The Better Mousetrap (28 page)

Mr Tanner’s mother glanced down at the pattern, sighed, and reached for the wire-cutters.

Amelia Carrington, she thought. It seemed like only yesterday that she’d been eating strained pear off a spoon and strangling snakes in her cot. It’s a shame they have to grow up.

Obviously, she was up to something; well, that went without saying. Knowing her, something big and flashy, probably some kind of take on world domination; something involving bauxite, at some level or other. The part that puzzled Mr Tanner’s mother, though, was why she needed to involve young Dennis.

That was a mystery; it was also pretty much the only clue she’d got. Fortunately, it was a significant one. For all that she was his mother, she had few illusions about her son. He was a perfectly competent private-practice magician with an undoubted flair for scrying, but that was all. His rise to a partnership in J. W. Wells & Co he owed to the slender but tenacious streak of ruthlessness that he’d inherited from her side of the family. The other, human side had made him sloppy, soft and sentimental, though to do him credit he hid it well. His worst fault was his own unshakeable faith in his own cleverness. It wouldn’t have mattered too much if he’d been stupid. Idiots with delusions of intelligence never climb up high enough to hurt themselves badly when they fall. It’s the level-eight smartarses who think they’re level tens who come badly unstuck; which was what had happened, of course, to Dennis.

The other problem caused by his most significant flaw was that when he fell, he hadn’t fallen quite far enough. If he’d been left broke and destitute after JWW crashed, he’d most likely have quit the frontline magic business and found some nice quiet backwater of the profession in which to live out the rest of his days. But he’d been just sufficiently clever to salvage enough from the wreck to set up this two-rooms-over-a-chemist’s-shop business of his own, and he was doing just well enough at it to harbour dangerous dreams of getting back into the big time, as and when the one lucky break came along. Hence, presumably, the Carrington bitch’s interest.

It had to be scrying, Dennis’s mother thought, as she twiddled the knobs of the oxypropane torch. It was what he was best at, so it had to be something of the sort. Even so; Amelia Carrington had two dozen scryers on her staff who were almost as good, and (more to the point) the scheme she’d told them about didn’t actually need the best in the business—

Pause. Was Dennis the best in the business? No, but a lot of people in the trade believed he was, or pretty close to it. A frown crossed her face and for a moment the auburn-haired temptress flickered, and you could have caught a glimpse of the underlying goblin. If Dennis Tanner said there was bauxite under some mountain in New Zealand, that’d be good enough for anybody. But what if there wasn’t any?

Yes, she thought, but that doesn’t make sense. The reason everybody would believe him if he said the new strike was the biggest yet discovered was that he wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true; and he’d know if Amelia Carrington was trying to trick him, he was definitely good enough for that. That was another defect in his character: integrity. Not that he wouldn’t lie and cheat for money and steal a child’s teddy bear from its cot if he knew someone who’d pay him money for it. But as far as scrying was concerned, he told the truth. Everybody knew that.

In which case, that had to be the scam; that Carrington bitch must’ve come up with something that’d fool even the great Dennis Tanner into guaranteeing a strike that didn’t exist. Except that that was impossible. Grr.

The phone rang. Talk of the—

‘Amelia Carrington. I’d like a quick word with Dennis, please.’

‘Putting you through.’ She put her on hold and rang Dennis. ‘It’s that cow on the line,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Amelia bloody Carrington. On the phone for you.’

‘Oh, right. For a moment I thought you were talking about railways.’

She sighed. ‘You want to talk to her or not?’

Pause; then, ‘Yeah, why not? Put her on.’

Mr Tanner’s mother would never have dreamed of picking up the phone and listening in on her son’s private conversation. With goblin hearing, she didn’t need to. ‘Dennis,’ said the Carrington female. ‘Good news. We’ve got the satellite pics.’

‘About time.’

‘Yes, well. Anyhow, they’re here on my desk right now. How soon can you come over?’

The hesitation that followed was so slight that only a mother would have detected it. ‘I’m a bit tied up right now. Could you have them sent over here?’

Good boy, thought Mr Tanner’s mother.

‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you. No offence, but somehow I doubt your security’s up to our standards. I’m probably being over-fussy, but the last thing I want right now is for these pics to fall into the wrong hands. I’m sure you understand.’

