The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  “When you say trolley,” Mikael asked urgently, “what exactly do you mean?”

  “A little wooden platform on wheels,” Sophie said. “He rode around on it because of not having any legs; he lost them at war.”

  Mikael sprang up from his seat and began pacing back and forth.

  “Sophie, you’re absolutely right,” he said. “It must have been your Veteran at the scene of the crime—”

  “He’s not mine,” Sophie interjected. “That’s just the name I have for him in my head.”

  “When the commander took me back to the hotel, he was especially interested in the marks on the carpet, marks I thought might have been made by the wheels of the room service cart. But they must have been the Veteran’s tracks!”

  “I’m sure that’s right,” Sophie said. “What I still don’t understand, though, is why he’d have wanted to kill Mrs. Tansy. It’s all a bit random. Could someone else have hired him to do it, do you think?”

  “There’s another connection that might perhaps be important,” Mikael said thoughtfully. “Commander Brown thinks the medium may have tried to blackmail someone high up in the Brothers of the Northern Liberties.”

  It was easy to imagine Mrs. Tansy resorting to blackmail. She must have known all kinds of things, many of them very nasty. Perhaps she’d learned the identity of the man behind the bombings and decided to turn it to her advantage.

  “Say it’s true,” Mikael went on. “Then the man who’s being blackmailed—the leader of the conspiracy, that is—hires the Veteran to kill Mrs. Tansy.”

  “Yes, all right, but why do you think the Veteran attacked the minister of public safety?” said Sophie.

  It was all most confusing, and it made Sophie wonder how the authors of detective novels kept their clues straight. She shivered when she remembered how many times she’d seen the Veteran in the last few weeks. She had been close enough to touch him—to touch the hands that murdered Mrs. Tansy. Or for his hands to touch her. Had Sophie herself been in danger?

  “The minister’s main job is to stop the terrorists,” said Mikael. “I suppose the leader of the Brothers might have very good reason to want her out of the way.”

  “That makes sense,” Sophie admitted, “but it still leaves an awful lot out. For one thing, why was the Veteran so useless when he attacked the minister? He seems to have done away with the medium in a most gruesome and effective manner, but the minister wasn’t even hurt. A good assassin would have used a bomb or a sniper’s rifle.”

  “I see what you mean,” Mikael said, sounding pensive. “Well, then…” His voice trailed off.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way one of us could get in to talk to the Veteran?” said Sophie.

  “No,” said Mikael, “and he’d have no reason to talk to us in any case. But Sophie, what can my brother have had to do with it? Let’s assume he’s not hurt or killed. Could he have been there in the hotel along with the Veteran? And if he wasn’t, why would anybody want to implicate him by leaving the knife?”

  “Did you ever work out exactly what your brother did to make your mother so angry?” Sophie asked. “If we knew that, perhaps we could find out where he is now and what he’s doing. Then we’ll know how his knife came to be there.”

  “Oh, it’s too stupid for words,” said Mikael. “Nobody but my mother would have made such a fuss; Aunt Solvej told me the whole story the other day. My brother’s spent the last four years working for a pharmaceutical company in Stockholm, but it turns out that recently he left that job for a new one with the Nobel Consortium, even though our mother told him she’d never speak to him again if he took a job working for Nobel.”

  “The Nobel Consortium?” Sophie said, surprised. “But they’re quite respectable! They sponsor a conference my great-aunt goes to every summer in Finland, the International Society for the Promotion of Peace.”

  “Yes,” said Mikael, “but the Consortium’s got a pretty sketchy reputation these days, in Scandinavia and the Baltic states at least. You see, it’s so wrapped up now with the dynamiteurs and the munitions companies that some people say it’s lost sight of its original goal of keeping the peace. The Consortium was implicated in the death of Norway’s prime minister last year—”

  “The man who said there was no point in the Hanseatic states adhering to the Geneva Conventions?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Dead as a doornail. Poisoned. And the Consortium’s definitely had a hand in the deaths of a few French industrialists. Aunt Solvej says my mother has convinced herself that my brother’s joining the Consortium is tantamount to his becoming a murderer himself.”

