The Explosionist (23 page)

J
UST BEFORE LUNCH
Sophie slipped away from the other girls to meet Mikael at the school’s side entrance. He was at the door already, wearing a cap and a navy blue shirt and trousers and carrying a brown paper parcel; he could easily have been mistaken for a delivery boy, which was exactly the idea.

Sophie led him through the halls to Mr. Petersen’s classroom. The teacher wasn’t there yet, though they could hear him talking on the telephone in the office at the back. Sophie had arranged to be there earlier than usual because it suited Mikael better.

They heard him put down the receiver. Sophie and Mikael looked at each other.

“I still can’t believe it’s really him,” Mikael whispered. “Do you think—?”

Then Mr. Petersen appeared in the doorway. He saw Mikael at once. His face went white and then red, and the two of them rushed into each other’s arms.

Seeing them together like that made Sophie inexplicably angry. She could hardly remember why she liked either of them in the first place.

“Mr. Petersen!” she said.

“What is it, Sophie?” he asked.

He and Mikael were smiling like idiots; Sophie sourly reflected that they hadn’t even thanked her for helping them to be reunited.

“There are things I need to ask you about,” she said.

Mikael looked at her curiously. Could he tell how angry she was?

“Arne, you must tell me the truth about this first,” he said urgently to Mr. Petersen, reaching into his trousers and pulling out the pocketknife. “I found—”

“My pocketknife!” said Mr. Petersen. “But how—?”

“It had fallen into the back of the couch in the suite at the Balmoral,” Mikael said. “The suite where the medium was killed.”

“What?” said Mr. Petersen.

They had all taken seats around the lab table at the back
of the classroom, and Sophie’s teacher looked genuinely horrified.

“I misplaced that knife a month ago,” he said, “but however can you know it turned up at the scene of the crime? I certainly never heard a word from the police, though I wondered whether they would contact me; I had several appointments with Mrs. Tansy in the weeks preceding her disappearance, though I was as surprised as anyone else to hear of her death.”

Sophie wanted to ask about the appointments, but Mikael spoke first.

“I was
there
,” he said stubbornly. “That’s how I know about the knife.”

“There at the hotel? You mean, when the medium was killed?” said Mr. Petersen. “That can’t be!”

Sophie could see they were going to go on at cross-purposes if someone didn’t set them straight, so she gave a clear short explanation of how Mikael had come to be at the hotel.

Mr. Petersen looked terribly worried.

“The knife must have got there by way of the Veteran,” he said. “You know the man I mean, Sophie, don’t you? I don’t think I’ve ever been so horrified in my life as when I saw him attack the minister. After that, it was less surprising to learn he’d also been implicated in the death of the medium. But it
still sends shivers down my spine to think of my own involvement with him. I can’t quite forgive myself—I felt awful when I heard about how he died, and I fear I may bear some of the responsibility for the crimes he committed along the way.”

“How so?” Sophie asked.

Before Mr. Petersen could answer her, Mikael asked another question. “Why did the Veteran want to implicate you? He could have framed anyone he wanted. Was there something about your dealings with him that might have given him a dislike for you?”

“He knew I worked for the Nobel Consortium,” Mr. Petersen said thoughtfully. “Hmm…I must mull that one over.”

“But why are you
here
?” Sophie burst in. “Are you still working for Nobel? Why did you meet with the medium and the Veteran?”

“That I can’t tell you,” said Mr. Petersen, sounding quite annoyingly apologetic. “Confidentiality. Sorry.”

There were all sorts of other things Sophie wanted to learn too. It would drive her mad if he wouldn’t answer any of her questions!

“Did you pay off our old chemistry teacher so that you could take her place?” she asked.

“Why do you say that?” said Mr. Petersen warily.

“Jean and I spotted her in the electric showroom in
Princes Street, still using her maiden name and spending money like water. It was clear she hadn’t got married at all, but on the other hand she had much more money than before. It was most odd. Then I accidentally saw the travel visas in your passport—I do apologize, I couldn’t help it, I was looking for something to write you a note with and it was right there in your desk drawer. I couldn’t understand why you’d been traveling back and forth so often to Stockholm without saying anything. It made me wonder whether your job here was just a cover for something else.”

“Damned fool!” said Mr. Petersen. “Sorry, Sophie; not you. Miss Rawlins is really the most impossible woman. I’m not surprised to hear of her behaving so foolishly. Well, that’s another little job for me….”

