The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  A tall middle-aged woman in a smart dark suit walked up to the window marked Securities. The clerk knew her by sight, of course, and had her key ready before she’d said a word. She smiled at him. A security guard opened a door and stepped aside to let her through. He didn’t go with her. She knew the way.

  Down a flight of old stone steps. The cellar was cool, very slightly musty, impeccably clean and dust-free. She stopped in front of an ancient oak door studded with big, blacksmith-made nails, and rang a little bell. The door opened slowly on well-oiled hinges. A small bald man stood up from behind a desk and said, ‘Good afternoon, Ms Carrington.’

  ‘Derek.’

  The man walked over to a set of beautifully polished library steps and wheeled them over to the back wall, which was covered from floor to ceiling with shelves: a cross between a stately home library and an old-fashioned ironmonger’s shop. Every shelf was crammed with black sheet-metal boxes, each of them just about big enough to house a pair of Wellington boots. The man knew his way around the shelves without needing to look at the faded gilt numbers. He picked up a box, tucked it under one arm and came down again.

  ‘Keeping well, Ms Carrington?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. And you?’

  ‘Can’t grumble.’ The man put the box down on the desk and walked to the door. ‘Just call out when you’re finished,’ he said, and the door closed behind him.

  The woman fitted the key into the keyhole in the tin box and turned it. There was a squeak, followed by a click. She lifted the lid carefully and stood back.

  The box expanded. You could try and explain how it did that by talking about film of a courgette growing into a marrow, played at extreme speed. Such an explanation would be, hopelessly misleading, but it’d be something that a human brain could accept without overloading, which is what would inevitably happen if you told it how it really was.

  The tall woman got out a powder compact and made a few trivial repairs to her face.

  When she’d finished and put the compact away again, the box had grown large enough to accommodate a set of steps, a bit like the wheeled stairs you leave an airliner by, but in reverse. Leaning against the table, she slipped off her two-inch-heeled court shoes and tapped each of them in turn with her forefinger. They flickered for a moment and turned into hairs, exactly the same colour and length as the hair on her head. She added them to her fringe. They stayed put.

  The stairs, which had been growing steadily, reached the floor and stabilised. A handrail materialised; first the rail hanging unsupported in mid-air, then the struts to hold it in place. She sighed (all this fuss; honestly!) and climbed down the stairs into the box.

  At the foot of the stairs was a large, spacious reception area, roughly the size of a football pitch. Expensive carpet compressed under her stockinged feet as she walked towards a large, rather magnificent reception desk, where a smartly dressed girl was answering a phone.

  ‘Carringtons, how can I help you?’ she said.

  The tall woman walked past her, through the middle of three fire doors, down a long corridor lined with regularly spaced office doors. At the end of the corridor was a huge room, its walls lined with books, most of its space taken up by a large, immaculately polished conference table. A dozen men and half a dozen women were seated round it, but the chair at the top of the table was empty.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, everyone,’ the tall woman said, in a voice conspicuously lacking in sincerity.

  She sat down at the head of the table and looked round. Everybody had stopped talking and was watching her closely. She reached up, tugged three hairs from the crown of her head and blew on them gently; they became a mobile phone, a laptop and a briefcase.

  ‘Sorry for the inconvenience in getting here,’ she said briskly. ‘I do hope it wasn’t too much of a bore, but in the light of recent events I felt we’d better go to yellow alert for the time being.’ She glanced round the table. ‘Just in case any of you didn’t get the memo, I’ve closed off realspace access until further notice. Anybody who’s got meetings with clients scheduled for the next few days, either arrange to meet somewhere else or use the service elevators.’ She paused and counted heads. ‘Anybody know what’s happened to Fritz?’

  ‘He asked me to tell you he’s been held up,’ said a small, ginger-haired woman at the far end of the table. ‘Apparently there was a mix-up at the Strasbourg branch of the bank, and they’ve lost the key to the box. He says he’s jumping on the 11.06 flight to Geneva, and he’ll use the box there.’

