The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  ‘I do understand, really,’ said Mr Hook. ‘You’re a hard-working, dedicated young woman who never gives less than a hundred and ten per cent. The profession isn’t just a job of work to you, it’s a passion. I think that’s wonderful, I genuinely do. But.’ He stopped and looked at her; that how-do-you-solve-aproblem-like-Maria look that made her feel - that was the wicked, cruel, unbearable thing about Mr Hook’s eyes. He could make her feel sweet. When his eyes latched on to her like that, suddenly she was a twelve-year-old girl who’d handed in twenty sides of homework that still didn’t manage to answer the question. He made her feel like she was playing at the job, indulging herself, instead of doing what she was paid for. Of course, if they’d hired a man—

  ‘Now then,’ said Mr Hook. ‘We really have got to sort this out, haven’t we? I’m going to give you one last chance. Bills properly drawn up, sent in on time, credit-control procedures carried out properly. You know you can do it if you try. After all, you’re a highly intelligent girl, and it’s just paperwork. If you’re having trouble with the VAT apportionments, get Clive or Sarah to help you - I’m sure they’ll be only too happy to show you how to do it. Get into the habit of setting aside a little bit of time every day - an hour and a half should be plenty - to really get a grip on those invoices and timesheets and yellow slips. Talking of which, I gather we’ve been a bit careless about filling out stores requisitions, haven’t we?’ Emily nodded. Left undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health in us.

  ‘I really don’t want to make a big issue out of this,’ said Mr Hook, concentrating a billion megawatts of disapproval into the pinpoint lasers of his eyes, ‘but we really can’t go on just taking stuff out of the stores without signing for it. Let’s see, now: twelve kilos of SlayMore, seven packets of detonators, nine boxes of rubber bands, three blocks of Semtex … It’s not just the materials themselves, it’s the time and effort it takes to get the books straight at the end of the month, and then of course we’ve got the licensing and the HSE inspections, and it’s getting really rather awkward trying to account for the discrepancies. It may seem like a lot of fuss to you, but it’s costing us a lot of money and causing some serious difficulties for us with the authorities, just because you can’t be bothered to fill in a few forms and write things down in the book. You do see that, don’t you?’

  That was, of course, the worst part of it. Emily could see. When she thought about it calmly, once the red mist had lifted and the urge to kill and kill and keep on killing had dissipated enough to let her brain start working again, she understood perfectly. Nobody in their right mind would slay monsters for fun; we do it for the money, and we don’t get paid unless we send out a bill. And yes, of course we have to keep the stock books and the registers straight, if we don’t want the health and safety people and the DEFRA bogies coming down on us like a ton of bricks. Hardly rocket science. It was just—

  She slammed into her office, threw her bag at the wall, crashed into her chair and did the long, silent scream. Once upon a time, she could clear her mind just by imagining Mr Hook being torn apart by goblins, but that didn’t work any more. No matter how vividly she pictured the scene, these days she tended to see the severed head’s lips move and hear the calm, sad voice saying, ‘But you know I’m right, don’t you?” And yes, he was. Right, right, right. And yes, you can’t eat unless you do the washing-up first, and her room would be so much more comfortable if she tidied it occasionally and yes, she’d be able to find things if they weren’t all piled up on the floor in a heap; and yes, they’d have been much better off if they’d hired a man to do her job, even if he’d been useless and she was the best damn dragon-slayer in London and quite possibly the whole of Europe; and yes, of course she’d do it all, every invoice and yellow slip and stationery requisition voucher, if only he’d bloody well stop telling her to—

  It’s me, isn’t it? Emily thought. I just don’t like doing as I’m told. How silly is that? And I get really angry when people don’t do what I tell them, because it’s stupid. If I say, don’t go in there, it’s dangerous, and they don’t listen and they come out covered in boils or a different species, of course I’m bloody furious, because how could anybody be so dumb? But for some reason, when it’s me—

  Deep breathing. Calm. Inner peace. And when I’ve done that, I’ll go out and kill something big and scary with enormous teeth, and that’ll make me feel better. It always does. Query: would I be able to motivate myself to do this job if I didn’t have Dave Hook? Good question. Don’t go there.

