CHAPTER EIGHT

For Amelia Carrington, magic meant never having to eat celery.

Today, she’d ordered in steak and kidney pudding, followed by chocolate mousse with whipped cream, with a bottle of good claret to help it down. Her father had always maintained that she ate like a man, and maybe he was right. Regardless of that, she had the satisfaction of knowing that her daughter couldn’t borrow her clothes because they’d be too tight.

She ate a mouthful of suet and gravy, and smiled. Cecily, whose weakness was cream cakes and boxes of Thorntons chocolates, relied on Effective magic to undo the ravages of comfort eating. That was all well and good, in its way. Everybody who met her saw a lithe, slender figure, so the reality didn’t matter; the only way she’d be found out would be if she happened to stand in front of an imp-reflecting mirror, an annoying Chinese invention that shows you as you really are, and at the last count there were only seven of them in London, one of which snuggled at the bottom of Amelia’s handbag. True, another one was built into the top of Carrington’s boardroom table, disguised as a really good French-polish finish: Amelia had paid top dollar for it at the J. W. Wells bankruptcy sale, partly because it was always helpful to know exactly who (or what) you were negotiating with, but mostly to annoy her daughter. Even so: Effective magic was a perfectly adequate response to Cecily’s weight problem. Good, straightforward professional thinking, if a little deficient in imagination.

Amelia, on the other hand, used Practical magic. It was a hell of a business, since every atom of surplus bulk had to be magically removed; it took a long time, and the process was inherently dangerous. Magic is strictly Boolean in its applications, and it’d be far more logical to lose two pounds by dematerialising a kidney than by stripping off small deposits of adipose fat. The point was, though, that whereas Cecily just looked thin, her mother really was thin. Another excellent reason for buying JWW’s conference table.

Amelia was just scraping the last smears of chocolate mousse off the sides of the dish when the buzzer went. Dennis Tanner was here to see her. She frowned, vanished the dirty plates, and adjusted the room slightly. Normally, it looked out over the back courtyard, a small, overshadowed concrete square where they put the dustbins out. But it’d be far cooler to have a panoramic view out over the City, so she rotated her floor of the building through ninety degrees and widened the window by six feet. Not bad, but the facade of the Credit Mayonnaise partly obscured the dome of St Paul’s. She toyed with the idea of vanishing the bank, but somebody’d be bound to notice and make a fuss, so she contented herself with raising her own building by forty feet. As a finishing touch, she turned the nice comfy old chair she was sitting in into genuine Louis Quinze, and gave the visitor’s chair an annoying squeak. Then she leaned forward and toggled the intercom.

‘Send him up,’ she said.

‘Right away. Oh, and he’s got someone with him.’

Amelia paused, fingertip on toggle. ‘What sort of someone?’

‘Assistant, I think. He didn’t say.’

Amelia frowned, then brushed the consideration aside. For all the difference it made, Tanner could have brought along a regiment of heavy cavalry. He was still small fry. ‘Fine,’ she said, and released the toggle. With a tiny movement of her head she added another chair, very straight-backed and spindly-legged; then, as an afterthought, she lengthened the lift shaft to compensate for the extra height of the building. Detail, detail, detail, as her father used to say. Well, indeed.

The someone Dennis Tanner had with him proved to be a nineteen-year-old bimbo with legs up to her armpits and an expression so vacant you could’ve dry-docked an oil tanker in it. Which meant precisely nothing, of course. It could be that Tanner was vainly trying to impress Amelia by dragging along his latest trophy PA; but, given his goblin connections, the dolly-bird could just as easily be his uncle. She smiled, acknowledging the small tactical victory. Of course it didn’t matter who he or she was, but the fact that Amelia had had to stop and think for a moment represented a point scored. Clever old Uncle Dennis. Aggravating as usual.

‘Dennis.’ Smile. The only proper response to the enigmatic bimbo was to ignore her entirely. ‘Great to see you. It’s been ages. Sit down.’ She twitched her head slightly, and a table with a large rectangular box on top of it appeared next to the squeaky chair. ‘Have a cigar.’

‘Thanks,’ Dennis grunted, flopping into the chair, taking a cigar from his top pocket and lighting it. He didn’t seem to have noticed the squeak. ‘Nice place,’ he said, wriggling backwards and forwards in the chair a few times and producing a noise like a cage full of breeding mice. ‘I was just thinking, I haven’t been in here since old Toss— your father passed away. How long’s that been, now?’

‘Seven years. And I do believe you’re right. In fact, wasn’t the funeral the last time I saw you?’

