The Better Mousetrap (42 page)

After a while, Frank felt his way along the wall to a corner and sat down. Eternity, he thought. Eternity in the dark with the Tanners and salmon-paste sandwiches. Later on, he supposed, he could have a go at slitting his wrists with the Coke bottle or choking to death on sandwich crusts, but he was fairly sure he’d be on to a hiding to nothing. If Mr Tanner’s mother was right and you couldn’t grow old in here, more than likely you couldn’t die, either. Or if he did succeed, what was the betting that Amelia Carrington would zoom in with the Door and bring him back to life? Someone capable of putting salmon paste in their eternally self-replenishing sandwiches wouldn’t think twice about doing something like that.

So far he’d managed not to think about Emily, but he knew he couldn’t dodge it for ever. Sooner or later he was going to have to face up to-well, what? He’d never see her again. By now, maybe, she was dead— His mind skidded off the word, like tyres on black ice. He’d taken more than his fair share of liberties with death lately; for George Sprague and his shareholders, to begin with, and then for her. Maybe somewhere in the valuable warehouse space behind his eyes he’d got into the way of thinking that it was somehow optional if you were clever enough, like capital gains tax. But now, here he was, for keeps, and if she wasn’t dead already she soon would be (in ten minutes, an hour, sixty years, two hundred; what’s time anyhow but calibrations on a clock face, artificial and arbitrary?); and that being so, how long would he sit here in the dark before it no longer mattered?

Really don’t want to start thinking about that. Frank dragged his mind away, but there wasn’t really anything else to think about; nothing that mattered, anyhow. All that was left inside his head was superseded trivia. What’s the capital of Paraguay? How does that song go? When was the last time an Australian won Wimbledon? Whatever happened to poor old George? And how did the Door come to be in Emily’s pocket when she was stuck in here with the dragon’s-teeth people?

Oink, he thought.

Frank held perfectly still and, for some reason, listened. Somewhere in the dark, Dennis Tanner was having a sneezing fit and his mother was eating. Very soft noises, you could easily go mad listening to them.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

No reply, so he said it again. ‘Excuse me?’

Nothing, apart from Dennis Tanner snuffling through his blocked nose. For some reason it was a rather evocative, poignant sound; mournful, even. While my catarrh gently weeps, and all that.

‘Excuse me.’

‘What?’ Mumbled through a mouthful of half-chewed bread.

‘The spare Door,’ he said. ‘Did you just say you put it in a bank?’

‘Mmm.’

‘The National—’

‘Lombard.’

‘Fenchurch Street?’

‘Mm.’

Suddenly, Frank’s mind was buzzing. ‘Isn’t that the bank-oh hell, of course, you wouldn’t know.’ He didn’t feel much like explaining; that would mean going back over ground he’d already covered, when he was bursting to press on with the tantalising new hypothesis growing in his mind. ‘Emily had to go to a bank, I think it was in Fenchurch Street, to kill a dragon. When she’d killed it, she found it had burned all the money and papers and stuff, so that all that was left was a cardboard tube which turned out to be the Door. But she didn’t know that at the time, of course, so she stuffed it in her pocket and forgot all about it, until that Colin Gomez bloke locked her in here with a load of magic warriors-something to do with teeth I couldn’t follow when she told me—’

‘Dragon’s teeth?’

‘I think so. Anyhow, she found the cardboard tube in her pocket with the Door inside it, and by then, of course, she knew what it was and used it to escape. She came to my place in New Zealand, and when she walked in through the wall I’d just found out that the Door wasn’t in my jacket pocket. I assumed the Door she used to get away from the teeth people was my Door.’ He paused for much-needed breath, then added, ‘But what if it wasn’t? What if it was this spare Door of yours, which you say you stored in a bank vault? Well?’

Long silence.

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ Mr Tanner’s mother said eventually. ‘Just, even if you’re right, I don’t see how it helps matters. It just means your girlfriend nicked my Door. A bit of a liberty, but in the circumstances I don’t think I’ll be pressing charges.’

Frank squeezed his nails into his palm. She was missing the point, and just at that moment Frank Carpenter was spearheading the movement for the ethical treatment of points. ‘If the Door she used wasn’t my Door, then what happened to it?’

Another silence. Then Dennis said, ‘You must’ve dropped it somewhere.’