  Emily took a deep breath. It didn’t work. She took another, and six more, and one more for luck. Then she got up, dragged an armful of files out of the cabinet, dumped them on the desk and reached for her calculator.

  Sodding apportionments. Slaying monsters was zero rated, but you had to charge VAT on materials used (apart from safety equipment and books); and anything that habitually stood upright on two legs - vampires, zombies; ores, goblins and balrogs were a bit of a grey area - was classed as humanoid and didn’t count as a monster for VAT purposes, which meant it had to be charged for. Werewolves were a complete pain: generally speaking they were quadrupeds when you killed them, but they reverted to human shape in the split second before they died, which meant you had to add VAT at 8.75% unless you killed them with a slow-acting poison such as silver nitrate, in which case the rate decreased from 17.5% by one percentage point per day for the period between the first administration of the poison and the actual date of death. And as for shape-shifters— The phone rang. Emily whimpered and picked it up. ‘Mr Gomez for you.’

  ‘What? Oh, right. Put him on.’

  Click, pause; then: ‘Emily?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Job for you.’

  Naturally. Like bloody magic. The moment she picked up a calculator, someone had a job for her. ‘Can it wait? Only I’ve got mounds and mounds of paperwork, and—’

  ‘Emergency,’ Colin said. ‘I’m at the client’s place now, as a matter of fact. Actually,’ he added, lowering his voice a little, ‘it’s the client’s mother-in-law. You know Stan Lazek, don’t you?’

  ‘No. Who the hell is—?’

  ‘CEO of Dragoman Software Solutions.’

  ‘Oh.’ Yes, definitely an emergency, in that case. ‘What seems to be the—?’

  ‘Can’t talk now,’ Colin interrupted. ‘Just get over here quick as you can. It’s at—’ He gave her an address in one of the more opulent west London suburbs. Emily jotted it down on the nearest file cover.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you need to tell me what it is so I’ll know what stuff to bring. Like, if it’s harpies I’ll just want SlayMore, but if it’s a thirty-foot-high one-eyed giant I’ll need the 105mm recoilless rifle—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. They’ve got everything you’ll need right here.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Click. Buzz. Bastard. Colin Gomez was intellectual property, entertainment and media, so it was only to be expected that his grip on reality was one fingertip hooked over the edge of a very tall cliff. Even so. If there was one thing that really annoyed Emily, it was a complete lack of consideration for other people.

  Everything you’ll need right here. Yeah, sure. But just in case—

  She slid open the top drawer of her desk and took out a little canvas pouch. She held it for a moment before dropping it in her bag, as if drawing strength from it. Then she scribbled a note to say where she was going, and left the room.

  At least, with Dragoman footing the bill, she could take a taxi rather than battling over there on the Tube. As the Embankment shuffled smoothly by outside the taxi window, Emily closed her eyes and tried to figure out what she’d be most likely to find when she got there. Of course, if it was an entertainment-and-media job, there was absolutely no way of knowing. E&M magic was typically flamboyant, wide-dispersal and highly temperamental. If a reality-fiction interface had blown, for example, you could be up against any bloody thing: dinosaurs, skyscraper-climbin
g gorillas, space aliens, you name it, those cowboys in E&M could contrive a way of getting it over the line and letting it get away from them. A faulty glamour was just as bad. A year or so back, some pinhead in media R&D had developed a sort of cap thing that turned the wearer into whatever he truly wanted to be. Marvellous idea in theory, but if you’re going to make stuff like that you really can’t go cutting costs at the production stage. If you do, sooner or later something’s going to jam, some poor bugger’s going to stick like it, and suddenly you’ve got a junior Home Office minister swooping low over Whitehall on a thirty-foot wingspan shooting out jets of green fire from both nostrils. And Colin reckoned they’d got everything she’d need right there. Absolutely.