‘Could be.’ Dennis Tanner sucked in a mouthful of blue fog. She waited for it to come out again, but it didn’t. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘what’s all this about a major bauxite strike?’

The bimbo, Amelia noticed, was staring right at her. Correction: not at her in general, but a needle-sharp focus on the underside of her chin. Instinctively she lifted her forefinger and prodded furtively, but of course there was nothing there, no unsightly weal of flab she’d inadvertently missed out of her daily reduction. Another point scored, she conceded, though with rather worse grace this time.

‘Take a look at these.’ She levitated a buff folder across the room and onto the cigar-box table. ‘Taken by our satellite last week. Have a poke about, tell me what you think.’

One of the very few advantages of having a face like Dennis Tanner’s was that it was relatively easy to keep-well, not straight, it could never be that; impassive, then. Poker-perfect, not an eyebrow twitched or a lip-corner tweaked. As he ran a fingertip over the glossy surface of the photos, it was only the slightest shiver of his neck that gave him away, and she wouldn’t have noticed that if she hadn’t known him practically since she was born.

‘Could be something there,’ Dennis said, putting the pictures back on the table. Amelia cocked her head a little on one side. ‘Only could be, Uncle Dennis?’

He grunted. ‘Fairly high probability,’ he said, ‘but I’d need seventy-five-by-nineties to be sure.’ He looked up at her. ‘You can arrange that, presumably.’

She nodded. ‘Assuming it’s what we think it is,’ she said. ‘What do you reckon?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said.

‘Bigger than Wayatumba?’

Minimal nod.

‘How much bigger?’

Another shrug. ‘Fifty, maybe sixty per cent.’ He paused to draw on his cigar, and found it had gone out. Amelia lit it for him with a glance. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there’s other things to consider. How far down it is, geological formations, dangerous contaminants. But assuming it’s viable, then yes. Nice strike.’

‘Splendid.’ She flashed him a big smile. ‘And just as well, in the circumstances. I bought the land earlier this morning.’

Dennis grinned. ‘Just like your dad,’ he said. ‘Did he ever tell you about the twenty thousand acres in Zaire he bought, thinking it was diamonds, and it turned out to be a coal seam, too deep to get at?’

Amelia nodded. ‘How we laughed,’ she said. ‘Though as a matter of fact, we’ve just finished building a safari complex on it. Hotels, pools, a clubhouse. Quite a good investment, seeing as how he got the land so cheap. Coffee?’

Dennis shook his head. The bimbo was looking out of the window. ‘So,’ Amelia went on, ‘we’ve got the land, and we’re pretty sure—’

‘Fairly sure.’

‘—Fairly sure there’s bauxite in there. Well, now, you’re the expert. How should we go about this? Last thing we want to do is let everybody know what we’ve got. Once the market gets to hear about it, the price’ll go through the floor.’

Dennis didn’t reply straight away. He appeared to be thinking about it, though she was sure it was just acting and that he already knew what he was going to say.

‘Do we know,’ he asked, ‘who owns Wayatumba these days?’

She nodded. ‘New Zealand Ethical Minerals Inc,’ she replied. ‘Which is just a corporate front for a trust fund-furry animals and stuff-set up by some people called Carpenter. I wasn’t able to find out anything about them.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Dennis’s face stayed as still as Buster Keaton posing for a photo, except that the tip of his nose twitched. Probably he wasn’t aware he did that. She filed it away for future reference. ‘My idea is,’ he went on, ‘we buy out New Zealand Ethical. Then, when the new strike comes on line, initially we pass it off as increased production from Wayatumba. Use the first proceeds to buy out as many of the other consortiums as we can.’

Amelia raised an eyebrow. ‘A monopoly, you mean?’

‘With hotels on Mayfair,’ Dennis answered casually. ‘Corner the market, you can set your own price. Then, when the truth about the big strike comes out, there’s sod-all anybody can do about it.’

For a moment, a Planck’s Constant fraction of a second, Amelia was tempted. It was, after all, rather a good idea. It’d mean a huge investment, but it’d work, and then there’d be all the money in the world, and nobody would have to die after all. But, on reflection, she resolved to go with her original idea. Not that it was all that much better; but it was hers, so she liked it more. ‘OK,’ she said cautiously. ‘With you so far. What if these Carpenter people won’t sell?’

‘Oh, I think they might.’

