The Better Mousetrap (24 page)

‘We’re here to see Mr Pickersgill,’ Emily said.

The receptionist looked up at her. ‘Have you got an appointment?’

‘No.’

‘Just a moment, I’ll see if he’s free. Who should I say—?’ No harm in giving her name, or the firm’s. After all, she was here because the board-the rest of the board-were paying for her to do a job. ‘Emily Spitzer,’ she said. ‘Carringtons.’

‘I’m afraid he’s on the phone right now,’ the receptionist said. ‘If you’d care to take a seat, I’ll ring through as soon as his call’s finished.’

This time, Erskine had brought something to read; well, he would have, wouldn’t he? It had been a suggestion rather than a direct order, but obviously he’d taken it to heart, considered it and seen its self-evident merits; probably written it down in a notebook. The book he’d selected was Hasdrubal and Singh on banshee management; Emily’d been told to read it for her final exams, but she’d never managed to stay awake past the introduction. Erskine, she noticed, was two-thirds of the way through, and was using a pink requisition slip as a bookmark.

Needless to say, she’d forgotten to bring a book of her own. She glanced down at the selection of classic issues of Country Life and The Times colour supplement, all of them so old she was surprised they weren’t bound in vellum and chained to the table. Not for her, she decided. Instead, she half-closed her eyes and tried to run scenarios for the job ahead. It was what you were supposed to do when you were waiting on a mission like this. She’d never managed to get the hang of it.

Instead, she thought: how the hell can you have a troll on your board of directors and not notice? A goblin, now; that’d be quite understandable. Goblins were natural shape-shifters. Ditto dark elves, gnomes and the Fey. Even giants-there were some very short giants, and some of the full-sized ones had techniques for shrinking down to normal proportions for up to seventy-two hours; a really smart giant with access to the right equipment could probably pass for human indefinitely, or at least until his morphic signature began to break down under the strain. But trolls? No. Sunblock and dark glasses helped them cope with the daylight issue, but there wasn’t really anything they could do about their size, their shape, or the fact that their mouths were full of precious stones instead of teeth. You’d notice something like that, surely.

(Without taking his eyes off the page, Erskine reached in his top pocket, took out a small notebook, and wrote something down. Emily hated him.)

Yes, of course you’d notice. In which case it stood to reason that the other directors had noticed, probably long before Mr Pickersgill was promoted to the board, and they were fine about it-no silly prejudice, no bigotry, this is the twenty-first century after all. It therefore followed that if they now wanted their colleague terminated with extreme prejudice, it wasn’t because of his inhumanity. There’d be some other reasona difference of opinion over a takeover offer or a recapitalisation issue, or maybe they had a buy-back option over his shares and wanted to get them cheap from his executors before higher than anticipated mid-term profits sent the share price soaring. All sorts of possible reasons; and it was all quite legal and legitimate, since Mr Pickersgill happened not to be human. You can’t murder a monster, you can only kill it, and provided you abide by the requirements of the Supernatural Vermin (Welfare) Regulations 1977 and the various EU directives, they can’t have you for it. Which, Emily had to concede, was generally fine by her. Ninety-nine per cent of the creatures she dealt with in the course of her professional life were ruthless instinctive killers who had to be disposed of in order to make the planet habitable for small, weak, squishy human beings. The other one per cent-well, omelettes and eggs. No room in this business for sentiment or Disneyeqsue anthropomorphising.

Even so. She did what she always did when she reached this point, and thought about something else. Frank Carpenter no, we won’t think about him. All right, then, his problem. The disappearance of Mr Sprague.

That was all right. It was challenging, interesting, and sufficiently remote not to bother her. Emily considered the facts as she knew them.

The laws of metaphysics categorically state that people don’t just vanish. They can be changed into something else (Practical magic) or made to look like they aren’t there (Effective magic); in the latter case, they can even be made to believe themselves that they aren’t there, a useful trick if you can do it. They can be transported from one place to another (telekinesis). They can be killed and their component molecules instantaneously dispersed (Gardner’s Hammer); they can be banished to the interdimensional void through Probability Snares, Better Mousetraps and Consequence Mines, or retuned to super-low intensity frequencies that mean they can only be detected with a Kawaguchiya RF7000 oscilloscope and three-way litmus paper. Any one of these processes can give you an effect indistinguishable to the layman from vanishing. But people don’t just vanish. Doesn’t happen. Can’t be done.

