The Explosionist (14 page)

“But couldn’t you somehow get me exempted?” Sophie asked, though she knew that Great-aunt Tabitha didn’t believe in bending rules.

“Imagine what the newspapers could do with that,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, shaking her head. “One of the most stalwart supporters of IRYLNS pulling strings to get her ward exempted from the scheme? Why, it might even be enough to topple the government! And that’s where I draw the limit. Sophie, I would lay down my life for you without a moment’s hesitation, but in the scenario I’ve just laid out, it wouldn’t be my own life at stake, it would be the safety of the country as a whole.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Sophie asked. “To protect myself?”

“Stay away,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. She had picked something up from the top of the chest of drawers, where Sophie always dumped the contents of her school satchel, and fiddled with it as she talked. “Stay out of trouble and stay away from IRYLNS. I took you there to show you what’s at stake. I don’t want you even to
think
about telling anyone what you saw.”

Sophie said nothing.

“The sleep of reason makes us all monsters,” said Great-aunt Tabitha in the special voice she used to mark a quotation, though Sophie had no idea where the words came from. “What about finishing your homework before bedtime, Sophie?”

She set down on top of the chest of drawers the little thing she’d been playing with. After she had gone, Sophie got up to see what it was: that small token Mrs. Tansy had pressed into Sophie’s hands—the iron…IRYLNS! Had the object itself been a concrete warning, a signal that Sophie simply hadn’t had enough information to understand at the time? But how would Mrs. Tansy have known about IRYLNS, and why would it have mattered to her that Sophie should be warned?

Sophie felt like Bluebeard’s wife. When Bluebeard gave his wife the keys of the wardrobes and strongboxes and caskets of jewels, when he handed her the master key to all his apartments, when he told her that she could go into any one of them except the little closet at the end of the ground-floor gallery, Sophie’s whole body always flared up in scorn, though she knew this wasn’t the real moral of the story, for the weak-willed wife. Why couldn’t she have kept her promise? Sophie always wanted to cry out, “Don’t! Just don’t unlock the door! Be perfectly obedient and you won’t get hurt!”

Could Sophie live with herself, though, if she didn’t try to find out what really happened behind the closed doors of IRYLNS—find out and perhaps try to put a stop to it?

O
N
T
UESDAY AFTER LUNCH
it was Sophie’s turn to supervise the younger girls on the playground. She’d been walking around like a zombie since Saturday. Fortunately playground duty didn’t involve much beyond making sure the children didn’t actually kill one another, and though Sophie’s eyes rested on a group of girls playing hopscotch, her thoughts were elsewhere. The other little girls were scampering over the climbing frame or running around playing tag, one particularly noisy bunch amusing themselves by shooting one of their playmates back and forth across the tarmac on some kind of cart.

In her mental haze, Sophie at first hardly noticed the police arriving, but within minutes the entire playground was
overrun with uniformed officers. What on earth was going on? Recognizing the woman nearby as the constable from the week before, Sophie took a chance that she would be friendly.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“The interrogation of the man who assaulted the minister of public safety here on Saturday has yielded information that may lead to a breakthrough in another case,” said the young woman, smiling at Sophie. “We’re here to pick up a crucial piece of evidence, but they’ve sent the bomb squad as well, in case it’s booby-trapped.”

“I’ve found it!” shouted an officer.

A team of men with Alsatians ran to join him. Once the bomb-sniffing dogs gave the all clear, the men moved away far enough for Sophie to see.

It was the cart the girls had been playing with, and a second later she realized it must be the Veteran’s transport, left behind the other day after his arrest.

“Why didn’t they take it away on Saturday?” Sophie asked, since the woman constable hadn’t moved away.

The woman shrugged and laughed a little. “Nobody ever said we were perfect,” she said, sounding quite human.

If there
had
been a bomb, Sophie couldn’t help thinking, several of the little girls might easily have been killed. She felt a surge of anger, the kind that was a mixture of scaredness and relief at surviving a danger one hadn’t even apprehended.

The bell rang to mark the end of recess, but most of the girls ignored it to watch the police, now huddled together.

By nighttime, everyone knew the Veteran was to be charged with the medium’s murder, but the story in the evening paper wasn’t very forthcoming, and nobody was at all sure how the police had linked him to that crime or why he had attacked the minister.

Nan thought he might have been angry because of the government’s decision to reduce pensions for veterans. She had also heard that the minister had annoyed the school servants by not tipping any of them after the lavish ceremonial breakfast. (Miss Hopkins had supposedly caused an uproar afterward in the staff lounge by commenting that she wouldn’t turn down a tip herself if a parent tried to give her one.) Nan wondered whether the minister might have offended the Veteran by not giving him money. That was easy enough to imagine, but it didn’t really seem grounds for actually attacking a person, Sophie decided, even if the Veteran had a screw loose.

Jean hadn’t heard anything.