Carpenter: the name rang a bell. Wasn’t there a Carpenter mixed up in the spectacular decline and fall of J. W. Wells & Co? That needed checking. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘For argument’s sake, let’s say they sell. It’s still an awful lot of eggs in one basket, and minerals—’ She shrugged. ‘To be honest with you, it’s more of a hobby with us. I know it was always your big thing, so naturally you’re inclined to take the broad, ambitious view. But I don’t think my partners’ll be too happy about committing so heavily to what’s basically a fringe thing for us. Sorry,’ she added sweetly. ‘Nice thought, though.’

Not a trace of a reaction from Dennis, but the bimbo smiled so broadly you’d think she was baring her teeth. ‘No worries,’ Dennis said. ‘So what did you have in mind?’

Very delicately, Amelia made herself two inches shorter and seven years younger. Time to be daddy’s little girl for a bit. ‘Like I said, Uncle Dennis,’ she said, ‘you’re the expert. Could we pretend the strike’s much smaller than it is? Then it won’t upset the price.’

Victory; a tiny gleam of a patronising grin. ‘Doesn’t work like that,’ Dennis replied. ‘You can’t keep stuff like this secret very long. Soon as we start digging, you can bet the other companies’ll have Mason and Schmidt or Zauberwerke on the case, and they can scry a photo just as well as I can. They’ll know, trust me.’

‘Awkward.’ Amelia synthesised a baffled look. ‘I suppose we could just sort of sit tight and wait to see what happens.’

Dennis shook his head. ‘Bad idea,’ he said. ‘If word does get out, the others’ll know we’re sitting on a major find, which means we could flood the market at any time. The bauxite price’d crash, and we’d be no better off. That’s why a monopoly’s the only safe way to go. But if that’s not practicable— ‘ He shrugged. ‘Maybe you should consider selling to one of the big companies,’ he said. ‘A nice little Dutch auction, maybe. All the main players’d have to join in, just to stop their rivals getting it. Nice return, no outlay, get shot of it and move on. If you’re not really into minerals, it’d be the sensible thing to do.’

He was calling her bluff. Loathsome little man. No wonder Dad had liked him. He always hero-worshipped people who were smarter than himself-his own offspring excepted, of course. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Amelia said, making herself sound just a bit disappointed. ‘It’d be a pity, though, wouldn’t it? I’m sure we’d make ever so much more if we mined it ourselves, just so long as we could control the silly old price.’

Dennis stifled a yawn; a genuine one, damn him. ‘I think you may be worrying too much about that,’ he said. ‘Even if the price goes splat, there’s still money to be made out of it. I’ve been in this business over a century, and if there’s a way of outsmarting the market I haven’t found it yet. Try being too clever and you’ll end up with footprints all down your back. Anyway,’ he added, stubbing out his cigar, ‘we don’t yet know for sure that there’s anything worth having down there. Get me those seventy-five-by-nineties and then we’ll have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.’ He stood up. So did the bimbo, simultaneously. ‘Great to see you again,’ he said. ‘Give me a shout when you’ve got the pics, and then we’ll talk.’

After he’d gone, and she’d conjured up demons to empty the ashtray and spray the room with air freshener, Amelia sat for a while and thought about her plan - no, her grand design. Clever Uncle Dennis, she thought; he’d come within a long gobshot of stumbling on the truth, and she wouldn’t put it past him to figure out what she really had in mind, given time. She’d known he was smart-he had to be, to have survived the savage office politics of JWW for nearly a century - but maybe she’d underestimated him; it made her wonder what sort of diabolical genius the Carpenter man must’ve been, to have outsmarted him and the rest of the JWW brains trust. It’d be annoying, to say the least, if he did manage to work it all out for himself. Maybe-she frowned as she contemplated it-there would have to be a tragic accident in Uncle Dennis’ near future. A probability mine, perhaps, or even (hang the expense) a Better Mousetrap. It’d be a pity, of course, because he reminded her of her childhood, and there was a sentimental streak buried deep inside her, like a small, uneconomic-to-exploit bauxite deposit. But there. Cruel world, and all that.

She’d have to think about it. If Dennis Tanner could be allowed to survive without jeopardising the project, nobody would be happier than her; if not, well. Meanwhile— Amelia snapped her fingers, and a cloud of small, burning flies appeared in mid-air. They swarmed for a moment, then split up, swirled around for a couple of passes and formed themselves into a flow chart of the project so far. A third of them turned green-things already done-while the rest stayed blue: things still to do. She studied them for a while, then disappeared them, picked up the phone and thought of a number.

‘Honest John’s House of Monsters, this is John, how can I—?’

‘Amelia Carrington,’ she snapped. ‘Is it ready yet?’

The sound of air being sucked in through teeth. ‘Ah yes,’ said the voice at the other end of the line. ‘That one. Been meaning to give you a call.’

