The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  ‘Ah.’ Emily looked at him as though she was wearing fogged-up glasses. ‘So I didn’t die after all?’

  ‘Oh yes, you died all right.’ Frank paused to crunch some more bread, and wipe crumbs off his shirt. ‘Broken neck, punctured lung, massive brain trauma. I read the autopsy report, it was practically instantaneous, so you didn’t suffer, but it was a genuine all-the-king’s-horses job all the same.’ He grinned. ‘George Sprague suffered, though. I imagine they could hear him groaning on Alpha Centauri. So he sent for me. It’s what I do. When there’s a particularly expensive accident giving rise to a claim, I go back in time and make it not have happened.’

  Long silence. Then she said, ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think it’s worth mentioning that you gave me more hassle than any other case I’ve handled. I had three goes at it, no, scratch that, four, and on each occasion you snuffed it. A lesser man would’ve given up,’ he added with a gentle smile that he later realised must’ve been quite insufferable, ‘but not me. I was baffled. Until, of course, I figured out what was going on. Well, actually,’ he conceded, ‘I went and asked someone, and he explained it to me. You see, you were the victim of a Better Mousetrap.’

  The look on Emily’s face told him that he wasn’t going to have to explain what that meant. It also had the useful effect of sobering Frank up. He’d been showing off, he realised. Not good.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Emily replied quietly. ‘But-look, you’re sure about that, are you? The Mousetrap, I mean. Only—’

  ‘Someone was trying to kill you, yes. I’m—’

  ‘Sorry, I know, you said.’

  She was angry; he could understand that. Actually, the way she snapped herself out of it was quite impressive. ‘But if it was a Mousetrap-I mean, they’re infallible. They always work, and there’s nothing anybody can …’ She stopped dead, like someone who’s just realised they’ve missed their turning. ‘You can go backwards and forwards in time?’

  ‘Yes. Also impossible,’ Frank said. ‘Unless you’re lucky enough to have a Portable Door.’ The look on Emily’s face was worth paying money to see.

  Eventually, she whispered, ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Straight up.’ For some reason, Frank felt absurdly pleased that she was so impressed. ‘The only one in existence, as far as I know. Belonged to my dad.’

  ‘You’ve got a Portable Door. That’s amazing.’ She made it sound ever so much cooler and more impressive than, say, boring old saving someone from certain death. ‘So that’s how you brought me here, then. The Door.’

  ‘Yes,’ Frank said smugly. ‘Like I said, I asked someone how to beat a Mousetrap. He said, the only thing stronger than a Mousetrap is the Door; because it can take you anywhere, you see, anywhere in time and space. And then I remembered, Dad used it to get out of death once-long story, and I’m not sure I ever really understood it-so, well, why not give it a go? And it worked.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So how did you—?’

  There are times when you can’t stop a grin. You’ve just got to step back and let it rip. ‘Quite simple, actually. I snuck up quietly while you were playing about up the tree with that cat, and spread the Door out on the ground exactly where you were going to land. Then, when you fell, I quickly opened it. You fell through the Door; I jumped through after you and told the Door to bring us here. Piece of cake, really. Ah, here’s lunch.’

  The lobster was a bit rubbery and the tomatoes didn’t actually taste of anything much, which was a bit of a disappointment. The restaurant guide Frank had found this place in had particularly recommended the lobster salad. Still, not all magic works. And Emily didn’t seem to mind, or to have noticed. She ate quickly and efficiently, like a jet liner refuelling in mid-air.

  ‘So you’re in the trade?’ she said.

  ‘Me?’ Frank swallowed a chunk of fennel. ‘No, not really. My parents were.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Complete lack of interest. It could be that she was thinking about something else: not being dead, maybe, or who it was that had tried to kill her. Frank decided that it probably wouldn’t have made much difference if the lobster had been all the guidebook cracked it up to be. It was awkward. It’d have been nice to talk to her (that was something Frank found he had strong views on: when had that happened?) but finding a subject wasn’t going to be easy. Probably best if he left that to her. But she just went on eating, as though it was a chore she had to get through; and when she’d run out of things to eat, she looked at him and said, ‘Now can you take me back, please?’

