The Better Mousetrap (33 page)

‘Sarah,’ Amelia said. ‘What’s so important that you had to see me right away?’

A sentient life form would’ve shrivelled up; but Sarah wasn’t a life form. Once, long ago, she’d been one of Amelia’s substantial collection of Barbies; the first, in fact, that Amelia had been able to bring to life for more than ten minutes. A simple augmentation charm to bring her up to normal human size, a course of accelerated memory implants and three years at Harvard Business School (where she’d fitted in perfectly) and Sarah was now one of Amelia’s most trustworthy and efficient assistants. And she didn’t mind holding still while Amelia styled her hair for her, either.

‘The bauxite project.’

‘Oh yes?’

Sarah looked grave. She couldn’t actually adjust her facial expression, which was set forever in the sweet simpering smile she’d been moulded with, but she’d learned to compensate with body language. ‘Dennis Tanner,’ she said. ‘He’s trying to double-cross you.’

Amelia smiled. ‘Is he really?’

Nod. Sarah had to be careful about that, because her head had a tendency to come off under stress. ‘He’s been snooping round behind our backs, buying up mineral rights. We don’t know where the money’s coming from, though we’re guessing it’s his goblin relations. At any rate, he’s got hold of the rights to all the land surrounding our original stake, so if the strike’s as big as we think it is—’

‘Oh, easily.’ Amelia yawned. ‘Huge.’

Slight tilt of the head to express puzzlement. ‘In that case, he’s got us screwed. It’s not just the bauxite on what’s now his land, there’s other issues. Access, water, power cables. Basically, he can stop us dead in our tracks.’ Sarah paused; cue reaction, which didn’t come. I thought you ought to know,’ she concluded. ‘I thought you’d be—’

Amelia giggled. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘All going according to plan. Listen, has he put together a proper consortium, or is it all just handshakes and gentlegoblins’ agreements?’

‘I’m not sure. I can find out.’

‘Yes, please. Quick as you like. And when you know who we should be talking to, offer to sell them our stake.’

Sarah predated the quantum leap in Barbie technology that made it possible for the eyelids to go up and down, but Amelia had had her retro-engineered at great expense. She blinked. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Be subtle about it, of course. Use intermediaries, so it’s not obvious that we’re giving in. Make it look like we’re being double-crossed by our venture partners, something like that. We’ve got to be a bit careful, or we’ll scare him off.’

‘I see.’ Barbies don’t lie very well. ‘How much do we want for it?’

Amelia beamed. ‘Lots,’ she said. ‘Say three times what it’s worth. It doesn’t actually matter, but if we make him pay through the nose it’ll stop him getting too suspicious.’ She frowned slightly. ‘I do hope you’re right and it’s the goblins who’re financing him. Goblins can be very direct when they’re upset with someone, especially when money’s involved.’

Shrug. ‘Of course. I’ll get on it straight away.’

‘I know you will,’ Amelia said fondly. ‘You’re a treasure. Oh, and there’s a dozen new pairs of shoes for you to try on down in reception.’

Sarah nodded and stood up. ‘Colin Gomez wants a word as soon as you’re free,’ she said. ‘He left a message on your voice-mail late last night. Didn’t say what it was about.’

Amelia grinned. ‘I can guess,’ she said. ‘All right, thank you.’

Sarah left, and then the phone rang. This time, it was the call.

Amelia gave them their orders, telling them to coordinate with Sarah about timing. ‘Whatever you do,’ she emphasised, ‘don’t let it go before she’s sold the land to the Tanners. Yes, of course you don’t understand, but she does. All right? Fine.’

She put the receiver back carefully, as if afraid of waking it up, then sat back in her chair and breathed deeply. It was, she decided, a wonderful world; a world full of opportunities. A world that needed bauxite, and would very soon find itself paying a lot more for it than it was used to. Her kind of planet, basically. Assuming that Colin Gomez had finally done as he was told. Her smile flickered briefly, and she picked up the phone. ‘Colin?’

‘It’s you.’ His voice was oddly high and strained. ‘Sorry, of course it is. Yes, all done.’

‘You’ve killed her, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Get in here.’

Short delay, during which Amelia amused herself with the New Magical Express crossword. (‘Shape-shifting magic of Julia Roberts’, six letters beginning with G. Yawn; too easy.) Then Colin came in and flumped down in the spare chair like a sack of worried potatoes.

‘With you in a moment - oh.’

Colin looked up at her. ‘What?’

