The Better Mousetrap (22 page)

‘Mphm.’ She nodded. ‘He’s the head of security, then.’

Slight frown. ‘No, he’s the troll. And this time, please remember to get the work order countersigned. You know we can’t raise an invoice without a completed work order.’

Emily kept her teeth clamped together. She turned to leave, but Mr Gomez called her back. ‘You’d better take young Erskine along with you,’ he said. ‘The more of our established clients he meets, the better. If they can put faces to names—’

‘Have I got to?’ She hadn’t meant it to come out as a whine, but there wasn’t really any other way of saying those particular words. ‘Look, it’s going to be a pretty delicate job as it is. If I’ve got to babysit Erskine while I’m at it—’ She closed her mouth. Complete waste of time. ‘I’ll take Erskine with me,’ she said. ‘It’ll be good experience for him.’

‘Splendid. Let me know how it went when you get back.’

As Emily walked back down the corridor, her mind was a three-lane highway. In the fast lane, the ethics of killing company directors just because they happened not to be human. In the middle, the practicalities of offing a troll (skin like Kevlar, bones practically unbreakable, immune to all major poisons; daylight usually fatal, but these days, with high-factor barrier creams—). Not just killing one, but doing it in broad daylight, in its office, and without turning most of SW1 into a radioactive desert. A challenge. Which left the slow lane, in which the problem of what had happened to George Sprague still chuntered quietly along, going nowhere in particular but draining her already overtaxed reserves. All that and Erskine too. What joy.

When she barged into his office without knocking, she found him sitting at his desk reading a file. ‘What’ve you got there?’ she snapped.

‘The Piedmont Technologies case notes,’ he replied pleasantly. ‘I was just admiring the way you handled the infestation of three-headed giant bats. Though, strictly speaking, the use of dioxin in an environmentally sensitive area—’

‘Put it away,’ she said irritably. ‘And get your coat.’ She paused, sat on the edge of the desk. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘how would you go about killing a troll?’

It was like pressing an on-switch. ‘Built-up area or open countryside?’

‘Horseferry Road.’

Dip of the head to acknowledge the data input. ‘In that case oh, sorry, daylight or night-time?’

‘Right now.’

‘One-oh-five millimetre recoilless rifle and a molybdenum steel projectile,’ Erskine said promptly. ‘Assuming we can establish a danger area not less than eight hundred by six hundred metres—’

‘In his office,’ Emily said sweetly. ‘Probably in an interview room, but we may have to do it in reception. Oh, and without making him suspicious.’

‘Hm.’ The look on Erskine’s face was thoughtful, but with overtones of suppressed enthusiasm. ‘Presumably a suicide attack isn’t an option.’

She shrugged. ‘You’ll be doing it.’

‘Me?’ He stared at her as if she’d just told him he’d been made king. ‘Really?’

‘Mr Gomez thinks the experience will be good for you.’

‘Gosh.’ Pause, as self-doubt cut in. ‘You’ll be there, though, won’t you? In case anything goes wrong, I mean. Only—’ Hesitation; then the big confession, all in a rush. ‘Only I’ve never actually done a solo trolloctomy, not in practice. I mean, I’ve done computer simulations, but—’

‘Of course you haven’t, you fool.’ Emily sighed. ‘Neither have I, come to that. You don’t get many trolls south of the Malverns these days. And yes, of course I’ll be there - you don’t think our insurance’d stand for letting trainees loose killing things without proper supervision? So,’ she went on, pressing her fingertips to the side of her head, ‘how are you going to go about it? Decided yet?’

Erskine thought for a moment-not explosives, not poisons, recoilless rifle not available, golly, tricky one-and suddenly the answer was there, staring him in the face. But it was so-well, so amazingly cool that he hardly dared suggest it—

‘M-magic sword?’ he said breathlessly.

Emily nodded sadly. ‘Magic sword,’ she repeated. ‘Worse luck.’

‘But—’ This was so exciting; he felt he was about to burst. ‘I mean, I didn’t think people really used them any more.’

‘Oh, they do.’ Emily pulled a face. ‘Believe me. It makes you wonder if there’s really such a thing as progress in this business. I mean, we can put a man on the moon and take out fully grown manticores with satellite-mounted high-energy lasers, but there’ll always be some prick who can’t resist the urge to chase after wildlife with a bloody great knife. Distinctly Freudian, if you ask me. Anyway, I told them when I joined, I don’t do swords unless I’ve really got to, and it strikes me you’re just the sort who’d enjoy it, so yes, the gig’s yours. Nip down to the stores and sign one out. See you in reception in ten minutes.’

