The Better Mousetrap Read Online Free PDF Page A

it off the pavement and tucked it into a small cardboard tube, which he stowed away carefully in his inside pocket. Not the most attractive of neighbourhoods, he decided. True, it wasn’t one of those districts where you have to look where you’re going so you don’t slip on a nest of cartridge cases from last night’s drive-by shooting, but the security grilles on the shop windows and the burnt-out P-reg Mercedes suggested that this wasn’t a happy environment for a shallow, easygoing hedonist like himself. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place where you’d expect to find— But there it was, just across the road and up a floor. Over a chemist’s, he noted. How are the mighty fallen, and all that. (Mum and Dad ought to see this, he said to himself. Most likely they wouldn’t grin or snigger, but they’d feel - what? Closure, a necessary turn of the wheel. Dad, anyway. Mum’d probably click her tongue and say serve them right. Or maybe not. Where they’d gone, something like this couldn’t possibly matter. It’d be like expecting the moon to care whether Tim Henman made it through to the quarter-finals.)
    Below him something snuffled, and he felt the soft assault of a wagging tail against his leg. He sighed. He was pretty sure he’d been alone when he folded up the door, but apparently not. Or maybe (not a notion he cared to dwell on), maybe Bobby didn’t need the door. They say that dogs will travel hundreds of miles to find their lost masters. ‘Oh well,’ he said aloud. ‘Bobby, heel.’
    Immediately the dog sprang out into the road, causing a van driver to burn ten quids’ worth of value off his tyres and brake pads. It reached the opposite pavement, turned round, looked at him and wagged its tail. Stupid animal.
    The stencilled black letters in the window above the chemist’s read:
    Tanner & Co
    Chartered M
    From the way the words were spaced, you could deduce that some other letters had faded away or peeled off after the ‘M’. Frank grinned. The chartered was a nice touch. It was one of those words that the eye skidded off. Behind a word like that, you instinctively thought, works a boring little man whose services I’ll never need, and which I couldn’t afford in any case. Interest evaporates. Nobody ever lingers in the street looking up and wondering what the ‘M ‘ stands for.
    There was a side door. The stair carpet was frayed, with flat blobs of spent chewing gum fossilised in the pile. At the top of the stairs, Frank faced a glass-panelled door with a bell-push and one of those boxes you speak into and wait for it to quack back at you before you’re allowed in. Somehow Frank got the impression that not many of Mr Tanner’s customers were walkins off the street.
    He pressed the button and said ‘Hello,’ the way you do. Nothing happened. He tried again. Silence. He was just about to fish in his pocket for the cardboard tube when the box belched static at him and a female voice said, ‘Yes?’
    ‘I’m here to see Mr Tanner,’ he said.
    ‘Snark wargle squirr appointment?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Name, please.’
    Ah, Frank thought. Of course, he could always lie, just to get through the door. But from what he’d heard about him, he didn’t want to start off with Mr Tanner leering down at him from the moral high ground, and quite possibly rolling boulders as well. ‘Frank Carpenter,’ he said.
    ‘Frank what?’
    ‘Carpenter. As in woodwork. Or Harrison Ford.’
    Pause. Maybe a little white lie would’ve been justified after all. But Carpenter wasn’t such an uncommon name. Maybe they’d think that—
    Bzzz. He applied gentle pressure to the door and it opened.
    He saw a small room with grubby woodchip on the walls and flogged-out carpet tiles on the floor. There was a plain chipboard desk in the middle of it, behind which sat the most beautiful girl Frank had ever seen in his life. Ah, he thought. I’ve come to the right place, then.
    The girl looked at him; eyes like soft