CHAPTER SIX

Emily Spitzer 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. Thirty 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. Emily fell. As she did so, her entire life flashed before her eyes, just the way it was supposed to. Having been trained in all aspects of her trade, including death management, she realised what the slide-show meant, and thought, Nuts. After all, it was such a silly way to go; and the thing about the life flashing in front of her eyes wasn’t just that it had been unfulfilled, pointless and so very short. Mostly it was that she hadn’t finished with it yet. It was as though the waiter had brought pudding and then snatched it away from under her nose before her fingers had closed round the handle of the spoon. Not bloody well fair. Thirty-two feet per second per second; good old Isaac Newton, or was it Galileo? Like it mattered a damn.

Falling out of a tree is a bit like life itself. It all goes swimmingly until the end, and then bad stuff happens. Since she knew she wasn’t going to survive this one, there was no point bracing for impact. An awfully big adventure, wasn’t it supposed to be? But she’d spent her working life battling dragons and staking vampires. Adventures? Yawn.

All in all, she just wanted to land, die and get it over with.

Emily landed; and the first observation she made was that death didn’t hurt. Since a large slice of humanity spends a lot of time worrying about that, it’d have been nice if she could have passed on the good news-sent them a postcard, maybe, or an e-mail- but presumably that wasn’t possible or someone would’ve done it already. Death, in fact, didn’t seem to be bad at all. It was dark-no, that was because she had her eyes closed.

Pause. If she still had eyes to close, how could she be dead?

She opened them, and a waiter handed her a menu.

Saving others is its own reward, which is just as well. You can’t expect gratitude. Even so, Frank had secretly been hoping for something along the lines of ‘My hero’ or ‘ You saved my life, how can I ever thank you?’ Instead, when Emily Spitzer opened her eyes, what she said was, ‘This isn’t death, it’s Paris.’

Factually accurate, but there are times when you want to hear a little bit more than just the truth. ‘Yes,’ he said, very slightly nettled. ‘I can recommend the lobster.’

‘It’s bloody Paris,’ Emily said, sitting bolt upright in her white plastic chair and staring past him. (As though he wasn’t there; great.) ‘Look, that’s the Eiffel Tower, for God’s sake.’ Then, apparently, she noticed him; she swivelled round in her seat like a tank turret and gave him a scowl that would’ve scorched asbestos. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ she snapped. ‘And who are you?’

‘Frank Carpenter,’ Frank said. ‘Or if you don’t fancy lobster, there’s the crepes Suzettes. My treat,’ he added. ‘I can get it back off expenses, so we might as well—’

‘But I died:

‘No,’ Frank pointed out emphatically, ‘you didn’t. Not this time. All the other times, oh yes. Whee, thud, splat, call a doctor, no, don’t bother, over and over again. This time, though,’ he added, with a certain fierce pride, ‘you made it. So we’re having lunch. To celebrate.’ He nodded at her defiantly, then raised the menu and made a show of studying it. ‘Oeufs en bricotte avecfleurs du matin. What on earth is that supposed to be when it’s at home?’

For about a second, Emily sat perfectly still, tense as a guitar string. Then she slumped back into her chair and began to sob. Oh God, Frank thought. He glanced furtively round. People were staring.

‘Look,’ he hissed, ‘if it’s something I said then I’m very sorry, and I understand that this must be rather disconcerting for you and you’ve got every right to be upset. But do you think you could possibly not make that fucking awful noise?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she snuffled. ‘It’s just, for a moment there I thought I’d died, and I must’ve been really, really bad and wicked in my life, or why would God have sent me to France …’ She stopped, and sat up. You could almost hear the click, as all the pulled-together parts of herself locked back into place. ‘Who are you?’ she said.

‘I just told you, Frank Carpenter.’ He hesitated. ‘That’s my name,’ he added, then heard what he’d just said, and went on, ‘I, um, save people.’

Emily frowned. ‘What, you mean, like Superman?’

A stray tendril of the concept tickled the edge of his mind, but he ignored it. ‘Not really, no,’ he said. ‘I do it for money, actually. I work for an insurance company.’

‘Oh.’ For some reason, the words insurance company made Emily feel a whole lot better. There’s something so wonderfully mundane about insurance. It’s so solid you could build skyscrapers on it. ‘But how—? You were standing under the tree and you caught me?’

Frank twitched. ‘Sort of.’