  The tall woman clicked her tongue. ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Can’t be helped. Now, then.’ She frowned. The tension level around the table went up a degree or so. ‘What are we to make of all this, then? Armando?’

  A thickset silver-haired man in full cardinal’s regalia cleared his throat nervously. ‘We’ve made a preliminary examination of the site, and initial findings would seem to suggest—’

  ‘Armando.’

  The cardinal swallowed. ‘It’s a mystery,’ he said. ‘No idea. Sorry.’

  ‘Ah.’ The tall woman tapped her fingers on the table top. ‘All right, then,’ she said, ‘let’s just run through what we do know. Emily Spitzer, junior pest-control associate at London office, was killed by a Better Mousetrap at-‘ she glanced down at her laptop ‘- four-fifteen p.m. on Friday the seventh of June at number 47 Waverley Drive, Kew, south-west London.’ She looked at the screen again. ‘Twice,’ she added. ‘No, scratch that. Three times. So far,’ she said, her eyebrows bunching gracefully. ‘Though the Mortensens seem to suggest there’ll be further activity. Anyhow,’ she went on, in a voice that nobody round the table seemed very comfortable with, ‘that’s part one. Colin, maybe you could fill us in on part two.’

  Colin Gomez wriggled nervously in his seat. ‘I’m not even sure it’s connected to-well, what happened to her,’ he said. ‘Could just be a coincidence. But—’ He took a deep breath. ‘We had a breakin here at London office. Obviously it’s hard to be precise, but as far as we can tell, it was some time after one a.m. on Saturday. They got the petty cash and a few computers, which turned up on Sunday in a lay-by just off the A34. One of them had a wooden stake hammered through the CD port, so I’m guessing that whoever nicked them must’ve switched them on. We’re making discreet enquiries around the mental hospitals, so it won’t be long before we know who did it. These things happen,’ he added, ‘and it’s just as well they didn’t go snooping about in the closed-file store, because getting rid of bodies is a real pain. The thing is,’ he went on (and his voice became a little higher and less sure of itself), ‘they also turned over a couple of the offices. Drawers pulled out, papers chucked on the floor, that sort of thing. There’s a photocopier missing that we know of, and some other stuff-garbage, really; office supplies pencils, Sellotape, ink cartridges, paperclips, staples, a few boxes of envelopes. But one of the offices they had a go at was Emily Spitzer’s.’

  Long, thoughtful silence. Then a slim blonde young woman said: ‘Surely it’s too obvious. Look, we know somebody murdered the girl. Somebody in the trade, because of the Mousetrap. Assuming it wasn’t just some personal vendetta, it must’ve been work-related. Well?’

  The tall woman frowned. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Immediately after, there’s the breakin. A lot of trouble to go to, burgling London office, particularly since there’s nothing in here worth stealing, unless you’re in the trade. But apparently none of the-well, the specialised stuff was taken, just worthless junk. Which is as clear a way of saying this isn’t an ordinary burglary as you could possibly think of, bar sky-writing. Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Someone wants us to think they’ve been through the Spitzer girl’s stuff and taken something-papers or a tape or a magic ring that makes you the ruler of the universe or whatever; and if they want us to think that, it clearly can’t be true. But,’ she went on, ‘if it’s that obvious that it’s not true, maybe it is true; and now we’re into double bluffs and triple bluffs and all that sort of stuff, and I
for one really don’t want to go there, because it always gives me migraine. I mean, if they want us to think that they don’t want us to think that they intend us to think that—’

  The tall woman cleared her throat. ‘Cecily.’

  ‘Yes, Mum?’

  ‘You’ve made your point. And it seems to me that the likeliest explanation for that is that whoever did this just wanted to confuse us. And, of course, they may also have wanted to get hold of something from Ms Spitzer’s office. All right, dear?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Fine. But,’ the tall woman went on, ‘since we’ve got no way at all of knowing if that’s the case-and if it is the case, even less of a clue whether or not they found what they were looking for I really can’t see any point in speculating about it; not, at least, until we’ve got a bit more hard data to go on. Well?’

