The Better Mousetrap (4 page)

‘Carpenter, did you say your name was?’

‘That’s right. Frank Carpenter.’

Was it possible to read someone’s DNA with the naked eye?

The girl looked as though she was giving it her best shot. ‘I’ll see if he’s available,’ she said, and picked up a phone. Into it she recited his name. There was a long, quiet interval; then she put the phone back and nodded at the door behind her. He rather got the impression that if the decision had been up to her, he’d be headed out through the other door. Or the window.

The back office was pretty much like the front, except that the mangy carpet was covered with heaps of paper and buff, red, orange, green and blue folders. At least someone had made an effort to decorate the walls; they were hung with a huge collection of tomahawks, each one with a little card under it to tell you where it had come from and who it’d been made by. Behind the desk, just visible through a haze of blue cigar smoke—

Frank recognised Mr Tanner at once. That was only to be expected. All through his early childhood he’d been told about him: eat your nice dinner, tidy your room, be polite to the visitors or Mr Tanner will come and get you. And when, not unreasonably, he’d asked, ‘What’s a mister tanner, mummy and daddy?’ they’d conjured up for him a mental image of a hunched, evil little man with curly salt-and-pepper hair, huge eyes magnified to disturbing size by massive glasses, wicked sharp teeth, a devilish grin and plumes of smoke coming out of his nose. Young Frank Carpenter’s plate was always polished clean and his bedroom immaculately tidy until he reached the age when that sort of fatuous threat no longer worked, and he’d come to assume that Mr Tanner was about as real as the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny.

Apparently not. If anything, his parents’ description had been an understatement. The little man lifted his head and glared at him. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘Dennis Tanner?’

‘That’s me,’ the little man said, in a strong Australian accent. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘My name’s Frank Carpenter. I believe you knew my—’

‘Oh shit,’ Mr Tanner said. ‘No, hang on, that can’t be right. Last time I saw Paul Carpenter and Sophie bloody Pettingell was only three years ago, and they sure as hell didn’t have a kid, so—’

An embarrassed grin slithered across Frank’s face. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘But yes. My mum and dad are Sophie and Paul Carpenter. They send their love, by the way,’ he added, because if you climb too far up the moral high ground there are avalanches and yetis.

‘Balls,’ said Mr Tanner succinctly. ‘How complicated?’

‘Very.’

Mr Tanner sighed, gusting smoke in Frank’s face. ‘Park your bum,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Curiosity’s always been my downfall. No, scratch that. Your bloody mum and dad were my downfall. Curiosity’s just one of my many nasty habits.’ He leaned forward across the desk, peering at Frank through his bulletproof-glassthick lenses. ‘Now you mention it, there’s definitely a resemblance. You’ve got my great-great-grandad’s chin, for one thing.’ He grinned, suddenly as a shark’s jaws snapping shut. ‘Your dad mentioned that we’re related, did he?’

Frank nodded. ‘Distant cousins,’ he said.

‘That’s right. You met my mum on the way in, of course.’

‘Oh yes.’

Mr Tanner leaned back in his chair. ‘She was very keen on your dad at one time, my mum. Which is the main reason I sent him to bloody New Zealand.’ The eyes flared with fear and hate. ‘He’s not come back, has he?’

Frank shook his head.

‘Still over there, then.’

Frank pursed his lips. ‘I did say it’s complicated,’ he replied. “But as far as I know, he’s got no plans to come back to this country again. Ever.’

Mr Tanner sighed, from his boots up. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘All right, I can start breathing again. So,’ he added, lighting a new cigar from the stub of the old one, ‘tell me all about it.’

There was no need to give Mr Tanner the full version. He knew better than anyone how Paul Carpenter, Frank’s father, had gone to work for J. W. Wells & Co, at that time the leading firm of sorcerers and magical practitioners in the City of London; how, once he’d found out what JWW actually did (he’d originally assumed that they were in shipping or commodities or something), the only reason he’d stayed on was that he’d fallen in love with Sophie, the other junior clerk; how he’d accidentally come into possession of the Acme Portable Door, a wonderful but dangerous gadget that allowed you to travel anywhere in time and space just by unrolling it and pressing it against the nearest available flat vertical surface; how Paul had had the wretched bad luck to get locked in a life-and-death struggle with most of the firm’s partners, one by one, and had incredibly prevailed, saving the human race and the fabric of the universe while he was at it but ruining the firm’s business in the process. None of that, Frank figured, was Mr Tanner likely to have forgotten.

