The Better Mousetrap (14 page)

‘How about getting served in pubs?’

He shrugged. ‘I walk up to the bar and someone asks me what I want.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is that unusual?’

‘A bit.’ Emily was staring - no, gazing - into his eyes, as if trying to read something written on his retina in tiny letters. ‘I can stand there for ten minutes and nobody sees me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m invisible.’

‘Really?’ He was about to say that he found it strange that people didn’t notice her; fortunately for his peace of mind, he stopped himself in time. ‘I’d have thought that, you know, in your line of work, an assertive personality—’

‘It’s not that, I don’t think. I mean, I can stand up for myself and all that. I don’t know, maybe I’ve just got myself into the habit of being inconspicuous—’

‘So that you can creep up on dragons without being seen and stuff?’

‘Well, sort of. Actually, you try not to get in a position where creeping up’s necessary, if you see what I mean. Dragon-slaying’s not like that, as a matter of fact, not if you do it properly.’

Frank frowned. ‘Sorry if this is a frequently asked question,’ he said, ‘but how do you go about something like that? I mean, Dad talked about it occasionally, but he never went into any sort of detail. He did say he killed one once himself; a very small one, though. He sat on it.’

Emily nodded, as though this was a perfectly normal conversation. To her, of course, no doubt it was. ‘A wyvern, probably,’ she said. ‘They’re pretty fierce, but they’ve got very fragile bones. Very thin bone walls, to save weight, for flying.’

‘Ah.’

‘That’s right. With wyverns, a percussive approach is often the best way, because they’ve got an amazing poison tolerance, for their body mass.’ Frank got the impression that she was comfortable talking shop. ‘And as for shooting them, you can forget it. Their muscles have a low water content, so ordinary hydrostatic shock just doesn’t seem to get the job done.’ She paused for a moment, then said, ‘Which firm was your father with?’

‘J. W. Wells,’ Frank replied. ‘They went bust.’

‘Heard of them. But you didn’t go into the trade.’

Something had changed; and it wasn’t the sort of effect you got with the Door, where a neat, surgical intervention altered history. It was-well, rather more remarkable than that. A moment ago, she’d been— well, bewildered to start with, understandably enough, then eating busily, because death gives you an appetite and you need to keep your strength up; and after that, she’d wanted to get back to the office … Something had changed; and if it meant listening to her talking shop, because that was the sort of talking she felt comfortable with, he didn’t really mind.

Bloody hell, Frank thought.

(But by the time you think that, it’s generally too late.)

‘Me? No.’ He could hear his own voice, and it didn’t sound very familiar. ‘Mum and Dad didn’t actually like the magic business very much-they were glad to get out of it. They came into some money, you see.’

‘Oh.’ He’d disconcerted her again. Probably, not liking the profession was heresy. ‘My father was in the trade, too,’ Emily went on, and she was being careful not to make it sound like a reproach. ‘It was what I always wanted to do, since I was little. I can’t imagine doing anything else.’

In Frank’s mind, sirens wailed as the damage-control teams swung into action. ‘I imagine it can be a really interesting job,’ he heard himself say, and made a mental note to save up and buy some decent words, instead of tatty old ones like interesting. ‘I mean, you must get to deal with some fascinating stuff—’

‘It’s boring, mostly.’ Emily frowned. ‘When it’s not terrifying, I mean. But it’s half a per cent blind terror and the rest is just being in an office. Funny, actually,’ she said, after a heartbeat’s pause. ‘I’m in the magic business and I do mostly tedious, repetitive clerical chores. You travel through time and save lives, and you’re in insurance—’

‘Mostly maths,’ Frank said quickly. ‘Got to calculate the exact moment of intervention, you see. For every minute of actual fieldwork, there’s two hours of quantum calculus and probability crunching. Actually,’ he added - it hadn’t really occurred to him before- ‘it may sound rather dashing and weird but it’s just work, really. I kid myself it’s not, because if it was work, that’d mean I’m all grown-up and responsible, but when you take a long, hard look at it, it’s not that easy to spot the difference.’

Silence. Not so much a pause as a rest, like in music. You have to stop occasionally to allow the changes to take effect. ‘I suppose I should be getting back to the office,’ Emily said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

Especially the ones who’re trying to kill you? Best not to go into that.