‘It doesn’t fit, there’s too many letters. Oh, of course, it’s the American edition.’ She smiled at him. ‘Why can’t Americans spell?’ she said. ‘Never mind. You’ve killed her at last. Good.’

He nodded. ‘It took some doing,’ he said. ‘I found out why she kept on not staying dead.’

Amelia frowned slightly. ‘Really.’

‘Yes indeed.’

She waited, but Colin just sat there looking like a fish. ‘Well? How was she doing it?’

‘It wasn’t actually her,’ Colin replied. ‘She had help. And you’ll never guess—’

‘Get on with it.’

Colin dabbed a tiny trickle of sweat off the shiny slopes of his forehead. ‘It was the insurance people, actually,’ he said. ‘Because we’ve got her insured against death in service, like all the junior staff.’

‘Have we?’ Amelia frowned. ‘Yes, I suppose we have. What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Well.’ Not his usual chatty, hard-to-make-him-shut-up self. More running in fits and starts, like a Land Rover engine. ‘The insurance people didn’t want to pay out on the claim—’

‘Don’t take any rubbish from them,’ Amelia said sharply.

‘No, of course not. But apparently they’ve hit on a way of not coughing up. They make it so the accident giving rise to the claim never happened.’

Amelia frowned. ‘That’s impossible.’

For some reason, Colin took a deep breath. ‘Not,’ he said, ‘if they’ve got a Portable Door.’

The same thought crossed both of their minds simultaneously; Amelia Carrington should’ve been an actress. ‘A what?’

‘The Acme Portable Door,’ Colin said. ‘I’m sure you must’ve heard of it.’

‘What? Oh, that. But it doesn’t exist, surely. It’s a thingummy, urban myth.’ (So that’s what all this has been about, Colin thought. I was right.)

‘Apparently it does,’ Colin said. ‘And the idiots at the insurance company got hold of it. Well, not personally. They hired the man who’d got it, as a freelance. And when Spitzer had her accident, falling out of the tree—’

‘He made it not happen, I see. How annoying.’

‘Quite.’

‘But I told you to use the Better Mousetrap.’

‘I did. Apparently the Door beats the Mousetrap.’

‘Heavens. Well, that’s that explained, anyhow. And the Door person saved her again, from the spiders.’

‘Yes. And the next time, too. I used dragons’ teeth.’ This time, there was no artifice about Amelia’s surprise.

‘Dragons’ teeth? Have you any idea what those things cost?’ Colin couldn’t help colouring with shame. ‘You did say get the job done. Any means necessary. So I thought—’

‘Yes, well. Never mind about that for now.’ Pause, while the penny dropped. ‘And they didn’t work either.’

‘No.’

‘Extraordinary. So what did you do?’

Colin ran a finger round inside his shirt collar. ‘I realised that it had to be the Door,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Nothing else could explain it. Once I’d figured that out, of course, it was easy.’

‘Was it?’

‘Oh yes. I rang Spitzer and told her I knew about the Door, and I was thoroughly fed up with you because you’d made me try and kill her, and I was plotting to get rid of you.’

‘Really.’

‘It was the only way to get at her, I thought,’ Colin said. ‘I promised that when you were gone and I was senior partner, I’d give her a partnership too.’

A moment of extremely eloquent silence. ‘I see. She accepted.’

‘Oh yes. Seemed thrilled at the prospect. So I told her that I’d need the use of the Door if I was going to have any chance of killing you. She wasn’t happy about that, but I insisted.’

‘Well, of course.’

Colin nodded. ‘I arranged a meeting: me, her, and the Door person. And when they arrived, I killed them.’ Amelia hadn’t realised she’d been holding her breath. ‘Excellent.’

‘And I got rid of the Door, as well.’

Time stopped. It was a quite unintentional reflex on Amelia’s part, triggered by a combination of shock and fury such as she’d never felt before. Luckily, she realised what she was doing and stopped it before any damage was done, although a lot of scientists subsequently wasted a great deal of time and effort taking their very expensive equipment to bits to see what had gone wrong. ‘You did what?’ she said quietly.

‘Got rid of it,’ Colin repeated. ‘Well, naturally, the thing’s an absolute menace. When you think that an untrained amateur managed to get his hands on it and was actually using it, on a daily basis; it’s a miracle we’re all still here. So I burned it.’

‘You—’

Colin nodded briskly. ‘Put a match to it. All gone. Made the world safe for civilisation as we know it, if you care to look at it from that angle.’

