The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt Page A

take care not to lose it. There, you see? Nothing to worry about. Go home.
    He stepped through the Door, closed it behind him and caught it as it rolled down his bedroom wall.
    You could call it home, but only like estate agents call Swindon the Cotswolds. Really, it was just a shed; to be precise, a temporary shelter for shepherds during the summer grazing season in one of the remotest parts of New Zealand’s North Island. Frank had chosen it precisely because it was miles from anywhere, or anyone. The sheep station it had originally belonged to had been derelict since the mid-twentieth century. Nobody came here, not even the movie people; it was practically the only place on the island that hadn’t doubled for Rohan or the Shire. He’d bought it, all legal and above board, just to be on the safe side, but he needn’t have bothered. Nobody else in the world could possibly live there, except the owner of the Portable Door.
    He kicked off his shoes and flopped down on the bed. He had a job to do, but he couldn’t summon up the energy. Not like him at all. His motto had always been there’s no time like the present completely meaningless for him, of course, but nevertheless. Mostly it was just that he hated sitting still. That was why he’d chosen the hut; it was an ideal home for someone who was always out. He yawned.
    This is no good, he told himself. You’ve made the decision, and now there’s a poor dead girl out there for you to bring back to life. Get up. Busy busy.
    Frank closed his eyes. Something was missing and until he’d worked out what it was and got it back, he wasn’t going to feel right. Once again, he toyed with the rather appalling notion that it might just be the dog, but mercifully that didn’t ring true. Not the dog; but possibly something not totally dissimilar. Something that was always there. Something that followed him about, whether he liked it or not.
    It could well be something like that; except that his life didn’t contain anything that fitted that description. He had no bodyguards, disciples, groupies, cameramen or sound crews. As far as he knew he wasn’t being tailed by the police or the CIA or even the VAT people. His defining characteristic was that he was a table for one. So that couldn’t be right, could it?
    Forget it, he told himself as he opened a cupboard and took out a plate and a spoon and dropped them into a carrier bag. Can’t be important. Let’s get this job of work done and out of the way, and then-well, then there may be another job to do, and George Sprague was very good at keeping him busy. The main thing was not to stop too long in any one place, or any one time. My life, he decided, is the very antithesis of a posh restaurant. Absolutely no ties.
    He picked the Door out of its tube with the nails of his thumb and forefinger, and slapped it onto the wall. The familiar outlines spread and grew a third dimension. He concentrated on the target location and turned the handle.
    One thing Frank found hard to predict, even when entering a place he knew well, was what the Door would choose to open out of. Nine times out of ten it was a wall; other useful surfaces included billboards, hoardings, road signs, cliff faces. Once he’d had to materialise in the middle of the Gobi Desert, no vertical surfaces in ten square miles. On that occasion, the Door had turned into a manhole cover, and he’d had something of a shock when he’d tried to walk through it and tumbled head over heels into the sand. This time it was reasonably straightforward. He stepped out of a doorway in a garden fence onto a flower bed.
    There in front of him was an apple tree, with a ladder leaning against its branches. The object of his mission wasn’t hard to spot. She was halfway up the ladder, stretching out her arm towards a fat, annoyed-looking cat. Frank cleared his throat and said, ‘Excuse me.’
    She didn’t look down. ‘Yes?’ she snapped, in a go-away-I’mbusy voice.
    ‘Excuse