The Better Mousetrap (29 page)

‘Whatever it is,’ his mother said firmly, ‘don’t do it. Which means,’ she added, ‘don’t do anything. Forget all about it. Otherwise, it’ll all end in tears, you mark my words.’

He gave her a don’t-you-start look. ‘I’m guessing,’ he said, ‘that what I’m supposed to do now is try and double-cross her, to get my own back. Buggered if I can see how, though.’

She nodded. ‘Just as well. You don’t want to go messing with that one, our Dennis. She’s cleverer than you.’

‘Mum—’

‘She is,’ she said firmly. ‘And she’s the head of Carringtons, and you … Well,’ she went on, ‘anyway. Don’t do anything. Don’t give her the satisfaction.’

Dennis snarled. ‘Next you’ll be saying I really should think about retiring.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ his mother said reassuringly. ‘And you’ll get her back, one of these days. Just not now, all right? Look, whatever she’s got planned, she’s relying on you doing something predictable. My guess is, her whole plan depends on it. So don’t do anything. Then either she’ll have to give the whole thing up, which’d really piss her off, so that’s all right, or she’ll come back and have another go; and that may tell us a bit more about what she’s got in mind. At the moment, we know bugger-all, so anything we do’ll be playing right into her hands. You do see that, don’t you?’

Dennis grunted. ‘I never liked her,’ he said. ‘Do you remember, I bought her a cuddly lion when she was four, and she never did say thank you.’

‘That’s right.’ His mother nodded. ‘She brought it to life and it ate a plumber before young Ricky Wurmtoter managed to get rid of it. Always had a nasty streak, that one.’ She sighed. ‘Like I said, you don’t want to mess with her. Leave well alone, is my advice.’

Dennis stared out of the window for a moment or so. ‘We won’t see a penny of that money,’ he said.

‘Well, of course not.’

He yawned. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said wearily. ‘Forget all about it for now and see if she comes back. Though,’ he added doubtfully, ‘for all we know that’s exactly what she’s expecting us to do. You’re right about her being cleverer than me, but has it occurred to you that she may be cleverer than you as well?’

Mr Tanner’s mother shook her head. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Nobody’s cleverer than me. It says so in the rules somewhere.’

When they’d gone, Amelia Carrington made a few calls.

Yes, they told her, it was settling in nicely; eating well (very well), sleeping most of the day, hadn’t burned down any more buildings, should be ready to deploy any day now. That made her smile.

No, they told her, he’s not in the office right now, he must have gone home already, they’d leave a note on his desk to say she’d called. That made her frown, but it couldn’t be too important.

Yes, they told her (and could she speak up, it was a dreadful line), all the legal guff was sorted out, apart from final registration with the Mining and Minerals Commission, and they were pushing that through as fast as possible. No worries. That made her nod and say, ‘Fine, carry on.’

For crying out loud, they told her, did she realise what time it was? Oh, sorry, didn’t recognise her voice there for a moment. Yes, all going ahead as per schedule; finished the heavy blasting and ready to start pouring the concrete, as soon as the health and safety people had signed off on the plans. Yes, they were being a bit awkward but no more than usual. Maybe she could get her people to have a word with them, smooth things over a bit. Attention of Mr Donaldson. That’d be really helpful, thanks.

Yes, they told her, this is the health and safety executive, Donaldson speaking, who the hell gave you my home number and rivet rivet rivet.

No, they told her, she’s not home yet. No, she hadn’t said where she was going after work. I’m sorry, it told her, there’s nobody here to take your call, please leave your name and aaargh. Amelia put the receiver back, yawned and tapped her fingers on the desktop. So far, apparently, so good; the look on Uncle Dennis’ face … It’s so nice, she felt, to deal with people you know you could rely on. And Auntie Rosie, too. Never did like her very much.

She frowned. Auntie Rosie was clever, though not nearly as clever as she thought she was, and naturally Dennis would do exactly what his mother told him to. She tried to reconstruct the conversation they’d be having at that moment. Somehow she fancied the words don’t give her the satisfaction would come into it somewhere. True, she hadn’t actually factored Auntie Rosie into her calculations, but that didn’t matter. She knew exactly what line she’d be taking, and the only effect would be to make Dennis react the way he was supposed to, only slightly faster and with even more grim determination. Well, you would, with something like that nagging away at you all day long.