He’s lying, Amelia’s brain shrieked. Even Colin Gomez couldn’t be that colossally stupid. In which case—

But was he lying? As she looked at him, Amelia couldn’t be sure. The horrible part of it was, he was actually capable of doing something like that. Basically, she knew, deep down, Colin Gomez was-well, not an idealist, he had his faults but nothing quite as bad as that. Deep down, he was a nice man. He was able to function in business because the little seed of niceness had been overlaid with innumerable layers of obedience, ambition and corporate mentality, making it possible for him to doublethink himself into doing practically anything provided his superiors in the chain of command told him to. But in the absence of a relevant direct order-don’t destroy the Portable Door, for instance-there was always the danger that his inner niceness might assert itself and take over. And a nice man would realise how dangerous the Door was; just as a nice man, happening to find a nuclear warhead in the street, wouldn’t immediately start opening negotiations with well-funded terrorist groups, even though he’d be well aware of how much money they’d give for one. A nice man would hand it in at his local police station.

Which, in this instance, would be me, surely, Amelia thought. ‘You burned it,’ she repeated.

‘Yes.’

‘It didn’t occur to you to bring it to me.’

‘No. I knew you’d want it disposed of as quickly as possible, in case something happened and it fell into the wrong hands.’

Silent as a card-house folding, three-quarters of her grand plan evaporated. All that work, effort, time and expense of spirit. But Amelia rose to the occasion very well. A lesser woman would’ve wasted yet more time and emotion cursing herself for not telling Colin from the outset that getting hold of the Door was the main objective of the project-because she hadn’t trusted him not to keep it for himself, which was the bitter irony of the thing; because clearly she could have trusted him. That was obvious, now that it was too late, because if Colin had taken the Door for his own he wouldn’t be there in her office, and quite probably neither would she.

Well; too late to do anything about it now. One had to be businesslike, and cutting losses was one of the pillars of commercial wisdom. She wouldn’t even have Colin killed, because what good would that do? She’d only have to find someone else to do his job, and he was quite good at it. She made an effort, like a snake shedding its skin, and shrugged off the fury and the despair.

‘Quite right,’ Amelia said. ‘Well done. Get on to the agency and find someone to replace Spitzer. In the meantime, get Atkinson down from Manchester office to cover her workload.’ She gave Colin a bright, brittle smile. ‘I think that’s all for now,’ she said. ‘See you at the partners’ meeting on Friday.’

Colin stirred but didn’t get up. ‘Just one thing,’ he said.

‘Mm?’

‘The Spitzer girl. Just out of interest. Why did we kill her?’

We, Amelia noted. There you had it, the perfect synthesis of corporate and nice. ‘Oh, it’s complicated. All to do with a little deal I’m putting together. Nothing in your line.’

‘Ah.’ He stood up. ‘Well, I hope it works out, whatever it is. I’d better be getting on, I’ve got clients coming in.’

When he’d gone, Amelia counted up to twenty and screamed. It wasn’t like her, but then again, neither was failure. And it was her own silly fault, of course, keeping Colin in the dark.

Assuming he’d been telling the truth. She pursed her lips. Since he hadn’t already assassinated her, what would he have to gain by pretending to have burned the Door? Nothing sprang to mind. Even so. She picked up the phone.

‘Erskine.’

‘Gosh.’ Silence; then, ‘Is that really you?’

‘Stop babbling and get in here now.’

He must’ve run all the way. Amelia hardly had time to fill in four across before he was there, shiny-eyed and trembling slightly. ‘Erskine,’ she said, carelessly forgetting to tell him to sit down, ‘a little job for you. Several, actually.’

‘Golly. Thanks.’

‘First,’ she went on, ‘I want you to search Colin Gomez’s office from top to bottom. He’ll be seeing clients, so he’ll be out of the way.’

‘Right, yes, certainly, of course. Um, what am I looking for?’

Amelia described the Door. No point telling him what it was. ‘And when you’ve done that,’ she said, ‘I want you to clear Emily Spitzer’s stuff out of her office and put it in store. She’s dead.’

‘OK.’

‘And then,’ she went on-it was slightly wearing to be gazed at with such devoted intensity- ‘you might as well move your stuff in there.’

‘Thanks. Thanks ever so much.’

Sigh. ‘You’ll be looking after her work until John Atkinson gets here from Manchester. Do you know John? No, I don’t suppose you do. Anyhow, just hold the fort till he gets here. Can you manage that?’

‘I’ll do my very best.’

‘Yes, of course you will. Now, was there anything else? Oh yes. The cardboard tube thing might just be in with Emily Spitzer’s stuff. Keep an eye open for it, and if you find it, bring it here immediately. Don’t stop to ring first, just get yourself in here. Understood?’