  Which was why she’d brought the Lifesaver, otherwise known as the Mordor Army Knife. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t really supposed to have one, since it had been made in the forges of the Dark Lord and counted as an instrument of darkness. But it had everything. As well as the usual penknife, screwdriver, bottle-opener and combination wire-stripper and fingernail-breaker, there was a siege tower, a battering ram, a folding heliograph, a scaling ladder, a high-velocity ballista capable of knocking holes through ten feet of solid rock, a caltrop dispenser, a six-dragonpower welding torch and a pair of scissors that you could actually cut things with. Furthermore, it didn’t belong to the firm. It was her very own, which meant she didn’t have to write out three pink chits and a yellow requisition every time she wanted to use it.

  ‘Pull up at the top of the road,’ Emily told the driver. ‘I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

  An important lesson, one she’d learned the hard way. Unless you know exactly what’s waiting for you at the other end, don’t jump straight out of a cab and onto ground zero. There’re all sorts of things you notice from a hundred yards away that might escape your attention if you’re too close, wrecked cars, burning trees, a six-ton adult gryphon perched on a neighbouring rooftop. As she walked slowly and quietly down Chesterton Drive, however, there didn’t appear to be anything to see, and her feather-edged professional intuition wasn’t picking up anything in the way of bad vibes. She could always tell when something was wrong; but here, everything seemed to be exactly as it should have been. In which case—

  You know you’re a professional when the hairs on the back of your neck start to crawl precisely because everything feels right.

  She rang the doorbell: Big Ben chimes, which set her teeth on edge. An elderly woman in an Edinburgh Woollen Mills cardigan opened the door and smiled at her.

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  Emily frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I think I’ve come to the wrong house. Only—’

  Behind the woman, Colin suddenly materialised. He was one of those men who manage to be very tall without achieving anything in the way of stature. ‘There you are,’ he said, in a voice that suggested that he’d had a long and uncalled-for day. ‘I was wondering where you could’ve got to. This is Mrs Thompson. This is Emily Spitzer, who works with me at the office. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better be making tracks. Clients coming in at four-thirty, mustn’t keep them waiting.’

  Colin slipped past Mrs Thompson and disappeared up the path in a sort of coherent blur. He was just in time to catch up the taxi she’d arrived in. E&M people could do that sort of thing. It was very impressive, until you realised that it was no more than the power of applied arrogance, harnessed through a few simple focusing techniques. If you sincerely believed the world was there entirely for your convenience and you knew the magic words, more often than not it turned out that you were right.

  Bastard, she thought. He could at least have hung around long enough to brief her on what needed doing, instead of leaving her to extract the information slowly and tactfully from someone who was quite definitely The Public. She hated all that: trying to explain things in terms that lay people could understand, and which wouldn’t blow their minds. She took a deep breath.

  ‘What seems to be the problem?’ she said.

  ‘What, dear? Oh yes. It’s Barney.’

  ‘Barney.’

  ‘My cat.’

  ‘Your—’

  ‘Didn’t Mr Gomez explain? Poor Barney’s got himself stuck in the apple tree in the back garden, and I’m so worried he might fall out and hurt himself.’

  For perhaps as long as a second and a half, the world seemed to flicker. At first it felt as though nothing was real, as though Emily was standing in the void waiting for the Creator to turn up. And then there was anger.

  ‘Your cat’s stuck up a tree,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right, yes. Now, Mr Wilcox at number sixteen’s got a ladder, but he may have gone out, it’s his day at the clinic, but Mrs Palladio at number twelve might have one, only I don’t know her terribly well, she only moved in a few months ago. Or I suppose you could try John at number twenty-four—’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  And then she thought: no. I don’t destroy old ladies, even old ladies with cats, because in the final analysis they aren’t the real enemy. I shall be as nice as I possibly can to the old bat, I might even rescue her bloody cat, and every precisely quantified milligram of niceness I expend on her will be another red-hot skewer with barbed wire wrapped round it when I get back to the office and see Colin—

  Emily smiled. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘You just leave it to me and everything’ll be just fine.’

  Mrs Thompson pursed her lips. ‘Are you sure? Because—’ You can read eyes after a year or two in the profession.

  Because, after all, you’re only a girl, I’d have thought Mr Gomez would’ve got a man to do it, after all, climbing up ladders-Emily broadened her smile. All the king’s horses, Colin, she thought, and all the king’s men. ‘Why don’t you show me where the tree is and then go and make us both a nice cup of tea?’

