The Better Mousetrap (27 page)

(And, even further back in her mind, in the grubby back streets where she preferred not to go, a little voice said: you know, a thing like that, it’s wasted on him. I mean, not even in the biz, doesn’t know how it works, could be really dangerous in the hands of the clueless. But if we had it … And then the rest of her mind reflected that when a part of you starts talking in the plural like that, it’s only a matter of time before it starts mucking up its grammar and saying ‘precious’ a lot. She closed her mind to the little voice and it crept away to its lair in the guilt stacks.)

There was a convenient alleyway behind the pub, with a nice broad brick wall. Emily watched Frank tap the Door out of its cardboard tube and flick it against the bricks like a veteran fly-poster. She hadn’t really watched closely before, not enough to observe the fine details with a professional eye; the way the lines went so subtly from two to three dimensions, the way it flowed rather than popped into existence. There was enough material for a doctorate, and he hadn’t even turned the handle yet—

He opened it, and over his shoulder she saw into the room beyond: an office, dark but faintly lit by the lamps in the street below, shining up through the window. It was the sort of perspective that creased your mind, and instinctively she looked away; but he was hissing ‘Come on’ at her, and she felt ashamed. She followed him, heard the Door click; and then he leaned past her to catch it as it unrolled off the wall.

We wants it, yes, precious, we wants it for our own—

Stop that, Emily ordered herself. Even so; there was a line in the marriage service that referred to worldly goods. Whether the Door counted as worldly was perhaps a moot point, but if well, if they somehow metamorphosed into a couple (in her mind’s ear the word sounded strange, bizarre, even faintly obscene), surely Frank would have no objection if she wanted to borrow it, just now and then, for a specially demanding job.

She shook her head, rattling the voice about until it shut up.

‘Switch the lights on,’ she snapped irritably, ‘before I fall over something.’

A moment later, there was a click and a wash of bright white light from the overhead tubes. Mr Sprague’s office turned out to be just another enclosed space for making money in; the desk was bigger than hers, maybe, the chair a bit more sumptuous and commanding; but the framed photo of Anonymous Wife And Child was in almost exactly the same place on the desktop as its counterpart in Colin Gomez’s room, and the two people in it wore exactly the same long-suffering expression. It’s a basic law of magic that all places are one place, and where offices are concerned it’s literally as well as metaphysically true.

‘I’ll set up the scanner,’ Emily said.

‘Great,’ Frank replied awkwardly. ‘Anything I can do?’

For a moment, he could have been Erskine: a superfluous life-form with the potential to get under her feet and impede her in the execution of her duties. ‘What? No. I mean, yes,’ she added quickly, because he wasn’t Erskine. ‘Keep watch, let me know if anyone’s coming.’

‘Right.’ Hesitation. ‘How, exactly?’

Good question. She’d said it because that’s what they say in films; and then the spare character goes offstage somewhere while the hero does his stuff with his impressive techy gismo. ‘Just keep still and don’t interrupt,’ she said, because every meaningful relationship is founded on total honesty. She was both surprised and impressed when he did exactly as he was told. In her experience, men were creatures who stood over you, saying ‘What does that bit there do?’ and ‘Are you sure you’ve got that the right way up?’ Maybe, Emily thought, he really is the only man in the world for me.

The screen flickered. The annoying chime made her jump. She pulled down the functions menu and tapped the little pad with the tip of her forefinger. A shoal of Mortensen data flooded the screen, and she frowned and ran the cursor across to Analyse.

The screen went dark.

Technology, she thought; oh well. Nothing for it but to reboot and start again.

‘How’s it—?’

‘Shh.’

‘Sorry.’

The flicker. The bloody stupid chime. The little dancing hourglass that she hated so much. The functions menu. The Mortensen numbers—

‘Now we’re getting— Bloody hell,’ she said, as the numbers vanished. The screen flashed brilliant white two or three times, and then filled with an image she’d never seen on it before: a single sea-blue eye, gazing straight at her.

Under different circumstances, she’d have assumed it was a practical joke, a virus, an Easter egg, something of the kind. Sad, technically proficient members of the profession had been known to play funny games along those lines, though the screen-filling eye was invariably red and usually bordered with darting flames. Intuitively, she knew this wasn’t anything like that. For one thing, CGI doesn’t jam your windpipe or turn your knees to aspic. The eye on the screen was too real. It wasn’t just pixels dancing on the face of a tube. It was alive, and looking at her with amused, malicious interest.

