The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  The Canongate bomber’s name was Andrew Wallace, his age nineteen, according to the newspapers, which also told Sophie his place of birth was Lanarkshire. Andrew had lost his father to the Great War and his two best friends to the government, the first dying overseas with the army, the second arrested for demonstrating in favor of the No Conscription Act and suffering a fatal asthma attack during his prison interrogation.

  Sophie closed her eyes, touched the scrap of bandage to the cat’s whisker, and let everything empty out of her thoughts. Andrew had loved football as a boy, hoped to be a car mechanic, and was fond of animals. A scene swam into focus in Sophie’s mind: the black Labrador puppy called Fido, a present for Andrew’s seventh birthday, now grizzled and slow and unable to understand the loss of his master. It was disgustingly sentimental, like something in a women’s magazine, but Sophie couldn’t help being moved. She saw the empty bedroom in his mother’s little house, a football trophy on the chest of drawers. On the bedside table, a collection of childhood treasures, things prettier than a boy like this might be expected to have: a glass paperweight blooming inside with blue and yellow flowers, a diode of rose quartz, a piece of green glass polished by sand and sea until it was the perfect shape for holding in one’s hand.

  Somehow Sophie knew that the pebble had lived in Andrew’s pocket and spent many hours in the warm hollow of his palm. Looking with her inner eye, she reached out for the pebble with her left hand and could almost feel it settle into place, her right hand steady all the while on the tuner.

  Suddenly she felt herself there with Andrew in Canongate, right in front of a shop window full of tartan. Andrew was feeling reflexively in his pocket for the piece of green glass, heart leaping into his mouth when it wasn’t there, then remembering he’d left it at home on purpose so that it wouldn’t be blown to bits with the rest of him.

  He raised a hand—naked without the pebble—to wipe away the sweat from his forehead.

  Then he reached for the detonator.

  “Speak to me, Andrew,” Sophie said out loud, brows crunched in concentration, clutching the pebble so tightly that her fingers began to hurt. “Speak to me. Tell me what happened. Who’s behind it? Andrew, did someone talk you into doing this?”

  The scene before her froze: Andrew, trapped just an instant before the explosion.

  She had to keep him there; she was afraid she might be blown up right along with him if she let time move forward.

  “Talk to me!”

  She slid the tuner slowly along the coil and paused when she heard something, a low murmur that resolved itself into words.

  “It’s worth it,” the voice said over the headphones, sounding uncertain and unhappy. “Just remember why you’re doing this. Remember Tim. Remember Tommy. This is for the two of them, and for all those others the government’s killed. I’m doing it for them.”

  “Andrew,” Sophie whispered intently. “Who helped you do it? Who gave you the explosives? Who set you up?”

  The voice continued as if Sophie hadn’t spoken.

  “It’s for them. Joining the Brothers of the Northern Liberties. Training for the mission. It’s all for them. I won’t live myself to see the Free Zone, but others will. The Free Zone. The Brothers.”

  Sophie feared she hadn’t allowed for a proper mechanism to get her words to the dead boy. “Andrew, who were the others?” she said, trying to shoot the question at him like an arrow across the moat separating life from death. “Who’s behind it all?”

  “Cells. They’ve got us in cells so we won’t know the others and bring them into danger. My team leader’s Duncan, Duncan from Fife, Duncan the baker’s boy. But Duncan’s dead now. Dead, dead, all dead.”

  Sophie remembered that one of the bombers who killed himself in April had been called Duncan MacDonald.

  “May his soul rest in peace,” she whispered to herself, her lips barely moving.

  “Duncan’s dead, Tommy’s dead, Tim’s dead,” said the voice, gone softer now and sort of quavery.

  She knew she hadn’t much longer before the spirit of Andrew Wallace would retreat to the faraway place.

