The Better Mousetrap Read online

  Green scales, she noticed. Who were they using as dragonknackers these days? Ibbotsons did a quick, efficient job but their charges were vicious. K & J Dragon Removals were quite reasonable, but they were sloppy about details such as acid leakage and blood clean-up, which annoyed the clients. (Understandable: no conscientious employer liked to see its staff dissolving from the feet up, or suddenly gifted with the ability to understand the language of birds.) The last she’d heard, Hancocks had been using Harry Fry, who was the most appalling cowboy. Zauberwerk UK were rumoured to be doing all their disposals inhouse. That made sense, given the high value of dragon-salvage. There were enough scales on this one alone to insulate a whole fleet of space shuttles.

  Under her feet, something soft. Also, something that wasn’t there. She knelt down and picked up a handful of fine white ash.

  The something that wasn’t there, she realised with a jolt that shook her whole body, was money. According to the bank, there should be— She took the briefing memo out of her pocket, counted the noughts and swore. And, as well as the cash, there ought to be bonds, securities, debentures, all that sort of thing. A substantial part of the wealth of the country should be down here, neatly parcelled up in bundles and sealed in wrappers. Instead, there was ash, and a great deal of empty space.

  She looked at the dragon. For some reason which she couldn’t begin to imagine, the dragon had incinerated all the money, every last note of it. Which was crazy. The love of dragons for cash money was, according to all the best authorities, the fiercest, most passionate emotion in the whole world. They scooped it up, nested in it, played with it for hours like happy kittens and, as far as they were concerned, nice soft paper was even better than gold. A dragon would be as likely to eat its own young as to damage a banknote.

  With the side of her foot she traced a little furrow in the ash. Unthinkable, she thought. Unless—

  She walked slowly across the floor until she was standing next to the vast contorted carcass. She studied the way the ash lay scooped and heaped into dunes around it. She put her head on one side and squinted a little. A bit like a sandcastle, or rather, a ring of sand forts surrounding a citadel. Even in its last convulsive moments, as the SlayMore dissolved its guts and burnt away its heart and lungs, it had been trying to shield something with its enormous bulk.

  What, though? She could tell from the lie of the ash that it had done everything it could not to roll on one particular spot, but there was nothing there; just a fine layer of ash covering the white tiles. Something: something so valuable, maybe, that as far as the dragon was concerned billions of dollars’ worth of negotiable currency was just more clutter to be got rid of, along with the shelves and the cabinets and the surveillance hardware. In which case, something truly beyond price. But there wasn’t anything there. Just ash and floor.

  Not my problem, she thought; and then it occurred to her that, as soon as she gave the all-clear, the manager would come scuttling down the tunnel expecting to see all that money, and wasn’t he ever going to be disappointed. She winced. It wasn’t her fault and she’d done a thoroughly professional, efficient job, but she had a strong feeling that the client wasn’t going to be happy. Never mind, she told herself. Let’s finish up and get out of here, before the ash hits the fan.

  Serpentine dentistry is a miserable affair. She got the pliers out of her briefcase, pulled on her Teflon-impregnated gloves and made a start. She had a plastic box to put the teeth in. Mercifully, they came out relatively easily, but her wrists and elbows were still painfully sore by the time she’d finished. The key thing, of course, was to make sure that you didn’t drop one…

  She clipped the lid onto the box, stuffed it into her briefcase, put away the pliers, took off the gloves. Ash powdered under her heel. The next bit, she reckoned, was going to be awkward. She took her phone out of her pocket and thumbed in the number.

  ‘All done,’ she said.

  ‘Are you all right? Is it—?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the— I mean, did it do much damage?’

  Deep breath. ‘You’d better see for yourself.’

  ‘Not the shelving,’ the manager’s voice whimpered. It was brand new last month. God only knows what the board’s going to say if we’ve got to have all new shelving.’

  ‘I don’t think you need worry too much about that,’ she said, and rang off.