Simple, then. She had to get into Sprague’s office with an RF7000 and take readings. That’d tell her what had happened to him, and thereafter the mystery should solve itself. It wouldn’t be difficult, not for Frank and his Portable Door; when everyone had gone home, and there was nobody to worry about apart from cleaners and night security. And then they could have dinner, to celebrate—

Emily’s train of thought skidded on the wet leaves of shock and ploughed into the embankment of shame. She wasn’t quite sure why. She’d do him a favour, naturally he’d want to thank her, they could discuss her findings over Thai chicken with lemon grass, and what was so very wrong about that? She couldn’t put the reason into words, but then, she didn’t have to. It’d be-what? Betrayal? Surrender? Prostituting her craft in order to worm her way into the affections of her mark?

Oh, come off it.

But. She scowled, and Erskine, happening to look up from his book, intercepted her ferocious glare and shrivelled like a salted slug. Good, she thought; serve him right for-well, for whatever it was he deserved to be punished for. Existing, for example.

‘Mr Pickersgill’s free now, if you’d like to go through.’

Who the hell was Mr Pickersgill? Oh yes, the troll they were here to kill. Emily stood up abruptly and marched towards the open door, Erskine trailing behind her like the tin cans behind a newly-weds’ car.

As soon as the door closed behind them, her mind reverted to tactical mode. They were in a small, bare room-interview room-with a plain table and three chairs; one door, but there was a nice old-fashioned sash window (sealed shut with nine or so coats of paint) and they were on the ground floor. She glanced through it and saw a grubby, overshadowed courtyard, empty apart from a colony of wheelie bins. Escape route, in case things went wrong. She ticked Priority One off her mental list, and relaxed very slightly.

‘Where should I sit?’ Erskine hissed at her.

Stupid question, she thought; no, scrub that, it’s a very good question, since he’ll be doing the sword work. She stared at the backs of the two visitors’ chairs, her mind a sudden blank. For sure, one of the chairs was better, strategically speaking, than the other, but just then she didn’t even know how to set about deciding which. ‘That one,’ she snapped, pointing at the space directly between the two.

‘Right,’ Erskine said, in a clipped, efficient voice, and took the chair furthest from the window. Well, of course. It placed him on the victim’s left, so he’d have space to use his right arm.

Assuming he was right-handed. Emily realised she hadn’t bothered to notice.

The door opened, and a troll walked in.

Other than his size-eight foot two, at a guess-there was nothing remotely intimidating about Mr Pickersgill. He was broad in proportion to his height, but cheeks like slices of grey spam and a veritable harem of extra chins dissipated the effect of his bulk. He was bald, with a shiny, pointy head that rose through a chaplet of fuzzy white hair like a mountain through clouds. He wore thick-lensed, gold-rimmed spectacles and a plain dark blue suit with the sort of tie that only gets bought by children for Daddy’s birthday.

I can’t kill that, Emily thought.

Mr Pickersgill smiled. It was a pleasant smile, faintly apprehensive. ‘Ms Spitzer?’ He held out a big, soft hand. She shook it. ‘Sorry to keep you hanging about, call from one of our suppliers. Now then.’ He waited for them both to sit down, then lowered himself carefully into his chair. ‘What can I do for you?’

Erskine was looking at her. He was practically quivering, like a dog watching a rabbit. She gave him a tiny frown. Oh God, she thought.

It was, she realised, all about spiders. As a little girl, she’d squashed spiders because she was terrified of them. Really, there wasn’t anything else she could do. She couldn’t leave them be, in case they ran up her leg-unthinkable, yuck. She couldn’t catch them alive and put them out the window, because that’d mean touching them. She didn’t have the dexterity or the quick reactions to trap them in matchboxes. But a swift, decisive blow with a long-handled hairbrush turned them into a smear on the wall, and that was the problem solved. The killing aspect-an inoffensive living thing brutally and arbitrarily crushed to death never crossed her mind. Then, later, she killed spiders because they scared other people, and by then she was hardened to it. After that-spiders, dragons, vampires, manticores, harpies, the world was a better place without them. An article of faith, and no grey areas. A few brown, sticky ones, maybe, but no grey.