  “Andrew,” she said, speaking now in her full voice, her hand shaking with the strain of holding the slider in the right position. “Andrew, it’s too many dead. Do you hear me? Too many dead. I need to find the person who’s behind this and stop him. Not Duncan. The big one, the one who tells everybody what to do. We’ve got to stop this. Enough people have died already.”

  “Green glass,” said the voice. “Green glass?”

  Sophie knew she must be imagining it—the sound quality was poor, and spirit voices were not known for their emotional range—but she heard puzzlement in the Marconi waves.

  “Duncan saw my lucky piece,” the voice continued. “Green glass. The person’s eyes were glassy green, he said. And me pestering him for a clue about our leader. Green as glass. Where’s my lucky piece now? Where’s…”

  As the voice faded in and out, Sophie desperately sent thoughts of warmth and reassurance to the frantic disembodied spirit. Before long, though, whatever had been present was completely gone, lost in the atmospheric tangle of electromagnetic waves.

  She fiddled with the tuner, but Andrew Wallace was no longer anywhere to be found.

  It was past midnight, and Sophie felt bone-tired as she relaxed out of the position she’d held for the past hour, crouched over the apparatus and straining so as not to miss a single whisper of sound through the headphones.

  Finding her left hand still clenched into a tight fist, she opened it and her heart seemed to skip a beat.

  The green glass pebble lay in her palm, warmed to the exact temperature of her skin.

  TWENTY-TWO

  WAKING BLEARY-EYED on Saturday morning, Sophie drank a huge mug of tea and ate a piece of toast in the kitchen, then took her schoolbooks into the dining room, where she worked doggedly through a huge pile of homework. Peggy was away for the weekend at her second cousin’s wedding in Kirkcaldy, both maids had been given the day off, and Sophie was in charge of meals.

  After a supper of scrambled eggs and toast, Sophie climbed the stairs to her room, where she turned the key to lock the door and then retrieved the elements of the crystal set.

  She thought she’d learned as much as she could from poor dead Andrew Wallace, and besides, she couldn’t bear the idea of disturbing him again. The man who’d set off the bomb in Princes Street was a twenty-three-year-old engineering student called Malcolm Black, and Sophie had a few clippings and one of the dead flowers from the memorial (the one she’d picked up that day with Jean outside the electric showroom) to focus her tuning.

  This time it wasn’t nearly so easy, and she started to wonder if her success the night before had been beginner’s luck. She focused like mad on Malcolm Black, repeating the name to herself until the syllables stopped making sense. She had a faint perception of presence, but it was as if the bomb had pulverized Malcolm Black’s psyche along with his body.

  More than half an hour passed before Sophie began to detect a pattern to her failures. Both times that she’d almost reached Malcolm, the same voice had cut in over his, a voice whose timbre and accent suggested a working-class man, perhaps middle-aged or even elderly.

  There was something familiar about it, she thought. Could this be the voice of someone she had actually met? Someone who wanted to speak to her now?

  She put aside all thoughts of Malcolm Black and concentrated on the new voice.

  With a little adjustment, she found the place on the Marconi spectrum where it came through most clearly. Holding the tuner in place, she sent her own psychic energy to the unknown spirit.

  Suddenly the words snapped into focus, no longer garbled. “Ma money,” the voice said. “Where’s ma money?”

  And in a flash, Sophie knew who it was. It was the Veteran, who had been asking Sophie for money for years, every Friday afternoon, until he’d been taken away the week before, and who had called out something very
similar as he attacked the minister at Waterloo Day.

  But the Veteran wasn’t dead! He was very much alive, held in a cell at the Castle. Could being imprisoned in a dark cell let a spirit fly free of its body?

  She decided to venture a question.

  “What money?” she said. “Was it your pension? Or did you get paid to kill the medium? Why were you at the Balmoral, and who paid you to murder Mrs. Tansy?”

  “Ma money,” the voice repeated. “Where’s ma money?”

  “Who paid you to kill the medium?” Sophie said.

  “They took away my pension, and they said I’d not regret it,” the voice said, falling into a four-beat line like something out of a poem.

