The Better Mousetrap (36 page)

Sudden insight illuminated Emily’s mind. ‘Sally Esteban in Accounts,’ she said.

Amelia nodded. ‘And Jack Grimminger, at the St Petersburg office. He used to be a dear little Welsh cob, about thirteen-two, and now he’s in charge of Corporate Finance in one of the quickest-growing markets in the sector. Gelding, of course, but that just means one less distraction. Anyway, back to Erskine. When all this started I set him to sniff out the Door, and when it opened-you were running one of your errands for poor George Sprague-he nipped through and started following you around. Led me straight to you, bless him. And now silly old Colin’s gone and blasted him into his component molecules, and I don’t think I could bear to be parted from him, even though he’s a complete moron when he’s human. So,’ she went on, with a cheerful smile, ‘I decided to take a leaf out of young Frank’s book, use the Door and make the whole ambush incident never happen. Stroke of luck for you, of course.’

Emily frowned. ‘Is it?’

‘Oh yes. Sorry, forgot. Colin’s second thunderbolt took out the pair of you. In about-‘ glance at watch ‘- in roughly six minutes’ time, so we’d better get a move on, you two will be extremely dead. Or you will have been, only I want my dog back. So instead,’ Amelia said grimly, ‘I’m going to do to you what you had planned for me. Nineteen sixty-three,’ she added, with relish. ‘Really, I don’t know which of you diabolical geniuses was responsible for choosing the date, but for sheer inventive nastiness, it deserves some kind of award. But that’s all right, since I get to reap the benefit of your ingenuity.’ She smiled, and gave Emily an appraising look. ‘You’re going to look so cute in tall white vinyl lace-up boots,’ she said. ‘Just think of me every time you wear them.’

Emily said a rude word. Amelia grinned. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Colin, get Erskine in here. He’s going with you,’ she said casually, ‘to make sure that you behave. He’ll be coming back later, of course, but you won’t.’

Colin was on the phone. A sudden rush, Emily thought, while she’s off guard. Their last chance, probably. Heroism. But she’d been in pest control long enough to know that heroism, like true love, usually only makes things different, rather than better. The Sixties, though. Dear God.

‘He’s on his way up,’ Colin said. ‘Oh, and Dennis Tanner’s downstairs. He insists on seeing you.’

‘Tell them I’ll be down in a minute,’ Amelia replied. ‘He’s going to be terribly put out when he finds out what I’ve done to him. All in all, a good, busy day. Well, come on, you two. Colin, stand by in case they try something stupid. Erskine, there you are at last.’

In he bustled, and although in his human form he didn’t have a tail to wag Emily found herself wondering how she’d failed to realise that he was a dog all along. It was so blindingly obvious when you looked at him.

‘Door, Erskine.’

Immediately, he took a familiar-looking cardboard tube from his pocket, fished out the rolled-up plastic and spread it on the wall. Which was odd, Emily couldn’t help thinking, because last time she’d seen it the Door had been in Colin’s hand, just before he stowed it away in his pocket.

‘Fetch.’

Erskine darted forward, grabbed Emily by the arm and hustled her towards the Door. Frank tensed himself to intervene, then thought of the brown mark on Ms Carrington’s office wall. Play for time, he thought; so he said: ‘What have you done with George Sprague?’

Amelia shrugged. ‘He’s in Holding,’ she said. ‘Down in the cellars somewhere, I imagine. When he wakes up, of course, it’ll be in his own bed and he won’t remember a thing. Oh, it’s all right, you don’t have to worry about him. It’d be far too much bother to break in a new insurance account manager. I only needed him to give you a pretext for making up to her.’

Frank discovered the germ of an uncomfortable thought lodged under the dental plate of his mind. ‘That was all part of the plan, was it? Us two getting together.’

Amelia nodded. ‘So you’d come into my parlour, and bring me the Door. Economy of effort, you see, birds-to-stone ratios. I never begrudge a little added complexity if it means I can eliminate a superfluous ingredient or two.’

‘Whatever.’ Frank looked at her. At a time like this, he thought, troll’s blood would be quite welcome. ‘And Emily and me,’ he went on, anger just about overriding embarrassment. ‘Only, my father told me about love potions and stuff. You didn’t—’

‘Oh, I see.’ Amelia giggled. ‘No, that wasn’t me. Just a bonus, though I suppose it was always on the cards. Put two sad people together in close proximity and add excitement and pressure … It won’t last, of course,’ she added pleasantly. ‘I give it six weeks at the outside, and then you’ll be wondering what the hell you ever saw in each other. I mean, really. About all you’ve got in common is that, way back, you’re both descended from monkeys.’