‘Is it ready yet?’

Pause. ‘Remind me,’ said Honest John, ‘how long did we quote you?’

‘Six weeks, and that was five weeks ago.’

‘Mmm.’ A tongue, unseen and distant, clicked. ‘Could’ve been a shade on the optimistic side there. It’s the hot weather, basically. Throws out their whatchercallits, biological clocks. Hold on a tick, I’ll go and have a look in the tank.’

‘Now just a—’ Too late. Click, and the phone started warbling Aretha Franklin in her ear, apparently through a megaphone stuffed with socks. She scowled. It was well known in the trade that anybody who put Amelia Carrington on hold and made her listen to music was unlikely to live long and prosper, but clearly Honest John hadn’t been on the Cc list when that memo did the rounds. She clenched her fingers into claws, and told herself to be calm.

‘Thought so,’ Honest John said, after what seemed like a very long time. ‘Probably we’re looking at another three, maybe four weeks, call it five and you won’t be disappointed. Sorry,’ he added-very much an afterthought - ‘but there you go. Can’t rush Mother Supernature, after all.’

Amelia took a deep breath. ‘Now listen to me,’ she said (Penelope Keith and Margaret Thatcher and just a hint of the Goddess in her aspect as the Destroyer). ‘We have a contract, and if you care to look at clause 7(c), you will see that time is of the essence. Do you know what that means?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’ He sounded just a little bit rattled. Brave man. ‘But like I said, you can’t rush things in this business. I mean, you’re dealing with livestock here, not machines, and if the ewe’s not in the mood, there’s really not a lot I can—’

‘Seven days,’ Amelia said. ‘At the end of which, I expect a delivery. Failing which, I shall have you killed, eventually. Do we understand each other? Splendid. So nice talking to you - goodbye.’

It is, after all, just another kind of magic. Tell someone to do something impossible and back it up with a credible threat, and somehow it always seems to get done. It did occur to Amelia that maybe she’d been a little bit hard on the poor man, given the nature of his business. She resolved to make it up to him by sending him a card at Christmas, assuming he was still alive.

Eventually Frank decided to go with plain white with a button-down collar. It was, he felt, what George would have wanted him to choose.

He felt awful about it, of course, but what could he do? As far as being resourceful went, he was the proverbial one-trick pony.

If time travel could put it right, he knew how to cope. Other stuff-flat tyres, chip-pan fires, basic first aid-was beyond him, and he knew it. And in the matter of the disappearance of George Sprague en route from Cheapside to Marks & Spencers, Marble Arch, he couldn’t see how the Portable Door would be of any use. If he went back in time to try and prevent it, he’d have to confront himself in George’s office and somehow convince himself that he ought to choose his own rotten shirts without outside help, without actually mentioning what would happen to George otherwise. The hell with that. Even thinking about it made him feel timesick.

Feeling guilty, miserable and frustrated, he nipped back home to New Zealand, had a quick shower and changed into his new shirt. It didn’t suit him at all, and the thought that his good friend George Sprague was now missing presumed lost in time just so that Frank Carpenter could look like a waiter made him even more depressed. No, he couldn’t just leave it and hope it’d fix itself. He had to do something about it. What, though? That was the question. Pound to a penny magic was involved in it somewhere. He cursed his own ignorance, not to mention the arrogant stupidity of using magic without having the first idea how it worked. Nothing for it, he decided, he’d have to ask someone. Someone in the trade. Such as—

Well, Emily, of course.

Frank sagged with relief. Emily would know what to do. You could tell just by looking at her that she was good at her job. Besides (he felt slightly ashamed of the thought, but not enough to be put off it) it’d be a splendid opportunity to get to know her better. She’d come across as the kind of person who’d quite like showing off her professional expertise to a prospective boyfriend, a touch of the knight in shining armour embarking on a quest for his lady’s sake. Silver linings, he thought.

And then he thought, Shit, the time—

The panic didn’t last long. He took out the Door, spread it on his cabin wall, thought in the arrival coordinates and stepped out into Cheapside precisely on time, to find she wasn’t there.

No big deal. She was a busy professional, he reminded himself, she could easily have been held up by a last-minute phone call or an emergency call-out to an infestation of basilisks or something. Not everybody, he reminded himself primly, has a Portable Door. Most people have to go the long way round, via linear time. He leaned against the builders’ hoarding he’d just walked through and tried to relax.