  “Who?” Sophie said impatiently. “Who was it who said you’d not regret it?”

  “They said I’d not regret it,” the voice said, sounding less certain than before. “They took away my pension. They gave me an assignment.”

  “What was it?” Sophie asked.

  “They gave me an assignment, and they said I’d not regret it,” said the voice, words falling into the same four-beat rhythm as before.

  “What assignment?” she said.

  “They told me the Balmoral,” said the voice.

  The promptness and precision of the response took Sophie so much by surprise that she lost hold of the tuner and had to fiddle about for a few agonizing seconds before finding the place again.

  “—told ’em I was skint, and neither of ’em wanted to know,” said the voice.

  Sophie could have kicked herself. She’d missed the whole substance of his answer, with no guarantee she’d be able to get him to repeat it!

  “And I said to him,” the voice went on, in full flow, “‘But where’s ma money? Where’s ma bloody money? You’ve no idea what it means these days, to live from week to week on a fixed income.’ And so I took the other lady down, till they had to tear me off her and carry me awa’.”

  “Who wanted the medium dead?” Sophie asked, hoping to prompt the voice back to its earlier topic.

  But it was no good.

  “Ma money,” whispered the voice, fading even as Sophie listened. “All I asked for was ma money….”

  And try as Sophie might, she couldn’t find the voice anywhere on the spirit frequencies. It was all regular old everyday radio pirates blethering on about how to set up an illegal still or weatherproof a roof.

  She listened for a few minutes to Dr. Freud rabbiting away about the Daedalus Complex: men inventing machines that caused the deaths of young people who ignored constraints on how the technology should be used. Before too long, though, she let go of the tuner and turned away from the apparatus in disgust.

  She put away all the equipment and changed into her pajamas, got into bed, and turned out the light. But there was something she couldn’t get out of her mind.

  Sophie’s crystal set picked up the voices of the dead at certain wavelengths, as well as living people broadcasting on the frequencies in between. Obviously she’d somehow tuned in to the Veteran’s thoughts as well. But how would that work? The Veteran was alive and well.

  It was just about possible that the force of the Veteran’s obsession with the money had given his voice a special telepathic carrying power.

  But wasn’t it more likely that the Veteran, too, was now dead?

  Sophie got up the next morning at half past six, hours before the usual time on a Sunday, and put on her slippers and dressing gown before creeping downstairs to retrieve the newspapers from the front doorstep.

  Having lit the range and put a large kettle on the stove, she sat down at the kitchen table and spread the papers before her.

  Half an hour later, the kettle had long since boiled and was now releasing clouds of steam, but Sophie didn’t even notice, her whole attention fixed on a story in the left-hand column of the front page of the Scotsman:

  The vagrant who was arrested last week for his attack on a member of the cabinet at the Waterloo Day observances of a well-known Edinburgh girls’ school, and subsequently charged with the murder of Mrs. Euphemia Tansy, 56, at the Balmoral Hotel on the 15th of June, was found dead late Saturday evening in a cell in the Vaults at Edinburgh Castle. A spokesman for the authorities announced that to all appearances, the man—a veteran of the armed forces—died of natural causes. There were no signs of foul play, and the authorities have not scheduled an autopsy at this time.

  The Veteran was dead.

  He’d spoken to Sophie from beyond the grave.

  And she had no doubt—despite the paper’s bland assurances—that the death had been arranged, probably by the same person who hired the Veteran to kill the medium in the first place. Someone who feared that under interrogation the man might reveal what he knew and implicate his employer in that terrible crime.

  What kind of person had access to a prisoner locked up in the country’s securest stronghold?

  Were Sophie and Mikael in danger?

  TWENTY-THREE

  BETWEEN WORRYING ABOUT murderers, IRYLNS, and the everyday threat of terrorism, Sophie felt like she was on the verge of a complete breakdown. And IRYLNS was almost the worst of it. It was shocking how different the city looked to Sophie after having been to IRYLNS.

