The Better Mousetrap (38 page)

Biggest-ever bauxite find shut down by dragon infestation.

Dennis Tanner was reading the same headline.

He took it well. Instead of falling off his chair or screaming, he stayed perfectly still, as if the screen was a predator who’d pounce on him at the slightest sign of movement.

The bitch, he thought. The clever bitch.

The screen told him how the vast new bauxite deposit recently discovered at an undisclosed location on New Zealand’s South Island had attracted the unwanted attention of a dragon also, by some strange coincidence, the largest of its kind ever recorded-bringing the whole project to a standstill. Because of the location’s unique geology, access to the deposit was only possible through a large natural cavern, in which the dragon had made its nest. Pest-control teams from leading firms had so far failed to deal with the problem and a halt had been called to further attempts in view of the high attrition rate (follow the hypertext link to find out more about job vacancies in this exciting sector). The implications for the market—

Dennis thumbed off the screen. He didn’t need to be told about them.

First, the wonderful investment opportunity into which he’d persuaded his wealthy but vindictive relatives to pour their money now had a bloody great big lizard sitting on it. Wonderful. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was inevitable that the world bauxite market (in which his relatives were already catastrophically committed) was poised to dive like a cormorant. A vast new source of the stuff had been discovered, threatening to flood the market, but for the time being it couldn’t be got at; so, until the dragon was dead, only a gibbering idiot would touch bauxite with a ten-foot lance, since there was no way of knowing when the new strike would finally be unlocked. Dennis turned the screen back on and checked out the latest prices in Jakarta and Brisbane. As he’d thought: for the price of a pie and a pint, anybody stupid enough to want to do so could buy himself the bauxite mine of his choice.

He closed his eyes. Dennis wasn’t a natural clairvoyant (unlike his Uncle Garforth, banned from every bookmaker’s in the Western hemisphere) but he was prepared to predict that by close of trading someone would’ve been round buying up all those worthless and unwanted mining shares, giving that same someone the next best thing to a world bauxite monopoly and, with it, effective control over that useful commodity’s selling price. After that, he had a shrewd suspicion, the dragon’s life would be very short. But by then his uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces would’ve sold out and be too busy disembowelling Our Dennis to notice they’d been had—

Bloody woman, he thought. And then, in a moment of perfect clarity, the screen inside his mind cleared, and he understood.

He jumped up out of his chair, scuttled across the room and hauled down a dusty old book from the top shelf of his bookcase. Index: dragons, prophecies concerning—

Dennis snapped the book shut, filled his lungs with air and yelled (as all good boys eventually must) for his mother.

At least thirty seconds, possibly forty-five, had passed since Erskine had walked through the wall, but neither Frank nor Emily had spoken. There was too much to say, and not enough of the right kind of words to say it with. Also, as far as Frank was concerned, there was a problem with saying things to her that he couldn’t actually hear himself. Hard to pick exactly the right words, under such circumstances—

‘Well,’ Emily said eventually.

Frank nodded.

‘I don’t like it here.’ She looked round. To Frank, there didn’t seem all that much to take exception to. It was just a suburban street, no big deal. But, he reflected, I’m used to being out of my time. Some of my favourite places are in the past: Renaissance Tuscany, Edwardian London, fin de siecle Paris. Of course, you wouldn’t want to live there.

‘Stuff it,’ Emily said. ‘Let’s go home.’

She used the word assuming that Frank knew what it meant. But as far as he was concerned she might just as well have said, ‘Let’s go to the Hundred Acre Wood and see Pooh and Piglet’; because home was one of those places you grew up believing in, until you slowly came to realise it was just a pretty story. He opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it, fished in his pocket and took out a slightly grubby envelope and a pen.

OK, that’s When, he wrote. How about Where?

‘Frank, why are you writing - oh,’ she added. ‘I see. That’s—’

No offence. Two fs in offence? But right now I’d rather you didn’t.

Emily frowned. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘whatever you like. But—’

Thanks for being so under—

‘But,’ she repeated firmly, ‘it’s-well, it’s hardly a vote of bloody confidence, is it? I mean, what are you thinking that you don’t want me to hear?’

Interesting question; and Frank could think of a lot of other questions that’d crop up sooner or later, if they spent their lives together: Do you really like my hair this way? You don’t mind if I switch over and watch the film, do you? Are you sure you don’t mind going to stay at my mother’s for the bank holiday?

