The Better Mousetrap (19 page)

‘Oh, I think they might.’

Carpenter: the name rang a bell. Wasn’t there a Carpenter mixed up in the spectacular decline and fall of J. W. Wells & Co? That needed checking. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘For argument’s sake, let’s say they sell. It’s still an awful lot of eggs in one basket, and minerals—’ She shrugged. ‘To be honest with you, it’s more of a hobby with us. I know it was always your big thing, so naturally you’re inclined to take the broad, ambitious view. But I don’t think my partners’ll be too happy about committing so heavily to what’s basically a fringe thing for us. Sorry,’ she added sweetly. ‘Nice thought, though.’

Not a trace of a reaction from Dennis, but the bimbo smiled so broadly you’d think she was baring her teeth. ‘No worries,’ Dennis said. ‘So what did you have in mind?’

Very delicately, Amelia made herself two inches shorter and seven years younger. Time to be daddy’s little girl for a bit. ‘Like I said, Uncle Dennis,’ she said, ‘you’re the expert. Could we pretend the strike’s much smaller than it is? Then it won’t upset the price.’

Victory; a tiny gleam of a patronising grin. ‘Doesn’t work like that,’ Dennis replied. ‘You can’t keep stuff like this secret very long. Soon as we start digging, you can bet the other companies’ll have Mason and Schmidt or Zauberwerke on the case, and they can scry a photo just as well as I can. They’ll know, trust me.’

‘Awkward.’ Amelia synthesised a baffled look. ‘I suppose we could just sort of sit tight and wait to see what happens.’

Dennis shook his head. ‘Bad idea,’ he said. ‘If word does get out, the others’ll know we’re sitting on a major find, which means we could flood the market at any time. The bauxite price’d crash, and we’d be no better off. That’s why a monopoly’s the only safe way to go. But if that’s not practicable— ‘ He shrugged. ‘Maybe you should consider selling to one of the big companies,’ he said. ‘A nice little Dutch auction, maybe. All the main players’d have to join in, just to stop their rivals getting it. Nice return, no outlay, get shot of it and move on. If you’re not really into minerals, it’d be the sensible thing to do.’

He was calling her bluff. Loathsome little man. No wonder Dad had liked him. He always hero-worshipped people who were smarter than himself-his own offspring excepted, of course. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Amelia said, making herself sound just a bit disappointed. ‘It’d be a pity, though, wouldn’t it? I’m sure we’d make ever so much more if we mined it ourselves, just so long as we could control the silly old price.’

Dennis stifled a yawn; a genuine one, damn him. ‘I think you may be worrying too much about that,’ he said. ‘Even if the price goes splat, there’s still money to be made out of it. I’ve been in this business over a century, and if there’s a way of outsmarting the market I haven’t found it yet. Try being too clever and you’ll end up with footprints all down your back. Anyway,’ he added, stubbing out his cigar, ‘we don’t yet know for sure that there’s anything worth having down there. Get me those seventy-five-by-nineties and then we’ll have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.’ He stood up. So did the bimbo, simultaneously. ‘Great to see you again,’ he said. ‘Give me a shout when you’ve got the pics, and then we’ll talk.’

After he’d gone, and she’d conjured up demons to empty the ashtray and spray the room with air freshener, Amelia sat for a while and thought about her plan - no, her grand design. Clever Uncle Dennis, she thought; he’d come within a long gobshot of stumbling on the truth, and she wouldn’t put it past him to figure out what she really had in mind, given time. She’d known he was smart-he had to be, to have survived the savage office politics of JWW for nearly a century - but maybe she’d underestimated him; it made her wonder what sort of diabolical genius the Carpenter man must’ve been, to have outsmarted him and the rest of the JWW brains trust. It’d be annoying, to say the least, if he did manage to work it all out for himself. Maybe-she frowned as she contemplated it-there would have to be a tragic accident in Uncle Dennis’ near future. A probability mine, perhaps, or even (hang the expense) a Better Mousetrap. It’d be a pity, of course, because he reminded her of her childhood, and there was a sentimental streak buried deep inside her, like a small, uneconomic-to-exploit bauxite deposit. But there. Cruel world, and all that.