“You’re not going to kill her?” Sophie asked, aghast. She didn’t like Miss Rawlins, but that didn’t mean it was all right to talk about disposing of her as one might an unattractive garden shrub.

“Kill her?” Mr. Petersen looked quite horrified. “Certainly not, Sophie. Whatever must you think of me? Oh dear, I see you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick completely. God, what a mess!”

He jumped out of his seat and began pacing back and forth. “You’ve got no reason to trust me, Sophie,” he said. “But by the most solemn oaths possible, I swear I mean you
no harm. On the contrary, your safety’s vitally important to me.”

“What about the bombings?” Sophie asked. It was her deepest darkest worry, especially now that the Nobel connection had been proven. “If you had anything to do with those deaths, we can’t keep it secret.”

Mikael might be satisfied simply to know his brother hadn’t been at the murder scene, but Sophie couldn’t let things go so easily, even if it
was
her beloved Mr. Petersen.

“Sophie, I swear to you on my mother’s head that I’m not involved in any way with the Brothers of the Northern Liberties,” said Mr. Petersen. “I’d never intentionally harm another human being. I’m deeply committed to pacifism. Look, I can see why you’re suspicious. Those entry stamps in the passport must have been a bit of a facer! Indeed, I must confess that I
was
involved with one of the bombings, the one at St. Giles’ Cathedral.”

“The one where nobody was killed?” Sophie said, confused. “But—”

“I was asked to find the device and, if possible, to defuse it without detonating it. Unfortunately the bomb went off as soon as I sent in the first mechanical probe. It wasn’t supposed to work that way, but at least it prevented the bomb’s going off in the middle of morning services, as it was meant to.”

“A mechanical probe?” Sophie asked, curious despite herself.

Mr. Petersen looked for a moment as if he would like to indulge her curiosity. Then he shook his head.

“Another time, Sophie, I’ll tell you all about the latest antiterror gadgets,” he said. “All you need to know now is that I was there with the full knowledge of the police—indeed, at their request. They contacted the Nobel Consortium, and someone there told them I was nearest by.”

“Oh,” said Sophie. “Mr. Petersen—”

She was going to ask why he had taken the teaching job in the first place, but she stopped when Mikael started chuckling quietly. She supposed he thought it was funny, the way she kept calling his brother by his formal name.

“Stop it!” she said, so annoyed she actually reached across—she couldn’t believe she did it—and whacked him in the stomach, a hard backhanded blow that took him completely by surprise. He reached over and grabbed her arm and forced it back until she begged him to stop.

Now it was Mr. Petersen laughing.

“I can see you two are old friends,” he said. “Oh, it’s so good to see you again, Mikael!”

He clapped Mikael on the shoulder, and the two of them looked at each other affectionately.

At that moment Sophie had a revelation—a
horrible
revelation. She let her arm go limp so suddenly that Mikael was put off balance and couldn’t stop her from snatching it back from him. She didn’t want to touch him; she couldn’t let him touch her for even a moment longer.

For months Sophie had believed herself to be in love with Mr. Petersen. Everyone knew about it and joked about it, and even Sophie had grown comfortable with the idea.
Of course
Mr. Petersen would never fall in love with Sophie—that was a given.

But Sophie wasn’t jealous of the love she could see in Mr. Petersen’s face as he looked at his younger brother. It was
Mikael
whose affections she begrudged; she could hardly bear seeing even an
iota
of love in his eyes for someone else, even for his brother.

It was really Mikael Sophie had been in love with all along! Oh, how awful, how shameful; it was the most humiliating—the most
unforgivable
—thing she had ever done. Falling in love with her best friend!

The other two were looking at her curiously. She couldn’t say a word to explain why she’d gone silent. She was briefly consumed with a powerful and irrational dislike for both of them. Why couldn’t they have stayed in Denmark where they belonged?

“Forgive me for saying so, Sophie,” said Mr. Petersen, after a quick look at his watch, “but I have a strong feeling
you’re going to be in very hot water if you don’t make haste to lunch.”

“Oh, golly,” said Sophie. At least it was an excuse to leave right away.

“Give me a week to sort things out,” the teacher said. “That’s all I ask. Then I’ll tell you everything I can.”

“But Mikael will have gone by then!”

