The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  Sophie trudged along the corridor toward the head’s office with a strong feeling that the world was against her. It seemed incredibly unfair to get in trouble for something she had done in a trance, and worse to think of having fallen into an altered state without even knowing it.

  She thought suddenly of Jekyll and Hyde and the way the transformation came on more and more easily until Dr. Jekyll actually lost his original form and became only Mr. Hyde. Had Sophie somehow opened herself up to this degradation by her own willful meddling in the spirit world?

  She told the secretary that Miss Botham had sent her to see Miss Henchman, then took a seat on the bench. It was funny how horrible it felt to have to wait there outside the head’s office, even knowing she had done nothing substantially wrong. It gave her a disconcerting glimpse into what it would be like to be one of those girls who got into trouble all the time.

  Her thoughts intent on what had happened in class just now, it took Sophie a little while to notice that the voices in the office had become loud enough for her to hear them.

  The person in the head’s inner sanctum was none other than Sophie’s Great-aunt Tabitha.

  “I hadn’t thought of it for her, possibly not at all and certainly not yet,” Sophie heard her great-aunt say. “Let her complete the university degree first. There are far too few women in the sciences, and I have always argued that a handful of exceptional young women must be allowed to opt out of the scheme.”

  Sophie heard the murmur of the headmistress’s voice, but couldn’t distinguish the words.

  “Nonsense!” said Great-aunt Tabitha.

  Miss Henchman’s more muted voice responded.

  “Certainly not,” said Great-aunt Tabitha.

  Another inaudible statement by the headmistress.

  “Well,” said Sophie’s great-aunt, sounding rather less certain, “I suppose I can’t stop you.”

  They were arguing about what Sophie would do after taking her exams.

  Great-aunt Tabitha thought Sophie should go to university.

  Miss Henchman thought she should go to IRYLNS. The headmistress was winning.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SOPHIE DECIDED TO WALK home from school on Friday afternoon rather than taking the tram. Walking lubricated the thought processes, somehow. She decided that the incidents with the pantelegraph and the Dictaphone had to be related. Both came close on the heels of her using the radio to contact the dead. Had Sophie opened up some kind of doorway? Who wanted to contact her, and why?

  The technical diagram from Mr. Petersen’s class remained a mystery. Sophie had consulted a number of reference books without finding anything like it. When she asked Mr. Petersen the next day whether he’d worked out what had gone wrong, he brushed off her questions, avoiding Sophie’s eyes.

  Putting aside the drawing for the moment, Sophie could see a pattern.

  The first dead bomber had revealed hardly anything. He had been too young, too confused, too remote from the heart of the conspiracy and, Sophie thought, too long dead.

  The second voice had been the Veteran’s. The Veteran had told her more than poor Andrew Wallace, but not with the kind of detail that would clear up any mysteries. He’d talked about the minister taking away his pension and someone hiring him for an assignment, probably the murder of the medium. He was clearly trying to say something else about the minister, but Sophie shrank from the idea of contacting him again. Let him rest in whatever peace he could salvage.

  Then the next verbal communication, the words on the typewriter in Miss Botham’s class. Sophie still had no recollection of hearing anyone on the recording other than Miss Henchman. She’d gone back afterward and begged Miss Botham to allow her to finish the typing job properly. That was just what Miss Botham wanted to hear, and so she let Sophie listen again to the whole thing, on the condition that she type out a clean copy. And there was nothing out of the ordinary, unless one found it extraordinary that Miss Henchman thought it possible to prevent girls from being seen in town during term time without the full, correct school uniform.

  But there was no doubt in Sophie’s mind that the voice she’d heard belonged to the dead medium. The spirit of Mrs. Tansy had spoken of a bloody interfering bitch—Sophie mentally cringed, but mightn’t she be talking about Great-aunt Tabitha? What if Sophie’s great-aunt had interfered in some crucial way, perhaps by telephoning the ministry to ask for surveillance after that first séance?

