The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  Quite, Dennis said to himself; and if that’s right, it’s the first natural thought you ever had in your life. ‘I’d be interested,’ he said carefully. ‘What’s the deal?’

  ‘Joint venture.’ Dennis nearly dropped the phone. ‘Your expertise, we do the legwork and the boring stuff-the legal side, contractors, all that. Obviously we’ll organise the money. Basically, you find the stuff, we dig it up and flog it.’

  Joint venture. Dennis tried to light his cigar and scorched the tip of his nose instead. It was his experience, painfully and often bloodily acquired, that anything that seems too good to be true is probably too good to be true. And as far as trustworthiness was concerned, Amelia Carrington was a British government dossier. Even so.

  ‘Sounds good,’ he managed to croak. ‘When are you free?’

  ‘Right now.’ Alarm bells. Amelia I-can-window-you-five-minutes-next-January Carrington, free right now. An urge to grow a beard and flee the country gripped Dennis Tanner like a mole wrench, but he suppressed it. There was an old goblin saying: your enemy is never more vulnerable than when he’s trying to be clever. And if there was one resource Dennis Tanner had every confidence in, it was his own cleverness. ‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘Your place or mine?’

  ‘Here, I think.’ Amelia’s voice had just the right modulation of distaste. ‘No disrespect, Uncle Dennis, but I think our facilities are just a tad more cutting-edge than yours.’ Slight pause. ‘Shall I send a car, or—?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Dennis replied through gritted teeth. ‘The bus’ll do me fine. See you soon, then.’

  ‘Ciao.’

  He sat for a while with the phone in his hand, thinking serious thoughts. Old Tosser Carrington, for example. A complete idiot blessed with ridiculously good luck and just enough vicious low cunning to survive; back in the nineteen-hundreds they’d been good mates, two young newly qualified magicians trying to make it in the merciless cut and thrust of the Canberra sorcery trade. When they’d quit Oz to give the old country a go, they’d had some kind of vague idea of setting up in partnership: Dennis on corporate magic and minerals, Tosser handling the private-client and pest-control side. But within a few weeks of getting here, Tosser had been practically handed an apprenticeship at Mortimers on a plate, leaving Dennis to fend for himself. True, the first job he’d applied for had been at J. W. Wells, and the rest was history, as his obituary was at pains to point out. Nevertheless, the old resentment was still there, logged and ticketed and archived in Dennis’s monumental grudge collection. The thought that, now he was down on his luck and scratching a living in inner-city Nowheresville, Tosser Carrington’s equally obnoxious daughter was going to wave a magic wand and make him rich and famous once again was a bit too much to swallow.

  A trap, then. Well, she was perfectly capable of it, but why bother? If she meant him harm, why go to such ridiculous lengths? Damaging people, getting rid of them entirely, was easy-peasy for someone like Amelia. Which reminded him of something. Carringtons. Better Mousetraps.

  Dennis’s nostrils flared. He believed in coincidences to the same extent that the Pope believes in Odin. The possibility that this stuff was somehow Carpenter-related gave him a pain in his midriff. He scowled, rebuking himself for his own dimness. Lights should have gone on when Amelia had mentioned New Zealand: last known address of Paul and Sophie Carpenter, location of the vast bauxite deposit with which he and his erstwhile partners had paid those two unmitigated pests off after the nasty business with Theo van Spee and custardspace. He shivered. He could feel dark, slimy tendrils of Carpenter curling softly around him, poised to crush him into pulp.

  Yes, but a joint venture with Carringtons-Dennis Tanner knew all about tides in the affairs of men, and he was Australian enough to know that any tide can be ridden if you’re handy enough with your surfboard. And, of course, he had one special weapon that Amelia had almost certainly underestimated and quite possibly clean forgotten about. He frowned, then grinned the great, unique Tanner grin. Then he rang through to the front office.

  ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘get your coat. We’re going out.’

  In the bottom left-hand corner of the big screen, which at that precise moment was filled with Russell Crowe’s hugely amplified armpit, a door opened.