One drawback to having a Door is that you quickly get out of practice when it comes to being bored. No more arriving half an hour early and having to kill time wandering up and down looking in shop windows; just fast-forward through the tedious, unproductive bits and cut to the chase. But he couldn’t do that on this occasion, and as three minutes became five and then ten, he started to feel distinctly uncomfortable. His feet were hurting, for one thing, from the unaccustomed labour of standing still. Also, he was sure that people were looking at him; and nobody likes the thought that maybe they’ve been stood up. Fifteen minutes: it was sheer torture, especially with the George business still painfully unresolved at the back of his mind. Even if Emily’d changed her mind and didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him after all, he still needed the wretched girl to help him find George. Bloody woman, he thought. Talk about inconsiderate—

Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty—

If it hadn’t been for George, he’d probably have given up; walked away, reset his mind and heart to zero, made a note on the file not to fall in love again, gone home. But he needed a magician to help him save his friend, and apart from Dennis Tanner, who’d be unsympathetic and either refuse to help or charge him money, Emily was the only one he knew. Frank walked across the street and into reception.

‘Hello. I’d like a quick word with Emily Spitzer, if she’s free.’

The woman behind the desk looked at him. ‘Oh,’ she said. Not on the list of reactions he’d been expecting. ‘Are you family?’ she asked.

Oink. ‘What?’

‘Are you family?’

I got all my sisters and me? No, that didn’t seem to be what she was getting at. ‘You mean, am I a relative?’

‘Yes.’

And then it struck Frank that there’s only one set of circumstances where they ask you that.

Another thing the Door had taught him was how flexible time could be. Given the right equipment, you could bypass a hundred years in a few seconds. Or, given exactly the right kind of shock, you could live a year in the time it took to blink twice.

Something bad had happened. Yes, and if he said he wasn’t a relative, they’d tell him-politely, of course-to take a hike, and he’d have no way of knowing what had happened to Emily, and he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. ‘Cousin,’ he heard himself say; then, as it occurred to him that maybe a cousin wasn’t a close enough relative, ‘First cousin. What’s going on?’

The receptionist’s eyes told him that she wasn’t paid enough to do things like this. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘She’s dead.’

Don’t be silly, Frank was about to say; and then he remembered. Apple tree, Better Mousetrap. He couldn’t say, ‘Don’t be silly, people her age don’t just die,’ because of course she already had.

She already had; and afterwards, he’d asked her out to lunch. He wriggled slightly, pressing the Door’s tube gently against his ribs. It was there in his pocket. Dead, he said to himself, right. We’ll see about that.

‘How?’ he snapped. The receptionist looked away. ‘Maybe it’d be best if you saw Mr Gomez,’ she gabbled. ‘I’ll just ring through and see if he’s—’

‘How?’

No nonsense from anybody; he was rather impressed. The receptionist wavered for a moment, and he treated her to a big stare. Apparently it worked. Frank was surprised but pleased.

‘She was killed. By a giant spider. It bit her head right off.’

‘Yes, fine, I see. Where? And when?’ he added sharply. ‘It’s important.’

Startled, she told him.

‘And you’re sure about that? Twelve forty-five precisely?’

‘Pretty sure,’ the poor receptionist whimpered. Frank felt guilty for badgering her, but it couldn’t be helped. ‘I heard Mr Cannis - that’s the new trainee, he was there when it happened telling Mr Gomez and he said twelve forty-five, I’m sure he did. If you want, I can ask—’

‘No, that’s fine. What was the address again? No, write it down for me. Thanks. Sorry, is that a P or an R?’

No time to think, because thinking would mean he’d have to address the issues raised by the words giant spider and bit her head right off. Frank had never faced physical danger before, unless you counted being driven in a beat-up old Fiat by Lucy Henderson. Giant spiders that bit off people’s heads … He found a wall, not caring if anybody saw him, spread out the Door and lunged through it.

He came out in a corridor. The carpet underfoot was deep and springy, like spring grass, with a monogram woven into it; very corporate. There was a door a few yards down, a proper door, non-portable, with No Admittance written on it. He hesitated. If that door led to the room where the spiders were, where she’d died, was about to die, he really didn’t want to go inside; unless he’d arrived a little bit too late and she was in there already—

Calm down, he ordered himself. If she’s in there getting decapitated, there was nothing he could do; he’d just have to reset the Door and come back again, this time five minutes earlier. No, not chicken, just sensible. He wouldn’t be in any position to save anybody if the spider got him. Headless chicken. Quite.

Frank heard voices; one of them was hers. Relief and joy washed out his mental processes for a moment or so, and then he realised he hadn’t figured out what he was going to say. No time for that, though; she’d just walked round the corner.

