Read Online The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt - Free Book Online

an hour. Don’t let anybody touch anything till they’ve gone if you value your no-claims. Oh, and you’d better get someone down here with the key to the bike lock. And some Dettol and a sponge.’
    I’m probably not a very nice person, Emily reflected as she rattled back to the office on the Tube. A nice person would’ve have drawn that poor boy’s little accident to the attention of his ignorant pig of an office manager. And it’s all very well to say that a nice person wouldn’t be in this line of business, but does that necessarily follow, or am I only saying it because I’m not nice?
    She shook herself like a wet dog. Niceness, she decided, wasn’t everything. The lad chained to the desk was probably extremely nice and, if she was honest with herself, she found it hard to believe that he and she belonged to the same species.
    Emily filled in the operations report and the travel expenses voucher and attached them to her timesheet with a paperclip. Wednesday; on Wednesdays she usually had lunch with Marcia and Jane from Snettertons at the pizza place in the Strand, but Marcia was on holiday and she couldn’t stand Jane if Marcia wasn’t there to hold her lead. Am I really not a very nice person? she wondered. Surely not. I have friends-Jane, Marcia … (It occurred to her that she didn’t actually like either of them very much: one was a bitch and the other was silly, that particular blend of calculating frivolity that made you feel uncomfortable all the time. There was something gritty and sharp-eyed about Marcia when she was being silly. She was as sinister as a clown.)
    All right, she conceded to herself. I may not like my friends very much, but my friends like me. They couldn’t like me if I wasn’t basically a nice person. I have redeeming qualities. I’m calm, level-headed, sensible, honest, realistic. I tell it how it is. I don’t muck about. I have standards.
    She played that last bit back. Dear God, she thought.
    Not that it mattered. Emily’d known way back in college that if she intended to make a career for herself in pest control she was going to have to be single-minded about it. There would be sacrifices. (Suddenly she thought of the skinny young man standing on his patch of damp carpet. She smiled.) In pest control, all work and no play meant you might just stand a chance of staying alive long enough to get your money’s worth out of a month’s rent paid in advance. If you were really diligent, committed, focused and determined, you might even contrive to get the job done and still have your licence at the end of it, in spite of the vast accumulation of brain-pulping Byzantine regulations that you had to comply with in order to slay monsters legally. That kind of commitment didn’t leave much time for anything else. There was even a saying in the trade: you can’t get a life and take one too.
    Eight years of that sort of thinking does things to a person. These days, if she had a feminine side, it was probably the Goddess in her aspect as Kali the Destroyer.
    Which reminded her: credit-control meeting with Dave Hook at three-fifteen. Bugger. My cup runneth over, Emily thought, and little dribbles are trickling down inside my sleeve.
    Dragons can burn you or flay you alive with their claws. Manticores can shred your face with a flick of their tongues; harpies excel at fly-by scalpings, and their prehensile, six-fingered tails can slice the top of your head off like a boiled egg and dip soldiers in your brain. All Dave Hook could do was look at you and go ‘Tut.’
    I’m brave, Emily thought. Really I am. But the little voice in her head said: no, you aren’t, not really. Bravery is defined as facing up to the things that really scare you. Monsters can kill you, but this man can take away your job.
    Mr Hook put down the spreadsheet, looked at Emily over the top of his glasses, and frowned. ‘Tut,’ he said. She winced.
    ‘You’re doing the work,’ he said. ‘No question about