The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  “You had another visitor after that. That’s the person I want you to picture for us now. Before you answered the door, you bundled Mikael into the wardrobe and locked him in. Then you answered the door. Who did you see there?”

  She waited without feeling anything, then realized she had to give the medium a little more help.

  “What was it?” she said, breathing deeply and feeling suddenly as if her rib cage had come into alignment with someone else’s, two hearts pumping, two pairs of lungs expanding and contracting. “Oh. You answered the door and at first you thought that nobody was there.”

  She paused to get a clearer sense of the scene.

  “You’re looking straight ahead and you don’t see anybody. You’re thinking someone’s knocked and then run away, like those awful children in the street where you used to live.”

  The words were coming fast to Sophie’s tongue.

  “You look left, then right. And then you hear someone chuckling and you look down….”

  The click from before echoed again in Sophie’s head. Keith seemed to hear it too, for he muttered encouragement to Sophie.

  “The man comes into the room. He’s at ground level. Now he’s coming toward you and throwing his arms around your knees in something like a rugby tackle. He’s bringing you to the floor. He’s got a straight razor and almost before you know it, he’s clambered up onto your body and slashed your throat and you roll back away from him as the blood starts gushing out. Look—look right at his face. Look at the face of the man who’s just killed you. There—give it to us now.”

  Snick. Louder and more definite than before.

  “And your spirit’s leaving your body now, hovering over it. But I need you to answer a few more questions. Mrs. Tansy, did you ever talk to someone from the Nobel Consortium? The police seem to think you were in contact with someone—is there a person I can talk to and find out more?”

  Sophie felt the spirit waver. It was rather like leaning over a boiling saucepan and letting the tiny waves of warmth hit one’s face like hot invisible jelly.

  She concentrated hard. “Nobel,” she said again. “Did you speak to someone of Nobel’s?”

  Click. Faint but firm.

  “Forward to the next frame, Mikael,” Keith whispered. “I’m sure we got an image there.”

  “Just two more things,” Sophie said now, trying not to betray the importance of these last questions.

  “We think you had strong suspicions about who was behind the bombings. Did you identify anyone in connection with them? And if so, who was it? We might need this picture to track the person down,” she added, “so it will be especially helpful if you can give us a really good shot.”

  Click. The unmistakable sound of a picture being taken. Sophie heard Mikael advance the film to the next exposure.

  “One more,” said Sophie softly. She felt drained and exhausted from concentrating so hard. “Just one more thing. Can you tell us who you think hired the man who killed you? Who sent the Veteran to kill you, Mrs. Tansy?”

  SNICK. This time the click was quite loud. Sophie heard one of the boys swear—she couldn’t tell which—as he failed to catch a jar of chemicals that slid off a shelf and smashed on the floor.

  “Time to stop this,” Mikael said in a loud voice, angry and afraid.

  “Don’t worry,” Keith said, his voice more excited than fearful. “Telekinetic disturbances often accompany this kind of manifestation. Sophie, can you hear me? Are you ready to stop?”

  Sophie reached up to take off the blindfold, but paused to thank the medium first. She did it silently, not wanting to sound silly to the others, but the words in her head were heartfelt. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was really helpful. And I promise you I’m going to bring your true murderer to justice. The Veteran’s dead. I expect you know that. But I swear to you I’ll do everything I possibly can to find the person who sent him to kill you. I’ll stop that person, if it’s the last thing I do.

  She hoped the medium would go away now. She still had a slight unpleasant sense of the woman’s presence in the room.

  Taking off the blindfold, she found the other two staring at her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Are you all right, Sophie?” Keith asked.

  Sophie considered the question.

  “I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “Not too bad, though. How soon will we know whether we’ve got any results?”

  Keith looked at his watch.

  “It’s half past seven,” he said. “Even working with high-speed chemicals, it’s going to take me at least ninety minutes to process the film, make a contact sheet from the negatives, and blow up the prints. Why don’t you two leave me to it for now and come back just before nine to take a look at what we’ve got?”