Amelia tried Mr Sprague’s office again, but they’d all gone home and the switchboard was down for the night. Which reminded her. She reached for the phone and called Colin Gomez.

‘Colin,’ she said briskly, ‘why hasn’t that Spitzer girl been killed yet?’

Pause. ‘She has,’ he replied awkwardly.

‘No, she hasn’t, Colin. I know for a fact she’s still alive.’

‘Well, yes, she’s still alive. But I’ve had her killed. Twice.’

‘Ah.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Well, you know what they say. Third time lucky.’

‘Certainly, yes, I’ll get on to it right away.’ Pause. ‘Actually, I was thinking—’

‘Yes?’

‘Well.’ Pause. ‘Since she will insist on coming back to life again, I thought maybe a slightly more oblique approach, possibly slanted more in the getting-her-out-of-the-way direction, as opposed to actual life termination—’

‘Don’t be silly, Colin. Look, as of now I’m authorising the use of extreme measures, up to and including tactical nukes. Things are starting to move at the New Zealand end, that stupid prophesy’s hanging over me like the Sword of Whatsisname, and I don’t want to be held up and lose out on a rising market because of a silly little girl. Do you understand?’

Amelia didn’t need to see him to know what expression he had on his face. Poor Colin. He could be so sweet sometimes. ‘Yes, certainly, of course. Right away.’

‘Excellent. What’s her status at the moment?’

‘I’ve got her in a Tomacek trap. She’s in holding, down in the basement.’ Pause. ‘Do you want me to—?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course. Right away. Certainly.’

‘That’s very nice of you, Colin, thanks. Ciao.’

In his office two floors below, Colin Gomez pushed away from his desk and shuddered. In his view of the universe, all it took to make the world go round was for everybody to work hard, pull together for the good of the firm, keep the clients happy and always charge slightly more than the job was worth. Management philosophies based on the balance of greed and terror had never appealed to him much, however fashionable they might be in the world at large. Employees, he reckoned, were like tubes of toothpaste: there to be squeezed, but only from the right end. He tried not to browbeat or bully, if he could help it. As for actually killing junior members of staff, it was something he preferred to avoid whenever possible. However tactful and discreet you were about it, inevitably it led to tension and bad feeling in the workplace, which in turn reduced output and efficiency and encouraged a distrustful us-and-them approach which was the exact opposite of the way things ought to be.

But a direct order from the senior partner wasn’t open to question, and if Amelia Carrington wanted the Spitzer girl disposed of, that really ought to be good enough for him. He sighed, thinking about her for a moment. True, she was a good worker, professional, got the job done with a minimum of fuss. But her attitude towards the clients had never really quite come together, he couldn’t help thinking; she’d never quite understood that a client was like a beautiful fruit tree, to be nurtured, cared for, pollinated and pruned. She’d always given the impression that clients were just another nuisance arranged by the malevolent universe to make her job slightly more awkward. Which just went to show: the senior partner always knows best. The secret of survival in middle management is the ability to recognise the new truth, even when it was heresy and sin only ten minutes ago.

Colin Gomez had been a partner in Carringtons for twenty years. When the boss told him something, he believed. In which case, Emily Spitzer had to go. A pity. Omelettes and eggs. The only remaining question was, how?

There are proverbially more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in cream. Sure. The problem in this case was persuading it to stay dead. Cagliari’s Marvellous Tree hadn’t managed to get the job done (which reminded him: it was still under warranty, so at the very least he should be able to get the money back). A rogue Atkinsonii, kitted out at ruinous expense with a cynanidegas-proof cybernetic breather unit hadn’t cut it, either. More to the point, the Better Mousetrap, which should’ve guaranteed immunity from all this now-she-is-now-she-isn’t nonsense, had failed spectacularly. He sighed and scratched his head. They have a slightly different version of the proverb in the magic biz. If drowning in cream is what it takes, buy a cow.