  That must’ve been the right thing to say, because Mrs Thompson nodded and led the way through the house and into the back garden. There, sure enough, was an apple tree, with a fat ginger blob sticking like used chewing-gum to one of the spindly upper branches.

  ‘You sure you don’t want to borrow Mr Wilcox’s ladder, dear?’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine. Now, how about that cup of tea? This won’t take a moment.’

  ‘You will be careful, won’t you? Only Barney can be a little bit wary of strangers.’

  Emily waited till the back door was safely shut; then she took the Mordor Army Knife out of her bag, thumbed out the scaling-ladder attachment, dropped it on the ground and jumped back.

  She didn’t know how it worked, and couldn’t have cared less, but she’d learned the hard way to give it plenty of room. The little metal thing like a comb which she’d hooked out of the body of the knife seemed to blur for a moment, as though it had gone out of focus. When it resolved itself again, it was a twenty-foot aluminium ladder. She frowned at it and said, ‘Shorter.’ The adjustment was instantaneous. When she picked the ladder up it was warm, just about bearable to the touch. She leaned it against the nearest substantial branch to where the cat was, wiggled it about a bit to check it was stable, and began to climb.

  ‘Here, kitty,’ she said through gritted teeth. She wasn’t a cat person, in the same way petrol doesn’t have a soft spot for naked flames. The cat, which was licking its paw, lifted its head and looked at her.

  ‘Don’t start,’ she said grimly. The cat’s left ear flickered. She felt her tights catch on a projecting twig. Colin Gomez, she promised herself, was going to spend the rest of his abbreviated life paying for this.

  Three more rungs and Emily reckoned she was in comfortable grabbing range. She put together a plan of action. Left hand off rung, reach out, form grip on cat’s collar, secure cat firmly under left arm, then back the way we came. No bother. The key to success would be smooth, controlled movements.

  The cat hissed at her and stood up, its tail stiff and straight as a pine tree. At this point, it occurred to her that all her trainin
g and experience had been directed towards killing animals rather than saving them; which was fine, bearing in mind the sort of animal she tended to deal with, but maybe in this case she was a trifle out of her depth. She glanced over her shoulder to see if Mrs Thompson had emerged from the house; no sign of her, and she wouldn’t be able to see what was going on up the tree from her kitchen window. She grinned.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘make my day.’

  The cat made a growling noise that it had inherited from ancestors who hunted mammoths for a living, and edged a little further along its branch. Emily recognised the tactic: deliberately fall off, get yourself killed, land me in serious trouble with your owner, the feline equivalent of suicide bombing. All domestic animals are terrorists at heart. The secret is, never negotiate.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she said to the cat. ‘You fall off if you want to. I’ve got reflexes like a snake - I’ll catch you by your tail or something, it’ll hurt like hell and I’ll have won. Or you can hold still, we can go back down together in comfort, and then I can go back to the office and make Colin Gomez eat his own legs. You decide. Your choice. Oh and by the way, the Knife’s got a built-in safety field extending three feet in all directions from its base, so even if I miss you, you’ll just bounce. So go for the big gesture if you want to, but it won’t do you any good.’

  When you talk to animals it’s all in the tone of voice. The cat gave Emily a look of quiet disgust and walked calmly along the branch until it was well outside her reach. Then it made a sort of chirruping noise and started washing its ear with the back of its paw.

  Emily sighed. You don’t negotiate, and when they raise the stakes you don’t back down. Carefully she took one foot off the ladder and pawed the empty air until she felt something reasonably solid under her sole. Gradually she applied weight to it until she was satisfied it wasn’t going to break off, and repeated the procedure with her other foot. It was, she realised, a bit like going after nesting harpies in a bell tower, except that there was a better choice of footholds and she wasn’t burdened with cumbersome heavy weapons. On the other hand, there was plenty of tree left for the cat to move to. She thought about the Knife’s safety field; she knew it was there because she’d read about it in the owner’s guide, but she’d never actually had occasion to put it to the test. How high up was she, exactly? Twelve feet? Fifteen?