Frank shook his head, a futile gesture in the pitch dark. ‘Can’t have,’ he said. ‘I was back home, in New Zealand, remember. So I must’ve had the Door with me when I got there, I must’ve used it to get home. And she-I mean, your mum - knows what my place is like. Small.’

‘Scruffy. Strong smell of mould. You really ought—’

Reminder, if any was needed, that Mr Tanner’s mother was as much mother as goblin. ‘Well, quite,’ Frank snapped. ‘What I meant was, though, it’s a small place. One room, basically. I’m trying to remember what I did, and I think I just took the Door down off the wall and lay down on the bed.’

‘Fine, so that’s what you did. And at some point it must have fallen out of your—’

‘No,’ Frank yelled. ‘It couldn’t have. Immediately I found it wasn’t in my coat pocket, I searched the place from top to bottom. No sign. And it may be scruffy but it isn’t cluttered. If the Door had fallen out onto the floor or down the back of a chair, I’d have found it. And I didn’t.’

A yawn from Dennis Tanner. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So whatsername’s Door must’ve been your Door after all.’

‘No!’ Frank hadn’t meant to shout. ‘No, how could it have been? How could it have gone back into the past, into that bank vault, under that dragon, all on its bloody lonesome?’

‘Magic?’ suggested Mr Tanner weakly.

‘That’s what I assumed at the time,’ Frank admitted. ‘Weirdness. The kind of shit I’ve had to get used to putting up with, ever since I fell in with you people. But you’re the magic expert. You tell me what sort of magic could’ve made that happen, and then I’ll be convinced. Well?’

‘Off the top of my head—’

‘Hm?’

‘Not possible,’ Dennis conceded. ‘But this is the Door we’re talking about. Really, all we know about the perishing thing is that anything can happen. So—’

‘Not possible,’ Frank repeated firmly. ‘In which case—’ A huge thought collided with him. ‘No, it couldn’t be that, it’d be so—’ He tore his jacket off his shoulders, laid it on the floor and started a fingertip search.

‘What’s he doing, our Dennis?’

‘I don’t know, it’s dark in here.’

‘Christ!’

Dead silence; then Mr Tanner’s mother said, ‘Now what’s he doing?’

‘Ask him yourself, you—’

Frank sat up on his knees, his fingers in his inside coat pocket, the tip of his forefinger thrust into a hole in the lining. He was still dizzy from the nasty bump on the head that the huge thought had given him; maybe that was what made him reluctant to take the next step. Or it could have been fear that he was wrong.

‘Dennis.’

‘Shh.’

Frank pulled himself together. A hole in the pocket of a lined jacket. He knew what happened in those circumstances. ‘Anybody got a knife?’ he asked.

‘A what?’

‘Forget it.’ With his teeth, he bit into the jacket lining. Not nearly as straightforward as you’d think. Chewy old stuff, polyester. But, after he’d worried at it for a bit, he managed to make a hole big enough to get a finger in, and the rest was quite easy.

‘He’s tearing up his jacket.’

‘Why’s he doing that?’

Next, Frank inserted his hand, up to the wrist. Of course, it wouldn’t be there. You get these inspirations when you’re searching frantically for something; they fit all the known facts and for a while you’re all excited and hopeful, but they always turn out to be—

He felt it; the pad on the tip of his left index finger brushed against cardboard.

He froze. Other things besides Door holders are made of cardboard, and he really, really didn’t want to get his hopes up. In fact, wriggling his fingers deeper inside the lining and teasing out the cardboard tube was quite possibly the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

‘Got it,’ he said.

‘Now what’s he—?’

‘I’ve got it,’ he said again. ‘The Door. My Door. It was in my coat, all the time.’

If anybody had told Colin Gomez, a week earlier, that a day would come when he wouldn’t feel like working, he’d have laughed out loud. Might as well predict that he’d stop breathing air. For Colin Gomez, the universe was composed of two elements, work and other stuff. He’d never cared much for the latter.

But, as he sat at his desk with a file open in front of him, the words of the letter (from Harlequin and James, a tempting compromise offer in the Northampton beanstalk dispute) seemed to repel him like reversed polarities, and however hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to read them.

He gave up trying and instead made an attempt to analyse the problem.