  Nodding heads all round the table, to the extent that a casual observer might have thought he was in Hollywood. After a while, however, the small ginger-haired woman said, ‘That’s all very well, but it doesn’t alter the fact that someone killed one of our people. With a Mousetrap, what’s more, which makes it pretty well certain that it was someone in the profession—’

  ‘Unless that’s just a quadruple bluff.’

  ‘Quiet, Cecily, you aren’t helping.’ The tall woman pulled a hair from her fringe and blew on it. It turned into a pencil, which she turned over in her long fingers a couple of times before deliberately breaking off the lead against the side of the table and fixing her stare on the ginger-haired woman. ‘Sorry, Consuela. What you’re saying is, if they didn’t get what they wanted they might kill again. Is that right?’

  ‘Well, it needs thinking about.’

  ‘Oh, I agree. That’s why we’ve moved to yellow alert, of course. And naturally we’re doing everything we can. I’ve asked the forensic department from Rio office to see if they can piece together what’s left of the Mousetrap to the point where we can at least find out who it was made by; a batch number or a date stamp would be a wonderful bonus, but I’m not holding my breath. I know the ID markings on Mousetraps are supposed to be indelible, but we all know there’s ways round that. Hutchinsons have promised to lend us their morphic resonance amplifier, and Bert Schnell from Zauberwek AG says we can borrow Friedrich for a day or so, just in case they’ve been careless about time signatures-well, you never know, everybody makes mistakes. No, pulling up the drawbridge and minding our backs for a week or so isn’t really the problem, and if it was just a security matter I wouldn’t have dragged you all out here.’ She paused, to make sure she had their undivided attention. ‘I should’ve thought it’s obvious, actually, what the real puzzle is. It’s not that someone killed the girl. It’s that someone’s been trying to bring her back.’ The tall woman paused again. ‘Not someone in the trade, because a professional would know all about Mousetraps; but someone with the knowledge and the equipment to try, three times. Now that, I put it to you, is cause for genuine concern. Not to put too fine a point on it, there’s someone out there meddling in the affairs of wizards, and until we’ve found out who it is and applied the traditional ton of bricks I think we’re going to have to take this very seriously indeed.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Emily Spitzer thought of something else she could say to Colin Gomez, and the thought gave her the strength to proceed. Equalising her weight on both feet, she reached out towards the cat’s neck. It was only a few inches from her hand. She reached a little further and felt her elbow brush against a branch. There was a click, like a door opening. The tree disappeared. Thirty feet up in the air, with nothing to hold on to except an absence of tree. Don’t try this at home. You could do yourself a mischief. Emily fell. As she did so, her entire life flashed before her eyes, just the way it was supposed to. Having been trained in all aspects of her trade, including death management, she realised what the slide-show meant, and thought, Nuts. After all, it was such a silly way to go; and the thing about the life flashing in front of her eyes wasn’t just that it had been unfulfilled, pointless and so very short. Mostly it was that she hadn’t finished with it yet. It was as though the waiter had brought pudding and then snatched it away from under her nose before her fingers had closed round the handle of the spoon. Not bloody well fair. Thirty-two feet per second per second; good old Isaac Newton, or was it Galileo? Like it mattered a damn.

  Falling out of a tree is a bit like life itself. It all goes swimmingly until the end, and then bad stuff happens. Since she knew she wasn’t going to survive this one, there was no point bracing for impact. An awfully big adventure, wasn’t it supposed to be? But she’d spent her working life battling dragons and staking vampires. Adventures? Yawn.

  All in all, she just wanted to land, die and get it over with.

  Emily landed; and the first observation she made was that death didn’t hurt. Since a large slice of humanity spends a lot of time worrying about that, it’d have been nice if she could have passed on the good news-sent them a postcard, maybe, or an e-mail- but presumably that wasn’t possible or someone would’ve done it already. Death, in fact, didn’t seem to be bad at all. It was dark-no, that was because she had her eyes closed.

  Pause. If she still had eyes to close, how could she be dead?

  She opened them, and a waiter handed her a menu.

