The Explosionist (9 page)

She didn’t say it as though she meant it.

On an impulse, Sophie crossed over and kissed her great-aunt on the cheek before saying good night to the two women. She went straight upstairs to bed without stopping in the kitchen; Great-aunt Tabitha never remembered that Sophie hated milk.

War, she said to herself, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep. If the minister gets her way, the country will be at war by the end of the summer. At war not because of justice or the need to protect national boundaries or save lives, but simply due to one woman’s desire to force the world into alignment with her vision.

Sophie distracted herself by translating the sentence into Latin. The Latin version was different from the English because you had to put both parts into the future tense: If the minister will get her way, the country will go to war.

She drifted off to sleep with the grammatical constructions running through her mind like sand through one’s fingers at the beach.

O
N THE WAY TO MEET
Mikael after a reassuringly indigestible Sunday lunch, Sophie found the streets almost empty. Her destination was the foyer of the central branch of the public library, but as she passed under the Corinthian colonnade through to the grand marble entrance hall, Sophie got a nasty shock. A loud clatter sounded just behind her, and she turned and saw the Veteran on his cart. He leered at Sophie, and she hurried up and made her way inside without delay.

How unusual—how
unpleasant
—to see him on Saturday and Sunday as well as during the week. Usually she only saw him hanging around school.

She tried to push him out of mind, rubbing her temples
with her fingers to dispel a slight headache. She had to stop being silly and concentrate on the task at hand.

Mikael was waiting in the lobby, lounging in a way that proclaimed great satisfaction at his having got there before Sophie.

“Sophie, what kept you?” he said virtuously.

“I’m not late!” Sophie protested.

“No, it’s true,” he said, laughing. “I was here early, but I knew just what you’d say if I hinted you were late.”

Sophie kept her face still so he wouldn’t know she was upset, but inwardly she seethed. Why, oh why couldn’t she have been born with the sort of thick skin and easy temperament that made Nan, say, completely impervious to teasing?

Something else had caught Mikael’s attention.

“What are those things?” he asked, pointing to the row of booths running all along one side of the lobby.

“Those?” Sophie said, surprised. “Don’t you have them at home?”

“I can’t tell you if we do until I know what they are! Seriously, are they for voting in elections, or perhaps for getting your photograph taken automatically?”

Sophie had forgotten the way Mikael’s insatiable curiosity made her notice things about Edinburgh she normally took for granted.

“You really don’t know, do you?” she said, still not quite
certain he wasn’t pulling her leg. Everybody knew what the machines were for, though it wasn’t much talked about.

“No, I don’t know, and if you don’t tell me, I’m not going to help you find this quack medium of yours, either! Only one person’s gone into a booth while I’ve been here, and he hasn’t come back out yet, or I’d ask him instead. There was an old lady who wanted to, but a younger woman—I think it must have been her daughter—stopped her.”

It was hard to find the right words to explain.

“You said someone did go in?” she asked.

He nodded.

“How long ago?” she said.

“Oh, five or ten minutes,” Mikael said.

“Watch, then.”

They turned to face the machines.

“What am I looking for?” Mikael asked after a bit. He was still grinning and seemed to suspect Sophie of playing a minor practical joke.

“You’ll know when you see it.”

A minute later, two ambulance men came in through the front door, carrying a stretcher and accompanied by a constable in uniform. Clearly they were in no particular hurry; they stopped to chat with the porter on duty before they sauntered over to the third machine in the row of eight.

The constable took a key from his belt and inserted it into
the lock, then held the door open as the ambulance men leaned in and pulled out the corpse of the man Mikael had seen.

The way they handled the body made it quite clear he was dead.

“What happened to him?” Mikael gasped. “Did he die of a heart attack? How did they know where to find him?”

“A signal went off at the police station,” Sophie said. Oh dear, she could see she’d have to say it outright. “Mikael, they’re suicide machines. Machines for the Voluntary Removal of Life, that’s the official name. I thought they had them in all the Hanseatic states. Have you really nothing of the sort in Denmark?”

“Sophie, in København, they’d throw you into prison just for suggesting it! Suicide is illegal in all civilized countries. Do you mean to say that a man can go into one of those things and kill himself, just like that?”

