The Better Mousetrap Read Online Free PDF Page B

cousins,’ he said.
    ‘That’s right. You met my mum on the way in, of course.’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    Mr Tanner leaned back in his chair. ‘She was very keen on your dad at one time, my mum. Which is the main reason I sent him to bloody New Zealand.’ The eyes flared with fear and hate. ‘He’s not come back, has he?’
    Frank shook his head.
    ‘Still over there, then.’
    Frank pursed his lips. ‘I did say it’s complicated,’ he replied. “But as far as I know, he’s got no plans to come back to this country again. Ever.’
    Mr Tanner sighed, from his boots up. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘All right, I can start breathing again. So,’ he added, lighting a new cigar from the stub of the old one, ‘tell me all about it.’
    There was no need to give Mr Tanner the full version. He knew better than anyone how Paul Carpenter, Frank’s father, had gone to work for J. W. Wells & Co, at that time the leading firm of sorcerers and magical practitioners in the City of London; how, once he’d found out what JWW actually did (he’d originally assumed that they were in shipping or commodities or something), the only reason he’d stayed on was that he’d fallen in love with Sophie, the other junior clerk; how he’d accidentally come into possession of the Acme Portable Door, a wonderful but dangerous gadget that allowed you to travel anywhere in time and space just by unrolling it and pressing it against the nearest available flat vertical surface; how Paul had had the wretched bad luck to get locked in a life-and-death struggle with most of the firm’s partners, one by one, and had incredibly prevailed, saving the human race and the fabric of the universe while he was at it but ruining the firm’s business in the process. None of that, Frank figured, was Mr Tanner likely to have forgotten.
    Instead, he concentrated on what had happened after Paul and Sophie had retired to New Zealand, where they’d acquired (by way of a murderously begrudged gift from JWW) the world’s biggest and most profitable bauxite mine. For a while, Frank explained, they tried to live a normal happy life with nothing but each other and an unimaginable amount of money. After twenty-nine years—
    ‘Hold it,’ Mr Tanner interrupted, with a bewildered expression on his face. ‘That’d be twenty-six years into the future, right?’ Frank nodded. ‘Though from my perspective, of course, it’s three years ago, although—’
    ‘Do I look like I’m remotely interested in your bloody perspective?’
    After twenty-nine years of putting up with a lifestyle neither of them liked very much but which they endured because they thought the other one liked that sort of thing, they came to a decision. Using the Portable Door one last time, they took a trip to a place and time that only the Door could reach, waved an embarrassed and slightly weepy goodbye to their son, and told him to peel the Door off the wall.
    It had, of course, been a traumatic parting, but Frank had managed to drag himself through it, ever so slightly buoyed up by the thought of inheriting the bauxite mine. It was only a few days later that he found out that one of his parents’ last acts in this reality had been to make over the mine, the company and their goose-liverpate-bloated bank account to the New Zealand Trust for Wildlife Conservation. It had been, the lawyer explained, his mother’s idea. She knew how much Frank cared about the environment and our natural heritage. She was sure he’d be secretly pleased.
    Best-kept secret in human history. After spending a month vainly trying to use the Door to reach his parents’ pocket reality, he gave up and considered his position as dispassionately as he could. He had no money, no home (the vast Carpenter mansion he’d grown up in was now the official residence of the Chairman of Trustees, whose first move on taking possession had been to grub up Sophie’s thirty-acre endangered orchid nursery and turn it into tennis