The Explosionist (21 page)

“W
AIT 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, there’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 Murchison, 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.

“She’s telling us something about a man and a woman,” said Keith.

“Do you suppose they’re real people?” Mikael asked.

Sophie had almost forgotten the others were there, let alone that they wouldn’t recognize the faces. “They’re real people, all right,” she said grimly.

“How do you know?” It was Mikael, of course, sounding distinctly skeptical.

“Because I know who they both are,” said Sophie. “I’ve met them. They came to my great-aunt’s house for supper, and I’m not in the least surprised to see their faces again here.”

“But who
are
they, Sophie?” said Keith. “You must tell us!”

“The man’s name is Nicholas Mood, and he works for the
woman, who’s called Joanna Murchison.”

“Joanna Murchison,” said Mikael. “Sounds familiar—seems to me I’ve seen that name in the newspapers recently. Oh, no, Sophie—you’re not serious….”

“I’m dead serious,” she said. “She’s the minister for public safety, the person responsible for bringing terrorists to justice and keeping Scotland safe.”

“But—”

This time it was Sophie who silenced Mikael by turning and catching his eye and making a tiny gesture with her head toward Keith.

“Don’t worry, you two, the politics of it really aren’t my business,” Keith said comfortably into the awkward silence that ensued. “You can explain the whole thing to him later, Sophie. I can see you’ve got a pretty clear idea of the way things must have happened, you and that spirit were on the exact same wavelength.”

Sophie shuddered.

“What I’m really impressed with,” Keith added, “is the way the medium’s left you with a nice puzzle.”

“A puzzle?” Sophie asked, feeling by now as if her brain was barely functioning. “What puzzle?”

“It’s obvious what he means, isn’t it?” said Mikael, picking up both prints and looking back and forth between the two. “Which one of them really did it? Did Mrs. Tansy simply
not know
, and implicate them both as suspects? Was Nicholas Mood working primarily as the minister’s agent, and is she the one to hold culpable? Or is it the other way around, with Mood having gone beyond his mandate as the minister’s tool?”