The Better Mousetrap (3 page)

Mr Sprague sighed. He was, at heart, a gambler; he knew and accepted the fact. But gamblers come in all different shapes and sizes. Some of them spend their days behind newspapers in bookmakers’ shops and sleep under the railway arches. Some of them wear fancy waistcoats with a derringer in the pocket. Not all gamblers are completely honest. Some of them even cheat.

Mr Sprague turned a page and whimpered. The odds against a V-reg Astra leaving the road, cartwheeling twenty yards down the central reservation and completely flattening a brand new Mercedes had to be— As it happened, he was an outstanding mathematician and could calculate the odds to three decimal places, but he knew it’d only depress him if he did. He sighed instead, and ate another Malteser. There were days when Maltesers were the only thing that kept him going.

He was so preoccupied with the report that he didn’t see the lines appear on the blank wall opposite the door. First a single black line, where a door lintel would be; then two vertical lines running down at right angles to the first one, forming three sides of a rectangle—

He looked up, frowned; then, as a carefully buried memory broke cover and scampered across his mind, he smiled. It was a rather special memory, since it related to something that hadn’t actually happened yet. You got used to that sort of thing after thirty years in insurance.

The outline became a door, with a round brass knob. It swung open, and a young man dressed rather like a monk stepped through it.

‘Hello, George,’ he said.

Mr Sprague was old-fashioned, and didn’t really hold with the first-name stuff, except when angled downwards, from superior to inferior. It was insidious, he felt, so American that it was practically Japanese, and the thin end of a wedge whose back was baseball caps with the company logo and compulsory early-morning t’ai chi on the roof. But he was prepared to make exceptions.

‘Hello, Frank,’ he replied cheerfully.

The young man grinned at him. Mr Sprague closed his eyes and moved his head just a little before looking down at the pages in his lap. They were blank.

‘Thanks,’ he said, with feeling.

‘No worries,’ the young man replied briskly, in a medium-strong New Zealand accent. ‘You know me, anything for money. Ten per cent, as usual, right?’

Mr Sprague’s face went blank. ‘Ten per cent of what, Frank?’

The young man frowned and, when Mr Sprague glanced down at the sheets of paper, they were covered in words again. He sighed. He was pretty sure he understood how the rest of it worked, but he’d never been able to figure out how he did that.

‘Sorry,’ Mr Sprague said sheepishly. ‘But you can’t blame a man for trying.’ Frank clicked his tongue. ‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘But not every single bloody time.’

Mr Sprague nodded. From the second drawer of his desk he took a chequebook and wrote out a cheque for one point two million pounds, payable to Frank Carpenter. He blew on it to dry the ink and handed it over.

‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘you also saved seven lives, not to mention the debilitating injuries, which included—’

Frank shrugged. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t like that sort of stuff.’ He folded the cheque and stuffed it in the sleeve of his robe. It always annoyed Mr Sprague intensely when he did that. By way of revenge, he asked, ‘Bobby not with you today?’

A scowl flickered on Frank’s face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I left him at—’ He stopped short as the door wobbled and a scruffy brownand-white dog bundled happily through it, tail wagging. ‘Yes,’ he amended. ‘Sit, Bobby. Good dog. Bobby, fucking well sit.”

The dog brushed past him, jumped up onto Mr Sprague’s lap, turned round three times and went to sleep. Mr Sprague stroked its head gently and smiled.

‘I’ve tried taking him to training classes,’ Frank said wretchedly. ‘But it’s no good. Last one we went to he got expelled.’

‘Really.’

‘Mphm. Setting the other dogs a bad example.’

The dog wriggled a little and snuggled its nose against Mr Sprague’s fly. ‘Fancy,’ said Mr Sprague. He opened the drawer again, took a Malteser and fed it into the dog’s mouth. The dog crunched it without waking up. ‘One of these days, you’ve got to tell me how you came to—’

‘No.’

‘Ah well,’ said Mr Sprague, and to a certain limited extent the look on Frank’s face made up for the one point two million. ‘Well,’ he repeated, and his tone of voice was meant to suggest that he was eternally grateful and would never forget what Frank had done for him, but he did have work that he needed to get on with. ‘Another successful mission, then. I expect we’ll be in touch again soon. In the meantime—’

‘You want me to go away.’ Frank grinned at him. ‘Fair enough. You know how to reach me. Come on, Bobby. Here, boy, good dog.’ The dog opened its eyes, yawned and nestled a little more firmly in Mr Sprague’s lap. ‘He likes you,’ Frank said. ‘Anybody can see that.’