‘Ah. But in that case, what’re we doing in France?’

Shrug. ‘Like I said, I thought it called for a celebration. You know, you not being dead and everything.’ Silence. A long interval, during which Frank buttered a piece of bread and ate it.

‘But I fell out of the tree like, two minutes ago. How did we get here?’ A look of panic spread across Emily’s face. ‘I’ve been in a coma, haven’t I? Or did I get amnesia from the bash on the head, and—?’

‘Nope,’ Frank interrupted. ‘Look, if you can’t make up your mind I’ll order for both of us, all right? Only I’m hungry. Missed breakfast.’ He waved at a waiter, who immediately homed in like a Scud missile and took down an order for two lobster salads. That alone made Emily realise that supernatural forces were at work.

‘This is magic, isn’t it?’ she said quietly.

‘Of course,’ Frank said. ‘You’re in the trade, I’d have thought you’d be used to— All right,’ he said, holding his hands up by way of supplication, ‘I can see I’m possibly not handling this as well as I might have done. Begin at the beginning?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘You died.’

‘Oh.’

Frank smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but luckily your employers had the good sense to insure your life with Beneficent Mutual for eleven million quid. My boss-George Sprague, nice bloke when you get to know him-he could no more pay out eleven million quid on a claim without a fight than walk to Mars without a spacesuit. So he hired me to save you. And I did.’

‘Ah.’ Emily looked at him as though she was wearing fogged-up glasses. ‘So I didn’t die after all?’

‘Oh yes, you died all right.’ Frank paused to crunch some more bread, and wipe crumbs off his shirt. ‘Broken neck, punctured lung, massive brain trauma. I read the autopsy report, it was practically instantaneous, so you didn’t suffer, but it was a genuine all-the-king’s-horses job all the same.’ He grinned. ‘George Sprague suffered, though. I imagine they could hear him groaning on Alpha Centauri. So he sent for me. It’s what I do. When there’s a particularly expensive accident giving rise to a claim, I go back in time and make it not have happened.’

Long silence. Then she said, ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think it’s worth mentioning that you gave me more hassle than any other case I’ve handled. I had three goes at it, no, scratch that, four, and on each occasion you snuffed it. A lesser man would’ve given up,’ he added with a gentle smile that he later realised must’ve been quite insufferable, ‘but not me. I was baffled. Until, of course, I figured out what was going on. Well, actually,’ he conceded, ‘I went and asked someone, and he explained it to me. You see, you were the victim of a Better Mousetrap.’

The look on Emily’s face told him that he wasn’t going to have to explain what that meant. It also had the useful effect of sobering Frank up. He’d been showing off, he realised. Not good.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘That’s all right,’ Emily replied quietly. ‘But-look, you’re sure about that, are you? The Mousetrap, I mean. Only—’

‘Someone was trying to kill you, yes. I’m—’

‘Sorry, I know, you said.’

She was angry; he could understand that. Actually, the way she snapped herself out of it was quite impressive. ‘But if it was a Mousetrap-I mean, they’re infallible. They always work, and there’s nothing anybody can …’ She stopped dead, like someone who’s just realised they’ve missed their turning. ‘You can go backwards and forwards in time?’

‘Yes. Also impossible,’ Frank said. ‘Unless you’re lucky enough to have a Portable Door.’ The look on Emily’s face was worth paying money to see.

Eventually, she whispered, ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Straight up.’ For some reason, Frank felt absurdly pleased that she was so impressed. ‘The only one in existence, as far as I know. Belonged to my dad.’

‘You’ve got a Portable Door. That’s amazing.’ She made it sound ever so much cooler and more impressive than, say, boring old saving someone from certain death. ‘So that’s how you brought me here, then. The Door.’

‘Yes,’ Frank said smugly. ‘Like I said, I asked someone how to beat a Mousetrap. He said, the only thing stronger than a Mousetrap is the Door; because it can take you anywhere, you see, anywhere in time and space. And then I remembered, Dad used it to get out of death once-long story, and I’m not sure I ever really understood it-so, well, why not give it a go? And it worked.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So how did you—?’

There are times when you can’t stop a grin. You’ve just got to step back and let it rip. ‘Quite simple, actually. I snuck up quietly while you were playing about up the tree with that cat, and spread the Door out on the ground exactly where you were going to land. Then, when you fell, I quickly opened it. You fell through the Door; I jumped through after you and told the Door to bring us here. Piece of cake, really. Ah, here’s lunch.’

