The Better Mousetrap (18 page)

‘I said hello,’ Erskine bellowed. ‘Is anything the matter? Can I do anything to help?’

Dropping dead would be a good start, Emily thought. She did her best to edit his voice out of her mind. Was that a very faint rustling sound, such as two-inch leg bristles might make as they rubbed against the leg of a desk? Needless to say, she’d gone in without anything even remotely resembling a weapon, unless you counted the Mordor Army Knife (one of whose more puzzling features was the lack of any kind of cutting edge; she could only assume that the users it was designed for had perfectly good claws and teeth for that sort of thing, so there wasn’t any call for a blade). Unleashing a twelve-foot collapsible ladder under its rapidly moving mandibles might disconcert the bastard for a moment or so, but would that be long enough for her to reach the doorway? Probably not. The RSPCA website recommended clapping your hands loudly and saying ‘Boo!’ as a humane, non-lethal alternative to blowing Atkinsonii to hell with rocket-propelled grenades, but she had a suspicion that the recommendation wasn’t the product of what she’d consider as valid hands-on experience. Emily took a very careful step backwards, and felt something brush against her shoulder.

Nuts, she thought.

The stickiness and strength of Atkinsonii gossamer makes it a revolting nuisance when there aren’t any live spiders around. In a spider-rich environment, it’s just a tad more significant. With exquisite delicacy, she moved her shoulder until the tendril started to tug on the fabric of her jacket. If, as was often the case, the web-builder was sitting up there in the centre seat of its creation, the slightest twitch on a strand would tell it everything it needed to know about her. That meant wriggling out of the jacket could prove fatal. On the other hand, staying put until the spider did its regular patrol was a guaranteed trip to Eternity. Under those circumstances, it was probably worth taking the risk that pachythoraces didn’t know English—

‘Help,’ Emily whispered. ‘I’m stuck.’

‘You’re not, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ The surprise in Erskine’s voice was very mildly flattering, implying that he was reluctant to believe that a skilled, highly trained professional like her was capable of getting into trouble of any kind. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes:

Pause. ‘But surely, if you recalibrated the XZ7700 to scan for gossamer fragments, like it says you should do in the office procedures manual, it ought to have picked up any stray bits of web, and you shouldn’t have got caught. In which case, I don’t understand how—’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I didn’t do that,’ she hissed. ‘Reconwhatsit the scanner. I should’ve done but I forgot, all right? Now, at the back of the tool kit there’s a zip-up compartment with a neon-acetylene cutting torch in it. I want you to adjust the flame till it’s—’

‘No, there isn’t.’

‘What?’

‘In the zip-up pocket. No torch. There’s half a roll of extra-strong mints, if that’s any use.’

It was a nasty blow, but Emily had handled worse. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Prime three more concussion grenades and pitch them in here, and then I want you to come in and haul me out while the spider’s counting stars. You’ll need to watch out for—’

‘Spider?’

‘Hphm.’

‘You mean there’s still one left alive in there?’

It was the constant, cumulative bombardment with snippets of the blindingly obvious that wore you down in the end. ‘I have reason to think so, yes. Now prime the bloody grenades like I told you, and then—’

‘We’re out of grenades. Sorry.’

Wince. Erskine was quite right, of course. She’d only brought four, and they’d all been used up in the preliminary strike. ‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘So what have you got? Cattle prod? Taser? Come on, for crying out loud, there must be something in the bag we can use, even if it’s just a poxy magic sword.’

Pause; then, ‘No, terribly sorry, nothing like that in here. This is very bad, isn’t it?’

If she had a knife, of course, or better still a pair of scissors, she could cut the cloth away from around the gossamer and be home and dry. Scissors. Scissor attachment on the Mordor Army Kn —

Emily froze. Now that definitely was a movement, somewhere in the darkness above her head. A tactical disaster, but at least she knew where the horrible thing was, whereas there was a chance it hadn’t made her yet, or why hadn’t it—?

Another movement. A big one, this time, and so fast that she never really had any chance of reacting to it. Swinging on a gossamer rope like five Siamese-twin Tarzans, the Atkinsonii swooped down on top of her. She felt its boot-leather belly slam into her face, breaking her nose. Without thinking, Emily cringed away, right into the thick of the gossamer net, which held her like a magnet. She filled her lungs with air for a really loud, pathetic, betraying-everything-she-stood-for B-movie scream, but she never made it that far. By the time her larynx had adjusted itself to the required shape, the spider had bitten her head off.