‘I just wanted to save time, that’s all,’ Dennis replied, so convincingly that his mother almost believed him herself. ‘The earliest I can get there is - what’s the time now, half-six; call it eight-fifteen, too late for New York or Tokyo.’ (Nice touch, Mr Tanner’s mother conceded; doesn’t actually mean anything, but just convincing enough to throw Amelia Carrington off balance for a second or two.) ‘If you rush them over here in a taxi right now, we’d still be able to catch Riyadh and possibly New Delhi.’

‘No, sorry. I sort of gave my word I wouldn’t let them out of my sight. Look, I’ll send a car for you, OK? See you soon.’

Followed by a click, meaning end of discussion. Fair enough. When you’re Amelia Carrington you don’t need to be subtle, in the same way elephants don’t need Wellington boots. A moment later, the dividing door opened and Dennis came in. He was wearing his coat.

‘You got all that?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘You’re not going, are you?’

‘Looks like it. Bloody woman,’ he added with feeling.

Mr Tanner’s mother turned off the gas bottle and stood up. ‘I wish I knew what she was up to.’

‘Only one way to find out.’ It’s annoying when your son, your own flesh and blood, turns out to have a point. ‘We won’t wait for the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a taxi.’

He grinned at her. ‘You’re coming, then?’

No need to answer that. She transformed into a coat-wearing blonde, flipped on the answering machine and reached for the door handle—

‘For crying out loud, Mum.’

‘What?’

Sigh. ‘You can’t go out looking like that.’

Not the first time they’d had this argument. Her first instinct was to ignore him-do him good, make him lighten up a little-but the prospect of him sulking at her all the way there and back again was too tiresome to contemplate. She relented and lengthened her skirt an inch. ‘There,’ she said, in her best humouring-withextreme-prejudice voice. ‘Is that better?’

‘No. Look at yourself, will you?’

Scowling, she grabbed her mirror from the front desk. Pause. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Two points in one day. She sighed. ‘Coincidence,’ she said.

‘Really.’

‘Yes.’

‘You turn into the exact spitting image of Amelia Carrington, and it’s a coincidence.’

‘All right, then, it’s subconscious. I must’ve been thinking about her, and—’

‘Whatever.’ Just to spite him for being right, she changed into a geisha.

‘Satisfied?’ she said.

‘If you insist.’ That resigned tone she knew so well. ‘Actually, it’ll bug the hell out of Amelia, so yes, why not? Get the taxi.’

If he hadn’t known Amelia since before she was born, Dennis wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of being proved right. The slightest flicker of the eyelashes, the faintest widening of the eyes thereby enclosed, and that was his lot as far as provoking her was concerned. In context it was enough. In fact, it was a triumph, and as always, Mother had known best.

‘Dennis, at last,’ she said, waving him into a chair and pretending that his exotic companion was invisible. ‘Well, here we are. The photos.’

There they were indeed. They looked like nothing at all; your best guess would’ve been black and white abstract painting by an avant-garde artist with absolutely no imagination. To Dennis Tanner, of course, they were aerial views of a large tract of landscape, taken from a satellite so high up that no man-made feature was large enough to register. He drew one of them across the desk with a fingertip and looked at it.

Like being hit across the face with a bike chain. He did his best to mask the shock, but he knew he was too late. Amelia would have seen the brief but extreme look of amazement on his face and appreciated it for what it was. Dennis Tanner, the whole world knew, wasn’t easy to impress.

‘Something there, Uncle Dennis?’ in that sweet-little-girl voice that made him want to puke. No point trying to dissemble now.

‘Too bloody right,’ he said, with deep feeling.

‘Is it big?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bigger than Wayatumba?’

‘I haven’t looked at the rest of the pics yet,’ he said, hedging.

‘But?’

‘Give me a chance.’ Dennis reached across and grabbed a few more prints at random. It was a bit like catching hold of a live electric cable, but he held on, gritted his teeth and, after a suitable pause, muttered, ‘Yes.’

He could have done without the peal of silvery laughter. To distract himself from the surge of irritation washing through his mind, he tried to recall what little he knew about Amelia’s mother. According to Tosser, she’d been a wood nymph he’d come across while she was bathing in a remote pool somewhere in the Welsh mountains. Trade scuttlebutt reckoned otherwise, of course; in any event, she must’ve inherited her flair for the infuriatingly dramatic from her mother’s side. Tosser’s idea of drama was the last act of Hamlet: dead bodies everywhere and a horrible untidy mess for someone else to sort out. Besides, were there still wood nymphs in rural Wales in the Sixties? He vaguely remembered something about Macmillan having them all relocated to Swansea.

