The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Shirt. We went through the Door together, but—’ Click. Frank sat still and quiet for two seconds, then handed her the phone. ‘He’s playing silly buggers,’ he said. ‘Probably getting his own back because of the shirt thing. That’ll be it.’

  She nodded. ‘He’s got a lively sense of humour, then. Practical jokes, that kind of stuff.’

  ‘No.’

  Emily was looking at him oddly again, but this time it was a different kind of oddness. ‘So you tell me,’ she said, ‘that you saved my life because you get paid by this Mr Sprague.’

  ‘That’s right, yes, but—’

  ‘Who reckons he’s never heard of you.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  Thinking about it, the earlier oddness had been quite nice. Not so the new form. ‘And you turn up just now telling me I’ve been killed by spiders, but - well, I’ve only got your word for that. Well, haven’t I?’

  It was a bit like using the windscreen washer on a very cold day; as soon as it hits the glass the water freezes, and suddenly you can’t see anything. ‘You don’t believe me,’ Frank said.

  But Emily shook her head. ‘I know you rescued me the first time,’ she said. ‘I can remember falling out of that damn tree, and thinking, well, this is it; and then I was in Paris—’ She frowned. That was yesterday, for pity’s sake. It seemed like ten years ago. ‘And I know you’ve got the Portable Door, because we went through it. So yes, I know you can travel through space, but the time thing—’ She pulled a face. ‘Everyone says time travel’s impossible, except for the Door. You have no idea how hard it is for me to come to terms with you having that thing. It’s like… I don’t know, like looking down at the foam cup your milk shake came in and finding it’s the Holy Grail. It’s just weird—’

  ‘Fine. But do you believe me?’

  She looked at him. ‘Well, that’s the funny thing,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. I think that either you or the universe is telling lies, and somehow I don’t think it’s you. I mean, why would you? I’ve only known you thirty-six hours, and in that time you’ve saved my life at least once. And maybe Sir Ian McKellen could act bewildered as convincingly as you’ve been doing, but I don’t think you could. I think you’re probably a rotten liar.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘See? I’m right.’ Emily smiled at him. ‘So, if you’re not lying—’

  Frank had no idea why a sudden flare of joy lit up inside him when she said that. Well, maybe a vague hypothesis— ‘—Then what the hell’s happened to Mr Sprague?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  On his return to the office, Erskine Cannis went to his room, took off his coat and sat down at his desk. He knew it was what he was supposed to do, and he did it well. He was getting the hang of this. He was proud of himself. The female, Emily, had told him that she wouldn’t be needing him till two-fifteen. He glanced at his watch-they were really very easy to use, not at all confusing-and worked out that he had over an hour before then. Plenty of time. Erskine Cannis analysed the phrase, and it made him smile. It implied that the stuff somehow gathered in pools, like rainwater, whereas he knew perfectly well that it was an unceasing linear progression, with its active component (the present) never more than one second long. Sort of like a one-millimetre-long conveyor belt. They, on the other hand, seemed to think of it as a form of chewing gum, something that could be softened and stretched and set hard, played for, wasted and even killed. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Really, it was rather silly, and he had an innate mortal fear of silliness. But, somehow, you couldn’t help liking them. They had a sort of quirky charm that was hard to resist. Plenty of time, then. The other prerequisite was not being disturbed.

  He looked down at his desktop and noticed a small pot. It was made of clear plastic, and inside it were paper clips, red and green and white and black. He frowned, momentarily distracted. Why all the different colours? He could conceive of a reason colour-coding, for instance, red for clipping together letters, blue for receipts, green for internal memos-but he knew intuitively that that wasn’t it. They manufactured them in lots of different pretty colours because it made them fun. That word was a brick wall across the fast lane of his mental processes. It meant he had to slow down, stop and find a way round, and just now he had better things to do. He realised he’d picked the pot up while he’d been thinking about paperclip colours, and for some reason he felt an urge to shake it, just to hear the noise it made. He put it down again, the urge denied (Why? Wouldn’t have done any harm just to shake a plastic pot. But no, it would’ve been silly) and tried to remember if it had been there earlier. No, it hadn’t. In which case, someone must’ve gone out of his or her way to put it there, believing that the new trainee would sooner or later need coloured paper clips. He frowned. Would that be an office procedure or some kind of quasi-religious ritual? No, stop it, he ordered himself; leave it. Fascinating though this environment undoubtedly was, crammed with strange new worlds, new life and new civilisations, he wasn’t here to explore it. He was here to work. The God depended on him-he kept letting that slip out of his mental focus; how could he do that? - and he had no time for idle curiosity.