  One last look back at the dragon. It was wrong to feel sympathy for it. Anything that big and powerful that allowed itself to be killed by a squirt of chemical hidden in a gobbet of liver was a disgrace to supernature and deserved whatever it got. But all that money; she’d seen yearling dragon colts fight each other to the death over a Scottish five-pound note. Burning all that money because it wasn’t worth anything, because it was irrelevant … She squeezed her brain for an alternative explanation, but there wasn’t one. The only possible reason was that it had found something else buried in the vault; something so valuable that, in comparison, money had no meaning. Even in the last stages of a SlayMore death it had avoided a small patch of the tiled floor, so as not to damage something. But she’d looked. There was nothing there.

  She was positive there was nothing. After all, she’d looked.

  Clearly, not carefully enough. Dropping her briefcase, she sprinted across the floor, kicking up little spirals of ash as she ran. Scrambling over an uplifted scaly leg, she dropped to her knees and scrabbled.

  It had burned all the money, just as it had trashed the fittings and smelted the built-in fixtures. Dragons were like that, obsessive-compulsive. When they went broody, everything that wasn’t treasure had to go. So if there was anything, anything at all, on that patch of desperately guarded floor, that’d be it, the something. A gemstone, perhaps - no, too bulky. All right, then, a microchip. What about the legendary ninth-generation Kawaguchiya sentient microprocessor prototype, which was believed to be locked away in a bank vault somewhere, waiting for the day when the global economy had grown enough to afford its existence? That’d be a hoard worthy of a really knowledgeable dragon. And it’d be small.

  Her fingernails trailed furrows in the ash. Some things are too small to see but big enough to feel. In the distance she could hear footsteps echoing in the tunnel. The manager was coming, and she really didn’t want him to find her like this, it’d lead to all sorts of awkwardness. In despair, she made one more sweep with her left hand, and touched something.

  A cardboard tube. Just like the ones you find in the middle of toilet rolls.

  Oh, she thought.

  It didn’t matter, she told herself. Whatever it was, supposing it even existed, it sure as hell wasn’t hers. It occurred to her that her motive been pure curiosity, because she urgently needed to know why the dragon had destroyed all that money. If she’d actually found it, this notional little thing of inestimable value, there was always the risk that she might have slipped it in her pocket without thinking, the way you do, and that would’ve been stealing.

  She stood up, pocketed the toilet-roll core, brushed five thousand dollars’ worth of ash off her knees and walked away. She met the manager halfway up the tunnel. He was carrying a torch and a big box file. ‘All yours,’ she said briskly. ‘We’ll send over the clean-up squad around lunchtime.’

  He was looking at her. ‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘You aren’t even singed. How did—?’

  She smiled at him; and she knew that, in spite of the hurricane of trouble and sorrow that was about to envelop him, it’d be that smile that haunted him as he lay awake in the early hours of the morning. ‘Piece of cake,’ she said. ‘We’re professionals. This is what we do.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re all covered in—’

  ‘Sorry, must rush. Another appointment.’

  She managed to keep from breaking into a run until she was out of the building.

  Nobody gets to see Mr Sprague without an appointment. Nobody.

  Mr Sprague sat behind his desk, reading. It was a beautiful desk, figured bu
rr walnut, Louis Something, with nothing on it to cover up the exquisite grain of the wood apart from three green telephones and a framed photograph of a sad woman and a plump, scowling girl in jodhpurs. The document in his hands was a report on a horrendous multiple pile-up on the A779, which was going to cost the company something in the region of twelve million pounds, assuming that liability could be established.

  Mr Sprague frowned, opened the top drawer of the desk and extracted a single Malteser from the bag.

  He’d been in insurance all his working life, and he knew that really it was just a series of bets. You bet people money that they wouldn’t set fire to their homes, smash up their cars, fall off ladders or die in their early fifties. Bets like that ought really to be safe as houses (safer, Mr Sprague thought sadly, safer) since the mark had a vested interest in losing, surely. Apparently not. Every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year, some damn fool of a policyholder somehow contrived to win his bet, which meant that the company had to pay him (or, if he’d won the bet really conclusively, his heirs) sums of money which should have gone to the shareholders, or the company reserves, or wherever profits went when he’d finished with them. Mr Sprague really didn’t care about that. What concerned him was that there should be profits; huge ones, and bigger every year. It was the only way he had of keeping score, and he had a very competitive nature.