As soon as she’d gone, Erskine was on his feet and tearing down the corridor towards the lift. As he ran, he accessed his mental plan of the building. Edged weapons were stored in the stationery cupboard on the third floor, in a locked steel cabinet whose combination was 1415 (easy to remember: battle of Agincourt). When he got there, he burrowed through stacks of green chit pads and timesheet books until he’d cleared a way through to the cabinet door. He picked the tumblers round with his fingernail and opened the door.

Tsk, he thought. Why do these people have to be so untidy? Spears, axes, cutlasses, crossbow bolts, all jammed in together any old how; he was going to have to take the whole lot out if he wanted to get at the stuff at the back, and all those sharp edges piled up like that was just begging for someone to do himself an injury.

Right at the back, behind a stack of mildewed whaling pikes, he found it: a simple black scabbard, flecked with white mould. A simple steel cross-hilt, with a brown label dangling off it on the end of a bit of white string. The label read E77931542 Magic Sword Class 2b.

Erskine finagled it out past the pikestaffs, wiped the mould off with his sleeve, and laid his right hand very gently on the wire-wrapped grip. It felt icy cold, and when he pulled his hand away sharply, small patches of skin stuck to it and ripped off.

I don’t know you, said a high, shrill voice in his head.

‘I’m Erskine Cannis,’ he said aloud.

Your name is not important. What are you?

Intuitively, Erskine knew he was going to have to choose his words very carefully. After all, the thing had already tasted his blood; didn’t that give them some sort of power over you? He was beginning to wish he hadn’t accepted the honour of carrying out the mission.

‘I’m a junior trainee,’ he said.

Very good. What are you, junior trainee?

He thought hard and quickly. People who lied to these things tended to have short, unhappy lives. On the other hand, he didn’t think he’d be much better off telling it the whole truth.

‘Scared,’ he said. Silence; then the voice in his head laughed softly. Nice answer, it said. Bear in mind that I am permitted three questions. ‘Are you?’

You didn’t know that?

Erskine tried a little smile. It came out droopy and sad. ‘Like I said, I’m a junior trainee. We were going to do magic swords in my second year at college, but we ran out of time.’

Unfortunate. What are you, scared junior trainee?

He managed to drag his stare off the sword and onto his watch face. ‘Late,’ he said. ‘My boss is waiting for me upstairs, so if it’s no trouble—’

Very well. The risk is yours to take, if you insist on it. Please note that Weyland Metal Industries and its successors in title accept no liability in respect of death or injury incurred as a result of false or misleading answers, for further details see handbook. Pause. Your last chance. Is there anything you’d like to say at this point?

Erskine swallowed hard and licked his lips. ‘Urn,’ he said.

Um?

‘Can we go now? Only, Miss Spitzer did say ten minutes, and I’ve still got to put all this junk back in the locker.’

He listened for a moment, but the voice had gone, and all he could hear was his own heart pounding. Well, he said to himself, got away with that, then.

So far.

Erskine shuddered and started stuffing weapons back inside the cabinet. His hands were bleeding where he’d lost the patches of skin, but they were still so cold and numb he couldn’t feel any pain. It took him a long time to reset the combination, with fingers that felt like huge overripe bananas.

‘There you are,’ Emily said as he scuttled through the fire door into reception. Of course, she couldn’t quite give it Colin Gomez’s unforgivably patronising tone. Presumably that only came when you were real management. ‘You found one, then.’

Erskine nodded. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘In the golf bag.’

‘Fine. Really inconspicuous, he won’t suspect a thing.’ She sighed. ‘I was going to take the Tube, but if you insist on lugging that thing around with you, the firm can bloody well pay for a taxi. We’ll be about an hour and a half,’ she called out to reception, who made a note in the going-out-and-coming-in book. ‘Come on, you,’ she said to Erskine. ‘And if you can make it look like you’re not with me, that’d be something.’

Like the Delphic oracle or a crystal ball, Frank’s ham sandwich with Emily had answered some questions and raised an uncomfortable quantity of others. As he peeled the Door off the cabin wall and lay down on the bed, he made an effort at correlating the results.

