The Better Mousetrap (8 page)

Colin slipped past Mrs Thompson and disappeared up the path in a sort of coherent blur. He was just in time to catch up the taxi she’d arrived in. E&M people could do that sort of thing. It was very impressive, until you realised that it was no more than the power of applied arrogance, harnessed through a few simple focusing techniques. If you sincerely believed the world was there entirely for your convenience and you knew the magic words, more often than not it turned out that you were right.

Bastard, she thought. He could at least have hung around long enough to brief her on what needed doing, instead of leaving her to extract the information slowly and tactfully from someone who was quite definitely The Public. She hated all that: trying to explain things in terms that lay people could understand, and which wouldn’t blow their minds. She took a deep breath.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ she said.

‘What, dear? Oh yes. It’s Barney.’

‘Barney.’

‘My cat.’

‘Your—’

‘Didn’t Mr Gomez explain? Poor Barney’s got himself stuck in the apple tree in the back garden, and I’m so worried he might fall out and hurt himself.’

For perhaps as long as a second and a half, the world seemed to flicker. At first it felt as though nothing was real, as though Emily was standing in the void waiting for the Creator to turn up. And then there was anger.

‘Your cat’s stuck up a tree,’ she said.

‘That’s right, yes. Now, Mr Wilcox at number sixteen’s got a ladder, but he may have gone out, it’s his day at the clinic, but Mrs Palladio at number twelve might have one, only I don’t know her terribly well, she only moved in a few months ago. Or I suppose you could try John at number twenty-four—’

‘Excuse me.’

‘Yes, dear?’

And then she thought: no. I don’t destroy old ladies, even old ladies with cats, because in the final analysis they aren’t the real enemy. I shall be as nice as I possibly can to the old bat, I might even rescue her bloody cat, and every precisely quantified milligram of niceness I expend on her will be another red-hot skewer with barbed wire wrapped round it when I get back to the office and see Colin—

Emily smiled. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘You just leave it to me and everything’ll be just fine.’

Mrs Thompson pursed her lips. ‘Are you sure? Because—’ You can read eyes after a year or two in the profession.

Because, after all, you’re only a girl, I’d have thought Mr Gomez would’ve got a man to do it, after all, climbing up ladders-Emily broadened her smile. All the king’s horses, Colin, she thought, and all the king’s men. ‘Why don’t you show me where the tree is and then go and make us both a nice cup of tea?’

That must’ve been the right thing to say, because Mrs Thompson nodded and led the way through the house and into the back garden. There, sure enough, was an apple tree, with a fat ginger blob sticking like used chewing-gum to one of the spindly upper branches.

‘You sure you don’t want to borrow Mr Wilcox’s ladder, dear?’

‘No, I’ll be fine. Now, how about that cup of tea? This won’t take a moment.’

‘You will be careful, won’t you? Only Barney can be a little bit wary of strangers.’

Emily waited till the back door was safely shut; then she took the Mordor Army Knife out of her bag, thumbed out the scaling-ladder attachment, dropped it on the ground and jumped back.

She didn’t know how it worked, and couldn’t have cared less, but she’d learned the hard way to give it plenty of room. The little metal thing like a comb which she’d hooked out of the body of the knife seemed to blur for a moment, as though it had gone out of focus. When it resolved itself again, it was a twenty-foot aluminium ladder. She frowned at it and said, ‘Shorter.’ The adjustment was instantaneous. When she picked the ladder up it was warm, just about bearable to the touch. She leaned it against the nearest substantial branch to where the cat was, wiggled it about a bit to check it was stable, and began to climb.

‘Here, kitty,’ she said through gritted teeth. She wasn’t a cat person, in the same way petrol doesn’t have a soft spot for naked flames. The cat, which was licking its paw, lifted its head and looked at her.

‘Don’t start,’ she said grimly. The cat’s left ear flickered. She felt her tights catch on a projecting twig. Colin Gomez, she promised herself, was going to spend the rest of his abbreviated life paying for this.

Three more rungs and Emily reckoned she was in comfortable grabbing range. She put together a plan of action. Left hand off rung, reach out, form grip on cat’s collar, secure cat firmly under left arm, then back the way we came. No bother. The key to success would be smooth, controlled movements.