The lobster was a bit rubbery and the tomatoes didn’t actually taste of anything much, which was a bit of a disappointment. The restaurant guide Frank had found this place in had particularly recommended the lobster salad. Still, not all magic works. And Emily didn’t seem to mind, or to have noticed. She ate quickly and efficiently, like a jet liner refuelling in mid-air.

‘So you’re in the trade?’ she said.

‘Me?’ Frank swallowed a chunk of fennel. ‘No, not really. My parents were.’

‘Oh.’

Complete lack of interest. It could be that she was thinking about something else: not being dead, maybe, or who it was that had tried to kill her. Frank decided that it probably wouldn’t have made much difference if the lobster had been all the guidebook cracked it up to be. It was awkward. It’d have been nice to talk to her (that was something Frank found he had strong views on: when had that happened?) but finding a subject wasn’t going to be easy. Probably best if he left that to her. But she just went on eating, as though it was a chore she had to get through; and when she’d run out of things to eat, she looked at him and said, ‘Now can you take me back, please?’

Oh, he thought. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Home,’ she replied. ‘I mean, the office.’ Interesting slip there. ‘I’ve got to get back and find out who tried to kill me.’ Well, there’s that.

‘Have you got any idea?’ Frank asked.

Emily shook her head. ‘Not a clue,’ she replied. ‘I mean, it’s not exactly unheard of in the profession. We’re pretty much a law unto ourselves, if you see what I mean. Partners-well, the office politics can get a bit intense sometimes.’ She frowned. ‘But I can’t see why anybody’d want to get rid of me. I mean, I’m not anybody. I’m right down at the bottom of the ladder, not even on the letterhead, so it can’t be someone who wants my job; and outside of the firm, I can’t think of anybody I could be a nuisance to. It doesn’t make sense, really.’

Frank rubbed his chin rather self-consciously. ‘Revenge?’ he said. ‘I don’t know, the family of a vampire you slew, something like that?’

‘Unlikely. The things I get rid of, everybody’s only too glad to see the back of them. Besides, nobody outside the profession would’ve known about Mousetraps, or how to get hold of one, or how to make it work. And vampires and werewolves and ogres and trolls and suchlike aren’t really in the profession. I mean, they don’t do magic themselves, usually they aren’t bright enough, for a start. Goblins, maybe; but I’ve never had a job with goblins involved. But if it’s not office politics—’ Emily paused. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘that’s my problem.’ Hesitation. Embarrassment, even? No, not really. Just another chore she was about to get out of the way. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rather primly, ‘I haven’t thanked you yet for—’

‘Forget it,’ Frank said, rather too quickly. ‘Like I said, I get paid. And now I’ve got this job out of the way at last, I can get on with something a bit less complicated. Usually it’s just road traffic stuff, the occasional industrial accident. Most of it you could do in your sleep.’ He waved his hand again, and a waiter materialised with a bill like a Klingon battlecruiser de-cloaking. He plonked a card on the tray without looking.

‘That’s amazing,’ she said. ‘How do you do that?’

He frowned. ‘What?’

‘Attract waiters like that. Is it some kind of psycho-telekinesis, or are you using a modified form of Lexington’s Hook?’

It took Frank a moment to figure out what she was talking about. ‘Oh, I see. No, it’s not magic or anything like that. I just sort of look hopefully at them and they come.’

‘Really.’

‘It’s just a knack, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

‘That’s—’ Emily was looking at him; for the first time since they’d met, looking at him as though he was actually visible. ‘I just sit there hoping they’ll notice me. And they never do. And I hate sitting around after the meal’s finished, waiting for the bill.’

Frank was disconcerted, he found, by how disconcerting he found her sudden interest. A great deal was happening all of a sudden, and he wasn’t sure he was keeping track of it. ‘Never been a problem with me,’ he mumbled, thinking: a moment ago, she was in a hurry to get back to the office. ‘Not that I’m a great one for eating out anyway. I generally just have a—’

‘How about getting served in pubs?’

He shrugged. ‘I walk up to the bar and someone asks me what I want.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is that unusual?’

‘A bit.’ Emily was staring - no, gazing - into his eyes, as if trying to read something written on his retina in tiny letters. ‘I can stand there for ten minutes and nobody sees me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m invisible.’