Do you still love me?

He wrote: Where shall we go?

Another frown. ‘Well, the office, naturally. We’ve got to catch up with bloody Amelia Carrington and help Colin with his Glorious Revolution. Well, haven’t we?’

No, Frank thought. ‘I guess so,’ he wrote. So much easier, on paper. Then a thought struck him. He crossed out what he’d just written

‘Look,’ Emily said impatiently, ‘how long are you going to keep this up for? Because for one thing, it’s bloody inconvenient.’

- and under it, wrote: Or we could get some allies first. Dennis Tanner.

‘Who? Oh, right, you told me about him. Your dad’s old boss. But why would he want to get involved? It’s none of his business.’

‘I don’t know any other magicians. Besides, I owe him money. If I can make him think we’re going to make a fortune out of this and I can pay him back out of the proceeds—

‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘But we don’t need him. I know loads of magicians.’

Frank scowled, turned the envelope over and wrote on the back: Yes. At Carringtons.

‘All right, good point,’ Emily agreed reluctantly. ‘But I still don’t see what—’

You’ve never met his mother, have you?

‘What, Dennis Tanner’s mother, you mean? No. At least, I don’t think—’

He hesitated, then wrote: Trust me.

‘Sorry, but your handwriting—’

He frowned, crossed it out and wrote it again, this time in capitals: TRUST ME.

‘Oh.’ She shrugged. ‘Fine. And in return, you can bloody well stop writing and talk to me. Agreed?’ Frank nodded, and flexed his cramped fingers.

‘Agreed,’ he said.

Emily glowered at him. ‘Do you really want us to run away together and start a new life in Vancouver?’

‘Oh for crying out—’

‘Sorry. I was just a bit puzzled. I mean, why Vancouver?’

‘First place that came to mind. And yes,’ he added, ‘I think that’d be a very good idea, but we’ve already been into all this, and you don’t want to run away, and I respect your reasons for not wanting to, and—’

‘Yes, all right. It’d bad enough just one of you talking quickly.’ Emily shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But this means something to me, that’s all. So do you,’ she added, and it wasn’t an afterthought. ‘But the two aren’t-well, mutually exclusive.’ She paused. ‘Please?’ she added.

Frank was quite shocked at what a difference that word made.

‘All right,’ he said.

She grinned. ‘Can I have that in writing?’

‘Look, if you’re going to—’

‘Sorry. Not the right time. So, if we’re going, let’s go.’

Frank nodded, and spread the Door against the wall. ‘Mostly,’ he said, as the lines appeared and spread, ‘I want to see if he can clear up a question that’s been bothering me.’

She reached for the handle. ‘Right. What’s that?’

‘How did the Door come to be in that bank vault when you killed the dragon?’ Right on the threshold, Emily stopped. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘that’s a good question.’

‘Isn’t it, though. Do you know the answer?’

‘No.’

‘Fine. In that case—’ Frank turned the handle. ‘We’re off to see the wizard. Well, are you coming, or what?’

He thought Mr Tanner’s office and stepped over the threshold. At the precise moment when he had one foot in Sixties suburbia and the other in south London forty-five years later, he called back, ‘Please just come on and walk through the Door, will you?’

And he heard Emily’s voice behind him saying, ‘Which one?’ ‘What do you mean, which—?’ he said, and then something bashed him on the head and he went to sleep.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Frank woke up and opened his eyes. Looking down at him was the loveliest girl he’d ever seen.

She was pale and fair, with eyes the colour of clear spring skies and a perfect heart-shaped face. She was wearing a flowing white dress that seemed to shimmer faintly, and she was gazing at him with a look of pure, deep compassion. An angel, he thought. I’ve died, and—

He thought again. ‘Knock it off, will you?’ he said.

The angel grinned at him. ‘Had you going there for a moment, didn’t I?’ she said, as she transformed into a reassuringly hideous goblin. ‘Couldn’t resist. Anyhow, you’d better go in and see our Dennis while he’s free.’

Frank rubbed the back of his head. ‘What hit me?’

‘I did,’ said Mr Tanner’s mother.

‘Oh.’

‘Thought you were someone else,’ she explained.

‘Let me guess. Amelia Carrington.’

