art, and no artist is good at every discipline.”

“What’s your art?”

“I would have thought that was obvious.” He forked in the first mouthful and sighed in genuine appreciation of his own cooking.

“Stealing is an art?”

Terence paused with the next mouthful raised halfway. “You seriously ask me that?”

Jazz shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

He pointed at her plate with his fork. “You’re not going to try?”

She collected up some lamb and rice, made sure it was liberally coated in the sauce, and popped it in her mouth. It tasted heavenly. She half-closed her eyes as she chewed, making approving noises, using the side of her fork to slice off a portion of the bhaji and ready it for her next mouthful. That was equally superb.

“Is there anything you’re not good at?” She hated herself for asking, but damn him, he’d prepared a feast in the time it took her to have a bath.

“Chutney.”

Jazz smiled. “So,” she said, resisting talking through another mouthful. “The apparatus.”

“Hmm.” Terence chewed and looked up into the corner of the dining room, thoughtful and contemplative. “Well…that blade you stole is part of it.”

“Right. So it’s a weapon.”

“Oh no, not a weapon! And that’s not really a blade. It’s a gear.”

“So what does it do?”

Terence ate some more, chewing slowly and taking a sip of wine. He had not asked her again whether she wanted any, and Jazz was beginning to regret saying no. He examined her frankly, staring as though trying to see past her outer self to the real Jazz beneath.
This
is
the real me,
she thought. She wondered whether he heard.