‘Really?’ He was about to say that he found it strange that people didn’t notice her; fortunately for his peace of mind, he stopped himself in time. ‘I’d have thought that, you know, in your line of work, an assertive personality—’

‘It’s not that, I don’t think. I mean, I can stand up for myself and all that. I don’t know, maybe I’ve just got myself into the habit of being inconspicuous—’

‘So that you can creep up on dragons without being seen and stuff?’

‘Well, sort of. Actually, you try not to get in a position where creeping up’s necessary, if you see what I mean. Dragon-slaying’s not like that, as a matter of fact, not if you do it properly.’

Frank frowned. ‘Sorry if this is a frequently asked question,’ he said, ‘but how do you go about something like that? I mean, Dad talked about it occasionally, but he never went into any sort of detail. He did say he killed one once himself; a very small one, though. He sat on it.’

Emily nodded, as though this was a perfectly normal conversation. To her, of course, no doubt it was. ‘A wyvern, probably,’ she said. ‘They’re pretty fierce, but they’ve got very fragile bones. Very thin bone walls, to save weight, for flying.’

‘Ah.’

‘That’s right. With wyverns, a percussive approach is often the best way, because they’ve got an amazing poison tolerance, for their body mass.’ Frank got the impression that she was comfortable talking shop. ‘And as for shooting them, you can forget it. Their muscles have a low water content, so ordinary hydrostatic shock just doesn’t seem to get the job done.’ She paused for a moment, then said, ‘Which firm was your father with?’

‘J. W. Wells,’ Frank replied. ‘They went bust.’

‘Heard of them. But you didn’t go into the trade.’

Something had changed; and it wasn’t the sort of effect you got with the Door, where a neat, surgical intervention altered history. It was-well, rather more remarkable than that. A moment ago, she’d been— well, bewildered to start with, understandably enough, then eating busily, because death gives you an appetite and you need to keep your strength up; and after that, she’d wanted to get back to the office … Something had changed; and if it meant listening to her talking shop, because that was the sort of talking she felt comfortable with, he didn’t really mind.

Bloody hell, Frank thought.

(But by the time you think that, it’s generally too late.)

‘Me? No.’ He could hear his own voice, and it didn’t sound very familiar. ‘Mum and Dad didn’t actually like the magic business very much-they were glad to get out of it. They came into some money, you see.’

‘Oh.’ He’d disconcerted her again. Probably, not liking the profession was heresy. ‘My father was in the trade, too,’ Emily went on, and she was being careful not to make it sound like a reproach. ‘It was what I always wanted to do, since I was little. I can’t imagine doing anything else.’

In Frank’s mind, sirens wailed as the damage-control teams swung into action. ‘I imagine it can be a really interesting job,’ he heard himself say, and made a mental note to save up and buy some decent words, instead of tatty old ones like interesting. ‘I mean, you must get to deal with some fascinating stuff—’

‘It’s boring, mostly.’ Emily frowned. ‘When it’s not terrifying, I mean. But it’s half a per cent blind terror and the rest is just being in an office. Funny, actually,’ she said, after a heartbeat’s pause. ‘I’m in the magic business and I do mostly tedious, repetitive clerical chores. You travel through time and save lives, and you’re in insurance—’

‘Mostly maths,’ Frank said quickly. ‘Got to calculate the exact moment of intervention, you see. For every minute of actual fieldwork, there’s two hours of quantum calculus and probability crunching. Actually,’ he added - it hadn’t really occurred to him before- ‘it may sound rather dashing and weird but it’s just work, really. I kid myself it’s not, because if it was work, that’d mean I’m all grown-up and responsible, but when you take a long, hard look at it, it’s not that easy to spot the difference.’

Silence. Not so much a pause as a rest, like in music. You have to stop occasionally to allow the changes to take effect. ‘I suppose I should be getting back to the office,’ Emily said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

Especially the ones who’re trying to kill you? Best not to go into that.

‘Not a problem,’ he said, with a bit of grin left over from his earlier bumptiousness. ‘The Door, remember? If I try hard I can land it on a quarter of a second. Marvellous thing,’ he added. ‘Sometimes I really wish I knew how it works.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Not a clue.’

‘Well—’ She stopped. ‘I can tell you, if you like, but it probably won’t make much sense. It’s a bit-well, technical.’

Frank made a fine-by-me gesture with his hands. ‘Try me,’ he said.