  The God. Even now, Erskine Cannis’s mouth went dry at the thought of her. It’s given to very few sentient entities to be so close to their God, in the same building, with the possibility, likelihood even, of actually seeing her, three or four times a day. His kind, he knew, was uniquely blessed in that regard, and the consideration for that blessing was duty. Work, he told himself. Snap to it.

  He moved his hand to open the desk drawer, and in doing so knocked over the plastic pot. It fell on its side and rolled. Quick as lightning, Erskine Cannis slammed a hand down on it and closed his fingers tightly. Then he frowned, let go and gently stood it upright.

  From the desk drawer-basically a rectangular storage compartment riding on an ingenious arrangement of runners and rollers-he took a small cloth bag, loosened the string round its neck and shook it over his palm. A few grains of light grey dust spilled out; he closed his hand on them, put the bag away safely and unclenched his fingers. The grey specks made his skin itch.

  He tried to remember how to do this.

  It wasn’t complicated, but it was only his second day. With his other hand, Erskine Cannis searched in his pocket and took out a cigarette lighter; next, he carefully dropped the dust onto a piece of scrap paper (a memo about reducing Sellotape wastage; obviously important, but he’d read it and taken its message to heart, so the actual paper was expendable), creased it down the middle to keep the dust from spilling, :and set light to it. The paper flared for a moment, then crumpled into black ash. He felt the tips of his fingers burn, but that couldn’t be helped. Any moment now, he thought.

  Bright white light scorched his eyes; he closed them (lacking a secondary eyelid) and, when he opened them again, a small green creature was perching on his knuckles. It looked vaguely humanoid, in a toad-like sort of way. Its most striking feature was its big round red eyes.

  ‘Put me down,’ it said.

  ‘Sorry,’ Erskine said automatically. Very slowly and carefully, he moved his hand down to desktop level, until the little creature could comfortably jump down.

  ‘Quite all right,’ the creature said pleasantly. It sat on the cover of Erskine’s desk diary, fished behind its ear and produced the stub end of a very small roll-up, which it lit by snapping its claw-like fingers. It took a long, deep drag and said, ‘Report.’

  Erskine took a deep breath. ‘So far, so good, I think,’ he said. ‘I’ve been assigned to assist the female, Emily Spitzer—’ The creature waved its cigarette at him impatiently. ‘We know all that,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry. This morning, we went to a place called Zimmerman and Schnell…’ He paused. Not the right time to ask, but curiosity had been gnawing at him all morning. ‘I was wondering about that, actually. If it’s a place, why’s it got the same name as people? Only places are called things like America and Leic
ester and Tottenham Court Road, but Zimmerman’s a person name. And isn’t Schnell the German for “quickly”?’

  The little creature sighed. ‘It’s technical,’ it said. ‘Look it up on the Internet in your spare time. You went to Zimmerman and Schnell.’

  ‘Yes.’ Erskine winced. He was being inefficient; in fact, verging on silly. ‘We went there. We had to exterminate a nest of giant spiders.’

  ‘Mphm.’ The little creature dabbed a tiny speck of ash off the tip of its miniature fag. ‘And?’

  ‘We succeeded,’ Erskine said, with a hint of pride. ‘Having sealed the infested area and run Everleigh scans, we introduced cyanide gas—’

  ‘Yes, yes, you can skip all that. Anything odd happen?’ The creature seemed to be making an extreme mental effort. ‘Anything-well, out of the ordinary.’