‘Odd, isn’t it?’ Mr Sprague said. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a cat person.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Frank said. ‘Especially when there’s a full moon. Oh look, bless him,’ he added, with extra syrup. ‘He’s so happy, it’d be such a shame to wake him up.’

Mr Sprague opened his knees. The dog dropped through them like a stone, landed on all fours and wagged its tail. ‘Mind how you go, Frank. And thanks again.’

Frank walked towards the door in the wall he’d come in through. ‘You know what I always say, George,’ he said. ‘Gratitude and half a dollar will buy you a— Oh for crying out loud, you stupid animal, leave it. I said leave it? He sighed. ‘Oh well. Sorry about that.’

‘Not to worry,’ Mr Sprague said amiably. I was going to get a new one anyway. Of course, that particular example was sixteenth-century Florentine, but what the heck. We’re insured.’

Frank made a noise in the back of his throat that communicated more than mere words ever could, and pushed open the door. The dog darted between his legs, hurled itself through the gap between door and frame, and vanished in mid-leap. It’s just as well, thought Mr Sprague, that my eyesight’s so poor these days that I can hardly see at all without (he quickly took them off and laid them on his desk) my glasses. Otherwise my brain might fool me into thinking I just saw a dog vanish into thin air. And that’s not possible. Just as well I didn’t see it, in that case.

(He frowned. There had been all sorts of reasons why, as a young man, he’d opted for a career in insurance - earning money, acquiring wealth, getting rich, making a fortune, to name but a few. Expanding his metaphysical horizons and finding out the truth about how the world actually worked didn’t feature anywhere on the list; which was unfortunate, seeing that since Frank had entered his life his horizons hadn’t been so much expanded as blown to bits, and the truth was no longer safely Out There where he could ignore it, but roaming around inside his living space looking for him with its tongue lolling out. Nevertheless. It was Frank who’d made it possible for him to outperform his rivals and scramble to the top, in the process making him so wealthy that he genuinely no longer really cared about the money, except as the one true way of keeping track of how he was doing. And that, of course, made everything worthwhile: all the strangeness, all the unwanted and intrusive insights, Frank, even the disappearing bloody dog. Besides, he liked dogs. Not as much as cats. Much, much more than people.)

He tried to concentrate on his work, but he was finding it difficult; not unusual in the aftermath of one of Frank’s visits. For instance: open in front of him was a thick wad of papers stapled together at the top right-hand corner, but all the pages were blank. He scowled at them. He knew that, before Frank arrived, there had been words on those sheets (bad words, nasty words) and that Frank had somehow contrived to send them away. As for what those words had been about - the last shreds of memory were stripping away like a dream upon waking, and in the time it’d take to boil a kettle every trace of them would be gone for ever. Splendid. But he couldn’t concentrate on anything else, because a part of his mind knew that by rights the full force of his considerable intellect should still be focused on a problem that no longer existed, that had never existed in the first place—

No wonder he got headaches; a bit like toothache in a tooth that’d long since been pulled. A gentle knock at the door (the permanent one, not the temporary hole-in-the-wall, which had vanished when his visitor left). In came Ms Dennaway, with a thick wad of stapled-together paper.

‘The report on the Eccleshaw factory explosion,’ she said, putting it down in front of him as though it was a plate of nasty greens that he’d have to eat before he got any pudding. ‘Oh, and Mr Cartwright rang. He’d like to talk to you about it before he briefs the loss adjusters.’

Mr Sprague winced. He remembered seeing the TV footage. It wasn’t till the next day that he remembered that they covered the Eccleshaw plant. Tentative as an engineer defusing a bomb, he flicked to the last page and read the double-underlined figure at the bottom. So many noughts trailing after the integers. Somewhere in the West Midlands a gambler had just hit the jackpot, though he hadn’t lived to enjoy it. Nor, apparently, had a lot of other people.

He sighed. Twice in one day. He thought about ice packs, paracetamol, ibuprofen. He thought about all that money.

His fingers did a little dance on the number pad of the nearest phone. Three electronic burps, and a familiar voice said, ‘Hello?’

Oh well, thought Mr Sprague. ‘Hello, Frank,’ he said.