‘Yes, but—’ Frown. ‘I get carried away when I start talking about work stuff. I have an idea that listening to a long speech about things you don’t understand can be a bit boring.’

Frank shook his head. ‘I grew up in New Zealand,’ he said. ‘If you live there for any length of time and you’re not interested in sheep or the movies, you learn boredom management as a basic survival skill. Also, it might be quite useful to know how the thing works, since I make my living out of it.’

‘Well—’

Actually, Emily was quite right. It was boring, very boring indeed, and she had the rare ability to reach inside a basically uninteresting concept and bring out the deeply buried latent tedium that the casual observer could so easily miss. The curious thing-very strange indeed, stranger than time-travel or dragon-slaying or mysterious assassins lurking behind suburban apple trees for no apparent reason - was that he really didn’t mind. Listening to her explaining about Z-axis bipolar simultaneous shunts was a bit like opera: you can’t follow the plot and the words are rubbish even if you can make them out through all the caterwauling, but if you relax completely and let it all wash over you like the lava flow from a volcano, it’s actually rather soothing. More to the point, Frank realised (and the realisation made him sit up in his chair as if he’d been poked in the bum with a sharp nail), he’d rather be bored by her than interested by anybody else. Which is about as perfect a definition of the L-word as you can get—

‘And that’s about it, basically,’ he heard her say. ‘Mostly it’s just Shirakawa’s Constant, but with a guidance system and stable superconductors. The only difficult bit is how anybody ever managed to make one in the first place, because of the reverse exit instabilities. If you’ve already got one, of course, then in theory you could duplicate it using—’ She paused, and seemed suddenly to be aware of how long she’d been talking for. ‘You didn’t really want to be told all that,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ Frank said immediately. ‘It was fascinating. I learned a lot,’ he added, neglecting to state what it was he’d learned a lot about. ‘Look, would you like some coffee or something? Ice cream? Boat trip down the Seine? You don’t have to worry about getting back,’ he added quickly. ‘I can have you standing outside your office door any time you like, in about thirty seconds.’ He stopped and noticed that he’d run out of words and breath. Whatever she said next, he knew, was going to be very important indeed.

‘I’d better not,’ Emily replied; and he’d been right. It was a very important, highly significant statement, easily up there with the Gettysburg Address and Ich bin ein Berliner, not so much because of the words, but because of the way she’d said them. ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘quite apart from the stacks of work I’ve got piled up on my desk, there’s this whole someone-trying-to-killme business, and until I’ve got that sorted out, it’s kind of hard to give my full attention to anything else. But—’ (It was at that moment that but became Frank Carpenter’s all-time favourite three-letter monosyllable.) ‘I don’t know, would you like to have lunch sometime? If you’re not busy or anything. So I can say thank you properly, when my mind’s not all clogged up with weirdness and stuff.’

‘Love to,’ Frank said. ‘I know this nice, quiet little Italian place in 1976. They do really good pasta, and it’s a well-known fact that anything you eat before you were born isn’t fattening.’

The Door whisked them away to Cheapside, where it opened in the side of a parked Transit van. Emily was clearly impressed by the foldaway stairs. When it was rolled up back in its tube, Frank said, ‘See you here tomorrow, then, twelvish’, and she nodded, smiled, and walked away. Not long afterwards, a door, an ordinary glass office door, swallowed her up and left him standing alone on the pavement.

The temptation to unroll his little square of plastic sheet and issue the command Here, tomorrow, twelvish was almost too strong to bear, but he managed it somehow. Instead, he walked slowly down the street, turned left and right a few times, and arrived at the entrance to Mr Sprague’s office.

‘That’s unusual,’ George Sprague said, when Frank had been shown in. ‘You came in through the door.’

‘So?’

‘Instead of the wall. Nothing wrong, is there?’

‘What?’ Frank woke up out of a distinctly soppy daydream. ‘Oh, no, everything’s fine. Just fancied the walk, you know.’

Mr Sprague shrugged, waited a few seconds, and said, ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘Oh.’ Frank shook himself like a wet dog. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Miles away. The job. Done.’ He fished about in his top pocket and produced a folded piece of paper. Mr Sprague read it, shuddered slightly, and put it in his in-tray. Then he reached for his chequebook.

‘Aren’t you going to check it out first?’

‘That’s all right,’ Mr Sprague replied. ‘I trust you.’

