The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  No wonder he got headaches; a bit like toothache in a tooth that’d long since been pulled. A gentle knock at the door (the permanent one, not the temporary hole-in-the-wall, which had vanished when his visitor left). In came Ms Dennaway, with a thick wad of stapled-together paper.

  ‘The report on the Eccleshaw factory explosion,’ she said, putting it down in front of him as though it was a plate of nasty greens that he’d have to eat before he got any pudding. ‘Oh, and Mr Cartwright rang. He’d like to talk to you about it before he briefs the loss adjusters.’

  Mr Sprague winced. He remembered seeing the TV footage. It wasn’t till the next day that he remembered that they covered the Eccleshaw plant. Tentative as an engineer defusing a bomb, he flicked to the last page and read the double-underlined figure at the bottom. So many noughts trailing after the integers. Somewhere in the West Midlands a gambler had just hit the jackpot, though he hadn’t lived to enjoy it. Nor, apparently, had a lot of other people.

  He sighed. Twice in one day. He thought about ice packs, paracetamol, ibuprofen. He thought about all that money.

  His fingers did a little dance on the number pad of the nearest phone. Three electronic burps, and a familiar voice said, ‘Hello?’

  Oh well, thought Mr Sprague. ‘Hello, Frank,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  After dealing with the Eccleshaw business, Frank Carpenter stepped through a door in a wall in Brierley Hill and came out through an identical door in a builder’s hoarding in south London. He closed it behind him, waited as it slowly slid to the ground and rolled itself up, picked it off the pavement and tucked it into a small cardboard tube, which he stowed away carefully in his inside pocket. Not the most attractive of neighbourhoods, he decided. True, it wasn’t one of those districts where you have to look where you’re going so you don’t slip on a nest of cartridge cases from last night’s drive-by shooting, but the security grilles on the shop windows and the burnt-out P-reg Mercedes suggested that this wasn’t a happy environment for a shallow, easygoing hedonist like himself. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place where you’d expect to find— But there it was, just across the road and up a floor. Over a chemist’s, he noted. How are the mighty fallen, and all that. (Mum and Dad ought to see this, he said to himself. Most likely they wouldn’t grin or snigger, but they’d feel - what? Closure, a necessary turn of the wheel. Dad, anyway. Mum’d probably click her tongue and say serve them right. Or maybe not. Where they’d gone, something like this couldn’t possibly matter. It’d be like expecting the moon to care whether Tim Henman made it through to the quarter-finals.)

  Below him something snuffled, and he felt the soft assault of a wagging tail against his leg. He sighed. He was pretty sure he’d been alone when he folded up the door, but apparently not. Or maybe (not a notion he cared to dwell on), maybe Bobby didn’t need the door. They say that dogs will travel hundreds of miles to find their lost masters. ‘Oh well,’ he said aloud. ‘Bobby, heel.’

  Immediately the dog sprang out into the road, causing a van driver to burn ten quids’ worth of value off his tyres and brake pads. It reached the opposite pavement, turned round, looked at him and wagged its tail. Stupid animal.

  The stencilled black letters in the window above the chemist’s read:

  Tanner & Co

  Chartered M

  From the way the words were spaced, you could deduce that some other letters had faded away or peeled off after the ‘M’. Frank grinned. The chartered was a nice touch. It was one of those words that the eye skidded off. Behind a word like that, you instinctively thought, works a boring little man whose services I’ll never need, and which I couldn’t afford in any case. Interest evaporates. Nobody ever lingers in the street looking up and wondering what the ‘M ‘ stands for.

  There was a side door. The stair carpet was frayed, with flat blobs of spent chewing gum fossilised in the pile. At the top of the stairs, Frank faced a glass-panelled door with a bell-push and one of those boxes you speak into and wait for it to quack back at you before you’re allowed in. Somehow Frank got the impression that not many of Mr Tanner’s customers were walkins off the street.