  Erskine shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We killed the spiders, called in the clean-up squad and came back here. Oh, and Mr Arkenstone from the Salt Lake City office stopped by to borrow some detonators. That’s it, really.’ Pause. ‘Did I do all right? Only—’

  ‘Hold it.’ The creature raised a claw. ‘Mister what from where?’

  ‘Mr Arkenstone from the Salt Lake City office.’

  The creature scowled; at least, that was the likeliest explanation for what it was doing with its face. ‘We haven’t got a Mister Arkenstone. Come to that, we haven’t got an office in Salt Lake City.’

  For a moment, Erskine’s mind went blank. He hated it when that happened. ‘But the female told me—’

  ‘Ah.’ The creature sat up. ‘Let’s go through this one step at a time. What happened?’

  ‘Well.’ Erskine took a moment to shepherd his thoughts. ‘We took the lift to the sixth floor-that’s where the infested room was-and when we got there, this man was standing outside the door, waiting for us. He said hello, and Ms Spitzer said, hello yourself, what are you doing here—’

  ‘Just a tick.’ The small creature frowned. ‘Just say that again.’

  ‘Hello yourself, what are you doing here?’

  The creature sighed. ‘Inflection,’ it said. ‘Emphasis. No, fine, all right. Did she say, what are you doing here, or was it more like, what are you doing here?’

  ‘The second one.’

  ‘Got you. Go on.’

  Erskine had lost his place. He wasn’t making a very good job of this. He felt ashamed. Still, he could put that right by doing much, much better. ‘Then the man said, you remember I told you what I do for a living. Then Miss Spitzer told me to go away. So I did.’

  The small creature studied him for a moment, and Erskine couldn’t help feeling that this wasn’t at all good. To have failed on only his second day—

  ‘All right,’ the creature said slowly. ‘You went away.’

  ‘Yes. There was a bend in the corridor. I went round that, so I’d be out of sight and earshot. I-well, I assumed she didn’t want me to see or hear anything.’ Pause. ‘Was that wrong?’

  The small creature waved its hand. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ it said, and Erskine’s heart blossomed with relief. He hadn’t failed after all. ‘So, how long did you stay there?’

  Erskine thought. ‘Fifty-one seconds,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t know how long I was supposed to be away for, you see, she didn’t say, and there was nothing in the training sessions or the accompanying written material—’

  ‘And then you went back.’

  ‘Yes.’ Erskine bowed his head. Now he came to think about it, his actions had been irrational and arbitrary; instead of asking how long he had to go away for, he’d just relied on his own intuition and guessed. He made a solemn vow never to let anything of the sort ever happen again.

  ‘And?’

  ‘The man had gone,’ Erskine said. ‘Miss Spitzer told me he was Mr Arkenstone from Salt Lake City, and—’

  ‘She told you. You didn’t ask.’

  Oh no, Erskine thought, I got that wrong as well. ‘No,’ he confessed.

  ‘Fine.’ Having found him out and made him confess, the creature didn’t seem inclined to make anything of it. ‘That’s interesting. Right, yes. Well done. Keep up the good work.’

  Erskine couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You mean I did all right?’

  ‘What?’ The creature was stubbing out its roll-up on its thumb claw. ‘Oh, yes, great stuff, keep at it. Report again tomorrow.’ He tucked the roll-up stub back behind his ear and stood on tiptoe, which meant he was about to dematerialise. But Erskine couldn’t let him go without asking—

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Mm?’

  He could hardly bring himself to say it. ‘Will you—?’ Go on, say it and get it over with. ‘Will you have to tell Her about it? About all the-well, the mistakes I made? Only, I know they were pretty bad, some of them, but really, I’ve learned a lot today, and I promise I’ll make absolutely sure I don’t do anything like that again, so if you could possibly …’ He ran out of words, sagged and waited. The creature looked at him.

  ‘Get a grip, son,’ it said, and vanished.

  When Emily got back to the office after lunch, there was a message waiting for her at reception. Mr Gomez wants to see you, ASAP.