  Though the medium had alluded to an old one and a young one, Sophie didn’t know who they might be. But she’d also mentioned a favorite young fellow, and it had come in a flash to Sophie at breakfast that Mrs. Tansy might have been talking about her cat.

  She’d seemed to speak directly to Sophie, in any case, when she warned her “it’s not the one you think it’s the other one.” But which was which?

  Sophie tried to reason backward from the medium’s words. Two people, a young one and an old one. Who might they be? And who was the man the Veteran had conversed with, the conversation that led him next to mention the attack on the minister?

  The strap of Sophie’s satchel pressed painfully into her shoulder, and a blister was forming in the place where her sock had worn through. Absently her hand found Andrew’s green glass piece in her pocket. At the same time her eye fell on the pyramid of fruit in front of the greengrocer’s: punnets of strawberries, raspberries, currants, and gooseberries beside a few lonely bunches of imported grapes.

  The dead boy had said something about a man with eyes the glassy green of peeled grapes, hadn’t he? All grapes were pale green once you peeled them, even red ones—the same green as the softly polished glass under her fingers. Green like gooseberries. Green like glass.

  And in a blinding flash, Sophie saw it. What an idiot she was not to have thought of it sooner!

  The dead boy hadn’t spoken of green grapes, only of green glass. It was Sophie who’d met a woman whose eyes reminded her of peeled grapes, a woman whose assistant had eyes the exact same color.

  The Veteran had attacked Joanna Murchison in public, asking where his money was. Not his pension, but his rightful payment for a commission?

  Murchison’s ministerial portfolio included Scotland’s prisons as well as the army veterans’ association. She would have had no difficulty having the Veteran killed in his cell.

  Joanna Murchison—the minister of public safety—responsible for the Veteran’s death, and for the medium’s before that?

  The thought struck Sophie like a thunderclap. What if the minister had ordered the medium killed because Mrs. Tansy had discovered she was the puppet master pulling the strings of the Brothers of the Northern Liberties, directing all the terrorists’ actions from behind the respectable façade of the ministry, perhaps even supplying them with explosives?

  What a fool Sophie was for not having seen it before! The great thing about the attacks, from the minister’s point of view, was that they provided the perfect pretext for Scotland to go to war with Europe. The minister believed that only war would keep the country safe. That meant she would do just about anything to make sure people agreed, even if it meant killing hundreds of innocent citizens. Someone like the minister, Sophie felt certain, could easily persuade herself that giving explosives to terrorists was for the greater good.

  Joanna Murchison had probably been tracking the Brothers of the Northern Liberties and planting evidence against the Europeans all along. When her plan came to fruition, she would make the evidence public, arrest all the remaining terrorists, and lead the country to war. Even peace supporters would want revenge for the deaths of so many civilians on Scottish soil.

  The most shocking thing, if this was true, was the way the minister hadn’t scrupled to sacrifice the lives of Edinburgh’s citizens. Almost more than the murders of the medium and the Veteran, that showed what kind of person she was.

  Wait, though. Was the minister the principal villain of the piece, or was it Nicko? That must have been what the medium was tryin
g to tell her. It wasn’t the old one, it was the young one! The green glassy eyes that Andrew’s spirit had mentioned were just as likely to belong to Nicko Mood as to his master. The actual perpetrator, the person who dealt with the terrorists and hired the Veteran to kill Mrs. Tansy, surely wouldn’t have been the minister. It was far more likely to have been Nicholas Mood, Nicko with his insatiable desire to please and his desperate impulse to advance himself. Why, it even seemed possible that the minister herself might not know about all of his stratagems.

  Sophie didn’t realize that she’d stopped with her key actually in the lock until the front door fell open, Great-aunt Tabitha on the other side.