  Oh, he thought. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Home,’ she replied. ‘I mean, the office.’ Interesting slip there. ‘I’ve got to get back and find out who tried to kill me.’ Well, there’s that.

  ‘Have you got any idea?’ Frank asked.

  Emily shook her head. ‘Not a clue,’ she replied. ‘I mean, it’s not exactly unheard of in the profession. We’re pretty much a law unto ourselves, if you see what I mean. Partners-well, the office politics can get a bit intense sometimes.’ She frowned. ‘But I can’t see why anybody’d want to get rid of me. I mean, I’m not anybody. I’m right down at the bottom of the ladder, not even on the letterhead, so it can’t be someone who wants my job; and outside of the firm, I can’t think of anybody I could be a nuisance to. It doesn’t make sense, really.’

  Frank rubbed his chin rather self-consciously. ‘Revenge?’ he said. ‘I don’t know, the family of a vampire you slew, something like that?’

  ‘Unlikely. The things I get rid of, everybody’s only too glad to see the back of them. Besides, nobody outside the profession would’ve known about Mousetraps, or how to get hold of one, or how to make it work. And vampires and werewolves and ogres and trolls and suchlike aren’t really in the profession. I mean, they don’t do magic themselves, usually they aren’t bright enough, for a start. Goblins, maybe; but I’ve never had a job with goblins involved. But if it’s not office politics—’ Emily paused. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘that’s my problem.’ Hesitation. Embarrassment, even? No, not really. Just another chore she was about to get out of the way. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rather primly, ‘I haven’t thanked you yet for—’

  ‘Forget it,’ Frank said, rather too quickly. ‘Like I said, I get paid. And now I’ve got this job out of the way at last, I can get on with something a bit less complicated. Usually it’s just road traffic stuff, the occasional industrial accident. Most of it you could do in your sleep.’ He waved his hand again, and a waiter materialised with a bill like a Klingon battlecruiser de-cloaking. He plonked a card on the tray without looking.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ she said. ‘How do you do that?’

  He frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘Attract waiters like that. Is it some kind of psycho-telekinesis, or are you using a modified form of Lexington’s Hook?’

  It took Frank a moment to figure out what she was talking about. ‘Oh, I see. No, it’s not magic or anything like that. I just sort of look hopefully at them and they come.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘It’s just a knack, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘That’s—’ Emily was looking at him; for the first time since they’d met, looking at him as though he was actually visible. ‘I just sit there hoping they’ll notice me. And they never do. And I hate sitting around after the meal’s finished, waiting for the bill.’

  Frank was disconcerted, he found, by how disconcerting he found her sudden interest. A great deal was happening all of a sudden, and he wasn’t sure he was keeping track of it. ‘Never been a problem with me,’ he mumbled, thinking: a moment ago, she was in a hurry to get back to the office. ‘Not that I’m a great one for eating out anyway. I generally just have a—’

  ‘How about getting served in pubs?’

  He shrugged. ‘I walk up to the bar and someone asks me what I want.’

/>   ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is that unusual?’

  ‘A bit.’ Emily was staring - no, gazing - into his eyes, as if trying to read something written on his retina in tiny letters. ‘I can stand there for ten minutes and nobody sees me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m invisible.’

  ‘Really?’ He was about to say that he found it strange that people didn’t notice her; fortunately for his peace of mind, he stopped himself in time. ‘I’d have thought that, you know, in your line of work, an assertive personality—’

  ‘It’s not that, I don’t think. I mean, I can stand up for myself and all that. I don’t know, maybe I’ve just got myself into the habit of being inconspicuous—’

  ‘So that you can creep up on dragons without being seen and stuff?’

  ‘Well, sort of. Actually, you try not to get in a position where creeping up’s necessary, if you see what I mean. Dragon-slaying’s not like that, as a matter of fact, not if you do it properly.’