Priscilla had learned from a well-informed friend that the police had now definitely tied the Veteran to the murder at the Balmoral, but that he still refused to tell them why he’d attacked the minister.

“A friend!” Jean said, curling her upper lip and turning
away. “Boyfriend, more like.”

Priscilla smiled her pretty, teasing smile.

“James isn’t really a boy,” she said. “He’s a man; at least, eighteen’s old enough to be allowed to get married.”

Jean slammed her chemistry textbook shut, knocking a small china dog off the desk and smashing it on the floor.

“You’re not going to marry him, though, are you?” she asked Priscilla. “Promise me you won’t!”

“Surely you’re not going to stand in the way of my union with my one true love?” said Priscilla, in the same light tone she might use to reproach someone for not passing the sugar for her tea.

Sophie and Nan exchanged glances, but there was nothing they could do to avert the inevitable clash.

“Priscilla, you made me a promise that when we leave school, you’ll share a flat with me while we both do our certificates at the School of Electric Cookery,” Jean said. She was almost in tears by now.

“I said we
might
share a flat,” Priscilla said, calm as always. “I never made any promises. It’s important to keep my options open at this point; that’s what Daddy always says.”

“But what about me?” Jean cried out. “I can’t possibly afford a flat on my own. Besides, it wouldn’t be the same without you. Why do you like those wretched boys so much?”

Now Priscilla looked really annoyed.

“You’re acting like a baby,” she said to Jean. “You talk as though you’d like to stay a schoolgirl all your life. Now, that’s all very well for girls like you and Sophie, but I know there’s better stuff waiting when we leave this place, and nine-tenths of the fun will involve men. I want to have a good time before I settle down. But James is truly sweet, Jean; I wish you could have seen him last weekend, kneeling on the ground in front of me and holding my hand and telling me he adores me….”

The image of James at Priscilla’s feet was more than Jean could bear. She uttered a strangled yell and fled.

Priscilla began laughing. “Oh, it’s almost too easy,” she said. “I really shouldn’t, but poor Jean does expose herself so, and I simply can’t resist….”

“Are you really going to marry James?” asked Nan, who approved of James because he was captain of the boys’ cadet corps at the Edinburgh Academy.

“Of course not!” said Priscilla. “I’m much too young. I think twenty-one’s the perfect age to get married, don’t you? I’m not one of those awful Brides-to-Be!”

The Brides-to-Be were the girls who dropped mathematics, science, and classics in their fifth year to take the Housewife’s Certificate. Priscilla was scathing about them. “I certainly don’t expect to do my own cooking and mending and washing once I’m married,” she’d said in class once when the domestic science instructor begged her to keep her mind
on the lesson. “Talk about a waste of time!”

“My father thinks I should take a degree in law,” Priscilla said now. “He says that even if I’m married, it can’t hurt to have another string to my bow.”

“I don’t mean to criticize,” said Nan, “but it’s quite cruel of you to torment Jean like that. Won’t you go and find the poor girl and tell her you’re sorry?”

“But I’m not sorry,” said Priscilla, sounding surprised. “She asked for it. She’s got no business being so jealous. Let her stew.”

And with that remark, Priscilla returned to her English essay, leaving Sophie rather impressed with her ruthlessness.

When the housemistress came by to tell them to begin getting ready for bed, the three girls put their things away, turned out the study lights, and went into the bedroom, where they found Jean sitting shamefaced on Priscilla’s bed, her hands clasped together in her lap, her eyes swollen and red.

“Priscilla, I’m so sorry,” she blurted out. “It’s none of my business what you do when we leave school. I promise I’ll never pester you about this again. Only I would love it if we could share that flat….”

“Well, let’s wait and see,” said Priscilla, sitting down next to Jean and putting an arm around her shoulders. “You’re a goose sometimes, but you’re my best friend. I won’t do anything without telling you first. Don’t worry, all right?”

“All right,” said Jean, forcing a smile.

Thinking about possible futures made Sophie’s mind run again over everything she’d seen at IRYLNS. What if Jean decided to go there? How would Sophie persuade her not to, without breaking the injunction to secrecy laid upon her by Great-aunt Tabitha? Would Sophie be able to save even herself from IRYLNS?

O
N
T
HURSDAY AFTERNOON
Sophie went for tea at the professor’s. She had to nerve herself up for it. Assuming Mrs. Lundberg was still angry with her, she went around the front way, with a vague sense that she’d forfeited the privilege of entering through the garden.

She rang the doorbell and waited. What if they didn’t want to see her?

But when the housekeeper opened the door, she threw her arms around Sophie and hustled her into the sitting room toward a particularly lavish spread of cakes and sandwiches, just as if nothing had happened.

When Mikael came in, Sophie’s mouth went all dry and she couldn’t swallow. It wasn’t as though they’d actually had
an argument, but there had been something painful and unpleasant about the end of their last telephone conversation.

“Sophie?” he said quietly, speaking into her ear as his aunt piled his plate high with food.