  “How do we know you’re not going to pull a switcheroo on us and substitute another film for the one in the camera, or give us a completely different set of proofs for that matter?” Mikael asked, advancing on Keith, his right hand clenched.

  Sophie shrank away from Mikael’s fist, but Keith just sighed and held his ground.

  “Look,” he said, “I suggested that Sophie mix in questions she knew the answers to with ones she didn’t, if you see what I mean. I don’t even know Sophie’s last name or where she lives, let alone what she’s just been talking about.”

  “Don’t you read the papers? You must have recognized the details—the murder of the woman at the Balmoral—”

  “Now I do, but I couldn’t have had pictures prepared in advance. You’re going to have to trust me on this. You can certainly stay and watch if you like, but it’s awfully cramped in here and the smell of the chemicals gets to you after a while, especially if you’re not used to it. Sophie needs to eat something—she’s just expended a huge amount of mental energy, and I bet her blood sugar’s low. Do me a favor and go to the chip shop around the corner, get her something to eat, and let me do my part of the job in peace and quiet, all right?”

  He let Sophie and Mikael out the back door into an alley full of garbage, a pack of feral cats nosing through it for their dinner.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “WAIT FOR ME!” Sophie called out as Mikael navigated through the rubbish.

  Mikael turned around to look at her, arms folded across his chest, face expressionless. Sophie couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “What is it?” she said, her voice faltering as she caught up with him. She felt quite sick to her stomach.

  “Don’t tell me you really don’t know,” Mikael said, not meeting her eyes as he kicked an empty tin across the way.

  “I really don’t know!”

  “Sophie, this whole spirit business—well, for a long time I didn’t believe in it at all. Recently I haven’t been so sure. Some things you have to take seriously, and I can see that tonight’s one of them. So you can cross me off the official skeptics list.”

  Sophie just looked at him. What did he mean her to say in response? Something flat in his delivery made his words more hurtful than reassuring.

  “Good,” she said uncertainly.

  “Just don’t think this whole ‘medium’ business makes you special,” he added. It was frankly almost a relief to hear the anger overtly now in his voice, easier than having him angry with her and insisting he wasn’t. But she didn’t understand why he was so angry. “Mediums are creepy, and that part of my opinion’s never going to change. You’d better be very careful you don’t start picking up bad habits, Sophie.”

  Letting him browbeat her like this was hardly any different from encouraging him to punch her repeatedly in the stomach, but Sophie felt immobilized by submissiveness. They were standing outside the chip shop by now, its grease-smeared windows all steamed up on the inside, and the sight of a random beggar out of the corner of her eye forced her to speak.

  “We’ve got to go into the shop,” she said urgently. “It’s too dangerous hanging around outside like this. For all we know, the
re’s a whole gang of homeless veterans out looking for us.”

  Mikael let himself be dragged into the storefront, where the smell of hot fat enveloped them like a cloak of invisibility.

  “I’m starving,” he said, sounding surprised. He turned to Sophie and laid a hand on her elbow, an apology fluttering in the softness of his touch. “Let’s get some food. Have you any money left?”

  They ordered two fish suppers and an extra portion of chips and mushy peas. Though the chips were soggy, the fish was shockingly good, its flesh falling into fragrant white flakes under the crisp batter shell.

  “So what do you think?” Sophie asked when the ruins of the meal lay on the table between them.

  Mikael swigged the last of his Iron Brew, a rust-colored fizzy drink (“Made in Scotland from Girders”). He burped and wiped his hands on a paper napkin.

  “On the basis of that beggar following us this afternoon,” he said, “I think we’re justified in drawing a few conclusions. Are we in agreement that (a) the same person may be responsible for the terrorist attacks as well as for the murder of Mrs. Tansy, and (b) he’s also potentially running a whole network of those army veterans you see begging on the streets?”

