The Better Mousetrap (34 page)

‘Perfectly.’

‘That’s all, then.’ Amelia looked at him. He’d have to do. ‘For now,’ she added. ‘Right, on your way.’

Busy, busy. No sooner was Erskine out of the door than Sarah called in to say that she’d arranged the sale of the bauxite stake. She’d done well, too. A small enough consolation, now that the Portable Door had apparently slipped through her fingers, but every little bit helped. Look after the billions, and the trillions will look after themselves.

More to the point, though; Amelia dialled a number, tapping her fingers impatiently on the desk until she got an answer.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘You can let it go now.’

The dragon woke up.

It had no idea where it was, or how it had got there. Since it was awake, however, its new surroundings hardly registered. It moved its head painfully on a cricked neck, following the scent of roast pork until it located a heap of freshly cooked pig carcasses. It ate five and felt better.

Not hungry, it noted with satisfaction. Go to sleep now.

It wriggled, but the surface under its belly felt strange. It wasn’t the cold, smooth feel of its usual bedding. Not good. It was lying on stones—

It shifted, preparing to move, then intuited better of it. Stones, yes, but nice stones. Being a dragon, it could carry out with a brush of its belly scales a valuation more accurate and detailed than anything a trained mineralogist could do with a fully equipped lab and a staff of twenty. Nice stones, worth lots.

Can sleep now.

Its nose touched its curled-up tail, and it slid into the intersecting matrices of its dreams. Bauxite, it told itself, currently quoted in New York at sixteen, seventeen-point-two in Lisbon, seventeen-point-six in Sydney and London. Meanwhile, the innate sensors in its hindbrain performed their usual miracle of quantity surveying, and reported back a figure which, multiplied by the closing price in Singapore, made it whistle the melting point of iron.

Blessed are the pure in heart, apparently, for they shall see God. Nobody had ever seen fit to tell Erskine this, since it wasn’t immediately relevant to his duties, but he’d sort of figured it out for himself, from first principles. Because he’d been good, he’d been chosen by Her for a special mission of great importance. The glow of pride charged him up like an electric current.

Mr Gomez’s room. Normally, he wouldn’t have dared trespass on a partner’s carpet, but a mandate from the highest possible authority made all the difference.

First, the desk. Erskine had been designed to be methodical. First, he took a mental photograph, noting the exact position of everything. It took some doing, because Mr Gomez’s desk was a perfect example of dynamic chaos, but Erskine had been specially fitted with an enhanced memory. With the picture saved on his internal screen, he took everything off the desk, stacked it neatly on the floor and put it back again, in the process frisking everything for small cardboard tubes.

No result; so he started on the piles of blue, orange, green and buff folders that covered two-thirds of the floor, the way the oceans cover the planet. Any one of the piles could have been artfully arranged to hide a small cardboard tube. As it turned out, they hadn’t, and Erskine moved on to the filing cabinet.

Nothing in the filing cabinet but files; nothing in the files but paper. Next, he examined the pockets of the two coats that hung behind the door. Mostly, they were full of discarded wrappings from extra-strong mint rolls. No cardboard tubes.

He glanced at his watch. Because the firm charged for its services on a time basis, Mr Gomez considered it a point of honour to make any interview with clients last at least an hour. That meant Erskine had a minimum of twenty minutes in hand. Enough time to lift the carpet and prise up the floorboards? Possibly, but he’d be pushing it. Well; he’d just have to work faster.

First, though, there was the walk-in cupboard. He’d left that till last, because it was such an obvious place for hiding stuff. He opened the door, then took a step back.

‘Oh,’ said Emily Spitzer. ‘It’s you.’

‘Hello,’ Erskine replied. ‘And it’s Mr Arkenstone from the Salt Lake City office, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Shhh. Yes, Mr Arkenstone.’ Emily looked disconcerted, and also unusually scruffy. Her clothes were a bit rumpled, and her lipstick was smudged. ‘From Salt Lake City. I expect you’re wondering what we’re doing in Mr Gomez’s cupboard.’

‘Looking for files, presumably,’ Erskine replied.

‘That’s right, yes. Mr Arkenstone needed a file, and I said I’d help him find it.’

‘I thought so,’ Erskine said. ‘Sorry to have disturbed you, only I didn’t know you were in there. I’d have knocked if I’d known.’

‘Yes, of course you would.’

‘Can I help you look?’

‘What? No, thanks, it’s fine, we can manage.’