Questions definitely answered. Yes, she was now an unmistakable and unavoidable issue, something he was going to have to deal with, one way or the other. It wasn’t an issue he particularly wanted to face, because love is like consumer credit: a refusal often offends. He’d always had a tendency to believe what people told him, and ever since he could remember, his parents had given him the impression-in the nicest, most loving way imaginable-that he was neither use nor ornament, and nothing he’d done or experienced since leaving home had given him cause to question their assessment. It was logical, therefore, to assume that any girl he offered his heart to would find it about as desirable as junk mail; and then there’d be all that tiresome lovelorn mooning-about to get through before he could draw a line under the whole business and move on to something else. Certainly, if God had come to Frank in a dream and asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he wouldn’t have put true love at the top of the list. Come to think of it, he’d probably have ended up asking for socks and soap on a rope, because as far as he knew he’d never really wanted anything-which explained why at one stage he’d had ten million pounds in his bank account, and never spent it on anything except underwear and convenience foods.

Yes, but doesn’t everybody want true love? Everybody else. He had the advantage over them of having seen it in action, close up. His parents had been utterly devoted to each other, he knew that for stone-cold fact; for one thing, his mother was under the influence of J. W. Wells & Co’s universally acclaimed love philtre, guaranteed to ensure true love for ever, and Dad well, dosing him with the stuff would’ve been like pouring bottled water into the Great Lakes. A fat lot of good true love had done them, though; true love and unlimited wealth and even the Portable Door, but if you had to sum them up in one word, it’d have to be miserable. Why else, after all, would they have built their own pocket universe and retired into it? That, Frank recognised, had left him with a rather jaundiced view of love, not to mention money and magic. As far as he could tell, all three were in the same category as satellite TV and broadband: everybody says you’ve got to get it, so you do, and then it either doesn’t work or turns out not to be worth having. In which case, why bother?

Not the most constructive world-view, he was perfectly ready to admit, but it was the one he was stuck with, and there didn’t seem to be a lot he could do about it. Take away love and money, though, and what were you left with? All he could think of was Doing Good; and somehow he’d never been able to get himself particularly worked up about that. He had no quarrel with other people; most of the other people he’d met had turned out to be quite nice, on balance. But the thought of spending his life doing nice things for them had never really grabbed his enthusiasm. The insurance thing, with Mr Sprague, had been the closest he’d been able to get. It was Doing Good, because people who would’ve died or been horribly mutilated didn’t and weren’t. Also, he got paid money for it, and (most important of all) it hadn’t called for any real effort on his part. Nip through the Door, hold up a bit of cardboard with some writing on it, nip back, the rest of the day’s your own. True, there was also the heavy maths, figuring out precisely when and where he had to intervene, but he’d never really minded that. He hadn’t enjoyed it, but it had been a not-too-irksome chore; somewhere between a little light dusting and ironing while watching something good on TV.

Fine; not much of a life, all told, but a hell of a lot better than working for local government. Now, though, it looked like all that was about to go up in smoke, thanks to the question answered and the question posed; yes, I’m in love, and what the hell happened to Mr Sprague?

Well. There wasn’t a lot Frank could do about the question answered. Like a man trapped in a subterranean cavern rapidly filling with water, he was just going to have to wait and see what happened on that score. Mr Sprague, though: different kettle of fish. He didn’t know much about these things-and Emily, for all that she was now officially the most wonderful person on earth, hadn’t been much use at all-but it did seem quite likely that the George Sprague thing was because of him, and quite possibly his fault. In which case, it was up to him to do something about it. The problems of others which weren’t his responsibility might not have interested him much, but he was red-hot on clearing up his own messes. It was, he recognised, about all the character he had. When he was fourteen, his bedroom had been tidy. It was that bad.

Frank rolled off the bed and stood up. He hadn’t a clue where to start, so the only option open to him was to go and ask someone. And, since he couldn’t think of anybody else to ask

He spread out the Door and walked through it into Mr Sprague’s office. This time, to be on the safe side, he didn’t go straight into Mr Sprague’s actual inner lair. Instead, he chose a patch of wall in a corridor halfway between the secretary’s office and the toilet. Luckily there was nobody about, and he rolled up the Door and put it away. Then he presented himself before what was her name? He’d heard George say it many times, but he hadn’t taken it in. Luckily, he’d never actually met her; the most she’d been was a squeaky voice at the other end of a phone line.