He stood up straight and smiled at her. ‘Hello,’ he said. Emily looked at him. Confused, slightly embarrassed, but not hostile - ‘Hello yourself,’ she said. ‘What’re you doing here?’

For a moment he couldn’t speak; then he remembered that if he screwed it up this time round, he could always try again. And again, and again. Somehow that made it much easier, and he felt himself relax a little. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You remember I told you what I do for a living?’

‘Friend of yours?’ Frank hadn’t noticed the man with her until he spoke. Her assistant, he remembered the receptionist saying. Mr Cannis, the trainee.

‘Yes,’ Emily said. ‘Erskine, do me a favour.’

‘Certainly.’

‘Go away.’

‘Right you are.’

The trainee retreated back round the corner; quite the human sheepdog. ‘You’ve got him well trained,’ Frank said.

Emily pulled a face. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she said, ‘I think he’s always like that. Stuck like it or something. What did you mean by what you do for a living?’

Oh well, he thought, here goes. ‘I was round at your office just now.’

‘Oh yes?’

Nod. ‘When I say just now,’ he went on, ‘I mean about an hour and a half in the future. You hadn’t shown up for our lunch, you see, and I was … Well, anyway, I asked if you were in your office and they said no. Actually, they said that you’d been killed.’

She took it quite well. True, her eyes widened and her mouth fell open like the tailgate of the lorry off the back of which all good things fall, but she didn’t faint or scream or any of the things he was fairly sure that he’d have done in her shoes. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘The spiders got you,’ he went on. ‘Apparently you’d done the business with the cyanide gas and the readings all showed clear, but there must’ve been a fault in the equipment or something, because one spider was still alive, and it … Look, do you want to hear the details, or shall I just skip them?’

‘I think I get the general idea,’ Emily said quietly. ‘Listen, are you quite sure about all this? Only, it’s a bit hard to take in, if you see what I—’

‘Quite sure,’ Frank said firmly. ‘It’s what your receptionist told me, anyhow, and she didn’t strike me as someone who’d make stuff up.’

Emily dipped her head, conceding the point. ‘So basically,’ she said, nodding at the door, ‘if I go in there I’m history, is that it?’

‘Yes. Well, not necessarily. But in the version of events I’ve just come from, one of the spiders doesn’t get killed by the gas, that’s all I know.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I guess it’s a bit like getting a peek at the question paper the day before the exam. You know what the questions are going to be, but it’s still up to you to answer them.’ He yawned. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but it’s been quite an interesting day, and I reckon I’ve had about as much as I can take without a sit-down and a rest.’

‘Well, quite.’ She frowned. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll double the gas exposure and recalibrate the Everleigh for brain activity rather than heartbeat and respiration. Will that do it, do you think?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ Frank said, just a little sharply. ‘You’re the professional. I just save you when you die.’

‘Yes, quite. Sorry.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ he said gravely. ‘Tell you what. You get on with whatever it is you’re going to do, and I’ll meet you for lunch, same as we agreed. No, belay that,’ he added quickly. ‘We can’t meet where we’d planned, I’d be there already.’

She smiled. ‘Good point,’ she said. ‘All right, how about the pub on the corner? Cumberland Arms or something like that.’

‘Fine. And if you’re more than twenty minutes late, I’ll know you’ve been, um, held up, and I’ll come back and—’

‘Try again?’

Frank nodded. If at first you don’t succeed; like Robert the Bruce and the— ‘Anyway, don’t worry about that,’ he said, rather wearily, ‘we’ll get it sorted out one way or another.’ He unrolled the Door and slapped it on the wall. ‘You don’t mind if I don’t stick around and watch,’ he said. ‘Only, I’ve got this thing about spiders.’

For some reason that seemed to amuse Emily, but in a nice way; she smiled, and said, ‘Me too. See you later, then. And, um—’

‘Don’t thank me.’ He cut her off abruptly. ‘You may still be dead for all I know, I won’t know till I get back to the present.’ He thought about what he’d just said and screwed his eyes up tight for a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, relenting. ‘Anyhow, you’ve got spiders to kill, I’d better go home and change my shirt. Which reminds me,’ he added, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask. Tell you about it later.’

‘If I survive.’

‘Indeed.’ Frank unrolled the Door and opened it. ‘Oh, and take care, all right?’ he mumbled, and stepped through into the one bleak room of his cabin. There he changed his shirt, scrambling frantically even though being late clearly wasn’t an issue, brushed his teeth, combed his hair and hopped back through the Door, which opened inside a pub lavatory. Fortuitously, the man who saw him arrive was drunk; he shook his head, as if to say he wished he’d listened to his mother, and stumbled away up some stairs.