‘Not a problem,’ he said, with a bit of grin left over from his earlier bumptiousness. ‘The Door, remember? If I try hard I can land it on a quarter of a second. Marvellous thing,’ he added. ‘Sometimes I really wish I knew how it works.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Not a clue.’

‘Well—’ She stopped. ‘I can tell you, if you like, but it probably won’t make much sense. It’s a bit-well, technical.’

Frank made a fine-by-me gesture with his hands. ‘Try me,’ he said.

‘Yes, but—’ Frown. ‘I get carried away when I start talking about work stuff. I have an idea that listening to a long speech about things you don’t understand can be a bit boring.’

Frank shook his head. ‘I grew up in New Zealand,’ he said. ‘If you live there for any length of time and you’re not interested in sheep or the movies, you learn boredom management as a basic survival skill. Also, it might be quite useful to know how the thing works, since I make my living out of it.’

‘Well—’

Actually, Emily was quite right. It was boring, very boring indeed, and she had the rare ability to reach inside a basically uninteresting concept and bring out the deeply buried latent tedium that the casual observer could so easily miss. The curious thing-very strange indeed, stranger than time-travel or dragon-slaying or mysterious assassins lurking behind suburban apple trees for no apparent reason - was that he really didn’t mind. Listening to her explaining about Z-axis bipolar simultaneous shunts was a bit like opera: you can’t follow the plot and the words are rubbish even if you can make them out through all the caterwauling, but if you relax completely and let it all wash over you like the lava flow from a volcano, it’s actually rather soothing. More to the point, Frank realised (and the realisation made him sit up in his chair as if he’d been poked in the bum with a sharp nail), he’d rather be bored by her than interested by anybody else. Which is about as perfect a definition of the L-word as you can get—

‘And that’s about it, basically,’ he heard her say. ‘Mostly it’s just Shirakawa’s Constant, but with a guidance system and stable superconductors. The only difficult bit is how anybody ever managed to make one in the first place, because of the reverse exit instabilities. If you’ve already got one, of course, then in theory you could duplicate it using—’ She paused, and seemed suddenly to be aware of how long she’d been talking for. ‘You didn’t really want to be told all that,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ Frank said immediately. ‘It was fascinating. I learned a lot,’ he added, neglecting to state what it was he’d learned a lot about. ‘Look, would you like some coffee or something? Ice cream? Boat trip down the Seine? You don’t have to worry about getting back,’ he added quickly. ‘I can have you standing outside your office door any time you like, in about thirty seconds.’ He stopped and noticed that he’d run out of words and breath. Whatever she said next, he knew, was going to be very important indeed.

‘I’d better not,’ Emily replied; and he’d been right. It was a very important, highly significant statement, easily up there with the Gettysburg Address and Ich bin ein Berliner, not so much because of the words, but because of the way she’d said them. ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘quite apart from the stacks of work I’ve got piled up on my desk, there’s this whole someone-trying-to-killme business, and until I’ve got that sorted out, it’s kind of hard to give my full attention to anything else. But—’ (It was at that moment that but became Frank Carpenter’s all-time favourite three-letter monosyllable.) ‘I don’t know, would you like to have lunch sometime? If you’re not busy or anything. So I can say thank you properly, when my mind’s not all clogged up with weirdness and stuff.’

‘Love to,’ Frank said. ‘I know this nice, quiet little Italian place in 1976. They do really good pasta, and it’s a well-known fact that anything you eat before you were born isn’t fattening.’

The Door whisked them away to Cheapside, where it opened in the side of a parked Transit van. Emily was clearly impressed by the foldaway stairs. When it was rolled up back in its tube, Frank said, ‘See you here tomorrow, then, twelvish’, and she nodded, smiled, and walked away. Not long afterwards, a door, an ordinary glass office door, swallowed her up and left him standing alone on the pavement.

The temptation to unroll his little square of plastic sheet and issue the command Here, tomorrow, twelvish was almost too strong to bear, but he managed it somehow. Instead, he walked slowly down the street, turned left and right a few times, and arrived at the entrance to Mr Sprague’s office.

‘That’s unusual,’ George Sprague said, when Frank had been shown in. ‘You came in through the door.’

‘So?’

‘Instead of the wall. Nothing wrong, is there?’

‘What?’ Frank woke up out of a distinctly soppy daydream. ‘Oh, no, everything’s fine. Just fancied the walk, you know.’