  Luckily, it was the mid-afternoon showing, so nobody noticed as Frank Carpenter stepped out from under Russell’s coat, nipped smartly down the Door’s foldaway stairs and darted up the centre aisle. Thanks to Mr Sprague’s excellent report on the Catford multiplex blaze, he had no trouble finding the small patch of smouldering carpet. He jumped up and down on it a few times, emptied the bottle of Evian he’d brought with him over the embers and retraced his steps. Job done.

  The Door opened again in the back wall of a Marks & Spencers in West London, and Frank stepped out, looking unusually grave. Putting out the fire, saving several lives and many millions of pounds: morceau de gateau. Now he was going to have to do something really difficult and scary. He was going to try and buy a shirt.

  He had shirts, of course-three of them. One of them was a sort of blotchy off-white, with frayed cuffs and collar. One of them was yellow, with a striking Paisley motif, a birthday present from his mother. He’d been wearing the third for three days now, and even when it was pristine from the launderette it was hardly a thing of beauty. When a man’s got a date with the girl he thinks he may be in love with, he may well find himself having to reassess his entire shirt philosophy. Also, he decided, trousers. And socks. And stuff.

  Of course, Frank thought as he wandered in through the door, I could be really daring and hell-for-leather go-for-it and buy a suit. Probably that’s what Alexander the Great would’ve done, and possibly also Napoleon and Robert E. Lee. Also, with a suit you get a jacket as well as the trousers, which’d be two birds with one stone. On the other hand, there’s no point in overdoing it. I mean, suppose it doesn’t work out and I haven’t met the girl of my dreams?

  Then I’d be broken-hearted and all alone in the world, and stuck with a useless set of clothes I’ll never wear again. You’ve got to be practical, play the odds, have a fall-back position; like Hannibal, the Duke of Wellington or Field Marshal Montgomery.

  An escalator took Frank up two floors, and he found himself in a place where there were shirts. Lots of shirts. Everywhere he looked, shirts pressed in on him like the souls of the dead in the underworld, each one seeming to reach out to him, begging him to take them out of there into the light. The reckless courage that had got him in through the Door was ebbing fast. There were too many of the damned things, and how could anybody be expected to choose between them? By one set of criteria, they were all practically identical - two sleeves, collar, buttons, everything a boy could ever need in terms of weather exclusion neatly contained in one simple-to-operate package. Looked at from the other relevant perspective, the variety was stunning. Patterned and plain, stripes going up and down and side to side, colours representing every conceivable fragmentation of the spectrum, combinations of every colour imaginable; and the bitch of it was, some of these shirts were right and some of them were wrong, and he had no idea of how the rules worked. All he knew was that if you got it right, you looked a million dollars and lovely women melted into your arms like ice cream on a hot day, and if you got it wrong, children pointed at you in the street. It was, he couldn’t help thinking, a bit like the other incomprehensible scary thing, the one he was buying the shirt for. Finding the right one, having the wit to know it when you’d found it, keeping it, looking after it properly, never letting it go. Washing it occasionally. Ironing. Life is so much easier, of course, if you never bother.

  That had been easy enough back in Wayatumba, South Island, where Frank had lived in a pretty remote place and had never got opportunities to meet many shirts. Here, though, they were everywhere you looked. You couldn’t ignore them, sooner or later you had to bite the bullet and find a way of coping, unless you wanted to have nothing to look forward to but a lonely old age wearing nothing but
vests and polo-necks. And sometimes, when life steams up your mind’s glasses and you can’t see the pattern that governs your destiny, you just have to trust to providence and synchronocity and take a chance. Frank pulled himself together, clenched his muscles till the tendons twanged, and grabbed the first shirt that came to hand. It was pink.

  So much for providence and synchronicity. He put it back with the strained delicacy of someone handling something dead, looked again and gave up. It was too difficult. Given, say, three shirts to choose from, he could probably reach a decision if he took his time. Three hundred, however, was too many.

  I don’t actually have to do this, Frank told himself. I could Portable Door back home, wash, dry and iron the shirt I’m wearing and still be in good time for lunch. And yes, all right, using magic so I don’t have to do a perfectly simple thing that everybody else but me can cope with may be a bit pathetic and sad, but so what? Surely magic’s there for the pesky little things in life rather than the great big important stuff that only matters to governments and multinational companies; or if it isn’t, it damn well should be.