CHAPTER EIGHT

For Amelia Carrington, magic meant never having to eat celery.

Today, she’d ordered in steak and kidney pudding, followed by chocolate mousse with whipped cream, with a bottle of good claret to help it down. Her father had always maintained that she ate like a man, and maybe he was right. Regardless of that, she had the satisfaction of knowing that her daughter couldn’t borrow her clothes because they’d be too tight.

She ate a mouthful of suet and gravy, and smiled. Cecily, whose weakness was cream cakes and boxes of Thorntons chocolates, relied on Effective magic to undo the ravages of comfort eating. That was all well and good, in its way. Everybody who met her saw a lithe, slender figure, so the reality didn’t matter; the only way she’d be found out would be if she happened to stand in front of an imp-reflecting mirror, an annoying Chinese invention that shows you as you really are, and at the last count there were only seven of them in London, one of which snuggled at the bottom of Amelia’s handbag. True, another one was built into the top of Carrington’s boardroom table, disguised as a really good French-polish finish: Amelia had paid top dollar for it at the J. W. Wells bankruptcy sale, partly because it was always helpful to know exactly who (or what) you were negotiating with, but mostly to annoy her daughter. Even so: Effective magic was a perfectly adequate response to Cecily’s weight problem. Good, straightforward professional thinking, if a little deficient in imagination.

Amelia, on the other hand, used Practical magic. It was a hell of a business, since every atom of surplus bulk had to be magically removed; it took a long time, and the process was inherently dangerous. Magic is strictly Boolean in its applications, and it’d be far more logical to lose two pounds by dematerialising a kidney than by stripping off small deposits of adipose fat. The point was, though, that whereas Cecily just looked thin, her mother really was thin. Another excellent reason for buying JWW’s conference table.

Amelia was just scraping the last smears of chocolate mousse off the sides of the dish when the buzzer went. Dennis Tanner was here to see her. She frowned, vanished the dirty plates, and adjusted the room slightly. Normally, it looked out over the back courtyard, a small, overshadowed concrete square where they put the dustbins out. But it’d be far cooler to have a panoramic view out over the City, so she rotated her floor of the building through ninety degrees and widened the window by six feet. Not bad, but the facade of the Credit Mayonnaise partly obscured the dome of St Paul’s. She toyed with the idea of vanishing the bank, but somebody’d be bound to notice and make a fuss, so she contented herself with raising her own building by forty feet. As a finishing touch, she turned the nice comfy old chair she was sitting in into genuine Louis Quinze, and gave the visitor’s chair an annoying squeak. Then she leaned forward and toggled the intercom.

‘Send him up,’ she said.

‘Right away. Oh, and he’s got someone with him.’

Amelia paused, fingertip on toggle. ‘What sort of someone?’

‘Assistant, I think. He didn’t say.’

Amelia frowned, then brushed the consideration aside. For all the difference it made, Tanner could have brought along a regiment of heavy cavalry. He was still small fry. ‘Fine,’ she said, and released the toggle. With a tiny movement of her head she added another chair, very straight-backed and spindly-legged; then, as an afterthought, she lengthened the lift shaft to compensate for the extra height of the building. Detail, detail, detail, as her father used to say. Well, indeed.

The someone Dennis Tanner had with him proved to be a nineteen-year-old bimbo with legs up to her armpits and an expression so vacant you could’ve dry-docked an oil tanker in it. Which meant precisely nothing, of course. It could be that Tanner was vainly trying to impress Amelia by dragging along his latest trophy PA; but, given his goblin connections, the dolly-bird could just as easily be his uncle. She smiled, acknowledging the small tactical victory. Of course it didn’t matter who he or she was, but the fact that Amelia had had to stop and think for a moment represented a point scored. Clever old Uncle Dennis. Aggravating as usual.

‘Dennis.’ Smile. The only proper response to the enigmatic bimbo was to ignore her entirely. ‘Great to see you. It’s been ages. Sit down.’ She twitched her head slightly, and a table with a large rectangular box on top of it appeared next to the squeaky chair. ‘Have a cigar.’

‘Thanks,’ Dennis grunted, flopping into the chair, taking a cigar from his top pocket and lighting it. He didn’t seem to have noticed the squeak. ‘Nice place,’ he said, wriggling backwards and forwards in the chair a few times and producing a noise like a cage full of breeding mice. ‘I was just thinking, I haven’t been in here since old Toss— your father passed away. How long’s that been, now?’