  Frank frowned. ‘Sorry if this is a frequently asked question,’ he said, ‘but how do you go about something like that? I mean, Dad talked about it occasionally, but he never went into any sort of detail. He did say he killed one once himself; a very small one, though. He sat on it.’

  Emily nodded, as though this was a perfectly normal conversation. To her, of course, no doubt it was. ‘A wyvern, probably,’ she said. ‘They’re pretty fierce, but they’ve got very fragile bones. Very thin bone walls, to save weight, for flying.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘That’s right. With wyverns, a percussive approach is often the best way, because they’ve got an amazing poison tolerance, for their body mass.’ Frank got the impression that she was comfortable talking shop. ‘And as for shooting them, you can forget it. Their muscles have a low water content, so ordinary hydrostatic shock just doesn’t seem to get the job done.’ She paused for a moment, then said, ‘Which firm was your father with?’

  ‘J. W. Wells,’ Frank replied. ‘They went bust.’

  ‘Heard of them. But you didn’t go into the trade.’

  Something had changed; and it wasn’t the sort of effect you got with the Door, where a neat, surgical intervention altered history. It was-well, rather more remarkable than that. A moment ago, she’d been— well, bewildered to start with, understandably enough, then eating busily, because death gives you an appetite and you need to keep your strength up; and after that, she’d wanted to get back to the office … Something had changed; and if it meant listening to her talking shop, because that was the sort of talking she felt comfortable with, he didn’t really mind.

  Bloody hell, Frank thought.

  (But by the time you think that, it’s generally too late.)

  ‘Me? No.’ He could hear his own voice, and it didn’t sound very familiar. ‘Mum and Dad didn’t actually like the magic business very much-they were glad to get out of it. They came into some money, you see.’

  ‘Oh.’ He’d disconcerted her again. Probably, not liking the profession was heresy. ‘My father was in the trade, too,’ Emily went on, and she was being careful not to make it sound like a reproach. ‘It was what I always wanted to do, since I was little. I can’t imagine doing anything else.’

  In Frank’s mind, sirens wailed as the damage-control teams swung into action. ‘I imagine it can be a really interesting job,’ he heard himself say, and made a mental note to save up and buy some decent words, instead of tatty old ones like interesting. ‘I mean, you must get to deal with some fascinating stuff—’

  ‘It’s boring, mostly.’ Emily frowned. ‘When it’s not terrifying, I mean. But it’s half a per cent blind terror and the rest is just being in an office. Funny, actually,’ she said, after a heartbeat’s pause. ‘I’m in the magic business and I do mostly tedious, repetitive clerical chores. You travel through time and save lives, and you’re in insurance—’

  ‘Mostly maths,’ Frank said quickly. ‘Got to calculate the exact moment of intervention, you see. For every minute of actual fieldwork, there’s two hours of quantum calculus and probability crunching. Actually,’ he added - it hadn’t really occurred to him before- ‘it may sound rather dashing and weird but it’s just work, really. I kid myself it’s not, because if it was work, that’d mean I’m all grown-up and responsible, but when you take a long, hard look at it, it’s not that easy to spot the difference.’

  Silence. Not so much a pause as a rest, like in music. You have to stop occasionally to allow the changes to take effect. ‘I suppose I should be getting back to the office,’ Emily said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

  Especially the ones who’re trying to kill you? Best not to go into that.

  ‘Not a problem,’ he said, with a bit of grin left over from his earlier bumptiousness. ‘The Door, remember? If I try hard I can land it on a quarter of a second. Marvellous thing,’ he added. ‘Sometimes I really wish I knew how it works.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Well—’ She stopped. ‘I can tell you, if you like, but it probably won’t make much sense. It’s a bit-well, technical.’

  Frank made a fine-by-me gesture with his hands. ‘Try me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but—’ Frown. ‘I get carried away when I start talking about work stuff. I have an idea that listening to a long speech about things you don’t understand can be a bit boring.’

