The Explosionist (29 page)

“Why should I want to save any of them?” said Nicko, looking genuinely surprised. “A few factory girls are no great loss!”

And at that moment one of the young women simply
threw
herself forward at him, four or five others instantly following, yelling as they went. In the blink of an eye, they had knocked him to the ground, and he vanished (so did the lighter!) beneath the heap of flailing limbs.

Everything happened next in a blur. Mr. Petersen and his men could do nothing without risking Mood letting off a bullet that would send them all to their deaths. They rushed up and simply stood in front of the heap—with all the girls, it was like the picture of Orpheus and the Maenads in Sophie’s book of Greek myths.

A minute later, Mood lay supine on the floor, a woman holding down each of his arms and legs, while the girl who’d first thrown herself on him had jumped up and was waving the extinguished lighter and gun in the air.

“Give those to me,” said one of the guards, struggling to keep his voice calm.

He took them and left the building, his deliberate pace more than anything else reminding everybody what a close shave they’d just had.

Two other guards handcuffed Mood in special plastic manacles and dragged him away with them. Sophie had to look aside as he wept and pleaded with the officers to let him go. He must have gone a bit mad in the end, she realized. Only a madman would have thought he could successfully orchestrate such a complex plot. Mr. Petersen went with them to escort Mood to the vehicle that would take him to jail.

Great-aunt Tabitha strode over to the girl who’d saved them—she had an amazingly pretty pink and white complexion, the result of breathing nitroglycerin every day—and pumped her hand.

“A quite remarkable effort,” she said. “It’s not necessary for me to say how very much we are in your debt.”

Then Great-aunt Tabitha turned to Sophie. “I suspect you know rather more about all this than I imagined, but I won’t inquire as to how that came about,” she said.

“Is everything going to be all right?” Sophie asked, still terribly worried about the consequences of the minister’s politicking. “Surely the minister must be brought to justice as well; it can’t have been only Nicko Mood who plotted those deaths!”

Great-aunt Tabitha looked quite triumphant. “The minister wants war, I want peace, but we’ve agreed to set aside our differences and work together in the short term for Scotland’s good. There won’t be any more money flowing in the direction of the Brothers, and as a token of her goodwill, the minister has accepted my candidate to replace Nicko Mood. Ruth Grant will make a superb chief of staff….”

Miss Grant to work for the minister?

Looking at Miss Grant, Sophie underwent a startling realization: Miss Grant had been looking forward to this moment for months. She’d planned to get Nicko’s job all along!

It rubbed Sophie the wrong way to think of the minister surviving unscathed. But at least surely now they’d be able to abolish IRYLNS. After pulling off this triumph of investigation and politicking, Miss Grant and Great-aunt Tabitha could do anything they wanted.

“You’ll be able to do away with IRYLNS!” Sophie said.

But instead of giving Sophie the ready affirmative she expected, the two women exchanged significant looks and smiled.

“Do away with it?” Miss Grant said. “Why ever would we do that?”

“IRYLNS is one of the country’s most precious resources,” Great-aunt Tabitha added. “We need every weapon we can get.”

“But at least you’ll stop the bill that says IRYLNS has the right to claim any girl once she turns sixteen from being passed into law?”

Their silence made it clear that neither woman meant to do anything of the sort, although Great-aunt Tabitha had the grace to look slightly ashamed.

Sophie found herself speechless.

Mr. Petersen appeared now to tell them that Nicholas Mood was safely in custody.

“Sophie, the most important thing is to get you out of here,” he said then. “None of this is necessarily going to prevent Scotland from continuing on a collision course with Europe, and meanwhile the risk that you might be sent to IRYLNS is too great to chance your staying here.”

“You know about IRYLNS!” Sophie said. “But how?”

“We have our ways,” said Mr. Petersen, making a wry face. He had taken Sophie slightly aside, though Great-aunt Tabitha and Miss Grant were close enough to listen in. “Sophie, you must leave the country, and now’s the ideal chance,” he said. “You’ve got more than enough time to meet Mikael and sail with him to København. There’s a driver waiting for you outside the gates as we speak.”