“I don’t know what was wrong when we talked the other day,” Sophie said, the words tumbling out. She licked her lips and swallowed. “I didn’t mean it. I—”

“Don’t be silly! You’ve got nothing to apologize for. I was in a bit of a mood myself. Pax?”

“Pax,” said Sophie, and as he squeezed her hand, the relief made her want to shout.

Over tea the professor told them about an Uppsala colleague who kept a pack of colobus monkeys in a two-acre enclosure, artificially heated at quite amazing expense, where the monkeys lived as they would in the wild. Nobody else said much. When Mikael had eaten his fill, he sprang up out of his seat and invited Sophie to join him in the garden, where, he said, a huge number of weeds awaited them.

Sophie looked at the professor to see if he wanted them to stay inside and keep him company, but he waved her away.

“If you two go outside now, I may finish with the proofs of my article in time for the last post,” he said. “Sophie, I trust to see you again before many days pass?”

Sophie assenting, the professor retreated to his study, and she and Mikael went through the glass doors into the garden.

“Are we really going to weed?” she said to Mikael once they were alone.

“Do you know how to tell weeds from flowers?” Mikael asked.

“No,” Sophie admitted.

“Neither do I. I really just wanted to get you out of earshot.”

They sat down on the bench beneath the tree at the bottom of the garden. Mikael pulled a branch from a bush and began to strip its leaves off one by one.

“Sophie,” he said, his uneasiness making Sophie fidgety, “the real reason I was in a bit of a state when we talked the other day is that there’s something I still haven’t told you about what happened in that hotel room.”

Remembering Mikael’s mix of self-possession and panic that night in the Vaults, Sophie realized she wasn’t really surprised.

“What was it?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“It didn’t seem wise.”

“Well, what made you change your mind, then?”

“I can only tell you if you promise to keep it a secret.”

“I promise,” Sophie said, though the words seemed to scrape in her throat.

Rather than saying anything, Mikael took a pocketknife out of his trousers. Sophie remembered seeing it with the rest
of his things at the police station.

“So?” she said. “It’s your pocketknife. What about it?”

“Sophie, this knife
isn’t
mine, though I said it was. When I finally got myself out of that awful wardrobe at the Balmoral and found Mrs. Tansy’s body on the floor, I sort of staggered back and sat down on the couch. I didn’t mean to, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up properly. And then something hard pressed into my leg, and I felt for it without even thinking, and it was this.”

Sophie still didn’t understand.

“Sophie, this isn’t just any old knife,” he said, turning it over in his palm. “I recognized it at once. Look where it’s chipped. You can see the spot’s just the shape of the British Isles.”

Sophie examined it.

“So it is,” she said, “but what does it matter?”

“The knife isn’t mine,” Mikael said again. “But I’m one hundred percent sure it’s my brother’s. It was our father’s, before he died, and then it passed down to him.”

“It’s your brother’s?” Sophie said, feeling stupid. “Your older brother, the one who’s so exemplary? But that’s impossible. What on earth would your brother have been doing in Mrs. Tansy’s hotel suite? Are you sure you didn’t somehow have the knife with you, and drop it yourself without knowing?”

“Quite sure,” said Mikael.

“Your brother’s not in Scotland, anyway,” Sophie said. “He lives in Denmark, doesn’t he?”

“Well, Sweden, usually, but he could just as easily be in Scotland,” said Mikael. “Nobody’s heard from him for months.”

It didn’t take Sophie long to see what this meant. “You don’t think—”

“I do,” said Mikael, a grim look on his face. “It’s unmistakably his. And the knife wasn’t there before. I’d been sitting in exactly the same spot on the couch before the murderer got there, and I’d have felt it beneath me if it was there.”

“How do you think it turned up?”

“Well, I suppose it’s just within the bounds of possibility that my brother himself actually came to the room and killed Mrs. Tansy.”

“Surely not!”

“I agree, it’s pretty much inconceivable. Whatever else he’s been doing, I simply can’t imagine my brother’s become a murderer. What’s more likely is that someone took the knife off him and planted it there to incriminate him. But how did they get the knife from him in the first place? I must face it: there’s a real chance he’s hurt or even dead.”

“Dead! But Mikael, he can’t be; wouldn’t you have heard something?”

“Normally, yes, but he’s been completely out of touch
with everyone in the family for several months now.”

“Even so, I simply can’t believe it. Pretend for a minute that we’re in a detective novel: If he was actually dead, someone would have found the body and the police would have identified him and got in touch with your mother.”

“Believe me, I hope you’re right. I’m pretty worried, though.”

“I can see it’s terribly worrying. But you know, Mikael, you really can rule out the idea that your brother committed the murder himself. Didn’t you see in the papers? The police are holding the Veteran, that homeless man who’s always hanging around, for the murder. They seem quite certain he did it; in fact, they were at school just the other day to pick up the trolley he left behind after he attacked the minister of public safety on Waterloo Day.”

“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.