‘Right you are.’ Erskine hesitated. ‘Only, I’m supposed to search the cupboard for a small cardboard tube. You haven’t seen one in there, have you?’

‘A what?’

‘Small cardboard tube,’ Erskine repeated. ‘About so long, with a bit of old plastic sheet inside, though I’m not to touch that. It won’t take me two minutes, and I can be looking for your file while I’m at it.’

‘Who told you to look for a cardboard tube?’ asked Mr Arkenstone. He didn’t have an American accent, which was odd if he was from Salt Lake City. Maybe he’d been posted there as part of a management restructuring initiative.

‘Ms Carrington,’ Erskine replied, trying not to sound too smug about it, but he couldn’t resist adding, ‘Personally.’ The name had the effect he’d expected. Mr Arkenstone looked properly impressed, and even Ms Spitzer raised an eyebrow. ‘And I don’t want to have to hurry you or anything, but Mr Gomez will be back quite soon, and he’s not supposed to know I’m here.’

Mr Arkenstone stood back out of Erskine’s way. ‘You go ahead,’ he said. ‘We’ll, um, carry on looking for our file when you’ve finished.’

‘Are you sure? I mean, I can easily keep an eye out for it while I’m looking for the tube.’

Ms Spitzer gave Erskine a conspiratorial glance. He was thrilled. He’d never had one before. ‘Need to know,’ she said, in a loud whisper. ‘You understand.’

‘Oh, of course.’ Erskine nodded seven times. ‘Quite. What file, eh?’

‘Absolutely. You crack on,’ Mr Arkenstone added kindly. ‘Don’t mind us. We’ve got all the time in the world.’

There was something in what he’d said that made Ms Spitzer giggle, though she managed to do it with a straight face. ‘Thanks,’ Erskine said. ‘After all, we’re all on the same side, aren’t we?’

Mr Arkenstone nodded gravely. Ms Spitzer must’ve got a frog in her throat or something, because she made a little gurgling noise. But not unkindly. In fact, Erskine reflected as he rummaged carefully through the cupboard (no tube; oh well), she was being a good deal nicer to him now than she had been before. It could only be because he’d been blessed with Her special favour. Would it go on like this from now on, he wondered. He hoped so.

And then he froze.

Erskine’s first instinct was to hate himself for being so careless. The excitement of it all had got the better of him, and he’d forgotten something that She’d said to him.

I want you to clear Emily Spitzer’s stuff out of her office and put it in store. She’s dead.

Erskine thought about that. True, the Emily Spitzer with whom he’d just had that extremely pleasant conversation hadn’t seemed all that dead to him, but then, who was he to judge? If She said Ms Spitzer had passed away, which of them was more likely to be right, the Creator or the unworthy result of Her labours? But, replied his inner common sense, Ms Spitzer really didn’t look terribly dead at all. In which case, maybe it was possible that whoever had told Her about Ms Spitzer’s demise had been lying. In which case, She really ought to be told, right away.

Twin forces of incalculable ferocity were tearing Erskine apart: the imperative of letting Her know, just in case someone was trying to deceive Her, and horrified fear of wasting Her time and getting into trouble. For a full ten seconds, he stood quite still, not even breathing, as his wretched mind was bounced backwards and forwards like a tennis ball. His first solo mission, and here he was, messing it up; because whichever course of action he took, it’d be bound to be the wrong one.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, even. She’d also told him to search Ms Spitzer’s things for the tube, if it wasn’t in Mr Gomez’s room. And he’d just gone and mentioned to her that he was looking for it. What if she wasn’t supposed to have it? In which case, he’d just tipped her off that it had been missed and was being searched for. What a terrible, terrible mess.

Nothing for it; he was going to have to tell Her at once.

Very carefully, Erskine opened the cupboard door and looked out. What he saw made him whimper. The room was empty. Ms Spitzer (and that nice Mr Arkenstone from Salt Lake City office) weren’t there any more.

‘Who the hell,’ Frank asked as they slammed through a fire door, ‘was that?’

‘Erskine,’ Emily told him. ‘Long story. In here.’

In Here proved to be a small, dusty room crammed with angle-iron racks filled with dusty files. She closed the door and listened, presumably for sounds of pursuit. There couldn’t have been any, because she came away and sat down on the floor, looking exhausted.

‘The new kid,’ she went on. ‘Trainee. Supposed to be going round with me, learning pest control. Coals to Newcastle,’ she added bitterly. ‘Though there’s something a bit bloody odd about him. I’ve only just figured it out, but it’s pretty strange.’

