The Explosionist (15 page)

“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 con
nection 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 pos
sibly 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.

S
OPHIE 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—sim
ilar 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.

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 class
room, plus the grubby sticking plaster Matron had put on her cut the day of the explosion.

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.