She’d have to think about it. If Dennis Tanner could be allowed to survive without jeopardising the project, nobody would be happier than her; if not, well. Meanwhile— Amelia snapped her fingers, and a cloud of small, burning flies appeared in mid-air. They swarmed for a moment, then split up, swirled around for a couple of passes and formed themselves into a flow chart of the project so far. A third of them turned green-things already done-while the rest stayed blue: things still to do. She studied them for a while, then disappeared them, picked up the phone and thought of a number.

‘Honest John’s House of Monsters, this is John, how can I—?’

‘Amelia Carrington,’ she snapped. ‘Is it ready yet?’

The sound of air being sucked in through teeth. ‘Ah yes,’ said the voice at the other end of the line. ‘That one. Been meaning to give you a call.’

‘Is it ready yet?’

Pause. ‘Remind me,’ said Honest John, ‘how long did we quote you?’

‘Six weeks, and that was five weeks ago.’

‘Mmm.’ A tongue, unseen and distant, clicked. ‘Could’ve been a shade on the optimistic side there. It’s the hot weather, basically. Throws out their whatchercallits, biological clocks. Hold on a tick, I’ll go and have a look in the tank.’

‘Now just a—’ Too late. Click, and the phone started warbling Aretha Franklin in her ear, apparently through a megaphone stuffed with socks. She scowled. It was well known in the trade that anybody who put Amelia Carrington on hold and made her listen to music was unlikely to live long and prosper, but clearly Honest John hadn’t been on the Cc list when that memo did the rounds. She clenched her fingers into claws, and told herself to be calm.

‘Thought so,’ Honest John said, after what seemed like a very long time. ‘Probably we’re looking at another three, maybe four weeks, call it five and you won’t be disappointed. Sorry,’ he added-very much an afterthought - ‘but there you go. Can’t rush Mother Supernature, after all.’

Amelia took a deep breath. ‘Now listen to me,’ she said (Penelope Keith and Margaret Thatcher and just a hint of the Goddess in her aspect as the Destroyer). ‘We have a contract, and if you care to look at clause 7(c), you will see that time is of the essence. Do you know what that means?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’ He sounded just a little bit rattled. Brave man. ‘But like I said, you can’t rush things in this business. I mean, you’re dealing with livestock here, not machines, and if the ewe’s not in the mood, there’s really not a lot I can—’

‘Seven days,’ Amelia said. ‘At the end of which, I expect a delivery. Failing which, I shall have you killed, eventually. Do we understand each other? Splendid. So nice talking to you - goodbye.’

It is, after all, just another kind of magic. Tell someone to do something impossible and back it up with a credible threat, and somehow it always seems to get done. It did occur to Amelia that maybe she’d been a little bit hard on the poor man, given the nature of his business. She resolved to make it up to him by sending him a card at Christmas, assuming he was still alive.

Eventually Frank decided to go with plain white with a button-down collar. It was, he felt, what George would have wanted him to choose.

He felt awful about it, of course, but what could he do? As far as being resourceful went, he was the proverbial one-trick pony.

If time travel could put it right, he knew how to cope. Other stuff-flat tyres, chip-pan fires, basic first aid-was beyond him, and he knew it. And in the matter of the disappearance of George Sprague en route from Cheapside to Marks & Spencers, Marble Arch, he couldn’t see how the Portable Door would be of any use. If he went back in time to try and prevent it, he’d have to confront himself in George’s office and somehow convince himself that he ought to choose his own rotten shirts without outside help, without actually mentioning what would happen to George otherwise. The hell with that. Even thinking about it made him feel timesick.

Feeling guilty, miserable and frustrated, he nipped back home to New Zealand, had a quick shower and changed into his new shirt. It didn’t suit him at all, and the thought that his good friend George Sprague was now missing presumed lost in time just so that Frank Carpenter could look like a waiter made him even more depressed. No, he couldn’t just leave it and hope it’d fix itself. He had to do something about it. What, though? That was the question. Pound to a penny magic was involved in it somewhere. He cursed his own ignorance, not to mention the arrogant stupidity of using magic without having the first idea how it worked. Nothing for it, he decided, he’d have to ask someone. Someone in the trade. Such as—

Well, Emily, of course.

Frank sagged with relief. Emily would know what to do. You could tell just by looking at her that she was good at her job. Besides (he felt slightly ashamed of the thought, but not enough to be put off it) it’d be a splendid opportunity to get to know her better. She’d come across as the kind of person who’d quite like showing off her professional expertise to a prospective boyfriend, a touch of the knight in shining armour embarking on a quest for his lady’s sake. Silver linings, he thought.