The goblin grinned approvingly. ‘You’re smart,’ she said. ‘Not like your dad, bless him. I always reckoned he was like confectioners’ custard, sweet and thick.’

‘You thought she’d got hold of the Door.’

‘It was a possibility,’ Mr Tanner’s mother said. ‘And not a risk worth taking, if you follow me. Bash first, look to see who it is at your leisure. It’s the goblin way.’

‘So I imagine.’ Frank stood up. His head hurt and he felt woozy and a bit sick. Had Mr Tanner’s mother finally hit on the elusive secret of the alcohol-free hangover? he wondered. ‘Emily’s in there already, I suppose.’

‘What?’

‘Emily. Emily Spitzer, the girl who was with me.’ A horrible thought struck him, though not quite as hard as Mr Tanner’s mother had done. ‘You didn’t bash her too, did you?’

A puzzled look in those small, round red eyes. ‘Sorry, dear, who are you talking about?’

Emily woke up.

‘Frank?’ she called out. Her voice echoed in the darkness. Not a reassuring sound. Something snagged her attention, and she sniffed.

Some smells are unmistakable.

Instinctively, she reached for her tool kit, which wasn’t there. A pity. Never go on a job without the proper equipment-it was the first rule of pest control. It’s a bit humiliating to have to tell the client that you’re just nipping back to the office for a reel of electric cable or a mass spectrometer or an RPG-7 anti-tank rocket. It’s really humiliating to get killed.

But she wasn’t on a job, was she? Her head was spinning a bit, but not so much that she couldn’t remember. She’d been with Frank. They’d been marooned in the Sixties, but they’d talked Erskine into giving them the other Door (what other Door? Skip that for now) and they’d been on their way to see Dennis Tanner, for some reason that she was sure she’d understood at the time. So what was she doing in a dark underground cavern that smelled disconcertingly of dragon?

Interesting question.

Calm down, Emily told herself. Just because a place stinks of dragon, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there’s a live one in there with you. The pong tends to linger quite some time after the dragon’s gone. This could be the strongroom of any one of a number of banks she’d disinfested over the last six months. No way of knowing in the dark, of course.

As if on cue, a light flared, showing her curved rock walls and a low rock ceiling, on which droplets of water sparkled as they dribbled down encrustations of limestone slurry. Being able to see her surroundings should’ve made her feel better, but it didn’t; mostly because the light was red.

When dragons snore, theorists claim, the plasma flares are as hot as the surface of the sun.

She listened, and heard the plop-plop-hiss of droplets of molten stone falling and cooling on the cavern’s damp floor. Sooner or later, the walls of a dragon’s bedchamber turn to glass, giving their living quarters a decidedly retro-Seventies look.

Oh, Emily thought.

Even in situations as desperate as this, it’s possible to keep calm provided you can anaesthetise your mind completely. Let’s think, she ordered herself. If there’s an unblocked exit in this place, it should be possible to locate it, even in the pitch dark, by the presence of a tell-tale cool draught. A match or lighter flame will quiver slightly, and there you are. Of course, even the slight glow of a match, combined with the smell of burning phosphorus, would wake the dragon up as effectively as a radio alarm clock tuned to Terry Wogan …

Her phone. Of course. All she had to do was ring the office, and they’d trace her by her signal and send someone to …

All right, Emily thought, weapons. Improvised weapons. Kurt Lundqvist had once killed a dragon in the vaults of the Vatican by forcing it to swallow a crystal-and-gold reliquary from its own hoard, on which it had obligingly choked to death. St John Xavier Willoughby, under similar circumstances in the strongroom of the Credit Lyonnaise in Dijon, had bashed a fifty-foot bull dragon to death with a hastily scooped fistful of krugerands stuffed inside one of his socks. And hadn’t Graziano Fiocchi poisoned the dragon in the stacks of the Uffizi with a lethal cocktail of white lead, cobalt and lapis lazuli scraped from the borders of late-fifteenth-century religious paintings?

Well, she thought, bully for them. They’d had the raw materials to work with. This dragon, by contrast, didn’t appear to have acquired a hoard. She reached out and scrabbled on the floor, but felt nothing under her fingers but grime and wet stone. The flare, she remembered, hadn’t lit up the whole place with the stunning warm orange of fire reflected in polished gold. No hoard. Very unusual.