  He crunched the Malteser and sucked the honeycomb centre. Yum.

  According to the report, some complete idiot of a policyholder had won the jackpot by ramming his nasty little red Peugeot up the tailpipe of a lorry carrying - you had to laugh or you’d cry - fifty thousand gallons of concentrated nitric acid. The lorry had swerved, hit a number of other cars (some of them expensive cars containing even more expensive people), overturned, sprayed acid everywhere; then other cars had hit other cars, which in turn hit the central reservation, blasted through it like a bullet through butter, and spread the general carnival atmosphere to the traffic on the northbound side of the road. Twelve million quid, gone with the wind. It wasn’t fair.

  Mr Sprague sighed. He was, at heart, a gambler; he knew and accepted the fact. But gamblers come in all different shapes and sizes. Some of them spend their days behind newspapers in bookmakers’ shops and sleep under the railway arches. Some of them wear fancy waistcoats with a derringer in the pocket. Not all gamblers are completely honest. Some of them even cheat.

  Mr Sprague turned a page and whimpered. The odds against a V-reg Astra leaving the road, cartwheeling twenty yards down the central reservation and completely flattening a brand new Mercedes had to be— As it happened, he was an outstanding mathematician and could calculate the odds to three decimal places, but he knew it’d only depress him if he did. He sighed instead, and ate another Malteser. There were days when Maltesers were the only thing that kept him going.

  He was so preoccupied with the report that he didn’t see the lines appear on the blank wall opposite the door. First a single black line, where a door lintel would be; then two vertical lines running down at right angles to the first one, forming three sides of a rectangle—

  He looked up, frowned; then, as a carefully buried memory broke cover and scampered across his mind, he smiled. It was a rather special memory, since it related to something that hadn’t actually happened yet. You got used to that sort of thing after thirty years in insurance.

  The outline became a door, with a round brass knob. It swung open, and a young man dressed rather like a monk stepped through it.

  ‘Hello, George,’ he said.

  Mr Sprague was old-fashioned, and didn’t really hold with the first-name stuff, except when angled downwards, from superior to inferior. It was insidious, he felt, so American that it was practically Japanese, and the thin end of a wedge whose back was baseball caps with the company logo and compulsory early-morning t’ai chi on the roof. But he was prepared to make exceptions.

  ‘Hello, Frank,’ he replied cheerfully.

  The young man grinned at him. Mr Sprague closed his eyes and moved his head just a little before looking down at the pages in his lap. They were blank.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, with feeling.

  ‘No worries,’ the young man replied briskly, in a medium-strong New Zealand accent. ‘You know me, anything for money. Ten per cent, as usual, right?’

  Mr Sprague’s face went blank. ‘Ten per cent of what, Frank?’

  The young man frowned and, when Mr Sprague glanced down at the sheets of paper, they were covered in words again. He sighed. He was pretty sure he understood how the rest of it worked, but he’d never been able to figure out how he did that.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mr Sprague said sheepishly. ‘But you can’t blame a man for trying.’ Frank clicked his tongue. ‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘But not every single bloody time.’

  Mr Sprague nodded. From the second drawer of his desk he took a chequebook and wrote out a cheque for one point two million pounds, payable to Frank Carpenter. He blew on it to dry the ink and handed it over.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘you also saved seven lives, not to mention the debilitating injuries, which included—’

  Frank shrugged. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t like that sort of stuff.’ He folded the cheque and stuffed it in the sleeve of his robe. It always annoyed Mr Sprague intensely when he did that. By way of revenge, he asked, ‘Bobby not with you today?’

  A scowl flickered on Frank’s face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I left him at—’ He stopped short as the door wobbled and a scruffy brownand-white dog bundled happily through it, tail wagging. ‘Yes,’ he amended. ‘Sit, Bobby. Good dog. Bobby, fucking well sit.”

  The dog brushed past him, jumped up onto Mr Sprague’s lap, turned round three times and went to sleep. Mr Sprague stroked its head gently and smiled.