Emily had a nasty feeling that she could put a name to it.

How long she sat there staring at it, she had no idea. It was only when an arm reached across her and hit the off-switch that it occurred to her that she might have been there for quite some time.

‘It’s not meant to do that, is it?’ Erskine - no, Frank. Frank’s voice, calm but worried. The eye was still there on the screen.

She tried to say ‘No, it isn’t.’ Her lips moved, but someone had pressed the mute button, and no sound came out. She couldn’t turn her head, either.

‘Hold on.’ She heard rustling, somewhere outside her field of vision; then a page from a broadsheet newspaper came between her and the screen, and she pulled away as though she’d been burned, overbalanced her chair, wobbled and fell off it onto the floor.

‘Are you all right?’

Emily scrabbled for a moment like a beetle on its back, then found her feet and jumped up. The eye was still there, in negative, a black oval with a burning white centre, printed on her retina. She massaged her eyelids, and it gradually faded.

‘The bitch,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The miserable cow.’ She groped her way to the desk and sat on the edge of it. ‘What a mean, nasty—’

Frank was there, standing in front of her. ‘What’s wrong?’ he was saying, looking so wretched that she nearly laughed. ‘That picture—’

She felt a lot better. ‘Booby trap,’ she said, as her heart started beating again. ‘Bloody Amelia Carrington. To stop people borrowing the firm’s kit for private work, I guess.’ She shuddered. ‘I know we’re not supposed to, but even so, that’s a bit extreme. It scared the life out of me, staring at me like that. Like she was looking right at me—’ She broke off, as a horrible thought struck her. ‘She was looking at me,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be in so much trouble in the morning.’

Frank was gazing at her, a pictorial dictionary’s definition of mortified. This time, Emily couldn’t help it. She giggled. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly, ‘but really, you should see your face.’

He frowned; still tortured by guilt and remorse, but a bit hacked off, too. ‘I’ve gone and landed you in it,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry, if I’d known—’

‘Forget it,’ she sighed. ‘It’s not your fault my boss is a miserable, sadistic cow with a warped sense of humour.’

‘But you could lose your job—’

‘Big deal.’ The words came out before the thought took shape in her mind. ‘Face it, would you want to work for someone who’d pull a stunt like that? Putting a lock on the stationery cupboard door, that’s one thing, but scaring people half to death, that’s got to be harassment or something like that. Not that it’d do me any good,’ Emily added ruefully. ‘We don’t do industrial tribunals in our profession. Last person who tried it ended up relocating to a lily pad. No, if they want to fire me, let them. But they won’t. I do a good job and bring in money. I’ll just get a bollocking, that’s all.’

‘Well, that’s bad enough,’ Frank said. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here, before it gets any worse.’ Before she could argue, he’d spread the Door on the wall and turned the handle. ‘Where to?’ he added. ‘I can drop you off anywhere you like.’

Anywhere she liked, just say the word. Venice, Acapulco, Barbados, the Alps, the Serengeti. She remembered something they’d made her read at school, when she was a little girl, about the cat who walked by herself and all places were the same to her. Sure, everybody wants to travel. But this would be too easy. Like giving in.

‘Just drop me off outside the office,’ Emily said, forced-casual. ‘I’ll get the bus home from there.’

Frank looked at her, but all he said was, ‘You sure?’

No, of course I’m not, you stupid man. You’re supposed to say, don’t be ridiculous, I can take you direct to your doorstep. She waited, a whole two-thirds of a second, but he just stood there looking blank. Not a word out of him, not so much as a muted squeak. He couldn’t have declared his lack of interest more plainly if he’d taken a thirty-second prime-time slot on ITV.

‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘Right, is this thing ready?’

He nodded and she pushed past him, nudging him out of the way. As her elbow prodded his solar plexus-accidentally; a happy accident, you might say-she heard his voice saying ‘Ow.’ And, at the same time, it said: I love her, but obviously she’s not the least bit interested, she’d rather take the bus home, well, fine, serves me right, won’t be making that mistake again in a hurry.

Hell of a time for the lithium cryp to wear off.