Mr Sprague shrugged, waited a few seconds, and said, ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘Oh.’ Frank shook himself like a wet dog. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Miles away. The job. Done.’ He fished about in his top pocket and produced a folded piece of paper. Mr Sprague read it, shuddered slightly, and put it in his in-tray. Then he reached for his chequebook.

‘Aren’t you going to check it out first?’

‘That’s all right,’ Mr Sprague replied. ‘I trust you.’

But Frank shook his head. ‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘I just want to make sure everything’s worked out all right. So if you wouldn’t mind—’

‘If you like,’ said Mr Sprague, and he prodded at his keyboard with a fingertip. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘No matches found. No record of any claims involving Emily Spitzer. Who is she, by the way? I mean to say, eleven million pounds. Someone must think pretty highly of her.’

Frank looked at him, then nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

The first thing Emily did when she reached her office the next morning was grab her diary and write down lunch, twelvish, on tomorrow’s page. When she’d done that, she looked at the words for rather a long time, as if wondering how the hell they’d got there. The opening of the door brought her out of suspended animation. Nobody ever knocked at Carringtons.

‘There you are,’ said Colin Gomez, and the white glare of the fluorescent strip lighting flashed off the shiny top of his slightly pointed head. ‘How’d it go? Everything all right?’

For a split second, Emily couldn’t think of what she should say next. ‘Fine,’ she managed to grunt. ‘No problem.’

‘Excellent.’ Colin Gomez loomed in the doorway like a large shapeless bag full of something. ‘Keep the clients happy, that’s the ticket. How about Mrs Thompson? Glad to get the moggy back safe and sound, I expect.’

Emily looked at him as if he was one of those puzzles where you have to find words hidden in a random jumble of letters. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t make out murderer. Lots of other words, perhaps, nearly all of them offensive to some extent, but not that one. ‘I didn’t get a chance to talk to her before I left,’ she mumbled. ‘Just got the cat and came away.’

‘Oh.’ Frown. His forehead made her think of a mop, the sort where you push a handle and it squidges up. ‘You should’ve waited and spoken to her, made sure everything was all right.’

‘Sorry.’

The mop unsquidged. ‘Never mind,’ said Mr Gomez. ‘Can’t be helped. I’ll phone her. Old biddies like the personal touch. Just rang to see if Tiddles is OK after his nasty experience, something like that.’

‘Good idea,’ she replied. ‘Actually, I was wondering—’

‘Got another job for you,’ Mr Gomez went on, blundering through the last words of her sentence like a stray elephant through a bazaar. ‘Giant spiders. Nest of the buggers, in the main computer room at Zimmerman and Schnell in Lombard Street. Turned up out of the blue early this morning and started spinning webs everywhere. Probably quite well established by now, so you’ll need rubber overalls and some kind of cutting torch.’

Emily sighed. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘It’d have been nice if they’d called us in a bit earlier, though. Those webs are a pain.’

Mr Gomez clicked his tongue. ‘They said sorry for that,’ he replied. ‘But it’s taken them this long to unravel the office manager, and apparently he’s the only one who can authorise bringing in outside contractors. They haven’t started laying eggs yet, though, so it’s not so bad. I said you’d pop over there as soon as you got back from your other job. Take a taxi,’ he said, with the air of a prince scattering gold to the urban mob. ‘Save you lugging all the gear about on the Tube.’

‘Thanks. That’ll make all the difference in the world.’

Colin Gomez nodded. Irony had a tendency to bounce off him, like gravel off a battleship. ‘Splendid. Oh, and one other thing.’

Oh for crying out— ‘Yes?’

‘You’d better take the new man with you. Show him the ropes, give him a feel for how we do things here. Nothing like plunging in at the deep end, after all.’

The final step of the escalator, the one that isn’t there. ‘New man?’

Mr Gomez frowned again. ‘Didn’t you get the memo? Oh, right. Yes, we’ve taken on a new trainee. Splendid chap, very highly qualified, we were lucky to get him.’

‘Oh.’ Emily snatched a fraction of a second to consider that. Nothing wrong with taking on trainees, of course, though the last she’d heard was that the partners reckoned the firm was overstaffed and there’d have to be Rationalisation unless productivity per capita could be jacked up to some impossible level. Still, since when was management consistent? ‘Sure,’ she added. ‘Only-well, giant spiders, it could get a bit awkward. I’m not sure it’s such a terribly good idea, taking along a novice. The client might not like it,’ she added quickly.