  ‘I’ve tried taking him to training classes,’ Frank said wretchedly. ‘But it’s no good. Last one we went to he got expelled.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Mphm. Setting the other dogs a bad example.’

  The dog wriggled a little and snuggled its nose against Mr Sprague’s fly. ‘Fancy,’ said Mr Sprague. He opened the drawer again, took a Malteser and fed it into the dog’s mouth. The dog crunched it without waking up. ‘One of these days, you’ve got to tell me how you came to—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said Mr Sprague, and to a certain limited extent the look on Frank’s face made up for the one point two million. ‘Well,’ he repeated, and his tone of voice was meant to suggest that he was eternally grateful and would never forget what Frank had done for him, but he did have work that he needed to get on with. ‘Another successful mission, then. I expect we’ll be in touch again soon. In the meantime—’

  ‘You want me to go away.’ Frank grinned at him. ‘Fair enough. You know how to reach me. Come on, Bobby. Here, boy, good dog.’ The dog opened its eyes, yawned and nestled a little more firmly in Mr Sprague’s lap. ‘He likes you,’ Frank said. ‘Anybody can see that.’

  ‘Odd, isn’t it?’ Mr Sprague said. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a cat person.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Frank said. ‘Especially when there’s a full moon. Oh look, bless him,’ he added, with extra syrup. ‘He’s so happy, it’d be such a shame to wake him up.’

  Mr Sprague opened his knees. The dog dropped through them like a stone, landed on all fours and wagged its tail. ‘Mind how you go, Frank. And thanks again.’

  Frank walked towards the door in the wall he’d come in through. ‘You know what I always say, George,’ he said. ‘Gratitude and half a dollar will buy you a— Oh for crying out loud, you stupid animal, leave it. I said leave it? He sighed. ‘Oh well. Sorry about that.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Mr Sprague said amiably. I was going to get a new one anyway. Of course, that particular example was sixteenth-century Florentine, but what the heck. We’re insured.’

  Frank made a noise in the back of his throat that communicated
more than mere words ever could, and pushed open the door. The dog darted between his legs, hurled itself through the gap between door and frame, and vanished in mid-leap. It’s just as well, thought Mr Sprague, that my eyesight’s so poor these days that I can hardly see at all without (he quickly took them off and laid them on his desk) my glasses. Otherwise my brain might fool me into thinking I just saw a dog vanish into thin air. And that’s not possible. Just as well I didn’t see it, in that case.

  (He frowned. There had been all sorts of reasons why, as a young man, he’d opted for a career in insurance - earning money, acquiring wealth, getting rich, making a fortune, to name but a few. Expanding his metaphysical horizons and finding out the truth about how the world actually worked didn’t feature anywhere on the list; which was unfortunate, seeing that since Frank had entered his life his horizons hadn’t been so much expanded as blown to bits, and the truth was no longer safely Out There where he could ignore it, but roaming around inside his living space looking for him with its tongue lolling out. Nevertheless. It was Frank who’d made it possible for him to outperform his rivals and scramble to the top, in the process making him so wealthy that he genuinely no longer really cared about the money, except as the one true way of keeping track of how he was doing. And that, of course, made everything worthwhile: all the strangeness, all the unwanted and intrusive insights, Frank, even the disappearing bloody dog. Besides, he liked dogs. Not as much as cats. Much, much more than people.)

  He tried to concentrate on his work, but he was finding it difficult; not unusual in the aftermath of one of Frank’s visits. For instance: open in front of him was a thick wad of papers stapled together at the top right-hand corner, but all the pages were blank. He scowled at them. He knew that, before Frank arrived, there had been words on those sheets (bad words, nasty words) and that Frank had somehow contrived to send them away. As for what those words had been about - the last shreds of memory were stripping away like a dream upon waking, and in the time it’d take to boil a kettle every trace of them would be gone for ever. Splendid. But he couldn’t concentrate on anything else, because a part of his mind knew that by rights the full force of his considerable intellect should still be focused on a problem that no longer existed, that had never existed in the first place—