Darke Mission Read Free Page B

sensitive boy and JJ knew that the real world could be a harsh place for sensitive kids so he wanted to ease his son into understanding that he couldn’t win at everything he tried. As it happens
Mario Kart
was now just about the only Wii game that JJ still had any chance of beating Cyrus at. From the age of nine, the kid would toast him at all the other games,
Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Wii Sports Resort, Skylanders Swap Force
, you name it and Cyrus would win at it. He often taunted his dad with ‘Loser, Loser’ while making the L letter with his forefinger and thumb and sticking it in front of his forehead. That made JJ smile. The boy’s computer skills had grown and grown.
    Cyrus’s fourteenth birthday was coming up in a few months and gadgets and games were top of his wish list. JJ had promised him a smartphone, feeling totally amazed that he’d managed to fend off that request for as long as he had. While he was still thinking about his son, JJ spotted a traditional black cab on St. James’s Street and hailed it. He preferred these cabs to the newer multi-person vehicle ones. In those ones you’d rattle around like a gob-stopper in a tin can if you were on your own. While it took JJ under fifteen minutes to get from the King’s Road to St. James’s Square early in the morning, it was normally five to ten minutes longer on the way back. The back end of Buckingham Palace Road was like a building site and once you were in Victoria there were always buses galore nose to tail and often traversing several lanes. The King’s Road never stopped. People walked onto the zebra crossings, fell onto them, ran across them, cycled over them. There were too many people and that was that.
    The cab pulled up outside JJ’s house in Markham Square. Although all modernised inside, the shell of most of the larger houses on the Square were built in the mid-1830s. Strictly speaking it’s a Regency terrace rather than a square because the fourth side of ‘the square’ is the King’s Road itself with only a set of wrought iron railings on it.
    Markham Square has an interesting history. It was built on a field which was part of Box Farm in 1836. The farm was owned by a Pulham Markham Evans, hence the name of the square, and the nearby street and place. For the more eclectic, it is the square where barrister Mark Saunders was shot dead by police a few years ago after the lawyer decided to fire bullets across the square willy-nilly into neighbours’ houses. A former supermodel of Wonderbra fame has a house on the east side and some folk believe Ian Fleming had it as the location of James Bond’s flat in London. Those folk were wrong; 007’s flat was meant to be in Wellington Square.
    JJ’s five storey creamy white exterior house was on the east side. In the basement he had it set out as a personal gym near the front of the house and an open space training area for martial arts towards the paved garden at the rear. Though not with the intensity that he used to, JJ still trained with one-on-one instructors for both Krav Maga and Jeet Kune Do, twice per week. The ground floor had a modern kitchen and dining area with a small sitting room near the Square end. While meals were being prepared, cooked or heated he and Cyrus could sit together, have a chat or watch TV. It was hard to get that intersecting Venn diagram moment when he and Cyrus could watch an equally enjoyable programme on TV. Tennis would do the trick, as would some music channels but football or motor racing wasn’t really to Cyrus’s liking. Perhaps oddly for a boy who was so tech savvy, Cyrus was an avid fan of the
Antiques Roadshow
or indeed any show about antiques wheeling and dealing especially involving auctions. When he was six JJ took him to an antiques fair in Chelsea’s Old Town Hall to get a present for his mum. He spotted Mark Tracy, well known TV antiques personality, the minute he walked