The cat hissed at her and stood up, its tail stiff and straight as a pine tree. At this point, it occurred to her that all her training and experience had been directed towards killing animals rather than saving them; which was fine, bearing in mind the sort of animal she tended to deal with, but maybe in this case she was a trifle out of her depth. She glanced over her shoulder to see if Mrs Thompson had emerged from the house; no sign of her, and she wouldn’t be able to see what was going on up the tree from her kitchen window. She grinned.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘make my day.’

The cat made a growling noise that it had inherited from ancestors who hunted mammoths for a living, and edged a little further along its branch. Emily recognised the tactic: deliberately fall off, get yourself killed, land me in serious trouble with your owner, the feline equivalent of suicide bombing. All domestic animals are terrorists at heart. The secret is, never negotiate.

‘Go on, then,’ she said to the cat. ‘You fall off if you want to. I’ve got reflexes like a snake - I’ll catch you by your tail or something, it’ll hurt like hell and I’ll have won. Or you can hold still, we can go back down together in comfort, and then I can go back to the office and make Colin Gomez eat his own legs. You decide. Your choice. Oh and by the way, the Knife’s got a built-in safety field extending three feet in all directions from its base, so even if I miss you, you’ll just bounce. So go for the big gesture if you want to, but it won’t do you any good.’

When you talk to animals it’s all in the tone of voice. The cat gave Emily a look of quiet disgust and walked calmly along the branch until it was well outside her reach. Then it made a sort of chirruping noise and started washing its ear with the back of its paw.

Emily sighed. You don’t negotiate, and when they raise the stakes you don’t back down. Carefully she took one foot off the ladder and pawed the empty air until she felt something reasonably solid under her sole. Gradually she applied weight to it until she was satisfied it wasn’t going to break off, and repeated the procedure with her other foot. It was, she realised, a bit like going after nesting harpies in a bell tower, except that there was a better choice of footholds and she wasn’t burdened with cumbersome heavy weapons. On the other hand, there was plenty of tree left for the cat to move to. She thought about the Knife’s safety field; she knew it was there because she’d read about it in the owner’s guide, but she’d never actually had occasion to put it to the test. How high up was she, exactly? Twelve feet? Fifteen?

She thought of something else she could say to Colin Gomez, and the thought gave her the strength to proceed. Equalising her weight on both feet, she reached out towards the cat’s neck. It was only a few inches from her hand. She reached a little further and felt her elbow brush against a branch.

There was a click, like a door opening.

The tree disappeared.

Fifteen feet up in the air, with nothing to hold on to except an absence of tree. Don’t try this at home. You could do yourself a mischief.

Half a second later, the tree was back again, pretty much exactly as it had been-it had rotated through something like six degrees clockwise, which was an acceptable margin. Too late, of course, to do Emily any good, at a speed of thirty-two feet per second per second. The last thing she heard was her own neck snapping.

A full two seconds later, the cat shimmered back into existence on its branch. It arched its back, yawned and scampered down the trunk, landing neatly and comfortably next to Emily’s outstretched left arm. Sniff, sniff; nothing to smell here, folks. With a slight wave of its tail, it walked lazily towards the back door and slid through the cat flap.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mr Sprague sighed deeply, put the file down on his desk and rang through to his secretary. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘please put a message through to Frank Carpenter. You’ll find the contact details in—’

A shadow fell on Mr Sprague’s face. He looked up.

‘Twice in one week,’ Frank said. ‘That’s unusual.’

Mr Sprague closed his eyes and slowly opened them. ‘Please don’t do that,’ he said. ‘You know I find it extremely disconcerting.’

Frank shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘From that, I take it that you haven’t actually sent for me yet.’

‘No. I was just about to—’

‘Ah. Slight miscalculation, then.’ Frank closed the Door, caught it as it slid off the wall, rolling itself up as it went, and tucked it into its cardboard tube. ‘It isn’t easy, you know, plotting these things to the exact moment. Anyhow, I got your message - well, obviously I did. And the file.’

He was holding a green wallet folder. Mr Sprague tried not to look at an identical folder sitting on his desk; identical, that was, apart from the fact that the version Frank was holding contained a ten-page briefing document that hadn’t been dictated or typed out yet. It was things like that, Mr Sprague decided, that made him question the wisdom of hiring Frank Carpenter: little things that get lodged under the dental plate of the unconscious mind, long after the big, vague issues have been chewed over and swallowed.