A mind like Colin Gomez’s can do practically anything with a bunch of facts. Accordingly, he quickly reached the conclusion that he’d done nothing wrong. True, he’d conspired against his senior partner, but he’d only done it for the good of the firm. Also true, he’d subsequently betrayed his fellow conspirators, but he’d only done that out of loyalty to his senior partner. So, he had nothing whatever to feel ashamed about, and plenty to be grateful for. He was still alive. He hadn’t been slung out of the partnership. He’d even hedged his bets, in the light of the apparent conflict between his two entirely justified actions, by giving the spare Door to Emily and her young man so that they wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives horribly backdated, trudging grimly through Beatlemania into the flares-and-sideburns era and then on through monetarism and the noxious Nineties just to get back to where they’d started from.

All bases covered, therefore. He should be feeling properly smug. But he wasn’t.

Rationalising his misgivings into pulp should have restored his appetite for work, but when he returned to the letter from Harlequin and James, it continued to avoid him, the communications equivalent of walking straight past him in the street. He had an idea what that meant. Work was shunning him, because on some level somewhere he’d proved himself unworthy of it.

It was just possible, Colin Gomez conceded, that his self-justifications had been just a bit too glib. The death of Emily Spitzer, for example; on the face of it, no big deal. It’s the role of management to play chess with the lives of employees, and from time to time in chess you have to sacrifice a pawn or two. There is a difference, however, between letting a pawn be taken and jumping up and down on it till it’s reduced to a fine resin dust. Maybe Amelia Carrington had gone too far there, and maybe he shouldn’t have been quite so ready to help her.

He thought about that, and dismissed it, remembering instead the first rule of management. Once you start thinking of employees as people, you’re screwed.

The problem had to be, therefore, one of his two tactical betrayals. Unsettling: questions of right and wrong, ethical dilemmas, weren’t usually a feature of his mental landscape, and detecting the presence of one was like coming across a stranded battleship in the middle of the desert. Still, if it was stopping him from working, it had to be dealt with, quickly.

Colin Gomez’s first loyalty was to the firm. The firm and the senior partner were one, an indivisible whole. Therefore his first loyalty was to the senior partner. No question about that.

By the same token, the firm had a right to have the best possible senior partner; and, it went without saying, the best man for the job was himself. Therefore he owed it to the firm to become senior partner. No question about that, either. Accordingly (it amazed him, now he came to think about it, that there had ever been any doubt or uncertainty in his mind on this score) Amelia Carrington had to go. Right. Fine.

Except that she was so scary. And not scary in the irrational-fear sense, like being afraid of loud noises or cows or the cracks between paving stones. Being afraid of Amelia Carrington was supremely rational, because she killed people.

Awkward.

For a short while, Colin Gomez had allowed himself to believe that the Spitzer child and her curious boyfriend might be able to get rid of Amelia, thanks to the Portable Door. But then it had become apparent that Amelia was way ahead of all of them, and was using them to get her perfectly shaped hands on that remarkable artefact, and he’d quickly purged his mind of dangerous wishful thinking and realigned his loyalties; quickly, and perhaps just in time, or perhaps not. Being realistic, probably not. If he was honest with himself, he had to recognise that he was almost certainly somewhere on her things-to-do list, gradually working his way up to the surface, like a splinter of shrapnel in an old wound.

He sighed. Such a shame that Spitzer and her sidekick were so sadly ineffectual. He’d gambled on them by making the fool Erskine give them the spare Door, but that had been some time ago, and nothing seemed to have happened, so presumably they’d used the Door to run away, as any half-sensible person would. No use pinning any of his dwindling stock of hopes on them—

Lines appeared on the wall facing his desk. They could have been stray strands of dust-laden cobweb, except that they were too straight. He lifted his head and stared.

The Door opened. Colin jumped up, quite an achievement for a man of his bulk. The lunatics, he thought; they can’t come here, if she finds out—

But the woman who walked in through the wall wasn’t Emily Spitzer, or Amelia Carrington; just some young blonde female. In Colin’s world, young women under the age of thirty were divided into two types. The ones who wore suits and carried briefcases were junior staff. The rest were typists, receptionists and office juniors. Neither category was any use except for routine, trivial tasks, and-most definitely-neither category should have the use of rare and powerful magical objects like the Door. In which case—