Emily was waiting at a table when he reached the bar. He let out the lungful of air he’d inhaled in New Zealand forty seconds ago and walked over, rather shakily, to join her.

‘You’re all right, then,’ he said. She nodded cheerfully. ‘Piece of cake,’ she replied. ‘Spiders all dead. I left the waste contractors loading them onto a lorry.’

‘What about your sidekick?’ he asked. He hadn’t intended to use such a pejorative word. ‘Did he suspect anything?’

She shook her head. ‘I told him you’re Mr Arkenstone from our Salt Lake City office, and you’d just popped by to borrow a pack of detonators. He gave me a sort of none-of-my-business look and we didn’t discuss it any further.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ Frank said. ‘In that case,’ he went on, ‘if it’s all right with you, I’m going to get myself a drink.’

Emily stood up. ‘Stay there,’ she said, ‘I’m buying.’

‘Thanks, I’ll have an orange and bitter lemon. No ice.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘Alcohol in the bloodstream can turn volatile in a strong temporal field.’

‘No, I just don’t like the taste of it very much.’

While she was away, he sank back into his chair, like cheese melting into bread. Now he came to reflect on it, he hadn’t actually stopped to think since the receptionist had told him she’d been killed. At that moment, he’d known exactly what he had to do, and he’d gone and done it. Better Mousetraps, screwing up the time-lines, the implications of Mr Sprague’s disappearance hadn’t even crossed his mind. Probably, he told himself, doctors act like that all the time; except, of course, that they know what they’re doing. Big except that.

‘Would it be OK if we just got a sandwich or something here?’ Emily said, putting down Frank’s glass and resuming her seat. ‘Only I don’t feel like a big lunch. I think it’s probably the spiders.’

‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘I’m not hungry either. Zipping about in time plays hell with your body clock.’

For a moment they sat and didn’t look at each other, like two cats on a fence. Then she cleared her throat and said, ‘I’m going to thank you for saving my life now, all right?’

‘OK.’

‘It was very—’ Emily sighed impatiently. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to say, it’s not like writing to your aunt on Boxing Day to thank her for the nice soap. I’d be dead right now if you hadn’t—’

Frank shrugged. ‘It’s what I do,’ he said. ‘For money.’

‘The first time, maybe.’ She took her gaze off the salt and vinegar bottles in the middle of the table and looked at him. ‘The second time, though: did your insurance man call you up and tell you to come and rescue me?’

He hesitated. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘Though I expect he would’ve,’ Frank said quickly. ‘I mean, you’re still insured, so—’

Emily nodded. ‘So,’ she went on, ‘if you were just in this for the money, when you found out I’d been killed, you’d have waited till he sent for you, and then you’d still have saved me, but you’d have got paid for it. Yes?’

Frank hadn’t thought of that. Well, of course not. Mr Sprague was missing. But he hadn’t thought of that, either. ‘What’re you getting at?’ he said irritably.

‘Just that this time, you rescued me because-well, you wanted to, not just for money. So I need to thank you.’

‘Ah.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

She smiled. ‘There,’ she said, ‘all done, have a rinse away. Didn’t hurt, did it?’

There were no arachnides grandiformae Atkinsonii in the bar of the Cumberland Arms. Even so, Frank had the distinct feeling that he was all caught up in something strong and sticky, and the more he struggled, the worse it’d get. Better, in that case, not to struggle. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t want you to-well, get the wrong impression or anything.’

Emily frowned. ‘What, you mean like you saved me out of sheer malice, something like that?’

‘Not sheer malice, no.’

‘Got you.’ She picked the slice of lemon out of her drink, fiddled with it and flicked it on the table. ‘Shall we drop that subject and lay barbed wire and a minefield round it?’

‘Better had,’ he replied. ‘Let’s order some sandwiches instead.’

Emily had cheese and pickle; Frank opted for simple ham. The bread was slightly stale, and they came with lettuce and the inevitable ring-and-a-half of onion that nobody ever eats. ‘This favour,’ he said.

She looked up. ‘Something professional, I take it.’

‘I think so.’

‘All right. Fire away.’

Frank paused for a moment to crowd his thoughts into a huddle. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this morning, before I went to meet you, I popped into Marks to buy a shirt.’

‘The one you’ve got on now?’

‘Yes.’

Emily frowned. ‘Doesn’t suit you. Makes you look like a waiter.’

He smiled thinly. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I thought so, too. Anyway, I got there and looked round, and I couldn’t decide, so I thought I’d get George Sprague-you remember, the insurance man I do the jobs for - to come and help me. But then—’

‘Just a moment. You took your boss along to help you choose a shirt?’