CHAPTER TWO

After dealing with the Eccleshaw business, Frank Carpenter stepped through a door in a wall in Brierley Hill and came out through an identical door in a builder’s hoarding in south London. He closed it behind him, waited as it slowly slid to the ground and rolled itself up, picked it off the pavement and tucked it into a small cardboard tube, which he stowed away carefully in his inside pocket. Not the most attractive of neighbourhoods, he decided. True, it wasn’t one of those districts where you have to look where you’re going so you don’t slip on a nest of cartridge cases from last night’s drive-by shooting, but the security grilles on the shop windows and the burnt-out P-reg Mercedes suggested that this wasn’t a happy environment for a shallow, easygoing hedonist like himself. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place where you’d expect to find— But there it was, just across the road and up a floor. Over a chemist’s, he noted. How are the mighty fallen, and all that. (Mum and Dad ought to see this, he said to himself. Most likely they wouldn’t grin or snigger, but they’d feel - what? Closure, a necessary turn of the wheel. Dad, anyway. Mum’d probably click her tongue and say serve them right. Or maybe not. Where they’d gone, something like this couldn’t possibly matter. It’d be like expecting the moon to care whether Tim Henman made it through to the quarter-finals.)

Below him something snuffled, and he felt the soft assault of a wagging tail against his leg. He sighed. He was pretty sure he’d been alone when he folded up the door, but apparently not. Or maybe (not a notion he cared to dwell on), maybe Bobby didn’t need the door. They say that dogs will travel hundreds of miles to find their lost masters. ‘Oh well,’ he said aloud. ‘Bobby, heel.’

Immediately the dog sprang out into the road, causing a van driver to burn ten quids’ worth of value off his tyres and brake pads. It reached the opposite pavement, turned round, looked at him and wagged its tail. Stupid animal.

The stencilled black letters in the window above the chemist’s read:

Tanner & Co

Chartered M

From the way the words were spaced, you could deduce that some other letters had faded away or peeled off after the ‘M’. Frank grinned. The chartered was a nice touch. It was one of those words that the eye skidded off. Behind a word like that, you instinctively thought, works a boring little man whose services I’ll never need, and which I couldn’t afford in any case. Interest evaporates. Nobody ever lingers in the street looking up and wondering what the ‘M ‘ stands for.

There was a side door. The stair carpet was frayed, with flat blobs of spent chewing gum fossilised in the pile. At the top of the stairs, Frank faced a glass-panelled door with a bell-push and one of those boxes you speak into and wait for it to quack back at you before you’re allowed in. Somehow Frank got the impression that not many of Mr Tanner’s customers were walkins off the street.

He pressed the button and said ‘Hello,’ the way you do. Nothing happened. He tried again. Silence. He was just about to fish in his pocket for the cardboard tube when the box belched static at him and a female voice said, ‘Yes?’

‘I’m here to see Mr Tanner,’ he said.

‘Snark wargle squirr appointment?’

‘No.’

‘Name, please.’

Ah, Frank thought. Of course, he could always lie, just to get through the door. But from what he’d heard about him, he didn’t want to start off with Mr Tanner leering down at him from the moral high ground, and quite possibly rolling boulders as well. ‘Frank Carpenter,’ he said.

‘Frank what?’

‘Carpenter. As in woodwork. Or Harrison Ford.’

Pause. Maybe a little white lie would’ve been justified after all. But Carpenter wasn’t such an uncommon name. Maybe they’d think that—

Bzzz. He applied gentle pressure to the door and it opened.

He saw a small room with grubby woodchip on the walls and flogged-out carpet tiles on the floor. There was a plain chipboard desk in the middle of it, behind which sat the most beautiful girl Frank had ever seen in his life. Ah, he thought. I’ve come to the right place, then.

The girl looked at him; eyes like soft blue-black holes. He looked down at his shoes, and noticed that they were splashed with whatever the noxious stuff was that they processed at the Eccleshaw plant. Oh well, he thought. If it burns holes in the carpet, I don’t suppose anybody’ll notice.

‘Is that your dog?’

Inside Frank something growled, but he was a civilised human being, so he nodded. ‘I’d like a word with Mr Tanner, please, if he’s free,’ he said, as pleasantly as he could. The beautiful girl looked at him, and under his clothes he fancied he could feel little dotted lines, like the ones you see drawn on pictures of cows in butchers’ shops, to tell you the names of the various cuts and joints.