Instead, he concentrated on what had happened after Paul and Sophie had retired to New Zealand, where they’d acquired (by way of a murderously begrudged gift from JWW) the world’s biggest and most profitable bauxite mine. For a while, Frank explained, they tried to live a normal happy life with nothing but each other and an unimaginable amount of money. After twenty-nine years—

‘Hold it,’ Mr Tanner interrupted, with a bewildered expression on his face. ‘That’d be twenty-six years into the future, right?’ Frank nodded. ‘Though from my perspective, of course, it’s three years ago, although—’

‘Do I look like I’m remotely interested in your bloody perspective?’

After twenty-nine years of putting up with a lifestyle neither of them liked very much but which they endured because they thought the other one liked that sort of thing, they came to a decision. Using the Portable Door one last time, they took a trip to a place and time that only the Door could reach, waved an embarrassed and slightly weepy goodbye to their son, and told him to peel the Door off the wall.

It had, of course, been a traumatic parting, but Frank had managed to drag himself through it, ever so slightly buoyed up by the thought of inheriting the bauxite mine. It was only a few days later that he found out that one of his parents’ last acts in this reality had been to make over the mine, the company and their goose-liverpate-bloated bank account to the New Zealand Trust for Wildlife Conservation. It had been, the lawyer explained, his mother’s idea. She knew how much Frank cared about the environment and our natural heritage. She was sure he’d be secretly pleased.

Best-kept secret in human history. After spending a month vainly trying to use the Door to reach his parents’ pocket reality, he gave up and considered his position as dispassionately as he could. He had no money, no home (the vast Carpenter mansion he’d grown up in was now the official residence of the Chairman of Trustees, whose first move on taking possession had been to grub up Sophie’s thirty-acre endangered orchid nursery and turn it into tennis courts, a golf course and a landing strip for his Lear jet) and no means whatsoever of earning a living. On the positive side, he had a change of underwear, a pair of jeans, a Lizard-Headed Women 2030 World Tour T-shirt and the Portable Door.

All in all, he decided, things could be worse.

‘To start with,’ Frank went on, ‘I set my sights quite low. Materialising inside food stores and clothes shops at two in the morning, that sort of thing. Not really my style, but—’ He frowned. ‘Are you all right, Mr Tanner?’ he asked.

‘Mm.’ Mr Tanner looked as though he’d tried to eat a whole cow in one bite. ‘Sorry. Go on.’

‘You’re trying not to laugh, aren’t you?’

‘Me? No. Get on with the story.’

‘Well—’

‘Snrgff…’

The insurance thing had been just one of those bright ideas. It had come to him out of the blue, while he’d been thinking about something else. At first he’d smiled and filed it away in the mental trashcan marked Wouldn’t-It-Be-Cool-If. But materialising inside shops and helping yourself to merchandise for which you don’t intend to pay is burglary, even if you use highly advanced magic instead of a jemmy, and that (Frank decided) was no way to live. He’d actually made a note of everything he’d taken and where it had come from in a little blue notebook, so that some day when he had the money he could make it all right again, but his conscience wasn’t fooled that easily. The time had come, he realised with a sinking heart, for him to go out and get a job; or, at the very least, a profession (which is, after all, only a smart word for a job, but with longer hours, better money and a helping of alphabet soup after your name on the printed letterhead).

The time had come-yeah, right. But, he thought, for someone with an Acme Portable Door, time is delightfully flexible. With the Door, when he ran out of money, all he had to do was go back in time to a moment when he’d been loaded, and spend it all over again. Or, better still, what about that crazy insurance idea? After all, it might just work, and if so—

Simple, as the best ideas always are. Insurance companies, he figured, have to pay out huge sums of money whenever there’s a disaster; and disasters often start off with some small, avoidable error of judgement-the Great Fire of London, for example, caused by the seventeenth-century equivalent of a chip-pan blaze. Someone with the hindsight of a retrospective hawk who could travel in time could go back to those crucial oh-shit moments, prevent the error and avert the disaster. The fire, explosion, meltdown or multiple pile-up wouldn’t happen, the insurance company wouldn’t be called on to pay out-true, history would be violated and a brick would be thrown through the brittle surface of reality, but in a good way, surely, because people who should’ve been killed or horribly mutilated would survive intact, wouldn’t they? You’d have to be a really callous bastard or a government to find fault with that—

‘Your dog,’ Mr Tanner interrupted, ‘is eating the telephone flex.’