  He pressed the button and said ‘Hello,’ the way you do. Nothing happened. He tried again. Silence. He was just about to fish in his pocket for the cardboard tube when the box belched static at him and a female voice said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m here to see Mr Tanner,’ he said.

  ‘Snark wargle squirr appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Name, please.’

  Ah, Frank thought. Of course, he could always lie, just to get through the door. But from what he’d heard about him, he didn’t want to start off with Mr Tanner leering down at him from the moral high ground, and quite possibly rolling boulders as well. ‘Frank Carpenter,’ he said.

  ‘Frank what?’

  ‘Carpenter. As in woodwork. Or Harrison Ford.’

  Pause. Maybe a little white lie would’ve been justified after all. But Carpenter wasn’t such an uncommon name. Maybe they’d think that—

  Bzzz. He applied gentle pressure to the door and it opened.

  He saw a small room with grubby woodchip on the walls and flogged-out carpet tiles on the floor. There was a plain chipboard desk in the middle of it, behind which sat the most beautiful girl Frank had ever seen in his life. Ah, he thought. I’ve come to the right place, then.

  The girl looked at him; eyes like soft blue-black holes. He looked down at his shoes, and noticed that they were splashed with whatever the noxious stuff was that they processed at the Eccleshaw plant. Oh well, he thought. If it burns holes in the carpet, I don’t suppose anybody’ll notice.

  ‘Is that your dog?’

  Inside Frank something growled, but he was a civilised human being, so he nodded. ‘I’d like a word with Mr Tanner, please, if he’s free,’ he said, as pleasantly as he could. The beautiful girl looked at him, and under his clothes he fancied he could feel little dotted lines, like the ones you see drawn on pictures of cows in butchers’ shops, to tell you the names of the various cuts and joints.

  ‘Carpenter, did you say your name was?’

  ‘That’s right. Frank Carpenter.’

  Was it possible to read someone’s DNA with the naked eye?

  The girl looked as though she was giving it her best shot. ‘I’ll see if he’s available,’ she said, and picked up a phone. Into it she recited his name. There was a long, quiet interval; then she put the phone back and nodded at the door behind her. He rather got the impression that if the decision had been up to her, he’d be headed out through the other door. Or the window.

  The back office was pretty much like the front, except that the mangy carpet was covered with heaps of paper and buff, red, orange, green and blue folders. At least someone had made an effort to decorate the walls; they were hung with a huge collection of tomahawks, each one with a little card under it to tell you where it had come from and who it’d been made by. Behind the desk, just visible through a haze of blue cigar smoke—

  Frank recognised Mr Tanner at once. That was only to be expected. All through his early childhood he’d been told about him: eat your nice dinner, tidy your room, be polite to the visitors or Mr Tanner will come and get you. And when, not unreasonably, he’d asked, ‘What’s a mister tanner, mummy and daddy?’ they’d conjured up for him a mental image of a hunched, evil little man with curly salt-and-pepper hair, huge eyes magnified to disturbing size by massive glasses, wicked sharp teeth, a devilish grin and plumes of smoke coming out of his nose. Young Frank Carpenter’s plate was always polished clean and his bedroom immaculately tidy until he reached the age when that sort of fatuous threat no longer worked, and he’d come to assume that Mr Tanner was about as real as the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny.

  Apparently not. If anything, his parents’ description had been an understatement. The little man lifted his head and glared at him. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Dennis Tanner?’

  �
�That’s me,’ the little man said, in a strong Australian accent. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘My name’s Frank Carpenter. I believe you knew my—’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Mr Tanner said. ‘No, hang on, that can’t be right. Last time I saw Paul Carpenter and Sophie bloody Pettingell was only three years ago, and they sure as hell didn’t have a kid, so—’

  An embarrassed grin slithered across Frank’s face. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘But yes. My mum and dad are Sophie and Paul Carpenter. They send their love, by the way,’ he added, because if you climb too far up the moral high ground there are avalanches and yetis.

  ‘Balls,’ said Mr Tanner succinctly. ‘How complicated?’

  ‘Very.’