‘That’s all right, then,’ Mr Sprague said. ‘So you know the background?’

Frank nodded. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there’s a few things about it that seem a bit fishy to me. Not that it matters, I suppose, if I’m going to make it so that it never happened.’

‘Fishy?’

‘Well, I thought so. I mean, think about it for a moment.’ Frank was hovering next to a chair. He never sat down unless invited. Mr Sprague nodded, and Frank took a seat. Somehow, every chair Frank sat in seemed to fit him exactly. ‘There’s this woman, right? She’s a professional pest controller, monster hunter, whatever you choose to call it. Did you know my dad was one of those, by the way, when he was in the trade? Wasn’t terribly good at it, so he said. Only ever killed one dragon, and that was by sitting on the poor thing, by accident. Anyhow …’

‘Your father was in the—?’

‘Didn’t I mention it? Oh yes. Aeons ago, back in the - sorry, about three years ago. J. W. Wells & Co. They’ve gone bust since then. Anyhow, that’s beside the point. She’s a professional dragon-slayer, so you’d think she’d be fairly - well, agile, fit, good at climbing things, you know? And then she gets herself killed, falling out of a tree, trying to rescue some old dear’s cat.’

‘Accidents happen,’ Mr Sprague said, with feeling.

‘Maybe,’ Frank said. ‘But I remember some of the stories Dad used to tell me about his old boss, Ricky something. Quite the action hero, always jumping out of windows and scaling tall buildings and stuff. I can’t imagine him falling out of a tree.’

Mr Sprague frowned. ‘Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘I don’t know, maybe she got overconfident and careless. Showing off. To be honest with you, I’m not all that concerned about how it happened or why. All that concerns me is that her employers had her insured for eleven million pounds, which I’m going to have to pay unless you can go back and stop it happening. Not the most challenging assignment I’ve given you, I wouldn’t have thought.’

‘Fine.’ Frank held up a conciliatory hand. ‘None of my business, I entirely agree. You just leave it with me and I’ll see what I can do.’

Mr Sprague sighed. A great many things about Frank Carpenter irritated him unbearably, but so far he’d never failed to complete an assignment. Nine point nine million pounds which would otherwise have drifted out of his life like lost orphan lambs weren’t likely to be going anywhere after all. Mr Sprague arranged his face in a tolerably close imitation of a smile.

‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Usual terms, of course.’

‘Um,’ Frank said.

Mr Sprague knew all about that Um. It meant Frank was about to make difficulties. ‘Was there something?’ he said.

‘Well, yes.’ Frank got so coy when he was about to ask for more money. ‘Thing is - well, you know that before I do a job I run the projections; just to make sure I won’t alter history and start a war or cause a plague epidemic or anything.’

Mr Sprague nodded. ‘What about it?’

Frank clicked his tongue. Mr Sprague was familiar with that one, too. It was generally even more expensive than an Um. ‘Well - actually, it’s all a bit technical, really. All to do with, um, magic and things.’

‘Oh.’

‘Because she’s a - well, because she’s in the trade. You see, tracking component variables and extrapolating data for my projections, it’s all based on the assumption that, well, people are normal. Normalish, anyhow. I mean, they’ve got to be a bit different or they wouldn’t try overtaking on the inside at ninety miles an hour or nipping behind the bulk-hydrogen tanks for a quick smoke and all the funny little things that people do. But stupidity’s perfectly normal. I mean, it’s a defining characteristic of the species, so it’s dead easy to allow for it in the synthetic projection matrix.’

Mr Sprague looked at him. ‘The what?’

Frank flushed slightly. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘sort of maths stuff. You don’t need to bother about it.’

‘I happen to have a doctorate in pure mathematics from the Sorbonne,’ Mr Sprague said frostily. ‘But I don’t seem to remember anything called a synthetic—’

‘Synthetic projection matrix?’

‘That’s it. Of course,’ he added, ‘my attention might have been wandering at that point in the lecture, or maybe I was in bed with a cold or something. Unlikely, though.’

Frank’s ears were glowing pink. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I don’t think it’s been discovered yet. In fact, I know it hasn’t because it’s, um, one of mine. Little something I knocked up so that I could do these projections, you see.’