  “Sophie, what on earth…?” she said. “I thought it might be some sort of salesman—didn’t like the idea of someone lurking on the front doorstep without ringing the bell—thought I’d surprise the villain—never thought it might be you. Were you having trouble with the lock?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she hustled Sophie into the sitting room and rang for tea.

  “I’m off shortly,” she told Sophie, “but I thought you’d like to see the results of last week’s séance.”

  Sophie hung back. If only Great-aunt Tabitha would leave her alone!

  “Come and see,” coaxed Great-aunt Tabitha, her tone, Sophie couldn’t help thinking, rather like the wolf’s in “Little Red Riding Hood.” “At last week’s Domestic Photo Circle, we captured a number of the dead on film. Look, this is my dear departed sister Alice, who died of diphtheria when we were children.”

  The picture looked like nothing so much as the blurry image of the cirronimbus cloud type in Sophie’s geography textbook. It was hard to understand how even the most fond bereaved person could see a human being.

  Great-aunt Tabitha didn’t notice Sophie’s lack of enthusiasm. She chattered away until Sophie’s head ached, then left Sophie drinking a cup of strong, sweet milky tea while she got ready to go out. At least she didn’t seem annoyed with Sophie any longer.

  “I won’t be late,” she told Sophie before going upstairs. “If you’re still awake when I get back, I’d like a word before you go to bed.”

  Afterward Sophie took the tea tray down to the kitchen, said hello to Peggy, who was grumbling because the price of eggs had gone up again for the third time since March, and went upstairs to her room.

  Unpacking her satchel, she stopped dead in her tracks.

  Photography! That was the way to prove her suspicions groundless or else get firm corroboration, especially given the need to find out who was more culpable, the minister or her assistant.

  Spirit voices spoke in vague suggestive phrases. But if Sophie asked a spirit questions about the crimes and received an actual image of its perpetrator in response, the evidence would be irrefutable. Photos were by far the best way of identifying someone for certain.

  In primary school Sophie had made something called a pinhole camera, which was a fancy name for an ordinary cardboard box with a hole poked through the side, used for watching an eclipse without hurting one’s eyes by looking directly at the sun. If she worked out something like that, Sophie wouldn’t need an expensive camera, just a box and some special paper covered with photographic emulsion, a low-budget substitute for the mechanically sophisticated image trappers used by the professionals.

  And she knew the perfect place to get what she needed! Checking her watch, Sophie saw it was only half past five. Good. That funny little shop next door to the bookshop in Broughton Street Lane would still be open, the one that sold photographic supplies and spiritualist equipment.

  She dug around in her bag to see how much money she had, then sifted through the dish of coins on top of the chest of drawers, superstitiously averting her eyes from the mirror.

  That was where it all had started, with that pretty lady in the mirror on the day Mrs. Tansy had come for the séance. There was something painful in thinking about it. She very much wanted to see the lady again, and learn who she was—surely it must be a connection to Sophie’s dead mother’s family? The resemblance had been striking.

  When she finished counting her money, Sophie pulled herself together to face facts. She didn’t have much, she might well need more, and what that meant was that she’d have to break open the bank she’d had since age five, a hideous red clay pig with a rather sweet expression on its squashed face. The only way of getting the money out was to smash it open.

  For ten years now Sophie had put money into the bank whenever she could spare it—against a rainy day, Peggy would say. It felt satisfyingly heavy when she shook it around, the jangling of coins muffled by a few ten-shilling notes from birthdays and Hogmanay.

  Though it seemed to mark the destruction of her childhood, it was the work of only a moment to smash open the pig with the fireplace poker. Amazingly, she had over ten pounds.

  She tucked away most of it beneath her underthings in the top drawer, then shoveled several pounds’ worth of coins into the front pocket of her satchel. She’d have to find a dustpan and brush to clean up the wreckage, otherwise Peggy would want to know what she was up to, and Sophie had no intention of telling.