Emily froze in mid-step, but her weight was over her front foot, carrying her forward, under the two-and-a-bit-dimensional lintel of the Door. ‘Actually, you’re wrong,’ she blurted out; but by that time she was over the threshold. She jammed her heels down, wobbled, caught her balance and spun round, to find herself an inch or two away from a blank, featureless wall.

‘Shit,’ she yelled.

Calm down, she told herself. Any second now, the Door will open in this wall, he’ll come through, I’ll tell him-well, I’ll say something, any bloody thing just so long as it stops him thinking like that; and then we’ll have a calm, sensible talk about things, and it’ll all be fine. It’s nothing two rational human beings can’t iron out in a minute or two, and then we’ll both know where we are, and—

She shoved past him and lunged through the Door. Frank stepped smartly back to get out of her way. The Door slammed, then unrolled and fell off the wall.

Fine, he thought. Be like that. I can take a hint, particularly if it’s ferocious enough to make the floor shake and bits of loose plaster come off the ceiling.

He stood quite still for a moment, thinking about his life and its general futility. No change there; except, for the first time ever, there was something he wanted, and now it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to get it.

The hell with it, he thought. The hell with love, and happiness, and waking up each morning to greet the unlimited promise of a new day. The hell with all of it. The hell with her.

Frank stooped wearily, picked up the stupid Door, slapped it hard against the wall, opened it, went through, shut it, caught it, put it away and flopped onto his hard unmade bed.

No Door. No thin black lines forming on the whitewashed plaster. Emily frowned. What was keeping him? Naturally he’d come after her. Ordinary common politeness—

Oink, she thought. Whitewashed plaster wall. Not many of them in Cheapside. Whitewashed plaster interior wall. Forming part of a dimly lit, musty-smelling room. No windows. No furniture, apart from a single chipboard and square-section steel table, with a thermos flask and a plate of sandwiches on it. Aside from that, and Emily Spitzer of course, no contents of any kind.

And no door.

Oh, she thought. That’s not right. Got to have some kind of door, of the everyday, small-case-first-letter kind, or how the hell are you supposed to get into it? Or, come to that, out again? Magic?

Oh.

I’m being stupid, Emily thought. There’s got to be a door, but it’s in the shadows somewhere. I’ve just got to look for it, and there it’ll be.

She looked. Didn’t take long.

No door.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr Tanner’s mother sat at the front desk of her son’s poky little office, knitting.

Well, of course she did. Knitting is one of the things mothers do. In her case, she was using 6mm high-tensile steel winch cable, and her drop-forged chrome molybdenum needles were bent like saplings in the breeze as they took the five-hundred-kilo strain required to keep the line taut. It was going to be a baby-grow for little Paul Azog.

As her needles hummed-knit one, purl one, knit two together, and a quick tack-weld at the end of the row-she reflected on her other son, with particular reference to his gullibility and general naivety. No more idea, she told herself, sternly but fondly, than next door’s cat. Just as well he’s got me to look after him.

The welder sparkled, showering her knees with white-hot spatter. Instant ruin to tights, but since they were simply an extension of her morphogenic field, no harm done. She shape-shifted into a similar but different auburn-haired beauty wearing an unblemished pair of sheer silk tights, and cast on the next row.

On balance, she decided, she’d rather have a son who was a bit thick and a bit soft but who still had time for his old mum, than a hard-nosed, no-nonsense, streetwise offspring like, say, Amelia Carrington. Of course, she didn’t believe the rumours about her; and even if they were true, she wouldn’t have cared unduly. Tosser Carrington always was a waste of resources, and if his daughter had seen fit to turn him into a hedgehog and dump him on the hard shoulder of the M3, no great loss to the profession or the species. But Dennis would never dream of doing anything like that. He was fond of his mother. And scared shitless of her, of course, but also genuinely fond. Which counted for more, she felt, than all the brains in Seattle.

Even so.

Trouble was, the boy wouldn’t be told. She’d tried dropping a few hints on the journey home from the meeting-you do realise she’s going to have to kill you, I wouldn’t trust that skinny cow as far as I could sneeze her out of a blocked nostril, that sort of thing-but Dennis had just looked smug and declared that he knew what he was doing, at which point she’d lost patience with him and resolved to save her breath to cool her porridge. Well.