“I’m traveling to Denmark next week in any case,” said Mr. Petersen. “I’ll explain everything to him then; it will be easier that way.”

But when would Sophie get to see Mikael?

“Away with you now,” said Mr. Petersen. “Don’t worry, Sophie, it will all come right in the end, with a bit of luck.”

“Come to tea on Thursday,” Mikael called after her as she left. “I’ll tell Arne now about everything else that’s happened, and then you and I can talk on Thursday about what to do next.”

She waved a hand to show she’d heard, but didn’t look back. Probably they would enjoy having some time alone together. It wasn’t hard to tell when she was superfluous. Realizing she was in love with Mikael only drove home how peripheral Sophie was to his life. She would have to be
scrupulous
in making sure he caught no glimpse of her feelings; she would rather die than be exposed.

T
HAT EVENING
S
OPHIE
plowed steadily through an enormous pile of homework without letting anything distract her. Schoolwork was
nothing
compared to everything else that had happened recently.

Jean and Priscilla had yet to resolve their argument, but agreed to put their differences aside. Nan herself spent the evening in bed with her history textbook. She could hardly have turned more than a page or two, but if she was crying, she did so very quietly.

They all talked softly in bed until eleven o’clock, much too keyed up to feel in the least sleepy. Once the last inspection had come and gone and the corridor lights been put out, they joined Nan on her bed, Priscilla wearing a very fancy pair of
blue silk pajamas, the other three in the distinctly less glamorous regulation ones.

“Did you find the things I asked for?” Sophie asked Nan, speaking softly, though not actually whispering. Nan’s bereavement would keep them from being punished for breaking the lights-out rule only so long as their offenses were not too glaring. Quiet voices and a single candle would be safest.

In silence Nan laid a series of objects on the bed: a snapshot of Sam with his arm around Nan’s shoulders; a little double-action revolver, formerly Sam’s, usually kept in the rifle-club cabinet and illegally borrowed for the evening; an Azerbaijani woven bracelet Sam had sent his sister for Christmas; half a dozen postcards.

“Don’t you need anything else?” Jean asked Sophie. “Some incense, or a crystal ball?”

“I’ve got a powder compact with a mirror in it,” Priscilla suggested, “and there’s also my transistor radio.”

Her willingness to contribute her most treasured possession (Priscilla’s father had obtained the radio from one of the men who had actually invented the transistor) set Nan off into tears again.

“We won’t need anything like that,” Sophie said, trying to project confidence. “We’ll just use these things as a way of connecting with Sam.”

Sophie didn’t want Nan to hear her brother’s voice directly. There was something upsetting in the sound of a disembodied voice even when it didn’t belong to someone you loved, and hearing Sam’s spirit talk in its present thinned-out, incoherent state could do Nan no possible good.

“How does it work?” Nan asked. She seemed to be trying hard to behave as though everything was all right.

“It’s a technique called psychometry,” Sophie explained. “Every object retains impressions of the people who’ve handled it. They sometimes do it at séances—people put things like a pen or a watch into a tray, and the medium gives readings from them. It doesn’t have to be something of your own—people often get readings on an object belonging to someone they’re worried about.”

She felt incredibly silly stating the obvious like this, but the things taught in the mandatory Spiritualist Instruction class were all airy-fairy nonsense and none of the others came from the kind of family that had Friday-night séances. It wasn’t a question of social class, more of different cultures: Great-aunt Tabitha’s civil-service-oriented and rather mandarin circles practiced spiritualism very regularly, while most other people felt that it was all very well but not the sort of thing one did in one’s own home.

Priscilla and Jean stayed cross-legged at the foot of the bed, Nan at the head, while Sophie crouched on the floor beside them.

“Put the candle on top of your locker,” she told Nan, “and then touch each of these things, saying your brother’s name every time.”

The others watched Nan touch each relic in turn, her lips moving as she faintly sounded the name.

Once Nan had finished her pass along the row of objects, Sophie let her own fingers brush over them, forcing her mind to become as receptive as possible. Sophie had met Sam a few times over the years, but her mental image of him as distinct from the other Harris brothers remained blurry. Best of all would have been something that had been on Sam’s body right at the moment he died, for his spirit would cling to it afterward. Most of the things here gave off a much clearer sense of Nan than her brother, and it was with some discouragement that Sophie made a second pass over them, this time letting her hand rest a little longer on each item.