  The young women were everywhere. Sophie spotted more than a dozen of them before she’d even got halfway to school on Monday morning: the girl in the pink jacket on the tram, the girl wearing the plaid tam-o’-shanter and modest ankle-length skirt, the handsome young woman with black bobbed hair buying a cup of coffee from the stall at the corner of Waterloo Place. All their faces were as smooth and blank as wax.

  In contrast, the girls in first-period English looked reassuringly ordinary. Even Harriet Jeffries couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a real (horrible) living breathing human, especially when she caught Sophie staring and shot her an evil grimace, then resumed her usual butter-wouldn’t-melt expression before the teacher noticed.

  But though the girls looked just as they should, Sophie still had a strange cloudy feeling of cobwebby things hanging at the edge of her vision. Half a dozen times that morning she felt a tap on her shoulder and jerked around to find nothing there, so that when Nan came to fetch her to lunch, Sophie ignored her until the others began laughing at her absentmindedness.

  Over lunch in the refectory—greasy little pellets of mince like rabbit droppings, dun-colored mashed potatoes, and turnips—Sophie caught up on the weekend’s news. Having received special furlough from the headmistress on account of war preparedness needs, the others had gone home to Nan’s family’s house for a marathon session of driving lessons.

  “Nan’s brother’s lovely,” said Priscilla.

  Nan beamed at her.

  Jean put down her knife and fork.

  “How’s he doing with the prosthesis?” Sophie asked. It would be interesting to have a mechanical limb; it would make one into a kind of human-machine hybrid.

  “Pretty well, I think,” said Nan, though she didn’t sound confident. “The worst of it is that he didn’t lose the leg in combat. It was a Scottish mine that blew up the truck. When he first got home, he wouldn’t do anything but sit in Father’s armchair drinking whisky. But once they fitted him with the new leg, he began to feel much better. The best news is that there’ll still be a position for him in his old regiment. Not just a desk job, either: he’ll fight alongside everybody else. That’s cheered him up no end.”

  Sophie privately found this perverse, but it would not do to say so.

  “I daresay it cheered him up even more to have Priscilla hanging all over him,” Jean said, sounding so bitter that Sophie looked at her with surprise. “I found it quite disgusting.”

  “They were just dancing,” Nan said, rising at once to her brother’s defense. “I thought it was lovely. If it cheered Tom up, what’s wrong with that?”

  “I certainly enjoyed myself,” said Priscilla. She sounded almost angry. “Tom’s a wonderful dancer. Nan, do you think he has a girlf
riend?”

  “No,” Nan began, “he was engaged, but—”

  The rest of the sentence was drowned out by Jean smashing her teacup down onto her tray so hard that the saucer cracked in two. She pushed back her chair and ran from the room.

  Sophie looked around to see if any teachers had noticed, but there wasn’t a single adult in sight.

  What had happened? Usually at least two or three of them supervised at lunch.

  Priscilla followed her train of thought without effort.

  “Miss Henchman’s called all the teaching staff to a special meeting,” she told Sophie. “It’s supposedly something to do with the government bill about the school learning age and war preparedness. It sounds as though certain programs will be able to pick which girls they want and—”

  “It’s wicked of you to tease Jean like that,” Nan interrupted. “She can’t bear it that people like you so much, and that you’re so, well, nice to them all.”

  “By people, I suppose you mean boys?”

  “Well, yes, but I didn’t want you to think I was being rude,” Nan said.

  They didn’t see Jean again until they arrived in Mr. Petersen’s classroom after lunch and were greeted by three words on the chalkboard: POWER IN POWER, the motto of the Hanseatic League.

  “Our topic for the day,” said the teacher when all the girls had taken their seats, “is the relationship between science and politics. Everybody knows there’s a pun in the Hanseatic slogan. Paraphrased and expanded, it might read ‘Political power depends on the effective harnessing of new technologies and natural resources.’”