  He played that thought back, and sighed. Well, quite; and while you’re at it, feed the world and give peace a chance. All in all, it was probably just as well he’d never been tempted to go into the magic business. Just think of all the damage he could’ve done, even in the very short space of time he’d have been likely to survive.

  The hell with it, he thought. Quick look round, then into the changing room, where he spread the Door over the full-length mirror and stepped through.

  Mr Sprague was mildly surprised to see him. ‘Not business,’ Frank explained quickly. ‘Need a favour. Won’t take a minute. Please?’

  ‘Not business,’ Mr Sprague repeated, as if speaking a foreign language he didn’t understand.

  ‘No. Personal. Look, it’ll take longer to explain than to do it, so—’

  ‘All right.’ Mr Sprague scowled. ‘You don’t expect me to go into that thing, do you?’

  ‘What? Oh, the Door.’ Frank laughed. ‘You don’t want to worry about that. Perfectly safe. And if you’re really, really busy—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I promise I’ll get you back here one second after we leave. Deal?’

  ‘Urn.’

  ‘One second before we leave.’

  Sigh. ‘Well, if you really insist—’

  ‘Thanks.’ Frank held the Door open. ‘After you.’

  ‘Are you sure that thing’s—?’

  ‘Positive. I use it myself, every day.’

  Head bowed, fingers crossed, eyes screwed shut, Mr Sprague edged through the Door and disappeared. Shaking his head, Frank followed him, and walked out into the M&S changing room. ‘There,’ he said, closing the Door and catching it as it fell off the surface of the mirror, ‘you see? Safe as—’

  His mouth froze. He looked at the curtain in front of him, the mirror behind, the narrow space in between. Then he ripped open the curtain, plunged through it and stood for a moment, completely stunned.

  No sign of Mr Sprague. Vanished. Gone.

  When she was a little girl, Emily Spitzer was terrified of spiders. Her father, being that sort of man, refused to deal with them when she came sobbing. Life, he used to say, is full of scary things. The sooner you learn how to deal with them for yourself, the better. You’ll learn to be resourceful, self-reliant. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.

  Not knowing any better, Emily took him at his word; and, since she was the sort of person who has to do everything well, she quickly transformed herself from a perfectly normal junior arachnophobe into the champion spider-hunter of the Home Counties. She learned how to approach quietly, not making sudden movements that’d be likely to spook them and send them scuttling away into their inaccessible fastnesses under the skirting board. She learned the quick, wristy swat with a slipper heel or a rolled-up teen-fashion magazine, the precise amount of forward allowance to compensate for the last-second panic scuttle. By the age of ten, she was squashing spiders for her friends and their parents, at 25p a time. When she passed the entrance exam for magic college and had to choose a specialisation, it was almost inevitable that she’d opt for pest control; after all, it was no more than spider-hunting on a slightly larger scale, but with access to vastly more efficient forms of slipper heel. If she doubted her decision, it was only because pest control wasn’t one of the fast-track disciplines that got you a partnership before you were thirty, unlike, say, Media & Entertainment or spiritual conveyancing. The danger aspect of it didn’t bother her in the least, since she knew all about fear and how easy it was to overcome. Piece of cake, she thought. Line up those supernatural monsters and let me at ‘em.

  Her first encounter with giant spiders (arachnis grandiforma Atkinsonii) changed all that. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the class tutor who was demonstrating basic giant-spider-management skills got his head bitten off, leaving Emily to lead the rest of the tutor group to safety through a thousand acres of Atkinsoniihaunted forest. As the goblins say, though, it’s the burned child who fears the baptism of fire. On her return from that memorable field trip, as soon as she was out of intensive care, she amended her father’s first law of survival by adding to it three small but very important words. Henceforth, it went

  You have nothing to fear but fear itself and scary things.

  As the taxi stopped outside the offices of Zimmerman and Schnell in Lombard Street, it was in Emily’s mind to share her guiding principle with Erskine Cannis. She had an idea that it might help him survive until, say, next Wednesday. She wasn’t prepared to rate his life expectancy any higher than that, mostly because by then she would almost certainly have killed him herself.