As she came to the pistol, the candle guttered and a breeze swept through the room.

Jean yelped, Priscilla shushed her, and even Sophie (by now more or less hardened to the presence of the uncanny) almost lost her balance, stopped from toppling over only by Nan grabbing her shoulder and holding her upright.

“It’s not
really
glowing,” Priscilla whispered as Sophie’s fingers closed over the pistol’s grip. “That’s just a reflection of the ambient light.”

Nobody bothered to correct her.

Sophie couldn’t imagine Nan hadn’t unloaded the pistol as a safety precaution, but she double-checked the cylinder to make sure the chambers were empty. Then she took hold of the gun and let her mind go blank.

Next thing she knew, she found herself standing in the middle of the room, trapped between Jean and Priscilla, who were each holding one of her arms. All her muscles hurt, and her throat felt raspy and sore.

“Be quiet!” Jean hissed. “You’ve been shouting loud enough to wake the dead!”

“Surely that’s the point of the exercise?” Priscilla murmured, dragging Sophie back over to Nan’s side.

“Nan, was it any good?” Sophie asked. She couldn’t remember a thing—a strange and frightening feeling.

The others looked at one another.

“I’m not sure if
good
’s the word,” said Nan, sliding over to make room for Sophie as the others resumed their places at the foot of the bed. Her face was very white, and she swallowed several times as if trying not to be sick. “It was too much of a jumble for us to make much sense of. Sophie, I’m sure it was Sam speaking through you. He speaks—used to speak—very quickly when he’s excited, not a stutter exactly but a sort of jerky pattern. The way you were talking just now was exactly like it.”

“And what did I say?” Sophie asked.

She hadn’t meant to give voice to Sam’s thoughts, just to receive a message she’d be able to pass on later to Nan, but clearly her control wasn’t as good as she imagined.

The others exchanged glances.

It was Priscilla who spoke.

“It was pretty much what you’d expect,” she said, “from someone fighting hand to hand and knowing he’s about to die.”

“Oh, Nan, I’m sorry,” Sophie said, tears springing to her eyes. She clasped Nan’s hand, and Nan flinched at the contact.

“It’s not your fault, Sophie,” she said, detaching her hand from Sophie’s. “That’s war. We all know it can end like that. But Sophie, he really wasn’t
himself
. I think the pistol took things in the wrong direction. Too violent. Do you think you could try one more time? What I need is to say good-bye, and feel at least for myself that he hears it. I can see it’s horrible for you, Sophie, but it would mean the world to me if we could do it.”

Sophie gave Nan a doubtful look, then sighed. What did she think she was saving herself for, anyway?

“All right,” she said. “I’m going to try something different this time. I think there’s something I can do with the postcards. I only thought of it just now, but it should be better than the gun. That was a mistake.”

She sat and thought for a minute, the others afraid to interrupt. Then she picked up the little sheaf of postcards and looked at them closely. She laid them out writing side up on the coverlet like a game of solitaire.

“I need to get a few things from the other room,” she said. “Back in a minute.”

She tiptoed across the room and into the study, where she found an exercise book and a plumbago pencil.

“All right,” she said, back beside the others and amazed at the steadiness of her own voice. (It was a good thing she’d gone to so many of those wretched séances over the years.) “I need you all to work with me this time. We’re going to form a small sitter’s circle, the kind they use at real séances. You’ll all join hands, but I need to keep mine free, because I want to try letting Sam communicate with Nan in writing. That’s been the pattern of their contact over the last few years while he’s been abroad.”

Priscilla took Jean’s hand and Jean took Nan’s. Sophie asked Priscilla to rest her right hand lightly on Sophie’s left forearm, Nan doing the same on Sophie’s other side. Then Sophie took up the pencil and let it rest on the exercise book, her left hand pressing the page flat to the surface of the bed.

This time she spoke aloud. She didn’t think her concentration had been good enough the last time, perhaps because she’d
had little conviction that Nan would benefit from hearing what her dead brother had to say. But she couldn’t protect the others, not really. They were living through bad times, and whatever happened, there would be many deaths.

She raised her head and closed her eyes.

“Sam,” she said. “This is Nan’s friend Sophie at school. Nan’s here with me right now, and so are two other girls we share a room with, Jean and Priscilla.”