“How will I get out without a visa?” Sophie asked. It was all happening much too quickly—she’d only just decided to leave, and already they were conspiring to send her away with
out further delay. She had a sudden powerful urge to drag her heels. Wouldn’t she get to say good-bye to Peggy first? And what about her friends? Who would protect
them
from IRYLNS if Sophie just left?

“We’ve got a plan,” said Mr. Petersen.

“Couldn’t I stay until after my exams?” Sophie said, not liking the plaintive note she heard in her own words but unable to suppress it. “Then I could say good-bye to everybody first. Do I really have to decide right now?”

After looking around to make sure nobody but Miss Grant could hear their conversation, Great-aunt Tabitha unexpectedly joined her voice to Mr. Petersen’s.

“Sophie, you must leave at once,” she said firmly.

Sophie looked at her with enormous surprise.

“If Mr. Petersen whisks you off now and makes you disappear, I’ll be able to deny knowing anything about it,” Sophie’s great-aunt said. “The longer we wait, the riskier it becomes. Seize the day. If you stay, I can’t promise I won’t hand you over to IRYLNS.”

She leaned over and kissed Sophie’s cheek.

All Sophie’s energy was focused now on not crying.

Her eyesight was blurry as Mr. Petersen led her out of the building and across the narrow-gauge tracks, back toward the gatehouse at the main entrance.

Just before they reached it, Mr. Petersen turned to Sophie.
“We’ll speak again before long,” he said.

Sophie stared at him. “Aren’t you coming with me now?” she asked.

She didn’t understand it. They’d been walking for ages without him saying anything. If they weren’t to go on together, his silence became not surprising so much as completely infuriating.

“I can’t,” said Mr. Petersen. “I’ve got loose ends to tie up, and we can’t afford to have you waiting around while I take care of them. The commander you met that night in the Castle will be here within the hour, and once he gets his hands on you, it’ll be impossible to spring you.”

“Oh,” said Sophie, feeling somewhat bereft.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m handing you over now to somebody who will take extremely good care of you.”

They reclaimed Sophie’s bag from the guard and passed out of the compound into the sandy flat area in front of the gatehouse. There she looked at Mr. Petersen, and he looked back at her, and both of their faces expressed a shared sense of unfinished business.

Sophie waited to see whether he’d say anything else, but he didn’t. And she wasn’t about to say anything herself.

After a few minutes, a Crossley roadster pulled up in front of them. Mr. Petersen shook hands with the driver, then turned to give Sophie an awkward hug.

“Have a safe journey,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

In a daze, Sophie fumbled with the door and let herself into the passenger seat.

“Thank goodness you’re all right,” said the driver. “Hostage situations are always touch and go. I was extremely relieved when Mr. Petersen radioed to let me know you’d survived unscathed.”

The driver was Miss Chatterjee.

T
HE HISTORY TEACHER’S
unexpected appearance as getaway driver made Sophie feel confused as well as relieved. It was a better thing, of course, to be handed over to someone familiar than to a complete stranger. But what was Miss Chatterjee doing here?

The teacher took a left turn onto the feeder road that would take them to the highway leading east back to Edinburgh and the port of Leith. “Surprised to see me?” she said.

Sophie just nodded.

“I must make my confession,” Miss Chatterjee went on, politely ignoring Sophie’s distress. “Mr. Petersen was not the only teacher at the Edinburgh Institution for Young Ladies
who served two masters. Like him, I have been on the payroll of the Nobel Consortium for some time. Indeed, the Consortium paid for my education and set me up in Edinburgh more than ten years ago. It is very much the Consortium’s way to prepare for all possible eventualities, taking the longest view.”

Sophie turned and stared at her. This was utter betrayal, worse—
much
worse—than learning the truth about Mr. Petersen. Was that what Miss Chatterjee had meant the night she warned Sophie not to think of her as a hero?

“I can imagine how you feel,” said Miss Chatterjee when Sophie didn’t say anything. “I wish I could have told you before, but the Consortium is quite strict about us keeping our identities concealed. If I had let you in on the secret, I would have been recalled to the central office in Stockholm, where I could have done you no good.”