And then he thought, Shit, the time—

The panic didn’t last long. He took out the Door, spread it on his cabin wall, thought in the arrival coordinates and stepped out into Cheapside precisely on time, to find she wasn’t there.

No big deal. She was a busy professional, he reminded himself, she could easily have been held up by a last-minute phone call or an emergency call-out to an infestation of basilisks or something. Not everybody, he reminded himself primly, has a Portable Door. Most people have to go the long way round, via linear time. He leaned against the builders’ hoarding he’d just walked through and tried to relax.

One drawback to having a Door is that you quickly get out of practice when it comes to being bored. No more arriving half an hour early and having to kill time wandering up and down looking in shop windows; just fast-forward through the tedious, unproductive bits and cut to the chase. But he couldn’t do that on this occasion, and as three minutes became five and then ten, he started to feel distinctly uncomfortable. His feet were hurting, for one thing, from the unaccustomed labour of standing still. Also, he was sure that people were looking at him; and nobody likes the thought that maybe they’ve been stood up. Fifteen minutes: it was sheer torture, especially with the George business still painfully unresolved at the back of his mind. Even if Emily’d changed her mind and didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him after all, he still needed the wretched girl to help him find George. Bloody woman, he thought. Talk about inconsiderate—

Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty—

If it hadn’t been for George, he’d probably have given up; walked away, reset his mind and heart to zero, made a note on the file not to fall in love again, gone home. But he needed a magician to help him save his friend, and apart from Dennis Tanner, who’d be unsympathetic and either refuse to help or charge him money, Emily was the only one he knew. Frank walked across the street and into reception.

‘Hello. I’d like a quick word with Emily Spitzer, if she’s free.’

The woman behind the desk looked at him. ‘Oh,’ she said. Not on the list of reactions he’d been expecting. ‘Are you family?’ she asked.

Oink. ‘What?’

‘Are you family?’

I got all my sisters and me? No, that didn’t seem to be what she was getting at. ‘You mean, am I a relative?’

‘Yes.’

And then it struck Frank that there’s only one set of circumstances where they ask you that.

Another thing the Door had taught him was how flexible time could be. Given the right equipment, you could bypass a hundred years in a few seconds. Or, given exactly the right kind of shock, you could live a year in the time it took to blink twice.

Something bad had happened. Yes, and if he said he wasn’t a relative, they’d tell him-politely, of course-to take a hike, and he’d have no way of knowing what had happened to Emily, and he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. ‘Cousin,’ he heard himself say; then, as it occurred to him that maybe a cousin wasn’t a close enough relative, ‘First cousin. What’s going on?’

The receptionist’s eyes told him that she wasn’t paid enough to do things like this. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘She’s dead.’

Don’t be silly, Frank was about to say; and then he remembered. Apple tree, Better Mousetrap. He couldn’t say, ‘Don’t be silly, people her age don’t just die,’ because of course she already had.

She already had; and afterwards, he’d asked her out to lunch. He wriggled slightly, pressing the Door’s tube gently against his ribs. It was there in his pocket. Dead, he said to himself, right. We’ll see about that.

‘How?’ he snapped. The receptionist looked away. ‘Maybe it’d be best if you saw Mr Gomez,’ she gabbled. ‘I’ll just ring through and see if he’s—’

‘How?’

No nonsense from anybody; he was rather impressed. The receptionist wavered for a moment, and he treated her to a big stare. Apparently it worked. Frank was surprised but pleased.

‘She was killed. By a giant spider. It bit her head right off.’

‘Yes, fine, I see. Where? And when?’ he added sharply. ‘It’s important.’

Startled, she told him.

‘And you’re sure about that? Twelve forty-five precisely?’

‘Pretty sure,’ the poor receptionist whimpered. Frank felt guilty for badgering her, but it couldn’t be helped. ‘I heard Mr Cannis - that’s the new trainee, he was there when it happened telling Mr Gomez and he said twelve forty-five, I’m sure he did. If you want, I can ask—’

‘No, that’s fine. What was the address again? No, write it down for me. Thanks. Sorry, is that a P or an R?’

No time to think, because thinking would mean he’d have to address the issues raised by the words giant spider and bit her head right off. Frank had never faced physical danger before, unless you counted being driven in a beat-up old Fiat by Lucy Henderson. Giant spiders that bit off people’s heads … He found a wall, not caring if anybody saw him, spread out the Door and lunged through it.