  Sophie nodded. She supposed there was no point saying that it might be a woman; they would have to see what the pictures showed.

  “It’s possible, of course,” Mikael continued, “that the beggar following us today isn’t working for the same person who hired your Veteran to kill the medium—”

  “Possible, but not likely,” Sophie interrupted.

  “That’s right,” said Mikael. “Which means that (c) this person’s found something out about our investigation and alerted his gang to follow us wherever we go. How would you say we attracted his attention, Sophie?”

  “When you were taken to the Castle and questioned,” Sophie said, “that would have sent up a red flag. And I was there too. Because of the Veteran being killed in his cell, we know the villain must be someone with pretty good access, maybe even someone who’s part of the government….”

  “Well, whoever he is,” said Mikael, “it wouldn’t have been hard for him to have had one or both of us tailed.”

  “Both, most likely,” said Sophie.

  They looked at each other, their faces pale and frightened.

  “I don’t see what we can do about it,” Sophie said finally.

  “We’d better both be very careful,” Mikael said.

  Shortly before nine o’clock, they bought a paper poke of chips for Keith and returned to the door in the alley.

  “You’re not going to believe what good shots we’ve got,” Keith said in greeting. “Oh, thanks,” he added as Mikael handed him the chips. “Just let me lock up back here, and I’ll show you everything.”

  He ushered them again into the darkroom, where sheets of photographic paper were clipped to washing lines with ordinary clothes-pegs, amid a strong smell of chemicals and the sound of dripping water.

  “They’re exceptionally clear,” Keith said, stuffing chips into his mouth and gesturing to the suspended prints. “I’ve printed two sets, Sophie, one for you and one for me. You must promise you’ll work with me again. I’ve never seen anything so good.”

  Sophie was just relieved he didn’t use the word medium. She tried not to look at Mikael.

  “Each time Sophie asked a question,” Keith continued, tactfully directing the explanation toward Mikael, “it was framed in such a way that all the spirit had to do was focus on a single face. With the first question, she asked the spirit to provide an image of the young visitor that day. And look!”

  He held up a head-and-shoulders portrait that was so unmistakably of Mikael himself that even Sophie wondered for a split second whether Keith could have rigged a secret camera. Then she dismissed her suspicions. She had felt the medium’s presence, after all.

  She cast a quick look at Mikael, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  “After that, Sophie asked the spirit to focus on a second visitor. Here’s where Sophie made really imaginative use of her knowledge of what must have happened. Look, this print shows several superimposed images; it’s rather like what happens when an ordinary camera jams and gives you multiple exposures in a single frame. It’s a little dizzying, isn’t it? You two aren’t so used to it as I am. But look at the picture’s different layers. See, here’s where the dead woman—not that she was dead yet, of course—opened the door of the hotel room and looked straight ahead. If you look closely, you can see she’s actually captured the pattern of the wallpaper on the other side of the corridor.”

  Mikael leaned forward to look more closely.

  “I recognize that fleur-de-lis pattern,” he said, his voice hoarse with surprise. “That’s exactly the wallpaper they’ve got on the hotel walls, a sort of bumpy velvety stuff.”

  “These blurry marks show her moving her head from side to side,” Keith continued, politely ignoring Mikael’s shock. “And then she finds the target: she looks down and sees the person Sophie asked about. We’re facing down toward a figure—an elderly man, pretty scruffy-looking—who’s sitting for some reason on the floor in front of the doorway. Look, it’s so clear that you can actually see the weave of the carpet behind him.”

  “He’s not really sitting on the floor,” Sophie said. “He’s a double amputee, a war veteran, and if you look closely you can see he’s on a sort of cart.”

  Keith looked, raised an eyebrow, and wrote a few lines in the fat exercise book lying open on the counter.

  “The next one’s a bit gruesome,” he warned, pausing for a moment before he held it up for them to see.