Sophie was tallying up all the clues she’d missed: Miss Chatterjee’s lovely clothes, well beyond what one might purchase on a teacher’s salary; the elevated circles she moved in; most of all, the air she had of life being interesting and important. She remembered Priscilla’s canny observations about Miss Rawlins and wished she’d thought of asking her about Miss Chatterjee. But the thought of Nan and Priscilla and Jean, and not being able to say good-bye to them, made Sophie start crying in earnest.

Miss Chatterjee offered a silk handkerchief, and Sophie wiped her eyes and blew her nose and generally tried to pull herself together.

“The day the headmistress called a special meeting for all the teachers,” Miss Chatterjee said when Sophie had collected herself, “it became clear that things were in a parlous state. Her news—that Parliament was certain to take virtually all of you girls for IRYLNS—made us see that you were in even graver danger than we had anticipated. Neither Mr. Petersen nor I was quite sure what happens at the Institute, but enough stories have trickled out that we thought we’d better come up with a plan to get you out of danger. In that sense, all this business with the minister and her assistant just precipitated things a little sooner than we expected.”

Sophie remembered overhearing Miss Chatterjee ask on the day of the coffee spill whether the decision to send the girls to IRYLNS was really a matter of protecting the girls or just of promoting the interests of the country. That must have been the day they decided Sophie had to be rescued.

“You didn’t send me a little metal toy iron by way of the medium, did you?” Sophie asked. “As a kind of warning?”

Miss Chatterjee gave her a blank look, and Sophie wondered whether the medium had given Sophie the warning of her own accord. Many secrets must have gone to the grave with Mrs. Tansy; as much as she had disliked the woman in
life, though, and resented her for getting Sophie mixed up in the whole business to begin with, Sophie still felt she owed her something.

“Miss Chatterjee?” Sophie asked.

“What is it, Sophie?”

“What can be done about the other girls? Can’t you stop Jean and Priscilla from going to IRYLNS?”

Just then a radio receiver in Miss Chatterjee’s handbag, on the floor by Sophie’s feet, now began emitting short sharp bursts of speech.

“Would you mind passing me the radio?” Miss Chatterjee asked.

Sophie dug around in the bag and found it. It was one of the new transistor ones, like Priscilla’s.

Both Miss Chatterjee and the person at the other end spoke in code, so Sophie couldn’t follow most of what they said, but there was an ominous change in Miss Chatterjee’s body language. She didn’t drive any faster—she probably didn’t want to alert whoever might be watching—but she looked suddenly much tougher than before.

“Sophie, it’s bad news, but nothing we can’t deal with,” she said after signing off. “Apparently our old friend Commander Brown has cottoned on to the fact that a crucial witness has left the scene. He’s put out an all-points bulletin and instructed the police to mount a series of roadblocks.
We’re still miles away from Leith, but we’ve got to hide you right away so that if the car’s stopped, they won’t see you.”

Sophie didn’t know how to respond.

“Don’t worry,” Miss Chatterjee added. “We planned for this contingency, and the risk is minimal.”

The word
risk
made Sophie’s stomach hurt, but she thought she’d rather know the details than not.

“What’s the plan, then?” she asked.

She knew Commander Brown wouldn’t kill her, but his finding her would surely initiate exactly the series of events she most wanted to avoid, beginning with a serious interrogation in the Vaults and almost certainly ending with matriculation at IRYLNS.

“Well, let me put it this way,” said Miss Chatterjee. “How do you feel about small enclosed spaces?”

Five minutes later Miss Chatterjee pulled over at a spot where the road got wider and opened the boot of the car to show a steamer trunk—quite a large one, though it didn’t look big enough to hold a person, which was part of the point. It had a false bottom and breathing holes, and Miss Chatterjee assured Sophie that there was really plenty of room for her inside.

When she saw Sophie’s doubtful look, she sighed. “Yes, I know it’s awful, and I wouldn’t like it much either,” she said. “But I borrowed it from my friend Harry, who’s a stage magician
and twice your size, and he gets inside it every night.”

She showed Sophie the safety latch that she could use to let herself out if she accidentally got stuck in the hold of the ship, rather than in Mikael’s cabin as planned. She would have ended up in the trunk sooner or later, even without the roadblocks, Sophie suddenly realized, for this was how they intended to get her on board ship without the proper visa.