‘Excellent,’ Amelia was saying. ‘Our people were pretty sure about it, but I wanted to have it verified by the leading authority before we went any further. Well, thanks ever so much, Uncle Dennis. We really must have lunch sometime.’

The penny, dropping, never landed. It fell so fast it burnt up in the atmosphere, sprinkling Dennis’s mind with droplets of molten copper. ‘No worries,’ he managed to say, nevertheless. ‘Now, about our partnership—’

‘Not the P-word, Uncle Dennis.’

‘All right, then, our joint venture. Don’t take this the wrong way, but before we go any further, I’d like to see some paperwork. A draft contract, something like—’

‘Uncle Dennis.’ Such a sweet, sad smile. ‘You may be the greatest scryer in the world, but when it comes to business, you’re just an old silly.’ Ominous growl from the corner of the room; Amelia shot a startled glance in that direction, recovered quickly and went on, ‘Really, you know, you should’ve mentioned it earlier, before you carried out your side of the bargain. Be fair,’ she added, ‘you don’t really expect me to cut you in on a deal this size in return for services already rendered. I’m very grateful, of course, and I know Daddy would’ve been, too. But there it is. If you will go doing jobs for people out of the kindness of your heart, no wonder you’ve ended up in that squalid little office.’

The growl became a roar, at more or less the same moment that the geisha turned back into a fully grown adult female goblin. Amelia instinctively shrank back in her chair, then rallied gloriously and smiled at her. ‘Uncle Dennis,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’

‘My mother, actually.’

‘Of course.’ The smile widened, until it threatened to engulf the planet. ‘Auntie Rosie, how silly of me, I didn’t recognise you.’ She leaned forward a little and peered. ‘You’ve done your hair differently, haven’t you?’

Like spiders, goblins can move horribly fast. Before she could get within claw’s reach, though, Dennis reached out and caught hold of her wrist. ‘Forget it, Mum,’ he said.

‘But that bony little cow—’

‘Forget it.’

Mr Tanner’s mother quivered for a moment, then dissolved back into the geisha, demurely smiling and, as far as Amelia was concerned, non-existent. ‘Look,’ Amelia said, ‘I don’t want to be stingy or anything. Tell you what, I’ll give you a quarter of a per cent of the net profits, for old time’s sake. It’s what Daddy would have wanted, I’m sure. Take it or—’ Shrug, which set her golden hair dancing like Wordsworth’s daffodils. ‘It’s more money than you’ll ever see in your entire life,’ she said. ‘And all you had to do for it was prod a photograph. That’s not a bad evening’s work, when you think about it.’

Dennis Tanner sat quite still for four seconds, breathing through his nose. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘Actually, between you and me, I was planning on retiring sometime soon, in any case.’

‘Splendid idea.’ Amelia nodded sharply. ‘High time you got away from the stresses and strains of the business. You can relax, chill out, garden, play golf.’ Glance towards the back of the room. ‘Spend more time with the family. A nice little nest egg’s just what the doctor ordered.’

Dennis sighed and stood up. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I must be getting old. Lost the knack of judging character, and once that’s gone you’re not fit to be let out on your own in this trade. Well, time we were going.’ He paused at the door, and looked back at Amelia. ‘You’ve done pretty well for yourself,’ he said. ‘Your dad would’ve been proud.’

He opened the door; and then his mother said, ‘Aren’t you going to say thank you to the nice lady, after she’s given you such a lovely present?’

Dennis stopped, and grinned. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I won’t forget it in a hurry.’ ‘My pleasure.’ Amelia beamed at him. ‘Enjoy your retirement, Uncle Dennis.’ Dennis and his mother didn’t say anything to each other until they reached the street and found a taxi.

‘What the hell,’ Dennis said eventually, ‘was all that about?’

His mother thought for a bit before answering. ‘She wants to provoke you into doing something,’ she replied.

‘I know that.’ Dennis scowled at the back of the driver’s neck, giving him a headache that lasted for three days. ‘What, though? Bloody woman,’ he added petulantly.