  Mikael fell silent.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Sophie said firmly. “Just because the Consortium’s unscrupulous doesn’t mean your brother’s done anything wrong. I’ve never met your brother, but I’m sure he hasn’t suddenly turned into a murderer.”

  Then she thought of something else.

  “Do you remember the commander saying that the medium was probably somehow connected to Nobel,” she asked Mikael, “as well as to the Brothers of the Northern Liberties? Couldn’t your brother have been there at the hotel to see her on perfectly legitimate business, and left the knife by accident? And don’t say it,” she added when Mikael showed signs of interrupting, “I know you said it wasn’t there before, but when things fall into the cracks of a couch, the ordinary rules of matter in the universe don’t exactly apply.”

  “Whatever it is,” said Mikael, “I must find him. I wouldn’t cover for him if he did it; if he cut that woman’s throat, he must have completely lost his mind. But I don’t think he did anything of the sort. I’m afraid he’s in trouble.”

  Sophie’s thoughts had gone off on another track.

  “What we must do first, then,” she said, “is find the person who commissioned the Veteran to kill the medium—”

  “We don’t know that someone commissioned him,” Mikael interrupted.

  “—because that way we also learn who’s behind the Brothers of the Northern Liberties,” she finished up. “Then we can stop the attacks, and perhaps save hundreds of lives.”

  “Sophie, that’s not our problem! The intelligence officers are working around the clock to arrest the terrorists. What can we do that they can’t perform a million times better?”

  Sophie struggled to explain. “It’s not just the bombs themselves that are so dangerous,” she told Mikael. “I promised my great-aunt I wouldn’t tell anybody, so you must keep this a secret, but it seems that the Brothers of the Northern Liberties may be secretly accepting money from the European Federation.”

  “What?” said Mikael, looking at Sophie as if she’d lost her mind.

  “It’s quite true,” said Sophie. “And you see what that means. If it’s proven, Scotland’s got the right to force the other Hanseatic states to declare war on Europe.”

  “But that would mean—”

  “Yes,” said Sophie. “Death and destruction on a scale greater perhaps even than the Great War. We can’t imagine it.”

  “All right, then,” Mikael said, rolling his eyes. “It’s not much of a job, is it? I’ve got to find my brother—who could be anywhere in the Hanseatic states—and prove he didn’t commit murder. You’ve got to work out who hired the Veteran, bring that person to justice, track down the terrorists, and cover up Europe’s part in the business so as to stop Scotland from going to war. Have I left anything out?”

  “You can poke fun all you like,” said Sophie, wishing she dared tell him about IRYLNS as well—but IRYLNS didn’t even bear contemplating. “We may not be able to pull it off, but we must try.”

  She jumped when Mikael whacked the naked branch hard against the back of his hand.

  “Sophie, I’m really worried about my brother,” he said.

  The savage unhappiness in his voice gave Sophie a pain in her insides. If Mikael’s brother had been anywhere near that suite in the Balmoral, he probably was in big trouble. Sophie wished she
could tell Mikael that she was sure his brother was all right, but there was no point saying something she only half believed.

  “You know, Sophie,” he added, “if you really do have any rapport with spirits, now might be the time to start calling in a few favors…maybe they can give you some information that will help sort things out. Or at least find my brother for me!”

  “I must get back,” she said hopelessly. She couldn’t tell whether he was joking about the spirit business. “I’ll find out whatever I can.”

  Mikael put his hands together and gave Sophie a leg up to the top of the garden wall.

  “Will I see you this weekend?” he asked.

  “I’ve got an awful lot of homework,” Sophie said doubtfully. “Also Great-aunt Tabitha’s not likely to let me go out for long; I’m still being punished. Shall we meet on Saturday afternoon next weekend?”

  “Where?”

  “You wanted to see the Hanseatic Exposition, didn’t you? Why don’t we meet at half past one in Jawbone Walk?”

  “What a strange name!”