She stopped speaking and felt for some kind of a response—anything, really. She felt a little tug or a tweak, like a dog whistle pitched high above human hearing.

“Sam, your sister’s right here and she wants to say good-bye,” Sophie said, tipping her head in Nan’s direction and hoping she’d have the sense to speak.

“Sam?” Nan said. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was to miss you on that last leave. I’m so proud of you, and I love you. That’s all. I hope you’re at peace now.”

The words would mean nothing in a storybook, but the sound of them being spoken by a real person she actually knew made Sophie want to cry. She heard some sniffling, and one of the others pulled up a clasped pair of hands to wipe eyes on a sleeve.

Sophie forced herself to stop thinking so much and tried to make her mind blank. Then, suddenly and startlingly, something began to happen.

Her left hand felt for the edges of the exercise book, gripping the upper right-hand corner of the page, her forearm pressing it down flat along the top. Meanwhile her writing hand adjusted itself into a different grip on the pencil and began to move in fits and starts over the paper.

The feeling was altogether so strange that Sophie couldn’t help opening her eyes to look. She stared as the words took shape.

Two, three, four lines of writing. Sophie hoped it would be enough.

Just then she had a flash of him, the agonizing presence of whatever remained of Sam Harris, the shreds left over from the pain of his last moments (he’d died in
fire
, Sophie realized, gagging), his own self weakened by months of deprivation and the unrelenting hostility of the people he was meant to be protecting.

Within the agony, though, she sensed the solid core of his self intact. Even without having seen what he’d written, Sophie knew that none of Sam’s agony or his ambivalence about the army’s so-called peacekeeping mission or his doubt as to whether the sacrifice of his own life had any meaning would feature in the message to his baby sister.

Sophie found her lips moving, silently mouthing, “Please let him be at peace; oh, please be at peace, Sam,” repeating it over and over until the pencil fell still in her hands and she
slumped forward onto the bed.

She came to herself a moment later in a scene of quiet chaos: Priscilla in tears, Jean’s arm around Nan’s shoulders, Nan herself shaking with hysterical sobs as she read the words on the page.

“Are you all right?” Priscilla asked Sophie.

“Quite all right,” Sophie said. She couldn’t shake the memory of how Sam
felt
—the fear and the sorrow and the self-disgust and the awful sensation and smell of burning, and yet through it all something human and real that had to do with his love for his family and his old life in the world. “Does the message make any sense?”

Nan thrust the exercise book in Sophie’s direction, then got up and staggered across the room to the basin, where she ran water to splash on her face.

Sophie held the book under the small pool of candlelight and read the dim scrawl wandering up and down across the ruled lines.

“My dearest little Nanny goat don’t spare me another thought. So proud of you. Confident you’ll find your heart’s desire in Women’s Auxiliaries but do be careful Nan it’ll be harder than it seems at home. Look out for Mum and Dad they’ll need you now and take care of your good self with all love for evermore from your loving brother Sam.”

The gap between Sam’s message and the torrent of pain
and anger she’d felt from him struck Sophie hard. What must it have cost him to send these loving words? They had none of the vagueness Sophie associated with the run-of-the-mill spirit message—the postcard template had helped him write something very much like what he would have inscribed in life.

Sam telling Nan she’d thrive in the army, after his own experience and in full knowledge that she too might lose her life, showed a generosity and willingness to sacrifice that Sophie couldn’t begin to emulate.

The loud tread of the teacher patrolling the corridor brought them all back to the real world. Sophie blew out the candle and practically leaped back into her own bed, while Jean and Priscilla scurried across the room. Only Nan remained out of bed and over by the sink, the tap still running.

The steps paused outside for a moment. It was easy to imagine the teacher leaning down and checking the crack under the door to see if they had a light on, and then deciding not to bother the poor things.

“Nan?” Sophie whispered, after five minutes had passed and it seemed reasonable to assume the corridor was clear.

“I’ll come to bed soon,” Nan said.

“I’m so sorry,” Sophie said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“No! You can’t imagine what you’ve done; it’s all I hoped for. Thank you, Sophie. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

Sophie felt wretched. This couldn’t be right. Wasn’t one supposed to judge an action by its fruits, and hadn’t the night’s work only brought Nan more pain?

What if Nan asked Sophie to contact her brother again, wanting more messages? What if she became addicted to crossing the boundary between life and death?