“What about Jean and Priscilla?” she asked urgently. “You must tell them they can’t go to IRYLNS!”

“Don’t worry about them,” said Miss Chatterjee, handing Sophie a flask of water. “Your job now is to protect yourself. We can’t afford to lose any more time—get into the trunk!”

Despite her conviction that a police car might come into view at any moment, despite her horror at the idea of being taken into custody, despite her fear of IRYLNS, something in Sophie rebelled at the thought of shutting herself up in this awful cramped box.

“Do I really have to?” she said.

“You must,” said Miss Chatterjee.

The sky had become cloudy and overcast.

“Hurry up, Sophie!”

The unfamiliar note of anxiety in the teacher’s voice provided the necessary spur. Sophie reminded herself that she didn’t dislike small dark spaces, but climbing into the trunk
still made her feel as if she were going voluntarily into her own coffin.

“If things go as they should, I won’t see you again for a long while, so I’ll say good-bye now,” said Miss Chatterjee. “Sophie, it’s been a pleasure teaching you. And I swear to you I will deliver this trunk into the keeping of your friend Mikael on the
Gustavus Adolphus
if it kills me. Mr. Petersen was most precise in his instructions!”

The top of the trunk closed over Sophie and she found herself in pitch blackness, clasps shutting loudly over her head.

Would Sophie escape? What would happen to Jean and Priscilla?

Within five minutes these concerns looked trivial beside the need to prevent herself from being sick.

Sophie had already felt nauseated sitting in the front seat of the car. It turned out that the motion of the car as it affected her now was about a hundred times more sick-making than on an ordinary car ride. She wished she’d thought to retrieve Peggy’s barley sugar from her bag before Miss Chatterjee had tucked it in beside her in the trunk’s secret compartment, but there was hardly any space to move about in. Besides, even the slightest movement made being sick that much more likely.

The car twisted and turned, it sped up and slowed down, it even stopped a few times for long enough that Sophie would
have been absolutely terrified had all her attention not been engaged in the desperate struggle not to throw up.

It seemed an eternity before the car came to a halt. The engine stopped and Sophie heard the passenger door open and close again. She thought she wouldn’t even mind if Commander Brown was outside and about to order the car searched, so long as she never again had to endure such a ride.

Someone opened the boot and the whole car shook. Sophie hoped the last little bit of movement wouldn’t trigger actual vomiting. She was only barely holding on. Aside from the sheer unpleasantness of it, the sudden sound and smell of a person throwing up inside the trunk would let the authorities know that something was very wrong.

The trunk somewhat muffled the sound of their voices, but Sophie was relieved to hear Miss Chatterjee negotiating the fee with a porter rather than, say, explaining her actions to a police officer. Then the trunk was heaved out of the boot of the car and slotted onto some kind of handcart. Someone outside thumped the trunk a couple times; it might have been Miss Chatterjee bidding Sophie farewell.

She could hear the shrieks of gulls and smell salt air even through the dark masculine scents of the trunk, but it continued to be a great effort not to be sick as they rolled up the steep gradient of the gangplank and she began to feel the quiet movement of the ship.

Had there ever been such a test of the power of mind over matter?

It seemed an interminable wait, with lots of jerking around and sudden sharp yaws and pitches in unexpected directions, before Sophie’s trunk finally came to rest on a flat floor. She heard a boy’s voice saying “That’s for your help” and an older man thanking him and then the sound of a door opening and closing.

The top of the trunk opened now, and though Sophie was still trapped beneath the false bottom, she couldn’t help letting out a groan of relief.

The next thing she knew, Mikael had lifted up the decoy shelf above her and leaned down to help her out.

Her arms and legs were incredibly stiff, but Sophie struggled out as fast as she could.

“Thank goodness,” said Mikael. “I’d begun to be afraid—”

Sophie cut him off.

“Where’s the basin?” she gasped.

“Right there. Sophie, you must tell me everything! What happened—”

But though superhuman fortitude had helped so far, Sophie couldn’t hold it in for another second. She doubled up and to her great shame and mortification began to be sick into the porcelain basin on the washstand.