  “Someone put up an enormous whale’s jawbone there, an arch tall enough to walk through. It’s in the Meadows just south of the university.”

  “All right,” said Mikael. “But phone me if anything else comes up in the meantime, all right?”

  Sophie nodded, but she didn’t look back as she went over the wall and returned to the tennis courts to watch the last set. Nan and Jean’s crushing defeat of Harriet Jeffries and a sixth-form girl called Marjorie gave Sophie great satisfaction, especially when Harriet greeted the final score by slamming her expensive new racket to the ground and storming off the court.

  Back at school, Sophie let herself into the balance room with the key Mr. Petersen had had cut for her and waited for him to arrive and show her what he needed her to do today.

  Ten minutes later, he still wasn’t there. She checked her watch and racked her brain to see whether she could possibly have misremembered the time of their appointment. Most likely the teacher had simply forgotten.

  It was stupid of her to feel so completely crushed with disappointment.

  She decided to leave Mr. Petersen a note to let him know she’d been here. The trick would be to write it in a way that didn’t sound at all reproachful or upset. She looked about for pencil and paper. The top drawer of the desk stood halfway open, and she pulled it a little further out. Surely Mr. Petersen wouldn’t mind.

  There was the distinctive dark green passport recently adopted by all of the Hanseatic states.

  She knew she shouldn’t look at Mr. Petersen’s private papers. She really shouldn’t look at them.

  But if she looked at his passport, she could find out his birthday and see what he looked like when he was younger. She could see if he had a middle name she liked better than that awful Arnold.

  Surely it could do no harm to take a quick peek.

  Knowing she was doing something that was enough to get her expelled from school if she was found out, Sophie drew a deep breath and flipped open the passport.

  The first thing she noticed was the date. Mr. Petersen had been born on the fifteenth of January 1912. That meant he was twenty-six, only eleven years older than Sophie.

  The next thing she noticed was an anomaly. She had assumed Mr. Petersen must have been born in Scotland. But his national affiliation was marked as Swedish. In fact, his first name as it was given here wasn’t Arnold at all, but the much more Scandinavian-sounding Arne!

  There was nothing inherently suspicious about being called Arne or having been born in Sweden, but why was Mr. Petersen passing himself off at school as a Scottish person?

  She flipped through the pages, and was even more alarmed to find them stamped full of visas and entrance permits to all of the Hanseatic countries. Why, it seemed as though he had traveled to Sweden alone at least half a dozen times since he’d begun teaching in Edinburgh—almost every single weekend! And yet he’d never said a word about it.

  There was only one conclusion. Mr. Petersen was not what he seemed.

  He can’t be connected to the bombers, Sophie said to herself, hands sweating as she pushed the drawer closed to exactly where it had been before. He simply can’t.

  But taken in conjunction with his fixation on explosives, the evidence of the teacher’s journeys seemed rather more alarming. Might he even, like Mikael’s brother, have some connection with Nobel, whose name was virtually synonymous with Sweden?

  In the end Sophie decided not to leave a note. She locked the door behind her and raced down the hall to the refectory. All through supper, she tormented herself about what she should do.

  If there was any chance that Mr. Petersen was the bomber, she had to find out. The lives of others were at stake. But if Mr. Petersen was mixed up with the terrorists, it wouldn’t be safe to confront him directly.

  In class Friday morning Sophie couldn’t keep herself from examining Mr. Petersen for signs of treachery. She felt the strangest mix of feelings for him: admiration and love muddled up with fear and suspicion and guilt. She broke a beaker when she caught him gazing at her, and hardly noticed when the others teased her about it at lunch.

  The solution came to her halfway through the meal.

  Sophie couldn’t risk confronting Mr. Petersen in person, and even all those visas in his passport wouldn’t serve as grounds for taking her suspicions to the police. What if he were perfectly innocent?

  The people who really had the answers she needed—the medium, the suicide bombers—were all dead. They would be able to tell her whether Mr. Petersen had any part in the business, and what the medium knew that got her killed, and possibly even where Mikael’s brother might have got to.