  She pulled a terrifying face, which the receptionist ignored through long practice, and stalked through the fire door and up the stairs. By the time she got to Mr Gomez’s room, she’d calmed down a little; you could’ve melted brass on her, but not iron. She whacked the door with her knuckles and went in.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’ Why was it, she wondered, that no matter how quickly she responded to his call, how legitimate her reason for not instantly materialising when summoned, there was always that note of mild, indulgent reproach in his voice when he first spoke to her? ‘Good lunch?’

  Of course he didn’t give a toss. He just said stuff like that to show you what a warm, caring employer he was. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Fine. Now, we’ve got a bit of a situation with San Cristobal Plastics.’ He frowned. ‘Turns out that one of their board of directors is a troll.’

  ‘Know the feeling.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Beats me,’ Mr Gomez went on, ‘why they didn’t notice it earlier. I mean, they’re a very well established firm, very big in injection moulding, turnover up twenty-six per cent last year, and it’s a highly competitive market these days. Doing particularly well in the Far East, too. Still, there it is, nobody’s perfect.’ He paused, reflecting on the basic treachery of the universe. Usually, Emily would have let him indulge himself, but not today.

  ‘So?’ she said.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘So what do they want us to do about it?’

  Mr Gomez frowned. ‘Well, kill it, of course. Get rid of it, before it eats a customer.’

  ‘But—’ Emily took a deep breath. ‘You said it’s a director of the company. You can’t go around knocking off members of the board just like that.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, they’ve had a vote. Some trouble with the small investors, but the insurance companies and trust managers pushed it through. So they want it taken care of before the news reaches the market. They’re in a delicate enough position as it is, with the Koreans pushing them. And there’s rumours of a hostile bid from—’

  ‘Fine,’ Emily said. ‘I’ll go and do that, then. You’d better give me the details.’

  Mr Gomez gave her a little smile, the sort that a harassed mother might give to a teenager who’d finally consented to put away her newly ironed clothes. ‘Here’s the address,’ he said, handing her a sheet of paper. ‘They’re expecting you. Just go to the front desk and ask for Mr Pickersgill.’

  ‘Mphm.’ She nodded. ‘He’s the head of security, then.’

  Slight frown. ‘No, he’s the troll. And this time, please remember to get the work order countersigned. You know we can’t raise an invoice without a completed work order.’

  Emily kept her teeth clamped together. She turned to leave, but Mr Gomez
called her back. ‘You’d better take young Erskine along with you,’ he said. ‘The more of our established clients he meets, the better. If they can put faces to names—’

  ‘Have I got to?’ She hadn’t meant it to come out as a whine, but there wasn’t really any other way of saying those particular words. ‘Look, it’s going to be a pretty delicate job as it is. If I’ve got to babysit Erskine while I’m at it—’ She closed her mouth. Complete waste of time. ‘I’ll take Erskine with me,’ she said. ‘It’ll be good experience for him.’

  ‘Splendid. Let me know how it went when you get back.’

  As Emily walked back down the corridor, her mind was a three-lane highway. In the fast lane, the ethics of killing company directors just because they happened not to be human. In the middle, the practicalities of offing a troll (skin like Kevlar, bones practically unbreakable, immune to all major poisons; daylight usually fatal, but these days, with high-factor barrier creams—). Not just killing one, but doing it in broad daylight, in its office, and without turning most of SW1 into a radioactive desert. A challenge. Which left the slow lane, in which the problem of what had happened to George Sprague still chuntered quietly along, going nowhere in particular but draining her already overtaxed reserves. All that and Erskine too. What joy.

  When she barged into his office without knocking, she found him sitting at his desk reading a file. ‘What’ve you got there?’ she snapped.

  ‘The Piedmont Technologies case notes,’ he replied pleasantly. ‘I was just admiring the way you handled the infestation of three-headed giant bats. Though, strictly speaking, the use of dioxin in an environmentally sensitive area—’

  ‘Put it away,’ she said irritably. ‘And get your coat.’ She paused, sat on the edge of the desk. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘how would you go about killing a troll?’

  It was like pressing an on-switch. ‘Built-up area or open countryside?’

  ‘Horseferry Road.’

  Dip of the head to acknowledge the data input. ‘In that case oh, sorry, daylight or night-time?’