  Mr Tanner sighed, gusting smoke in Frank’s face. ‘Park your bum,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Curiosity’s always been my downfall. No, scratch that. Your bloody mum and dad were my downfall. Curiosity’s just one of my many nasty habits.’ He leaned forward across the desk, peering at Frank through his bulletproof-glassthick lenses. ‘Now you mention it, there’s definitely a resemblance. You’ve got my great-great-grandad’s chin, for one thing.’ He grinned, suddenly as a shark’s jaws snapping shut. ‘Your dad mentioned that we’re related, did he?’

  Frank nodded. ‘Distant cousins,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. You met my mum on the way in, of course.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Mr Tanner leaned back in his chair. ‘She was very keen on your dad at one time, my mum. Which is the main reason I sent him to bloody New Zealand.’ The eyes flared with fear and hate. ‘He’s not come back, has he?’

  Frank shook his head.

  ‘Still over there, then.’

  Frank pursed his lips. ‘I did say it’s complicated,’ he replied. “But as far as I know, he’s got no plans to come back to this country again. Ever.’

  Mr Tanner sighed, from his boots up. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘All right, I can start breathing again. So,’ he added, lighting a new cigar from the stub of the old one, ‘tell me all about it.’

  There was no need to give Mr Tanner the full version. He knew better than anyone how Paul Carpenter, Frank’s father, had gone to work for J. W. Wells & Co, at that time the leading firm of sorcerers and magical practitioners in the City of London; how, once he’d found out what JWW actually did (he’d originally assumed that they were in shipping or commodities or something), the only reason he’d stayed on was that he’d fallen in love with Sophie, the other junior clerk; how he’d accidentally come into possession of the Acme Portable Door, a wonderful but dangerous gadget that allowed you to travel anywhere in time and space just by unrolling it and pressing it against the nearest available flat vertical surface; how Paul had had the wretched bad luck to get locked in a life-and-death struggle with most of the firm’s partners, one by one, and had incredibly prevailed, saving the human race and the fabric of the universe while he was at it but ruining the firm’s business in the process. None of that, Frank figured, was Mr Tanner likely to have forgotten.

  Instead, he concentrated on what had happened after Paul and Sophie had retired to New Zealand, where they’d acquired (by way of a murderously begrudged gift from JWW) the world’s biggest and most profitable bauxite mine. For a while, Frank explained, they tried to live a normal happy life with nothing but each other and an unimaginable amount of money. After twenty-nine years—

  ‘Hold it,’ Mr Tanner interrupted, with a bewildered expression on his face. ‘That’d be twenty-six years into the future, right?’ Frank nodded. ‘Though from my perspective, of course, it’s three years ago, although—’

  ‘Do I look like I’m remotely interested in your bloody perspective?’

  After twenty-nine years of putting up with a lifestyle neither of them liked very much but which they endured because they thought the other one liked that sort of thing, they came to a decision. Using the Portable Door one last time, they took a trip to a place and time that only the Door could reach, waved an embarrassed and slightly weepy goodbye to their son, and told him to peel the Door off the wall.

  It had, of course, been a traumatic parting, but Frank had managed to drag himself through it, ever so slightly buoyed up by the thought of inheriting the bauxite mine. It was only a few days later that he found out that one of his parents’ last acts in this reality had been to make over the mine, the company and their goose-liverpate-bloated bank account to the New Zealand Trust for Wildlife Conservation. It had been, the lawyer explained, his mother’s idea. She knew how much Frank cared about the environment and our natural heritage. She was sure he’d be secretly pleased.

  Best-kept secret in human history. After spending a month vainly trying to use the Door to reach his parents’ pocket reality, he gave up and considered his position as dispassionately as he could. He had no money, no home (the vast Carpenter mansion he’d grown up in was now the official residence of the Chairman of Trustees, whose first move on taking possession had been to grub up Sophie’s thirty-acre endangered orchid nursery and turn it into tennis courts, a golf course and a landing strip for his Lear jet) and no means whatsoever of earning a living. On the positive side, he had a change of underwear, a pair of jeans, a Lizard-Headed Women 2030 World Tour T-shirt and the Portable Door.