  Sophie and Mikael stared in silence at a picture all the more horrifying for not showing any actual gore.

  All that could be seen was the Veteran’s contorted face, much too close up.

  Sophie could almost feel the flash of the razor across her throat and the pressure of the man’s powerful arms holding down her shoulders as she tried to roll away from him, his breath hot and horrible in her face.

  She suddenly wished she hadn’t eaten all those chips. She hoped she wasn’t going to be sick.

  “Sophie asked next about the Nobel Consortium,” Keith went on. “I suppose she’s trying to get a sense of the woman’s political entanglements. Well, there’s a pretty clear answer on this one. I’ve got no clue who the man is, but it’s an extremely clear photograph, and perhaps one of you has some ideas about where to look for him….”

  And the photograph he held up? It was Mr. Petersen!

  She was conscious of a fierce bubbling excitement—now they were getting somewhere, this made sense of so many other things, of course Mr. Petersen was working for Nobel!—and was about to open her mouth to identify him when she felt Mikael painfully grip her upper arm. “Don’t say anything,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “We’ll talk about it later—there’s no reason to let Keith in on it.”

  Keith politely ignored the conflict—he really was an unusually patient and well-mannered boy, not like Mikael, whose fingers were bruising Sophie painfully. How did Mikael know what she was about to say? She supposed her face must be more transparent than she thought, or else Mikael just knew her very well.

  “All right,” she whispered angrily to Mikael, “but stop making such an ass of yourself, it’s not polite.”

  “Polite?” Mikael yelped, but he let go of Sophie’s arm and said a gruff “Sorry, mate” to Keith.

  Sophie was consumed now with impatience to see the last two photographs, of the person Mrs. Tansy suspected of being behind the bombings and the person who’d sent the Veteran to kill her at the Balmoral.

  It was conceivable that the picture would show the face of some entirely unknown and quite ordinary-looking person, one impossible for them to track down. If the man had never been arrested and wasn’t a public figure, a picture wouldn’t necessarily yield a name. Sophie felt sure, though, it wouldn’t simply be some anonymous face. Joanna M
urchison, Nicko Mood—she had thought about it for many hours and she was certain that one or both of them must have been involved. Mrs. Tansy had almost certainly understood that to be the case.

  “Let’s take a look,” said Keith.

  Sophie envied him the luxury of having only a technical interest in the results.

  “These last two pictures are quite astonishing,” said Keith. “Sophie, this is really one for the history books! I’ve never seen anything like it. And the level of detail in the faces, given the nonrepresentational quality of the design—all I can say is that it’s quite extraordinary.”

  “Show us!” Sophie said.

  “Oh,” said Keith, looking surprised. “I forgot you hadn’t seen them yet.”

  Sophie almost tore the pictures out of his hands. Their beauty knocked the breath out of her. With Mikael close by her shoulder, she laid the two photographs on the table. At first glance they were virtually identical; both pictures, though they were the same size as the previous ones, looked less like ordinary snapshots than like blown-up images of the court designs from a deck of playing cards. They even had the suit and designation in the corners—how on earth had that happened, and what did it mean?

  The image produced in response to Sophie’s question about who sent the Veteran to kill the medium? The knave of clubs—and the face of the right-side-up knave was unmistakably Nicholas Mood’s, his features clear in every particular although he was dressed as if for a costume ball, with hair hanging about his shoulders and the strange flat cap and embroidered waistcoat the knave always wore in decks of cards. But the most surreal thing was that when the card was rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, it should have been the knave again (of course) but it wasn’t. The hair and clothes were the knave’s, but the face belonged to Joanna Murchison, as if Mood and Murchison were conjoined twins.

  The next card—the medium’s best guess about the person behind the bombings—was the queen of clubs. This time, the minister’s face could easily be discerned peeping out from the wimple and brocade—but the upside-down face at the other end of the card was Nicko Mood’s.