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ he was saying, as the taxi drove off and left them at the kerbside, ‘that section 47, paragraph 5(c) of the third schedule to the Endangered Species Preservation Order 1997 includes all three of the major European subspecies of Atkinsonii as category 6, which means you can’t destroy them with Class B explosives in a metropolitan district or the Isle of Wight without express permission from the secretary of state. Of course, if they turn out to be arachnis grandiforma Atkinsonii erythrostomata, there is a general licence during March and April—’

  ‘We’re here,’ Emily said, loudly and clearly. ‘Now then—’

  ‘The distinguishing marks of erythrostomata, as I scarcely need to remind you—’

  ‘Shut your face and carry the bags.’

  The woman at the front desk asked them their names and the purpose of their visit; Emily replied, ‘Pest control,’ and the woman gave them each a little plastic badge. Then they sat and waited for a long time, until Mr Ahriman from Maintenance saw fit to come down and claim them as his own.

  ‘Big bastards,’ he said, in the voice of someone who’s seen rather more than he wanted to. ‘Big hairy bastards with ten legs—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Erskine, smirking, ‘arachnis grandiforma Atkinsonii pachythorax. In which case, schedule four applies.’ Mr Ahriman shot him a terrified glance. ‘What’s he talking about?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Emily said firmly. ‘And even if it did, we aren’t going to start letting off nukes in the middle of the City of London, so you can forget about that for a start. Technical stuff,’ she told Mr Ahriman blandly - he’d gone ever such a funny colour - ‘nothing for you to worry about. You just leave everything to us and we’ll have them out of there in a brace of shakes. Oh, while I think of it,’ she added, ‘we’ll need some dust sheets and a couple of big rolls of sticky tape. Could you possibly organise that for us? Thanks.’

  Mr Ahriman left them outside a door on the third floor marked No Unauthorised Entry and scuttled back into the lift. When the doors had closed behind him, Erskine said, ‘What are the dust sheets for?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Emily replied. ‘It’s just to give him something to do, let him feel he’s contributing. And another thing,’ she said. ‘When we’re on a job, don’t you ever talk about trade s
tuff in front of the punter again. Got that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She sighed. Rebukes, even when pitched at bollocking level, just seemed to soak away into Erskine, like water into sand. Instead of cringing or taking offence like a normal human being, he was grateful. That was too much. It wasn’t natural. It was inhuman. ‘Good,’ she said weakly. ‘Glad we’ve got that sorted out. Now, then.’

  Her mind had gone blank. She couldn’t think what she was supposed to do next.

  Of course, Emily said to herself, I’m used to working solo. Having someone else along flusters me. Even so; it wasn’t good. On the other side of the door was an unspecified number of giant spiders (the ten-leg variety; oh, joy): lightning-fast, bodies as big as cows, legs like scaffolding, stings that went through five-mil Kevlar like it wasn’t there, venom sacks holding more poison that a party conference-dammit, she needed to be focused, tuned, in touch with the grimly single-minded little girl with the torch in one hand and the slipper in the other who feared nothing (except fear itself) and who got the job done. And instead, here she was, mind like a teenager’s bedroom, dithering.

  ‘Right,’ she snapped, her voice a trifle shrill, ‘prime the stun grenades, and-no, scratch that, set up up the Everleigh scanners and then prime the grenades. Or is it the other way round?’

  Panic.

  Emily had heard the stories, of course. Everyone in the trade had heard them. Hugo van Leipzig, winner of five consecutive Siegfrieds, suddenly freezing in the middle of a routine manticore clearance. Gordon Shirasaya, five hundred and seven authenticated vampire stakings, taken down by a poxy little Class Seven because he lost the plot at the critical moment and dropped his tent peg. It was the thing you dreaded and never ever talked about in the bar at seminars, the sudden, unexplained onset of crippling fear in the course of a piece-of-shit milk run. It happened, everybody knew that. Basically, if you’d already lasted more than eighteen months in the trade, you knew for stone-cold certain that, sooner or later, that was how you were going to die. But this isn’t that, screamed a voice inside Emily’s head; she thought about it, as dispassionately as she could, and had to agree. It wasn’t fear, she’d know it if it was. She’d feel the twisting in her stomach, the vicious twinge in the bladder, the loosening of the bowels. Not fear, then: something worse. It was-it was just woolly-mindedness, plain and simple. Somewhere in her head a door or a window had been left open, and she couldn’t concentrate.