Frank looked at her. ‘Well?’

‘I can’t hear him.’ Emily frowned, then shook her head. ‘No, that’s putting it badly. Look, I told you about the troll’s blood, right? Well, when Erskine says something, that’s all I hear. Just the words he says out loud. No little voice in my head telling me what he’s really thinking. And before you ask,’ she added, ‘that’s downright weird.’

‘Is it?’

‘Believe me, yes.’ She pulled a bewildered face. ‘You, Colin Gomez, Emma on reception, everyone I’ve talked to since it happened. But now I come to think of it, not Erskine. Which,’ she added quietly, ‘can mean only one thing. He’s not human.’

Frank pursed his lips. ‘He’s a management trainee, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, then.’

Emily frowned. ‘Good point,’ she said. ‘But no, I don’t think so. It’s like listening to - oh, I don’t know, an insect or something. No,’ she added impatiently, ‘it’s not even that. It’s like he’s not even real.’

Frank considered that. ‘You think he’s like that whatever-itwas in Mr Sprague’s office,’ he said. ‘The one that turned out to be a hair.’

‘Oh God,’ Emily said. ‘No, I wasn’t thinking that, actually. But you could well be right. Something inanimate that she’s brought to life.’

Frank mumbled, ‘Like I said, management trainee,’ under his breath, but not out loud. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if that’s true, so what? It’s no skin off our noses, is it?’

The look Emily gave him started off various trains of thought in his mind. One of them was that if they really had found true love and were going to spend the rest of their lives together, inevitably there were going to be a lot more looks like that and he might as well get used to them.

‘He knows I’m alive,’ she said. {Stupid, she didn’t add.) ‘And Colin Gomez has just told the Carrington bitch that he killed me.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Frank said quickly. ‘You mean, everything’s screwed up.’

‘Sort of.’

‘Ah.’

‘Like,’ she went on, ‘bang goes our chance of sneaking up on her quietly. She’ll know that Colin’s lied to her, which means curtains for his palace coup idea. Probably for Colin, too, though I can’t say the thought upsets me terribly much.’

Frank frowned. ‘You don’t really mean that.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Oh. Right, fine.’

Another look. But he wasn’t unduly concerned. Close observation of his parents’ relationship had led him to the conclusion that an unshakeable belief on the female’s part that the male is an idiot is a fundamental ingredient of true love. Odd, he’d always thought, but presumably there was a sound evolutionary reason for it. ‘He tried to kill me, for God’s sake,’ Emily said, maybe a tad defensively. ‘And besides, he’s a jerk.’

‘Quite.’

‘Insufferable bloody man. So inconsiderate.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘Right.’ She scowled. ‘No, we can’t just let her kill him. Bloody nuisance,’ she snarled. ‘As if we hadn’t got enough to do.’

The miracle of troll’s blood was something that Frank couldn’t really get his head around, though he believed in it. But maybe it wasn’t such a miracle after all, because as Emily spoke he could hear her thinking, and besides, he’s promised to make me a partner. Perhaps at some deep level he was mildly shocked. If so, he overrode the reaction. She might be the most wonderful person in the world and the meaning of his universe, but she was still Corporate. They think differently from the rest of us. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’ll add saving Colin Gomez to the list, then.’

She shrugged. ‘Well, it’s only fair. You save your Mr Sprague, I’ll save Colin. Assuming,’ she went on, ‘we both live that long. Come on, we’ve got to get out of here, before bloody Erskine tells her I’m alive. Typical Colin Gomez,’ she sighed bitterly. ‘Should’ve known better than to get involved in any scheme he’s responsible for. Get the Door and let’s be on our way.’

Frank took the cardboard tube from his pocket and teased the Door out with his fingertips. ‘Where to?’ he asked.

‘What? Oh, anywhere. No, hang on, let me think.’ Emily turned her back on him for a moment while he plastered the Door onto the nearest wall. She was thinking: I know precisely where we should go; back in time to the day Amelia Carrington was born - no, I couldn’t kill a baby, it’d be impossible, spiders or no spiders. All right, nine months earlier, we could kidnap her dad or something, and then it wouldn’t really be killing. Except, of course, that it would. The sad fact is, she admitted to herself (blaming the excessive honesty on the troll’s blood, but it wasn’t really that), it doesn’t matter whether we do it here and now or thirty years ago or before she was even born, it’s still basically the same thing; and killing dragons is one thing, but people—