But Frank shook his head. ‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘I just want to make sure everything’s worked out all right. So if you wouldn’t mind—’

‘If you like,’ said Mr Sprague, and he prodded at his keyboard with a fingertip. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘No matches found. No record of any claims involving Emily Spitzer. Who is she, by the way? I mean to say, eleven million pounds. Someone must think pretty highly of her.’

Frank looked at him, then nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

The first thing Emily did when she reached her office the next morning was grab her diary and write down lunch, twelvish, on tomorrow’s page. When she’d done that, she looked at the words for rather a long time, as if wondering how the hell they’d got there. The opening of the door brought her out of suspended animation. Nobody ever knocked at Carringtons.

‘There you are,’ said Colin Gomez, and the white glare of the fluorescent strip lighting flashed off the shiny top of his slightly pointed head. ‘How’d it go? Everything all right?’

For a split second, Emily couldn’t think of what she should say next. ‘Fine,’ she managed to grunt. ‘No problem.’

‘Excellent.’ Colin Gomez loomed in the doorway like a large shapeless bag full of something. ‘Keep the clients happy, that’s the ticket. How about Mrs Thompson? Glad to get the moggy back safe and sound, I expect.’

Emily looked at him as if he was one of those puzzles where you have to find words hidden in a random jumble of letters. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t make out murderer. Lots of other words, perhaps, nearly all of them offensive to some extent, but not that one. ‘I didn’t get a chance to talk to her before I left,’ she mumbled. ‘Just got the cat and came away.’

‘Oh.’ Frown. His forehead made her think of a mop, the sort where you push a handle and it squidges up. ‘You should’ve waited and spoken to her, made sure everything was all right.’

‘Sorry.’

The mop unsquidged. ‘Never mind,’ said Mr Gomez. ‘Can’t be helped. I’ll phone her. Old biddies like the personal touch. Just rang to see if Tiddles is OK after his nasty experience, something like that.’

‘Good idea,’ she replied. ‘Actually, I was wondering—’

‘Got another job for you,’ Mr Gomez went on, blundering through the last words of her sentence like a stray elephant through a bazaar. ‘Giant spiders. Nest of the buggers, in the main computer room at Zimmerman and Schnell in Lombard Street. Turned up out of the blue early this morning and started spinning webs everywhere. Probably quite well established by now, so you’ll need rubber overalls and some kind of cutting torch.’

Emily sighed. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘It’d have been nice if they’d called us in a bit earlier, though. Those webs are a pain.’

Mr Gomez clicked his tongue. ‘They said sorry for that,’ he replied. ‘But it’s taken them this long to unravel the office manager, and apparently he’s the only one who can authorise bringing in outside contractors. They haven’t started laying eggs yet, though, so it’s not so bad. I said you’d pop over there as soon as you got back from your other job. Take a taxi,’ he said, with the air of a prince scattering gold to the urban mob. ‘Save you lugging all the gear about on the Tube.’

‘Thanks. That’ll make all the difference in the world.’

Colin Gomez nodded. Irony had a tendency to bounce off him, like gravel off a battleship. ‘Splendid. Oh, and one other thing.’

Oh for crying out— ‘Yes?’

‘You’d better take the new man with you. Show him the ropes, give him a feel for how we do things here. Nothing like plunging in at the deep end, after all.’

The final step of the escalator, the one that isn’t there. ‘New man?’

Mr Gomez frowned again. ‘Didn’t you get the memo? Oh, right. Yes, we’ve taken on a new trainee. Splendid chap, very highly qualified, we were lucky to get him.’

‘Oh.’ Emily snatched a fraction of a second to consider that. Nothing wrong with taking on trainees, of course, though the last she’d heard was that the partners reckoned the firm was overstaffed and there’d have to be Rationalisation unless productivity per capita could be jacked up to some impossible level. Still, since when was management consistent? ‘Sure,’ she added. ‘Only-well, giant spiders, it could get a bit awkward. I’m not sure it’s such a terribly good idea, taking along a novice. The client might not like it,’ she added quickly.

But Mr Gomez waved his hand in that vague of-course-Iknow-best-I’m-a-partner way she’d had to get used to over the years. ‘It won’t be a problem,’ he said, in the manner of a bald pop-eyed god saying ‘Let there be light.’ ‘Just keep an eye on him, he’ll be fine. I’ve told him he’ll be working closely with you for the next six weeks. He seemed very pleased.’

‘Six weeks?’