‘Yes. Why? Is it significant?’

‘Probably,’ she said, in a rather odd tone of voice. ‘Sorry, you were saying.’

So Frank told her what had happened; and when he’d finished, she looked at him again and said, ‘And after all that, you went and bought a shirt anyway?’

He blinked. ‘Well, yes,’ he said.

‘I see.’ Pause. ‘Next time you go clothes shopping,’ she said, looking closely at him, ‘maybe I’d better come with you.’

‘Right. To recreate the sequence of events, you mean.’

‘No.’ Emily shook her head, as if trying to clear dust out of it.

‘Right,’ she said briskly, ‘let’s just go back over that, shall we? For-well, for reasons that made sense at the time, you took this Mr Sprague with you through the Portable Door—’

‘Yes.’

‘And he went in at his end but didn’t come out again at yours.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I see.’ She thought for a moment, then said, ‘And you’ve phoned his office to make sure he’s not turned up there?’

Oink, he thought. ‘Well, no,’ he said.

‘You haven’t?’

‘No. I assumed—’

Emily smiled, rather nicely. ‘I do that, too,’ she said. ‘I think it comes from being around weird stuff too long.’ She fished her phone out of her bag and turned it on. ‘What’s his number?’

Frank told her and she keyed it in. ‘Could I speak to George Sprague, please?’ Muffled, like a mouse inside a Wellington boot, but he heard a voice saying ‘Who’s calling?’ ‘Carringtons.’

‘Putting you through.’ A definite smirk on her face, there was no getting away from it. But so what, she’d earned it. ‘Like I said, happens to me all the— Oh, hello, is that George Sprague?’ Frank heard a grunt; Sprague for yes. ‘My name’s Emily Spitzer, from Carringtons. I have Frank Carpenter for you.’

‘Who?’

She raised her eyebrows and handed him the phone. He grabbed it and said, ‘George?’ Pause. ‘George Sprague here. I’m sorry, I don’t know you.’

‘Frank,’ said Frank. ‘Frank Carpenter.’ Silence. Emily shrugged at him across the table. ‘You know,’ he said feebly, ‘Frank. I was in your office just now. I asked you to come and help me choose a shirt.’

‘A what?’

‘Shirt. We went through the Door together, but—’ Click. Frank sat still and quiet for two seconds, then handed her the phone. ‘He’s playing silly buggers,’ he said. ‘Probably getting his own back because of the shirt thing. That’ll be it.’

She nodded. ‘He’s got a lively sense of humour, then. Practical jokes, that kind of stuff.’

‘No.’

Emily was looking at him oddly again, but this time it was a different kind of oddness. ‘So you tell me,’ she said, ‘that you saved my life because you get paid by this Mr Sprague.’

‘That’s right, yes, but—’

‘Who reckons he’s never heard of you.’

‘Yes, but—’

Thinking about it, the earlier oddness had been quite nice. Not so the new form. ‘And you turn up just now telling me I’ve been killed by spiders, but - well, I’ve only got your word for that. Well, haven’t I?’

It was a bit like using the windscreen washer on a very cold day; as soon as it hits the glass the water freezes, and suddenly you can’t see anything. ‘You don’t believe me,’ Frank said.

But Emily shook her head. ‘I know you rescued me the first time,’ she said. ‘I can remember falling out of that damn tree, and thinking, well, this is it; and then I was in Paris—’ She frowned. That was yesterday, for pity’s sake. It seemed like ten years ago. ‘And I know you’ve got the Portable Door, because we went through it. So yes, I know you can travel through space, but the time thing—’ She pulled a face. ‘Everyone says time travel’s impossible, except for the Door. You have no idea how hard it is for me to come to terms with you having that thing. It’s like… I don’t know, like looking down at the foam cup your milk shake came in and finding it’s the Holy Grail. It’s just weird—’

‘Fine. But do you believe me?’

She looked at him. ‘Well, that’s the funny thing,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. I think that either you or the universe is telling lies, and somehow I don’t think it’s you. I mean, why would you? I’ve only known you thirty-six hours, and in that time you’ve saved my life at least once. And maybe Sir Ian McKellen could act bewildered as convincingly as you’ve been doing, but I don’t think you could. I think you’re probably a rotten liar.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘See? I’m right.’ Emily smiled at him. ‘So, if you’re not lying—’

Frank had no idea why a sudden flare of joy lit up inside him when she said that. Well, maybe a vague hypothesis— ‘—Then what the hell’s happened to Mr Sprague?’