‘What? Oh God, sorry. Bobby! Bobby, bad dog, leave it.’ The dog lifted its head and gazed at him. Its deep brown eyes told him that it was hurt and very, very disappointed, but it forgave him. He looked around for something to throw at it.

‘It’s all right,’ Mr Tanner said, ‘I don’t mind. I like dogs.’ Pause, two, three - ‘Couldn’t manage a whole one, though.’ The joke, Frank realised, lay in the uncertainty as to whether Mr Tanner really was joking.

Being a conscientious young man, Frank hadn’t rushed into it. He’d thought it through.

The drill was as follows. Having identified a disaster that he’d be able to prevent (some disasters had horribly complex causes, or were inevitable anyway; or preventing them would be dangerous, or just too much like hard work) he researched the lives of the victims, to see if they were Significant People or just walkons in life’s pageant, and ran a simulation to find out how their unscheduled survival would affect the ebb and flow of history. To anybody else, that would have involved some extremely heavy maths; but Frank was descended on both sides from generations of ridiculously talented magicians, to the point where his genes practically glowed in the dark. Furthermore, his father had owned a small lump of rock crystal in which, if you got the lighting and the ambience exactly right, you could see all sorts of amazing stuff. He’d kept it hidden from Frank’s mother, who didn’t hold with anything connected to their previous lives. A Door trip back in time to retrieve it from under the loose floorboard in the attic three days before the Wildlife people took possession of the house, and he had what he needed to run the simulations.

He started small. There is a providence, he vaguely remembered reading somewhere, in the fall of a sparrow. Right on-as he proved with the Door, the bit of crystal and an air rifle. The simulation came out something like eighty-seven per cent accurate; if he hadn’t shot it, the sparrow would’ve been eaten by the Macreadys’ cat in any case, and the mother hatched the eggs perfectly well on her own. He felt bad about it for days, and he had a nasty feeling that his mother would’ve considered the experiment to be Testing On Animals and a mortal sin, but he couldn’t bring himself to start fiddling about with the lives of human beings without some sort of trial run. Besides, his views on wildlife in general had changed ever so slightly after the Chairman of Trustees moved into the Carpenter house and turned his old bedroom into a karaoke studio.

Then it was just a matter of establishing contact with Mr Sprague. Actually, he rather liked the man. There was something endearing about the dogged, persevering way he tried to oil out of paying Frank his commission after every successful mission. Also, sometimes when he knew Frank was coming, he laid on tea and biscuit. (Only ever the one: a Rich Tea, from his secretary’s private packet. He’d explained that he was in business to make money, not spend it, and he had the shareholders to think of.) Narrowing the focus of his amiability a little, Frank had realised that he liked Mr Sprague because he was just about the only human being he’d met more than once since he’d embarked on his new career. This practically made him a father figure, although when you considered what Frank’s real father had been like, maybe that wasn’t such a good thing.

‘And he pays you money,’ Mr Tanner said, after a long pause.

Frank nodded. ‘Ten per cent,’ he replied.

‘And you’ve been doing this for how long?’

Frank laughed. ‘That was supposed to be a trick question, right?’

Mr Tanner frowned. ‘What I meant was,’ he said, ‘you’ve done several jobs for this Sprague bloke.’

‘Forty-seven,’ Frank replied promptly. ‘Assuming this is the fifteenth of June 2008. Of course, by this time yesterday it could easily be a hundred and six. Or twenty-three. It’s complicated.’

‘Mmm.’ Mr Tanner scowled at him. ‘I’ll say this for you,’ he said, ‘you’re your father’s son, all right. And your mother’s too, of course, but that’s not quite so bad. I mean, yes, she was a total menace, and if I had that Door thing of yours, the first thing I’d do would be to nuke her in her cot. But your dad—’ He shuddered, and grinned. ‘What made your dad so very rucking special was the way he trashed the lives of everybody he came in contact with and screwed up the fabric of time and space while always doing the right thing, if you see what I’m getting at. What I’m saying is, you’d go over it afterwards and think it all through; and yes, anybody with a shred of human decency would’ve done exactly the same as he did in those particular circumstances, absolutely no two ways about it, even though the consequences were pure bloody hell for everybody involved. The choice had to be made, and he made it. It’s just, he kept on and on and on getting stuck with that kind of choice, it’s like the intolerable moral dilemmas homed in on him across vast distances; and if just once the choice had been up to a selfish, greedy, unprincipled little bastard like me—’ He shook his head; there was a miniature snowstorm of dandruff. ‘But there you go. Runs in the family, I suppose.’