Easier said than done, when the cat has at least nine lives and can swim. Colin Gomez was a methodical, analytical sort, not given to wild swoops of intuition, but perfectly capable of digging away at a mystery until he’d unearthed the tap root. If Emily Spitzer kept coming back to life again, it could only be because (a) someone was protecting her, and (b) that someone had access to some pretty impressive technology. Trying to figure out who the someone was would, he felt, be difficult and take too long. The technology, on the other hand, ought to be reasonably easy to identify.

When you don’t know the answer, look it up. He leaned across his desk and picked up his copy of the Carringtons office-procedures manual. Index: death, avoidance of.

Ten minutes later he had a shortlist.

Hiroshige’s quantum chicane; possibly. The chicane allowed you to zip backwards and forwards between alternate realities it was basically the same technology that had enabled him to keep track of Emily’s deaths and resurrections without getting hopelessly confused, although he had the Read-Only version, rather than the one that actually took you there. Even so; it was really only an observation-and-research tool, with academic and tourism potential. You could look at alternate futures or even visit them, but you couldn’t change anything while you were there, and you certainly couldn’t reprioritise the defaults and replace your own time-line with a different one that happened to suit you better. So, unless the mysterious someone had found a way of banjaxing the safeties and reconfiguring the entire feed mechanism, it couldn’t be the chicane.

Mississippi Micro Industries Synthetic Angel: a distinct possibility. Using advanced wish-fulfilment technology which some authorities declared was still only theoretical, the Angel allowed you to rewind unsatisfactory episodes in your life and record over them inside a bubble of very high-resolution synthesised reality that overlaid your original time-line. It meant you could go back and edit out your mistakes, even potentially fatal ones, but with the significant drawback that you had to spend the rest of your life isolated in a world of your own; and if you wanted to do that, there were easier and cheaper ways. What you couldn’t do (as far as Colin knew) was transfer the effect to anybody else. Which more or less ruled out the Angel. Oh well.

The Acme Portable Door.

The what? Oh, right. That.

Colin Gomez had heard of it, naturally. Everybody in the trade had. He just wasn’t quite sure he believed in it. If it really did exist, then it shouldn’t. It broke all the fundamental rules of the business, and to a serious practitioner like Colin, it was virtually an insult to his years of training and patient study. If there really was such a thing, of course, and if some irresponsible idiot had got hold of it and was using it to mess about with time-lines and raise the dead-well, it fitted all the known facts, you could get the job done with it. And there weren’t any other possibilities. Therefore, as Sherlock Holmes would have said—

Index again: Door, Portable. He found the place and started to read.

The Carringtons office-procedures manual devoted forty pages to the Portable Door. Eight of those pages were a closely reasoned explanation of why the Door couldn’t possibly work and therefore had to be mythical. A further twelve set out in considerable detail the letters you had to write and the file notes you had to make in order to notify the firm’s insurers if you came across one. There were nine pages of awful warnings, ways in which careless use of the Door could spell the end of sentient life in the galaxy, and ten more setting out the firm’s procedure for getting the senior partner’s written approval before using it, should you ever get your hands on one. The remaining page gave a very sketchy history of the thing: how it had been developed in total secrecy by the brilliant maverick and former J. W. Wells partner Theo van Spee, late professor of magic at the University of Leiden, how he’d originally made two (using the prototype to copy itself; but see page 277, note 3) but only one had survived, and its whereabouts were currently unknown, although there were unsubstantiated rumours connecting it to a former JW W employee (name unknown) who had used it to defeat the Fey and unmask and then defeat Professor van Spee himself. Anomalous Mortensen readings had been interpreted by some authorities to mean that the Door had recently been used somewhere in New Zealand (but see page 1,866 and Appendix 12), although their findings had been disputed by other researchers in the field.

There was a final paragraph, in bold type:

It is the policy of the firm that the Portable Door does not exist. Any member of staff coming into possession of it, or having information concerning its location or recent Door activity, should notify the senior partner without delay.

Not many grey areas there. If he was right, Emily Spitzer was being helped by someone with the Door-whether she was aware of it or not was another matter entirely-and the book said, quite explicitly, recent Door activity. A memo, at the very least, seemed to be called for. Colin reached for the microphone of his dictating machine and cleared his throat.