The Better Mousetrap (12 page)

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Because an accident is one thing, but this is murder, and that’s nasty and shouldn’t be allowed.

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Because of a million US dollars. (Good one. We approve of that one.)

- Because— Well. Because it’s there. Because.

He ran the checklist, and found it wanting. Those aren’t the reasons, he made himself confess. You know what the real reason is, and it’s very bad. We don’t do damsels in distress. Why don’t we? Because only heroes do that stuff, and we’re not a hero. We’re not a swinging-in-through-windows, Milk-Tray hero, nor are we the meek, quiet hero with hidden depths who comes through when the chips are down. We aren’t any kind of hero. We’re just us. Me.

Got that?

‘Fair enough,’ Frank said mildly. ‘It’s just a pity, that’s all.’

Mr Tanner shrugged. ‘Yeah, well—’

‘Because I was going to use the fee from this job to pay off a bit more of what I owe you, but since you say there’s absolutely nothing anybody can do—’

(Got that? Apparently not.)

Mr Tanner stayed perfectly still, apart from his eyes. They flicked round in their deep-set sockets and focused on him like an advanced targeting system. ‘Is that right?’ he said.

‘Never mind,’ Frank replied. ‘I expect there’ll be another job along in a bit, and I can pay you then. Assuming Mr Sprague still wants me to do stuff for him. I had a hundred per cent success rate, you see, up till now.’

Mr Tanner wasn’t fooled, he could tell. He could see the silly little bit of string being dangled in front of his nose. His problem was, he really, really liked string.

‘Hundred per cent, eh?’

‘Satisfaction guaranteed,’ Frank said. ‘Someone you can rely on. But it doesn’t matter. Mr Sprague’s a reasonable man. And surely everybody’s allowed to screw up once.’

The flash of a paw, as the string moves. ‘You think so?’

‘Well—’

‘It’s pretty obvious you’ve never been in business, then,’ Mr Tanner said. ‘It doesn’t work like that. Oh well, you did your best is one of those phrases you just don’t hear in the challenging environment of the modern market place.’

Keep the string moving. For both of us. ‘Oh, I don’t think Mr Sprague’s like that. He’s more of a friend than a boss, really. He’ll understand, I’m sure.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Mr Tanner was grinning at him. ‘Until the day comes when some other kid comes into his office with a Portable Door, or something else that does the same thing; and then he’ll have to ask himself, who can I really trust to get the job done and the shareholders off my back? Fat lot of good personal rapport and cards at Christmas are going to do you when that happens.’

‘All right,’ Frank said slowly. ‘But it’s all academic, isn’t it? Because you said yourself, there’s nothing at all anybody can do about it.’

Mr Tanner looked up at him. String, set and match. ‘Well,’ he said.

In the very heart of the City of London, wedged in between two dizzyingly tall glass and steel towers, snuggles the Cheapside branch of the Credit Mayonnaise. The building is extremely old, one of the very few survivors of the Great Fire of 1666; which means, among other things, that it’s so heavily listed, you’d need a dozen licences just to open a window. Most of its business is something abstruse to do with turning one sort of money into another, but it also has a modest cellar, which houses a number of safe-deposit boxes.

Cellar, please note; not vault. There are no time-locked steel doors, because the Environment wouldn’t stand for it; likewise, no pressure pads, infra-red beams or cunning sensors capable of registering the slight change in temperature caused by the heat of an unauthorised body. A moderately enterprising burglar could probably break into it armed with nothing more than a tyre lever and a garden trowel, although he’d have to be careful not to scratch the paint if he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life hiding from the enforcers from English Heritage. Besides, no burglar would bother. There’s nothing valuable down there; just a load of old papers and some empty boxes.

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.’