Frank nodded. ‘Thank you so much,’ he said. ‘We’ll be going now.’

‘Splendid. Oh, and if you were thinking that when you get there, you could go round to Daddy’s house and murder me in my cot, don’t waste your time. You’ll only get caught and thrown in prison, if you’re lucky, and what kind of a life would that be? Well, goodbye. It’s been such fun.’

Frank felt Erskine’s grip on his shoulder; surprisingly strong. Six weeks, he thought: well, we’ll see about that. Amelia Carrington may be able to undo the future, but that’s no reason to assume that she can predict the past. A hand shoved him between the shoulder blades and he stumbled forward, through the Door.

It swung to behind him, clicked shut, and vanished.

Perhaps it would’ve given Frank and Emily a small degree of satisfaction to hear Amelia’s scream of baffled rage as the Door turned into a blank, featureless wall. But they didn’t. By then, they were decades away.

The dragon woke up with a start, and yawned.

A drop of no more than a quarter of a degree in the temperature of the cavern: you’d have needed pretty sophisticated instruments to record it, but it was enough to smash a hole through the dragon’s dream and leave it with an uncomfortable hind-brainful of splintered images.

One of the good things about caverns deep underground is that their temperature stays constant: no sun, no wind or rain, roof insulation beyond the dreams of ecology. A quarter-degree fluctuation therefore can only mean that someone up-tunnel has just opened a door.

The dragon’s ears went forward. It listened carefully. It heard a pin drop.

Tinkle, went the pin on the tunnel floor. Bump bump bump went the grenade, like Winnie the Pooh going downstairs. The grenadier had done his calculations pretty well. As soon as the grenade skittered into the cavern, it went off.

The roar of the explosion echoed round the cavern for a good three seconds. Not just your ordinary run-of-the-Mills-bomb pineapple; this one had been specially loaded to exacting specifications by Hewitt and Lane of Curzon Street, bespoke munitions makers to the London magic trade. If the blast and shrapnel didn’t do the trick, the shock wave, in a confined space like an underground cavern, was guaranteed to break every high-tensile bone in a dragon’s body. It had been awarded an unprecedented five stars in Which Grenade, June 2005.

The dragon havered. Ever such a lot of dust had come down from the roof. It did its best, but finally it had to give in and sneeze; fortuitously, just as the assault party poked their heads round the tunnel mouth to see if the grenade had done the job.

The dragon turned round three times and went back to sleep.

‘Uncle Dennis,’ Amelia said. ‘How nice to see you again so soon.’

Dennis Tanner sat down without being asked, and put his feet up on the edge of her desk. That made her smile. Defeat has different effects on different people. Some it crushes; others put on an exaggerated show of stroppiness. Amelia had seen defeated men across that same desk enough times to read the body language at a glance.

‘It was that bloody Door thing, right?’

She nodded. ‘You’re terribly clever, Uncle Dennis. Not clever enough,’ she added sweetly, ‘but don’t feel bad about it.’ She pushed a box of cigars, which hadn’t been there a moment ago, across the desk at him. He picked one out, sniffed it and put it back. ‘How did you figure it out?’

‘The Carpenter boy came to see me,’ Dennis replied. ‘Told me about the Mousetrap you’d set for your pest-control girl. Didn’t take me long to work out you’re the only one who’d be in a position to do that. I knew about the insurance scam that Carpenter was working. What I couldn’t get was why you’d want to knock off one of your own employees. Oh, on general principles, yes,’ he added. ‘When I was at JWW there were times I’d have cheerfully exterminated the lot of ‘em. But just the one, and a Mousetrap—’ He grinned. ‘And then it just sort of clicked. Bait. To make the Door come to you.’

‘Very good.’ Amelia nodded. ‘So, did you come all this way just to—?’

‘Properly speaking, of course,’ Dennis went on, ‘the Door belongs to me. On account of the fact that Frank Carpenter’s dad found it in a drawer in his desk at JWW, so it was the firm’s property and, since I’m the only surviving partner, it’s mine.’ He paused. ‘But I don’t suppose you see it like that, somehow.’

‘No.’

‘Well, quite. We could have a lawsuit about it, maybe.’

