The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  ‘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.

  Mr Tanner’s mother glanced down at the pattern, sighed, and reached for the wire-cutters.

  Amelia Carrington, she thought. It seemed like only yesterday that she’d been eating strained pear off a spoon and strangling snakes in her cot. It’s a shame they have to grow up.

  Obviously, she was up to something; well, that went without saying. Knowing her, something big and flashy, probably some kind of take on world domination; something involving bauxite, at some level or other. The part that puzzled Mr Tanner’s mother, though, was why she needed to involve young Dennis.

  That was a mystery; it was also pretty much the only clue she’d got. Fortunately, it was a significant one. For all that she was his mother, she had few illusions about her son. He was a perfectly competent private-practice magician with an undoubted flair for scrying, but that was all. His rise to a partnership in J. W. Wells & Co he owed to the slender but tenacious streak of ruthlessness that he’d inherited from her side of the family. The other, human side had made him sloppy, soft and sentimental, though to do him credit he hid it well. His worst fault was his own unshakeable faith in his own cleverness. It wouldn’t have mattered too much if he’d been stupid. Idiots with delusions of intelligence never climb up high enough to hurt themselves badly when they fall. It’s the level-eight smartarses who think they’re level tens who come badly unstuck; which was what had happened, of course, to Dennis.

  The other problem caused by his most significant flaw was that when he fell, he hadn’t fallen quite far enough. If he’d been left broke and destitute after JWW crashed, he’d most likely have quit the frontline magic business and found some nice quiet backwater of the profession in which to live out the rest of his days. But he’d been just sufficiently clever to salvage enough from the wreck to set up this two-rooms-over-a-chemist’s-shop business of his own, and he was doing just well enough at it to harbour dangerous dreams of getting back into the big time, as and when the one lucky break came along. Hence, presumably, the Carrington bitch’s interest.

  It had to be scrying, Dennis’s mother thought, as she twiddled the knobs of the oxypropane torch. It was what he was best at, so it had to be something of the sort. Even so; Amelia Carrington had two dozen scryers on her staff who were almost as good, and (more to the point) the scheme she’d told them about didn’t actually need the best in the business—

  Pause. Was Dennis the best in the business? No, but a lot of people in the trade believed he was, or pretty close to it. A frown crossed her face and for a moment the auburn-haired temptress flickered, and you could have caught a glimpse of the underlying goblin. If Dennis Tanner said there was bauxite under some mountain in New Zealand, that’d be good enough for anybody. But what if there wasn’t any?

  Yes, she thought, but that doesn’t make sense. The reason everybody would believe him if he said the new strike was the biggest yet discovered was that he wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true; and he’d know if Amelia Carrington was trying to trick him, he was definitely good enough for that. That was another defect in his character: integrity. Not that he wouldn’t lie and cheat for money and steal a child’s teddy bear from its cot if he knew someone who’d pay him money for it. But as far as scrying was concerned, he told the truth. Everybody knew that.

  In which case, that had to be the scam; that Carrington bitch must’ve come up with something that’d fool even the great Dennis Tanner into guaranteeing a strike that didn’t exist. Except that that was impossible. Grr.

  The phone rang. Talk of the—

  ‘Amelia Carrington. I’d like a quick word with Dennis, please.’

  ‘Putting you through.’ She put her on hold and rang Dennis. ‘It’s that cow on the line,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Amelia bloody Carrington. On the phone for you.’

  ‘Oh, right. For a moment I thought you were talking about railways.’

  She sighed. ‘You want to talk to her or not?’

  Pause; then, ‘Yeah, why not? Put her on.’

  Mr Tanner’s mother would never have dreamed of picking up the phone and listening in on her son’s private conversation. With goblin hearing, she didn’t need to. ‘Dennis,�
�� said the Carrington female. ‘Good news. We’ve got the satellite pics.’

  ‘About time.’

  ‘Yes, well. Anyhow, they’re here on my desk right now. How soon can you come over?’

  The hesitation that followed was so slight that only a mother would have detected it. ‘I’m a bit tied up right now. Could you have them sent over here?’

  Good boy, thought Mr Tanner’s mother.

  ‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you. No offence, but somehow I doubt your security’s up to our standards. I’m probably being over-fussy, but the last thing I want right now is for these pics to fall into the wrong hands. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘I just wanted to save time, that’s all,’ Dennis replied, so convincingly that his mother almost believed him herself. ‘The earliest I can get there is - what’s the time now, half-six; call it eight-fifteen, too late for New York or Tokyo.’ (Nice touch, Mr Tanner’s mother conceded; doesn’t actually mean anything, but just convincing enough to throw Amelia Carrington off balance for a second or two.) ‘If you rush them over here in a taxi right now, we’d still be able to catch Riyadh and possibly New Delhi.’

  ‘No, sorry. I sort of gave my word I wouldn’t let them out of my sight. Look, I’ll send a car for you, OK? See you soon.’

  Followed by a click, meaning end of discussion. Fair enough. When you’re Amelia Carrington you don’t need to be subtle, in the same way elephants don’t need Wellington boots. A moment later, the dividing door opened and Dennis came in. He was wearing his coat.

  ‘You got all that?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘You’re not going, are you?’

  ‘Looks like it. Bloody woman,’ he added with feeling.

  Mr Tanner’s mother turned off the gas bottle and stood up. ‘I wish I knew what she was up to.’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’ It’s annoying when your son, your own flesh and blood, turns out to have a point. ‘We won’t wait for the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a taxi.’