Mr Pickersgill, on the other hand, wasn’t a spider, not even by Emily’s extended definition. He was just a rather large man whose skin happened to be the colour and texture of pumice. He didn’t invalidate the spider principle; it just didn’t apply to him, that was all.

Which left her in an awkward position, with only one way out. She took a deep breath.

‘I work for Carringtons,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Excellent firm,’ he said. ‘By the way, how’s old Colin Gomez these days? He did a marvellous job for us once. Infestation of pixies at our Swansea plant. Had ‘em all cleared out in no time, we hardly lost any production.’

She thought about the pixies. The recommended method was cyanide gas. ‘It was Mr Gomez who sent us,’ she said. ‘On behalf of your fellow directors.’

She’d hoped that that would be enough to send the penny tumbling through space. But he just looked mildly puzzled. ‘Oh yes?’

‘That’s right. They hired us to kill you.’

Mr Pickersgill froze; all apart from his eyes, which turned round and huge. Magnified by his glasses, they looked like fried ostrich eggs.

‘Because,’ she went on, ‘you’re a troll. And, as you probably know, trolls count as supernatural vermin, which means they can be killed-well, any time, so long as you obey the regulations.’ She paused, to give him a chance to digest what she’d just said. He seemed to be having trouble with that.

‘Killed,’ he repeated. ‘Heavens.’

‘Now,’ Emily continued, and to her surprise her voice sounded level and calm. ‘You can tell by the fact you’re still alive that-well, I’ve got a few issues with this assignment.’

‘Issues.’

She nodded. ‘The way you people run your company is none of my concern,’ she went on, ‘but I’m assuming they want you out of the way for some other reason besides you being a—’

‘Quite. Yes.’

‘Fine. On the other hand-‘ (help me out here, damn you) ‘- you’ve got to appreciate my position. If I go back to my bosses and tell them I didn’t do the job because I don’t like the thought of killing someone because they’re a nuisance to their business colleagues, I’ll quite probably lose my job. And-no offence my career means more to me than your life does.’

‘Perfectly reasonable view,’ Mr Pickersgill mumbled. ‘Perfectly reasonable.’

‘So.’ She was making terribly heavy weather of all this, she knew. ‘I’m asking you if you can think of any way I can not kill you, without disobeying a direct order and being told to clear my desk by half past five.’ Pause. ‘I’m open to any sensible suggestions, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to hurry you along a bit. I’m sorry, but I’ve got a whole load of paperwork to catch up on when I get back to the office—’

‘It’s all right.’ Mr Pickersgill held up a doormat-sized hand. ‘I do apologise. This has come as something of a shock, but I think I can see a way. Would you mind very much waiting here for a moment, while I see to something? I’ll get Denise to bring you in some coffee and biscuits.’

The biscuits turned out to be ginger nuts and Rich Tea. Emily watched Erskine eat one of each and not die of arsenic poisoning, then helped herself. The coffee was good, too-proper filter coffee, not instant.

‘Excuse me.’

‘Mm?’ she replied with her mouth full.

‘With all due respect,’ Erskine said, and you could believe he actually meant it, ‘should you have done that? I mean, warn him and—’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

‘No, I should’ve let you chop his head off with the magic sword. Then we’d have got the work order signed by one of the other directors, and gone back to the office. But I didn’t feel like doing that, so I didn’t.’

‘Ah.’ Short, thoughtful silence. ‘This is one of those ethical things, isn’t it?’

Emily sighed. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Actually, you may want to write this down. Ready?’

Notebook out. ‘Fire away.’

‘Good. In this business,’ she said slowly, ‘we don’t do ethics. As far as we’re concerned, ethics is southern East Anglia pronounced with a lisp. Got that? You can call it Spitzer’s Law if you like. By the same token, we don’t go around scragging company directors, either. It’s—’ She paused, trying to think in Erskinean terms. ‘It’s beneath the dignity of our profession. We have an understanding with the Mafia. We don’t rub out people’s business rivals, they don’t tamper with the fabric of perceived reality. It’s perfectly simple. And it’s I after E in “perceived”.’

‘Right.’ Erskine reversed his pencil, erased a few letters with the rubber end and made the correction. ‘So what do we do?’ Emily frowned. Good question. ‘We drink our coffee,’ she said.