  Frank shook his head. ‘I grew up in New Zealand,’ he said. ‘If you live there for any length of time and you’re not interested in sheep or the movies, you learn boredom management as a basic survival skill. Also, it might be quite useful to know how the thing works, since I make my living out of it.’

  ‘Well—’

  Actually, Emily was quite right. It was boring, very boring indeed, and she had the rare ability to reach inside a basically uninteresting concept and bring out the deeply buried latent tedium that the casual observer could so easily miss. The curious thing-very strange indeed, stranger than time-travel or dragon-slaying or mysterious assassins lurking behind suburban apple trees for no apparent reason - was that he really didn’t mind. Listening to her explaining about Z-axis bipolar simultaneous shunts was a bit like opera: you can’t follow the plot and the words are rubbish even if you can make them out through all the caterwauling, but if you relax completely and let it all wash over you like the lava flow from a volcano, it’s actually rather soothing. More to the point, Frank realised (and the realisation made him sit up in his chair as if he’d been poked in the bum with a sharp nail), he’d rather be bored by her than interested by anybody else. Which is about as perfect a definition of the L-word as you can get—

  ‘And that’s about it, basically,’ he heard her say. ‘Mostly it’s just Shirakawa’s Constant, but with a guidance system and stable superconductors. The only difficult bit is how anybody ever managed to make one in the first place, because of the reverse exit instabilities. If you’ve already got one, of course, then in theory you could duplicate it using—’ She paused, and seemed suddenly to be aware of how long she’d been talking for. ‘You didn’t really want to be told all that,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ Frank said immediately. ‘It was fascinating. I learned a lot,’ he added, neglecting to state what it was he’d learned a lot about. ‘Look, would you like some coffee or something? Ice cream? Boat trip down the Seine? You don’t have to worry about getting back,’ he added quickly. ‘I can have you standing outside your office door any time you like, in about thirty seconds.’ He stopped and noticed that he’d run out of words and breath. Whatever she said next, he knew, was going to be very important indeed.

  ‘I’d better not,’ Emily replied; and he’d been right. It was a very important, highly significant statement, easily up there with the Gettysburg Address and Ich bin ein Berliner, not so much because of the words, but because of the way she’d said them. ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘quite apart from the stacks of work I’ve got piled up on my desk, there’s this w
hole someone-trying-to-killme business, and until I’ve got that sorted out, it’s kind of hard to give my full attention to anything else. But—’ (It was at that moment that but became Frank Carpenter’s all-time favourite three-letter monosyllable.) ‘I don’t know, would you like to have lunch sometime? If you’re not busy or anything. So I can say thank you properly, when my mind’s not all clogged up with weirdness and stuff.’

  ‘Love to,’ Frank said. ‘I know this nice, quiet little Italian place in 1976. They do really good pasta, and it’s a well-known fact that anything you eat before you were born isn’t fattening.’

  The Door whisked them away to Cheapside, where it opened in the side of a parked Transit van. Emily was clearly impressed by the foldaway stairs. When it was rolled up back in its tube, Frank said, ‘See you here tomorrow, then, twelvish’, and she nodded, smiled, and walked away. Not long afterwards, a door, an ordinary glass office door, swallowed her up and left him standing alone on the pavement.

  The temptation to unroll his little square of plastic sheet and issue the command Here, tomorrow, twelvish was almost too strong to bear, but he managed it somehow. Instead, he walked slowly down the street, turned left and right a few times, and arrived at the entrance to Mr Sprague’s office.

  ‘That’s unusual,’ George Sprague said, when Frank had been shown in. ‘You came in through the door.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Instead of the wall. Nothing wrong, is there?’

  ‘What?’ Frank woke up out of a distinctly soppy daydream. ‘Oh, no, everything’s fine. Just fancied the walk, you know.’

  Mr Sprague shrugged, waited a few seconds, and said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Oh.’ Frank shook himself like a wet dog. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Miles away. The job. Done.’ He fished about in his top pocket and produced a folded piece of paper. Mr Sprague read it, shuddered slightly, and put it in his in-tray. Then he reached for his chequebook.