Chapter One
little birds
Even before she saw the house, Jazz knew that something was wrong. She could smell it in the air, see it in the shifting shadows of the trees lining the street, hear it in the expectant silence. She could feel it in her bones.
Dread gave her pause, and for a moment she stood and listened to the stillness. She wanted to run, but she told her-self not to be hasty, that her mother had long since hardwired her for paranoia and so her instincts should be trusted.
She hurried along a narrow, overgrown alleyway that emerged into a lane behind the row of terraced town houses. Not many people came this way, out beyond the gardens, and she was confident that she could move closer to home without being seen.
But seen by whom?
Her mother's voice rang through her head: Always assume there's someone after you until you prove there isn't. Maybe everyone had that cautionary voice in the back of their mind; their conscience, their Jiminy Cricket. For Jazz, it always sounded like her mother.
She walked along the path, carefully and slowly, avoiding piles of dog shit and the glistening shards of used needles. Every thirty seconds she paused and listened. The dreadful si-lence had passed and the sounds of normalcy seemed to fill the air again. Mothers shouted at misbehaving children, ba-bies hollered, doors slammed, dogs barked, and TVs blared inanely into the spaces between. She let out a breath she hadn't been aware of holding. Maybe the heat and grime of the city had gotten to her more than usual today.
Trust your instincts, her mother would say.
"Yeah, right." Jazz crept along until she reached her home's back gate, then paused to take stock once more. The normal sounds and smells were still there, but, beyond the gate, the weighted silence remained. The windows were dark and the air felt thick, the way it did before a storm. It was as if her house was surrounded by a bubble of stillness, and that in itself was disquieting. Perhaps she's just asleep, Jazz thought. But, more unnerved than ever, she knew she should take no chances.
She backed along the alley for a dozen steps and waited outside her neighbor's gate. She peered through a knothole in the wood, scoping the garden. The house seemed to be silent and abandoned, but not in the same ominous fashion as her own. Birds still sang in this garden. She knew that Mr. Barker lived alone, that he went to work early and re-turned late every day. So unless his cleaners were in, his house would be deserted.
"Good," Jazz whispered. "It'll turn out to be nothing, but..." But at least it'll relieve the boredom.. To and from school, day in, day out, few real friends, and her mother constantly on edge even though the Uncles made sure they never had any financial worries. No worries at all, the Uncles always said___ Yeah, it'd turn out to be nothing, but better to be careful. If she ever told her mother she'd had some kind of dreadful intuition, even in the slightest, and had ignored it, the woman would be furious. Her mother trusted no one, and even though Jazz couldn't help but follow her in those beliefs, still she sometimes hated it. She wanted a life. She wanted friends.
She opened Mr. Barker's gate. The wall between their gardens was too high to see over, and from the back of his garden she could see only two upstairs windows in her house —her own bedroom window and the bathroom next to it. She looked up for a few seconds, then brashly walked the length of the garden to Barker's back door.
Nobody shouted, nobody came after her. The neigh-borhood noise continued. But to her left, over the wall, that deathly silence persisted.
Something is wrong, she thought.
Mr. Barker's back door was sensibly locked. Jazz closed her eyes and turned the handle a couple of times, gauging the pressure and resistance. She nodded in satisfaction; she should be able to pick it.
Taking a small pocketknife from her jeans, she opened the finest blade, slipped it into the lock, and felt around.
A bird called close by, startling her. She glanced up at the wall and saw a robin sitting on its top, barely ten feet away. Its head jerked this way and that, and it sang again.
Above the robin, past the wall, a shape was leaning from Jazz's bedroom window.
She froze. It was difficult to make out any details, silhou-etted as the shape was against the sky, but when it turned, she saw the outline of a ponytail, the sharp corner of a shirt collar.
It was the Uncle who told her to call him Mort.
She never bothered with their names. To her they were just the Uncles, the name her mother had been using ever since Jazz could remember. They came to visit regularly, sometimes in pairs or threes, sometimes on their own. They would ask her mother how things were, whether she needed anything or if she'd "had any thoughts." They never ac-cepted a drink or the offer of food, but they always left behind an envelope containing a sheaf of used ten- and twenty-pound notes.
They told Jazz that she never had to worry about any-thing, which only worried her more. When they left, her mother would slide the envelope into a drawer as though it was dirty.
But what was this one doing in her bedroom? Whatever his purpose, Jazz didn't like it. They had never, ever come into her room when she was at home, and her mother as-sured her that they did not snoop around when she was out. They were perfect gentlemen. Like gangsters, Jazz had said once, and we're their molls. Her mother had smiled but did not respond.
The Uncle turned his head, scanning the gardens and alleyway.
He'll see me. If the robin calls again and he looks down to lo-cate it, he'll see me pressed here against Mr. Barker's back door.
The bird hopped along the head of the wall, pausing to peck at an insect or two. Jazz worked at the lock without looking, waiting for the feel of the tumblers snicking into place. One... two... three... two to go, and the last two were always the hardest.
The Uncle moved to withdraw back into the room, and Jazz let go of her breath in a sigh of relief.
The robin chirped, singing along with the chaotic London buzz of traffic and shouts.
The Uncle leaned from the window again just as Jazz felt the lock disengage. She turned the handle and pushed her way in behind the opening door, never looking away from the shadow of the man at her bedroom window.
He didn't see me, she thought. She left the door open; he'd be more likely to see the movement of it closing than to notice it was open.
The robin fluttered away.
Jazz did not wait to question what was happening, or why. She hurried through Mr. Barker's house, careful not to knock into any furniture, cautious as she opened or closed doors. She didn't want to make the slightest sound.
In his living room, she moved to the front window. The wooden Venetian blinds were closed, but, pressing her face to the wall, she could see past their edge. Out in the street, she saw just what she had feared.
Two large black cars were parked outside her house. Beamers.
Jazz's heart was thumping, her skin tingling. Something's happened. Rarely had more than three Uncles visited at once; and now there were two cars here, parked prominently in the street with windows still open and engines running, as if daring anyone to approach. They're a law unto themselves, her mother sometimes said.
Her mum had rarely said anything outright against the Uncles, but she never needed to. Her unease was there on her face for her daughter to see. But Jazz could not just sit here and spy on her own house, wondering what had gone wrong.
She and her mum had talked many times about fleeing the house if trouble ever came to the door.