  All in all, he decided, things could be worse.

  ‘To start with,’ Frank went on, ‘I set my sights quite low. Materialising inside food stores and clothes shops at two in the morning, that sort of thing. Not really my style, but—’ He frowned. ‘Are you all right, Mr Tanner?’ he asked.

  ‘Mm.’ Mr Tanner looked as though he’d tried to eat a whole cow in one bite. ‘Sorry. Go on.’

  ‘You’re trying not to laugh, aren’t you?’

  ‘Me? No. Get on with the story.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Snrgff…’

  The insurance thing had been just one of those bright ideas. It had come to him out of the blue, while he’d been thinking about something else. At first he’d smiled and filed it away in the mental trashcan marked Wouldn’t-It-Be-Cool-If. But materialising inside shops and helping yourself to merchandise for which you don’t intend to pay is burglary, even if you use highly advanced magic instead of a jemmy, and that (Frank decided) was no way to live. He’d actually made a note of everything he’d taken and where it had come from in a little blue notebook, so that some day when he had the money he could make it all right again, but his conscience wasn’t fooled that easily. The time had come, he realised with a sinking heart, for him to go out and get a job; or, at the very least, a profession (which is, after all, only a smart word for a job, but with longer hours, better money and a helping of alphabet soup after your name on the printed letterhead).

  The time had come-yeah, right. But, he thought, for someone with an Acme Portable Door, time is delightfully flexible. With the Door, when he ran out of money, all he had to do was go back in time to a moment when he’d been loaded, and spend it all over again. Or, better still, what about that crazy insurance idea? After all, it might just work, and if so—

  Simple, as the best ideas always are. Insurance companies, he figured, have to pay out huge sums of money whenever there’s a disaster; and disasters often start off with some small, avoidable error of judgement-the Great Fire of London, for example, caused by the seventeenth-century equivalent of a chip-pan blaze. Someone with the hindsight of a retrospective hawk who could travel in time could go back to those crucial oh-shit moments, prevent the error and avert the disaster. The fire, explosion, meltdown or multiple pile-up wouldn’t happen, the insurance company wouldn’t be called on to pay out-true, history would be violated and a brick would be thrown through the brittle surface of reality, but in a good way, surely, because people who should’ve been killed or horribly mutilated would survive intact, wouldn’t they? You’d have to be a really callous bastard or a government to find fault with that—

  ‘Your dog,’ Mr Tanner interrupted, ‘is eating the telephone flex.
’

  ‘What? Oh God, sorry. Bobby! Bobby, bad dog, leave it.’ The dog lifted its head and gazed at him. Its deep brown eyes told him that it was hurt and very, very disappointed, but it forgave him. He looked around for something to throw at it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mr Tanner said, ‘I don’t mind. I like dogs.’ Pause, two, three - ‘Couldn’t manage a whole one, though.’ The joke, Frank realised, lay in the uncertainty as to whether Mr Tanner really was joking.

  Being a conscientious young man, Frank hadn’t rushed into it. He’d thought it through.

  The drill was as follows. Having identified a disaster that he’d be able to prevent (some disasters had horribly complex causes, or were inevitable anyway; or preventing them would be dangerous, or just too much like hard work) he researched the lives of the victims, to see if they were Significant People or just walkons in life’s pageant, and ran a simulation to find out how their unscheduled survival would affect the ebb and flow of history. To anybody else, that would have involved some extremely heavy maths; but Frank was descended on both sides from generations of ridiculously talented magicians, to the point where his genes practically glowed in the dark. Furthermore, his father had owned a small lump of rock crystal in which, if you got the lighting and the ambience exactly right, you could see all sorts of amazing stuff. He’d kept it hidden from Frank’s mother, who didn’t hold with anything connected to their previous lives. A Door trip back in time to retrieve it from under the loose floorboard in the attic three days before the Wildlife people took possession of the house, and he had what he needed to run the simulations.