  She did stop back in the kitchen to say she’d be out for half an hour. Peggy muttered something about people who didn’t take their meals at regular times, but when Sophie promised to be back for supper at seven, Peggy kissed her on the cheek and told her not to hurry, they’d wait on her, fine lady that she was turning into.

  TWENTY-SIX

  WALKING THROUGH THE streets, Sophie’s feet felt light, like in the kind of dream where one speeds effortlessly forward, four or five inches off the ground. For a moment she wondered whether she might be getting assistance from the spirit world, then felt silly when she realized it was just the effect of having emptied the schoolbooks from her satchel.

  It was a great relief to find the shop still open. Sophie had never been inside before, having felt more aversion than attraction to the mysterious notices in the window (“Lady psychometrist seeks spiritualist gentleman, smokers need not apply”; “Train your powers of psychic communication in SIX EASY LESSONS”).

  It was a cramped room stuffed almost to bursting, the wall to the left dominated by a reproduction of Daguerre’s famous photograph of the Champs Elysées. The picture made Paris look like a ghost town, the presence of the thousands of people who must have passed across the camera’s field of view during the plate’s exposure marked only by fleeting streaks of light.

  Sophie heard someone clearing his throat. She turned to find a very young man with slicked-back hair, a spotty face, and a painfully prominent Adam’s apple, who smiled and asked how he could help her in a pleasant but nasal voice.

  Great-aunt Tabitha loathed and despised what she called jumped-up shop assistants, but Sophie thought this boy sounded nice. She decided to tell him the truth about what she needed.

  “I want to buy a packet of photographic paper,” she said, digging the coins out of her satchel and tipping them in a heap on the counter. “Whatever kind’s best for capturing images from the spirit world.”

  “Hmm,” the boy said, his fingers stroking a pitiful fringe of chin hair that only a dyed-in-the-wool optimist could have called a beard. “Tell me more. What kinds of spirit? Do you mean to use a camera, or do you prefer direct exposure? If I know exactly what you’re wanting to do, I’ll be better able to help you choose the right materials.”

  He had a good forceful way of speaking, and Sophie thought he’d be better off selling things over the telephone than in person, where extreme youth cut into his authority.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” she confessed, leaning her elbows on the counter and resting her chin in her hands. “I’ve been conducting an investigation, asking spirits quite practical questions and getting answers that are vague to the point of being actively unhelpful. What I want now is to get something more precise. I thought that photographs might make things clearer.”

  “So you’d like to use photography to persuade your sp
irits to narrow things down,” said the shop assistant. “You’ll not be wanting to take pictures of the spirits themselves, then?”

  “Oh, no,” said Sophie, a little shocked. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “You’d be surprised what people want,” said the boy. “You do see the difference between the two kinds of photography, don’t you? I’m Keith, by the way.”

  “I’m Sophie,” Sophie said.

  They shook hands solemnly, Sophie revising her estimate of his age downward from nineteen or twenty to sixteen or at the very most seventeen.

  “Yes, I know I look awfully young,” said Keith, disconcerting Sophie by seeming to read her thoughts, “but I turned eighteen last week and I’ve been subbing for my older brother in the shop for years. He’s off north to cover the Highland Games for the Courant—it might not sound like much, but the paper will put him on staff if he does a good job. He’s not like me; he goes mad if he has to spend every day in the shop, so we’re all crossing our fingers it’ll work out.”

  Sophie promised to add her own positive finger-crossing powers in aid of Keith’s brother’s advancement, and Keith thanked her before turning over a flyer for an amateur photography competition and beginning to sketch a diagram on the back.

  “Back to what I was saying,” he said, “if you’re simply trying to capture spirit presences, you don’t need anything fancy. Think of Becquerel proving the existence of radioactivity by wrapping a photographic plate in black paper. All he did was lay a sample of uranium on top, and it emitted rays that fogged the plate. In the same way a spirit will often leave traces on film, so long as the room’s really dark. Very often what people display as spirit photography, of course, really just shows they haven’t sealed the room properly.”