  Everybody knew that radios could capture transmissions from the spirit world. It happened all the time; indeed it was often most inconvenient. Surely it couldn’t be hard to tune in to the particular voice one wanted?

  In school the year before they had built a proper wireless set, with valves and everything. Sophie knew it would be far simpler just to put together the essentials with a pair of headphones. She would get the things at the ironmonger’s after school and build the apparatus over the weekend at home.

  She still didn’t know what to do about IRYLNS. But working out what exactly had happened to the medium and whether it had something to do with the Brothers of the Northern Liberties seemed like Sophie’s moral responsibility. And if she could clear Mikael’s brother, not to mention find out why Mr. Petersen had bothered to conceal his identity and how the stick of dynamite had come into his possession, she’d really be doing well.

  Feeling for the first time in weeks that she had actually taken charge of her own life, Sophie tore a piece of paper out of her exercise book and began to make a shopping list: the shiny metal lump called a crystal, the length of wire known as a cat’s whisker.

  Everything needed to build a radio for receiving the voices of the dead.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SOPHIE WAS NOT INVITED to join that Friday evening’s séance, an omission she took as a reprieve in the guise of punishment. Instead, she locked the door of her room from the inside and took out the kit she had purchased that afternoon on her way home from school, an assortment of odds and ends in a tin the size of a cigarette packet. The bright red tin said MIGHTY ATOM in lurid yellow capitals; it included tweezers and directions, as well as the galena detector crystal and the cat’s whisker for the semiconductor junction.

  The directions in the kit could not have been simpler. Sophie had already fashioned a coil with a slider that would let her tune the apparatus to different frequencies, and she had a flimsy set of headphones left over from a similar project—similar but non–spirit contacting—the year before. She fiddled with the parts until she had successfully installed the crystal inside a brass eggcup borrowed from the kitchen, then connected it to the iron springs of her bed (which would double as an antenna) and grounded it to the lightning rod outside the bedroom window.

&n
bsp; They had learned about Marconi waves and other electromagnetic phenomena the year before at school. Thanks to Hertz, Tesla, and the other pioneers of wireless telegraphy, one could tune across the whole Marconi spectrum to a huge array of programs broadcast on different frequencies, and here and there spirit voices found a wavelength that would carry their words back to the world of the living.

  Headphones on, everything in place, Sophie tried running the slider back and forth along the coil. She caught snippets of speech, including a woman talking about how to get rust stains out of linen and a man speaking in heavily accented English about something called the death drive. She stopped to listen: it was the great underground Marconi guru Dr. Sigmund “Thanatos” Freud, who broadcast an illegal show out of Hansestaat Hamburg that was picked up and redistributed on local frequencies by pirates all over the Hanseatic states and Europe.

  Sophie wasn’t staying up past her bedtime, though, to listen to the learned but peculiar ramblings of Dr. Freud, who proposed a new psychology of desire, in which he postulated that the denial of longing damaged one’s mental and physical health. She had assembled a small pile of things to help her. From the bundles of old newspapers in the coal cellar, Sophie had obtained a decent collection of clippings about the attacks in Canongate and Princes Street.

  She was a little scared of touching the medium’s thoughts—and of what might happen if she invited such a powerful personality back into the world of the living. She had decided as a result to start instead by trying to contact the two most recent suicide bombers. If the dead bombers knew anything about their leaders, there was surely no reason they shouldn’t tell it to Sophie. And unlike Mrs. Tansy, these men had chosen to die, making it less likely they would latch on to Sophie in anger and try to drain the life out of her, a form of attack known to have been attempted by spirits wrenched unwillingly from the world.

  The dead lingered for some time where their lives had been lost, particularly when they died violently. She would try to reach the Canongate bomber first. She had been so close when it happened, and in a sense the bomber had actually spilled her own blood (her fingers went to the tiny scar on her forehead), giving her a personal connection to him. She had obtained several bedraggled flowers from the memorial at the site and a fragment of broken glass from the chemistry classroom, plus the grubby sticking plaster Matron had put on her cut the day of the explosion.