Free The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt Page A

and combination wire-stripper and fingernail-breaker, there was a siege tower, a battering ram, a folding heliograph, a scaling ladder, a high-velocity ballista capable of knocking holes through ten feet of solid rock, a caltrop dispenser, a six-dragonpower welding torch and a pair of scissors that you could actually cut things with. Furthermore, it didn’t belong to the firm. It was her very own, which meant she didn’t have to write out three pink chits and a yellow requisition every time she wanted to use it.
    ‘Pull up at the top of the road,’ Emily told the driver. ‘I’ll walk the rest of the way.’
    An important lesson, one she’d learned the hard way. Unless you know exactly what’s waiting for you at the other end, don’t jump straight out of a cab and onto ground zero. There’re all sorts of things you notice from a hundred yards away that might escape your attention if you’re too close, wrecked cars, burning trees, a six-ton adult gryphon perched on a neighbouring rooftop. As she walked slowly and quietly down Chesterton Drive, however, there didn’t appear to be anything to see, and her feather-edged professional intuition wasn’t picking up anything in the way of bad vibes. She could always tell when something was wrong; but here, everything seemed to be exactly as it should have been. In which case—
    You know you’re a professional when the hairs on the back of your neck start to crawl precisely because everything feels right.
    She rang the doorbell: Big Ben chimes, which set her teeth on edge. An elderly woman in an Edinburgh Woollen Mills cardigan opened the door and smiled at her.
    ‘Yes, dear?’
    Emily frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I think I’ve come to the wrong house. Only—’
    Behind the woman, Colin suddenly materialised. He was one of those men who manage to be very tall without achieving anything in the way of stature. ‘There you are,’ he said, in a voice that suggested that he’d had a long and uncalled-for day. ‘I was wondering where you could’ve got to. This is Mrs Thompson. This is Emily Spitzer, who works with me at the office. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better be making tracks. Clients coming in at four-thirty, mustn’t keep them waiting.’
    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