Mr Gomez beamed. ‘I know you’ve had a lot on your plate lately,’ he said, ‘what with the Credit Mayonnaise job and the Dillington Fine Arts business. Having an assistant’ll take some of the load off your shoulders.’

‘Yes, but—’

How could someone with such big ears be so deaf? ‘All I ask in return is that you help him get settled in, take a bit of time to show him the routines, a bit of on-the-job training, no big deal. All right? Splendid. I’ll get Julie to send him down and introduce himself.’

The appalling thing, Emily thought, as Colin Gomez’s elephantine footsteps receded down the corridor, the truly appalling thing is that he honestly thinks he’s helping me. But what’s actually going to happen is, I’m going to have to nursemaid this clown, show him how to blow his nose and tie his shoelaces, keep him from getting eaten or fried, and still find time to get my work done. And to think: when Gomez came in here, the worst I thought him capable of was trying to have me killed. You can be so wrong about people.

By way of a counter-irritant, she turned her mind back to the Mousetrap and its implications. But her thoughts wouldn’t cut into it; they kept glancing off, like a knife on glass, and sneaking back to her rather bizarre lunch hour. Frank Carpenter: every time she tried to concentrate on motives and opportunities, he kept floating back into her mind’s eye, like the people who stand behind celebrities being interviewed in the street and wave idiotically into the camera. That was disturbing, rather more so than the alleged Mousetrap or even her brush with death. Emotional entanglements-Emily liked the expression, it always made her think of brambles, coils of rusty barbed wire, hopelessly knotted balls of string: dangerous, tiresome things that got in the way, held you up and could cut you to the bone if you weren’t very careful how you handled, them. A sort of World War One scenario; even if you made it over the top and across No Man’s Land, you still had to cut your way through the emotional entanglements before fighting it out hand to hand in the enemy’s trenches. Not fair, she protested to the universe. Bad enough getting saddled with the newbie for six whole bloody weeks. Love as well as nursemaiding was just plain insufferable.

Her mind froze; then, quite calmly, she played back that last thought. There it was, the L-word, like something nasty showing up on an X-ray. Unwelcome, scary, changing everything if you let it, but if we stay calm and practical, maybe we can figure out what to do about it before the panic sets in—

I actually agreed to have lunch with him tomorrow. No, excuse me, I damn well suggested it. I must’ve been out of my tiny—

Spend too long in the magic trade, and you start thinking differently from other people. Her first thought was: J. W. Wells, didn’t they use to market the best love philtre in the business? Bastard! He must’ve laced my salad with it; only, no, both meals came at the same time and anyway, you fall asleep for ten minutes before it takes effect. All right, then, while I was in transit, between Kew and Paris, maybe there was some way he could’ve—

Or maybe, Emily told herself, you just quite liked the guy. It’s possible. Maybe (heresy warning: secure all fragile preconceptions and evacuate sensitive areas) it’d be quite nice to meet someone, have a life outside work, access a few of those human feelings you’ve been carrying around all these years, like the mysterious gadget you find in the car’s tool kit and can never figure out the use of. Maybe. It’s all very well being the job, and her job was one that demanded absolute focus and paid for it in narrow-band self-esteem; in the words of the great Kurt Lundqvist, the man who’s tired of killing is tired of life.

But.

She scowled. Something she was scheduled to do in the near future was making her feel apprehensive, and she had a feeling it wasn’t exterminating giant spiders—

‘Emily Spitzer?’

She looked up. Standing in front of her was a tall young man, ginger-haired, with glasses. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

A smile you could’ve defrosted pizzas with glared in her face. When the dazzle abated and she could see again, she was aware of an outstretched hand pointed straight at her, like a weapon. It took her a moment before she realised that she was supposed to shake it.

‘Erskine Cannis,’ the young man said and, since he kept a straight face as he did so, Emily guessed he must be entirely immune to embarrassment. ‘I’m the new trainee, and I’d just like to say how excited I am at the prospect of working with you for the next two months. It’s been—’

‘Hold on,’ she interrupted, letting go of the hand and fighting the urge to wipe her palm on something. ‘Six weeks. That’s what Colin Gomez told me.’

The tiny spasm of Erskine Cannis’s eyebrows translated as does not compute. ‘Two months,’ he corrected her. ‘As part of the firm’s trainee-induction programme. It says all about it in the brochure.’