  Saving others is its own reward, which is just as well. You can’t expect gratitude. Even so, Frank had secretly been hoping for something along the lines of ‘My hero’ or ‘ You saved my life, how can I ever thank you?’ Instead, when Emily Spitzer opened her eyes, what she said was, ‘This isn’t death, it’s Paris.’

  Factually accurate, but there are times when you want to hear a little bit more than just the truth. ‘Yes,’ he said, very slightly nettled. ‘I can recommend the lobster.’

  ‘It’s bloody Paris,’ Emily said, sitting bolt upright in her white plastic chair and staring past him. (As though he wasn’t there; great.) ‘Look, that’s the Eiffel Tower, for God’s sake.’ Then, apparently, she noticed him; she swivelled round in her seat like a tank turret and gave him a scowl that would’ve scorched asbestos. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ she snapped. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Frank Carpenter,’ Frank said. ‘Or if you don’t fancy lobster, there’s the crepes Suzettes. My treat,’ he added. ‘I can get it back off expenses, so we might as well—’

  ‘But I died:

  ‘No,’ Frank pointed out emphatically, ‘you didn’t. Not this time. All the other times, oh yes. Whee, thud, splat, call a doctor, no, don’t bother, over and over again. This time, though,’ he added, with a certain fierce pride, ‘you made it. So we’re having lunch. To celebrate.’ He nodded at her defiantly, then raised the menu and made a show of studying it. ‘Oeufs en bricotte avecfleurs du matin. What on earth is that supposed to be when it’s at home?’

  For about a second, Emily sat perfectly still, tense as a guitar string. Then she slumped back into her chair and began to sob. Oh God, Frank thought. He glanced furtively round. People were staring.

  ‘Look,’ he hissed, ‘if it’s something I said then I’m very sorry, and I understand that this must be rather disconcerting for you and you’ve got every right to be upset. But do you think you could possibly not make that fucking awful noise?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she snuffled. ‘It’s just, for a moment there I thought I’d died, and I must’ve been really, really bad and wicked in my life, or why would God have sent me to France …’ She stopped, and sat up. You could almost hear the click, as all the pulled-together parts of herself locked back into place. ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  ‘I just told you, Frank Carpenter.’ He hesitated. ‘That’s my name,’ he added, then heard what he’d just said, and went on, ‘I, um, save people.’

  Emily frowned. ‘What, you mean, like Superman?’

  A stray tendril of the concept tickled the edge of his mind, but he ignored it. ‘Not really, no,’ he said. ‘I do it for mon
ey, actually. I work for an insurance company.’

  ‘Oh.’ For some reason, the words insurance company made Emily feel a whole lot better. There’s something so wonderfully mundane about insurance. It’s so solid you could build skyscrapers on it. ‘But how—? You were standing under the tree and you caught me?’

  Frank twitched. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Ah. But in that case, what’re we doing in France?’

  Shrug. ‘Like I said, I thought it called for a celebration. You know, you not being dead and everything.’ Silence. A long interval, during which Frank buttered a piece of bread and ate it.

  ‘But I fell out of the tree like, two minutes ago. How did we get here?’ A look of panic spread across Emily’s face. ‘I’ve been in a coma, haven’t I? Or did I get amnesia from the bash on the head, and—?’

  ‘Nope,’ Frank interrupted. ‘Look, if you can’t make up your mind I’ll order for both of us, all right? Only I’m hungry. Missed breakfast.’ He waved at a waiter, who immediately homed in like a Scud missile and took down an order for two lobster salads. That alone made Emily realise that supernatural forces were at work.

  ‘This is magic, isn’t it?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Of course,’ Frank said. ‘You’re in the trade, I’d have thought you’d be used to— All right,’ he said, holding his hands up by way of supplication, ‘I can see I’m possibly not handling this as well as I might have done. Begin at the beginning?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘You died.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Frank smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but luckily your employers had the good sense to insure your life with Beneficent Mutual for eleven million quid. My boss-George Sprague, nice bloke when you get to know him-he could no more pay out eleven million quid on a claim without a fight than walk to Mars without a spacesuit. So he hired me to save you. And I did.’