‘Seven years. And I do believe you’re right. In fact, wasn’t the funeral the last time I saw you?’

‘Could be.’ Dennis Tanner sucked in a mouthful of blue fog. She waited for it to come out again, but it didn’t. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘what’s all this about a major bauxite strike?’

The bimbo, Amelia noticed, was staring right at her. Correction: not at her in general, but a needle-sharp focus on the underside of her chin. Instinctively she lifted her forefinger and prodded furtively, but of course there was nothing there, no unsightly weal of flab she’d inadvertently missed out of her daily reduction. Another point scored, she conceded, though with rather worse grace this time.

‘Take a look at these.’ She levitated a buff folder across the room and onto the cigar-box table. ‘Taken by our satellite last week. Have a poke about, tell me what you think.’

One of the very few advantages of having a face like Dennis Tanner’s was that it was relatively easy to keep-well, not straight, it could never be that; impassive, then. Poker-perfect, not an eyebrow twitched or a lip-corner tweaked. As he ran a fingertip over the glossy surface of the photos, it was only the slightest shiver of his neck that gave him away, and she wouldn’t have noticed that if she hadn’t known him practically since she was born.

‘Could be something there,’ Dennis said, putting the pictures back on the table. Amelia cocked her head a little on one side. ‘Only could be, Uncle Dennis?’

He grunted. ‘Fairly high probability,’ he said, ‘but I’d need seventy-five-by-nineties to be sure.’ He looked up at her. ‘You can arrange that, presumably.’

She nodded. ‘Assuming it’s what we think it is,’ she said. ‘What do you reckon?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said.

‘Bigger than Wayatumba?’

Minimal nod.

‘How much bigger?’

Another shrug. ‘Fifty, maybe sixty per cent.’ He paused to draw on his cigar, and found it had gone out. Amelia lit it for him with a glance. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there’s other things to consider. How far down it is, geological formations, dangerous contaminants. But assuming it’s viable, then yes. Nice strike.’

‘Splendid.’ She flashed him a big smile. ‘And just as well, in the circumstances. I bought the land earlier this morning.’

Dennis grinned. ‘Just like your dad,’ he said. ‘Did he ever tell you about the twenty thousand acres in Zaire he bought, thinking it was diamonds, and it turned out to be a coal seam, too deep to get at?’

Amelia nodded. ‘How we laughed,’ she said. ‘Though as a matter of fact, we’ve just finished building a safari complex on it. Hotels, pools, a clubhouse. Quite a good investment, seeing as how he got the land so cheap. Coffee?’

Dennis shook his head. The bimbo was looking out of the window. ‘So,’ Amelia went on, ‘we’ve got the land, and we’re pretty sure—’

‘Fairly sure.’

‘—Fairly sure there’s bauxite in there. Well, now, you’re the expert. How should we go about this? Last thing we want to do is let everybody know what we’ve got. Once the market gets to hear about it, the price’ll go through the floor.’

Dennis didn’t reply straight away. He appeared to be thinking about it, though she was sure it was just acting and that he already knew what he was going to say.

‘Do we know,’ he asked, ‘who owns Wayatumba these days?’

She nodded. ‘New Zealand Ethical Minerals Inc,’ she replied. ‘Which is just a corporate front for a trust fund-furry animals and stuff-set up by some people called Carpenter. I wasn’t able to find out anything about them.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Dennis’s face stayed as still as Buster Keaton posing for a photo, except that the tip of his nose twitched. Probably he wasn’t aware he did that. She filed it away for future reference. ‘My idea is,’ he went on, ‘we buy out New Zealand Ethical. Then, when the new strike comes on line, initially we pass it off as increased production from Wayatumba. Use the first proceeds to buy out as many of the other consortiums as we can.’

Amelia raised an eyebrow. ‘A monopoly, you mean?’

‘With hotels on Mayfair,’ Dennis answered casually. ‘Corner the market, you can set your own price. Then, when the truth about the big strike comes out, there’s sod-all anybody can do about it.’

For a moment, a Planck’s Constant fraction of a second, Amelia was tempted. It was, after all, rather a good idea. It’d mean a huge investment, but it’d work, and then there’d be all the money in the world, and nobody would have to die after all. But, on reflection, she resolved to go with her original idea. Not that it was all that much better; but it was hers, so she liked it more. ‘OK,’ she said cautiously. ‘With you so far. What if these Carpenter people won’t sell?’