Brochure? ‘But that’s not-I mean, I think there’s been some confusion here,’ she mumbled. ‘But that’s OK, I’ll sort it out with Colin, and—’ She listened to herself, and the get-a-grip lights came on inside her head. Sort it out with Colin; sure. ‘So,’ she said, flattening herself against the back of her chair, ‘you’ve joined the firm. Well. Good to have you with us.’

‘It’s great to be here.’ It came back at her like a tennis shot. ‘This is a very special moment for me, and I want to thank you for—’

Emily held up a hand for silence. ‘You’re not American by any chance, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Ah. My mistake. Listen,’ she said quickly, before he could start again, ‘we’ve got a job to do.’

He nodded, like someone trying to shake cocktails in his mouth. ‘Mr Gomez told me,’ he said. ‘As you can imagine, I’m pretty damn thrilled about it. Of course, I haven’t absolutely committed to the pest-control track quite yet, naturally I won’t be making a final decision about specialisation-option selection until I’ve completed all the legs of the induction programme, but I think I can say that right now, pest control’s definitely heading up my shortlist, particularly since I got a distinction in both theory and practice in my finals. Talking of which, what are your views on depleted uranium versus traditional mercury as regards exploding projectiles for ogre management?’

Contrary to what everybody tells you, counting up to three in your head doesn’t really help. ‘You stay here,’ Emily said firmly, ‘while I get the stuff. Sit down, and don’t play with anything. All right?’

‘Absolutely.’

Induction programme, she thought, as she fiddled with the sticky lock on the grenade locker in the hardware store. Specialisation-option selection. Depleted uranium versus boring old traditional mercury. The brochure-what brochure, for crying out loud? When I joined up, they stuck me in front of a desk and pointed at the filing cabinet, and it was three days before I found out where the ladies’ toilet was. Where the hell did they get this exhibit from, anyhow?

Emily stuffed two more grenades into her plastic carrier for luck, then signed for the gas bottles in the weapons register. Two months, she muttered to herself. Two months of dedication, enthusiasm and motivation, unless she broke first and killed him. After killing Colin Gomez, of course. With a Better Mousetrap, just to be sure—

She paused, her fingers clamped tight on the handle of the poisons drawer. Better Mousetraps.

She wasn’t paranoid; of course not. But wasn’t it just a teeny-tiny bit odd that the tight-fisted, cost-hyperconscious firm should’ve hired a new trainee, one who by his own admission had pest control right up there on the frozen summit of his shortlist, at a time when they should be facing an unexpected vacancy in the dragon-slaying sector? If the Mousetrap had worked-and it had never been known to fail before; in front of her eyes danced a mental image of Colin Gomez, bleating ‘Of course, we must do everything to minimise workload disruption and inconvenience to established clients, I know, let’s take on a trainee—’

Bastards, she thought. It really must be them, then.

Emily drifted across the room and sat down heavily on a crate of 105mm armour-piercing shells. That doesn’t make sense, she thought. If they want to get rid of me, all they’ve got to do is fire me. True, that’d mean paying redundancy, and they wouldn’t want to do that; but they’d find a way round it somehow, something that wouldn’t actually involve homicide. And a Better Mousetrap: complete overkill, dark and slightly hysterical pun intended.

At least it answered one question. Why had they hired this clown? Because he was all they could get at short notice.

All right, fine. They really are out to get you; in which case, vitally important to decide what I’m going to do about it, and quickly, before they try again. Resign; they want rid of me, indulge them. But that wouldn’t do; see above, under firing, ease of. Run away? Leave the country, one-way ticket to Nova Scotia, change name, retrain as an aromatherapist. Emily shook her head; so naive. In her office on the eighth floor, she knew for a fact, Amelia Carrington had a mirror that could show you anything you wanted to see, anywhere. True, she’d buggered up the central processor unit by asking it ‘Who’s the fairest of them all?’ and kicking it round the room when it flashed up Kate Moss instead of her, but even so, it wasn’t a viable business risk to assume that it couldn’t still do simple things like finding runaway employees. And there were other ways they could track her down, if they wanted to. Running and hiding were strictly no dice.

Unless—

The thought made her wince, but she forced her eyes open. Hiring the trainee was so typically them; it made it believable, real, serious. In which case, she was going to die. Again. And again and again, if needs be, until the job was done and signed off. Unless the one man in the universe who could save her was prepared to help.

Emily sighed, and pulled a face. My hero, she thought.