‘We could,’ Amelia conceded. ‘Of course, that’d mean a lot of lawyers getting turned into frogs, but I’m game if you are. Whether they’d still be able to charge you Ł500 an hour for sitting on lily pads catching flies with their tongues is a moot point, but knowing your luck—’

Dennis grinned. ‘Alternatively,’ he said, ‘we could forget the whole thing, and you could cut me in for the share you promised me in the big bauxite strike.’

‘No.’

‘Pretty please? Go on, be a sport.’

‘No.’

Nod. ‘I was hoping you’d say that. I wasn’t going to give you a chance, but Mum insisted. Well, thanks for your time.’

Dennis stood up, then stopped. For a moment or so, he seemed to be trying to drag his feet off the floor, like a man trapped in deep mud. Then he sat down again.

‘That’s just showing off,’ he said. ‘Uncle Dennis,’ Amelia said. ‘You didn’t come here just to make me an offer that I can’t accept. What’re you up to?’ Dennis smiled at her. ‘You’re not going to let me go till I tell you, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Fine.’ He reached for the cigar box, only to find that it was now empty. He snapped his fingers, lit the result and blew smoke across the desk. It stopped in mid-air and vanished. ‘You know about the Wayatumba strike, of course.’

‘Naturally. Until word gets out about what we’ve found, it’s still officially the biggest bauxite deposit in the world. You gave it to Frank Carpenter’s dad.’

‘That’s right. And now I’ve got it back.’

Amelia’s eyebrows rose. ‘Really? How did you manage that?’

‘Bought it.’

‘Ah. Borrowed money, of course.’

Shrug.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Amelia went on. ‘Borrowed family money. Goblins.’

‘Sound enough investment,’ Dennis replied blandly. ‘And, being a naturally subterranean species, we reckon we know a bit about mining and minerals.’

‘Indeed,’ Amelia said. ‘I’m sure they went into it with their beady little red eyes wide open. Presumably this is some sort of declaration of war.’

Dennis nodded. ‘Price war,’ he said. ‘We plan on digging the stuff out in vast quantities and practically giving it away. Which means you’ll have to do the same. It’ll be a case of who can stand the loss longest, you or us, and then the winner buys out the loser’s stake for pennies from the liquidators.’

Amelia sighed. ‘Dear Uncle Dennis,’ she said. ‘You know, sometimes you can be very sweet. But I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.’

‘You reckon.’

‘I know for a fact. We sold all our rights in the new strike this morning.’

Dennis Tanner sat still and quiet long enough for his cigar to burn a neglected quarter-inch. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said eventually.

‘Yes. Well, do give my regards to your mother. I must say, she’s marvellous for her age. You can get up now, if you want to.’

Dennis shot to his feet, staggered and steadied himself on the back of the chair. ‘This whatever-it-is you’re up to,’ he said. ‘Is it connected to the Door, or just sort of running in parallel?’

‘That’d be telling,’ Amelia said cheerfully. ‘Talk to you soon.’

As soon as he’d gone, she relieved her feelings by taking the phone off its cradle and bashing it against the side of the desk until the plastic smashed. Of course, Uncle Dennis couldn’t have known that something had gone wrong and the Door had slipped through her fingers. No way. Just talking about it, though, hearing it mentioned, made her want to howl with rage.

For the hundredth time since it had happened, Amelia tried to figure it out.

She hadn’t, of course, been entirely honest with Carpenter and the Spitzer girl. Getting Erskine back hadn’t been the only reason. She’d have done it anyway: the attempted ambush had forced her hand, but it shouldn’t have mattered. As far as she’d been able to tell at the time, it had all worked out just fine. Except that now she was short one Portable Door.

Erskine would be back soon, she reminded herself, and then it wouldn’t matter. Then at least she’d have one Door, though two would’ve been nicer. Where was he, by the way? Bad dog.

Amelia ran through the calculations in her mind.

According to Pereira’s Last Theorem, if you used the Door to go back through time and open a Doorway in a wall at precisely the moment when, in the past, the Door was being applied to that same wall, you ought to achieve the Pereira Effect: the Door in the future would interface with its past and self-replicate, leaving you with two Doors.

Done that, Amelia reflected. And the look on Carpenter’s face when she’d walked through had been worth it on its own. For a short while, then, she’d had two Doors: the one she’d taken from Carpenter after he’d been thunderbolted during the ambush, and its ten-minutes-earlier past self. But, when Erskine had shoved the troublesome pair through the Door (a Door) into the Sixties, and she’d looked in the cardboard tube just in case, there’d been nothing inside it except a little stale air. Infuriating.