“Well, you can’t get in without a special token,” Sophie said. The expression on Mikael’s face made her flush a little, but there was nothing to be ashamed of, was there? “You can get one from a member of Parliament, a doctor, a minister, a licensed spiritualist, or the senior librarian,” she added, hating how defensive she sounded, “but they’re not supposed to give you one unless they’re convinced you’re in your right mind.”

“In your right mind, but bent on suicide? Impossible!”

Sophie could perfectly well imagine being in her right mind and yet at the same time wanting to die, but Mikael wasn’t the kind of person who would understand.

“Once you insert the token and go in,” she continued, deciding to stick with pragmatic rather than philosophical considerations, “the machine kills you with an electric shock and then it summons the police. There’s another lot of machines at the main post office, and almost every village has one now too, even the places too small for a Carnegie library.”

“And the government actually lets people commit suicide?”

“How can suicide be prevented?” Sophie countered. “Even in olden times, people found ways of killing themselves. It’s much more sensible to make it safe and legal.”

“Safe? Sophie, just listen to yourself!”

“I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up about it,” Sophie said, uneasily conscious that it had taken Mikael’s reaction to reveal what was troubling in the familiar practice. She suddenly wondered whether she might be blind to other things about Scotland as well. But the Scottish government was the best in the world; that was what Great-aunt Tabitha said, and Sophie’s great-aunt was always right about politics, even if she didn’t seem to understand much about Sophie.

“This country’s got an awfully distorted relationship with death,” Mikael said, gesturing around him in disgust.
“Enough of this arguing, Sophie. Let’s go and see what we can discover about that medium.”

“Did you find her the other day?” Sophie asked.

“It was really strange, Sophie,” Mikael said. “I went to the address on the card—it was a seedy place in the nastier part of the Old Town—and knew at once I’d found the right spot. The lady in the shop next door described Mrs. Tansy perfectly, and I found a pack of kids who told me she used to be picked up most evenings in a chauffeured motorcar and taken off to her appointments. But the flat was completely empty, and the landlady couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me where she’d gone, or when.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Sophie, puzzled. “Why would she have given out a card if she didn’t mean to stay at that address?”

“Fishy, isn’t it? It wasn’t hard to track down the carter who took her things, but that didn’t get me much further. He’d taken her goods to a long-term storage warehouse in Leith, where she paid on the spot for six months’ storage. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

“It’s most suspicious!” Sophie said. “What can she be up to?”

“It’s possible, of course, that Mrs. Tansy’s left the city, or even gone out of the country,” Mikael continued. “On the other hand, the landlady gave me the distinct impression that
she was still fairly close at hand.”

“What did she say that made you think that?” Sophie asked. Though the thought of seeing the medium again made her skin crawl, Sophie really did want to talk to the woman. It would be impossible to find out the meaning of her warning if she had left Edinburgh.

“It wasn’t anything she said, not exactly. Well, I suppose it was. Oh, it sounds silly now….”

“No, tell me,” Sophie pressed him. “What was it?”

“Well, the landlady had a bird in a cage—a budget, is that the word?”

“Budgie!” Sophie said, amused by his small mistake.

“Budgie, then. But there was an enormous black cat stalking about the flat. Several times the cat actually made it up onto the shelf and got his paw through the bars before the landlady noticed. She saw me looking and said she was only keeping the cat for a few days. If her friend hadn’t come for it in a month, she’d throw the wretched animal out into the street.”

“That’s a real Sherlock Holmes move, isn’t it?” Sophie said, full of admiration for Mikael’s perspicacity. “It does seem likely the cat belonged to Mrs. Tansy; you could see her thinking a big black cat would be a good prop for a medium.”

“Afterward I checked with the children outside,” said Mikael, clearly pleased. “That cat
definitely
used to live with
Mrs. Tansy. She doted on it and paid the kids off to make sure nobody would hurt it.”

Sophie congratulated Mikael on having found all this out.

“It wasn’t hard,” he said, brushing away the compliment. “The trick will be to find where she’s gone now. I can’t watch her old place. I’ve bribed a couple of those kids to get me word if she shows up, but we can’t count on them.”

“Where do you think she’s gone?”

“Hard to say. If she’s holed up at a friend’s, we may never find her. On the other hand, she hasn’t taken much with her, and I think there’s a good chance she’ll have gone to a hotel. Would that fit with what you saw of her that night at your great-aunt’s?”

Sophie thought about it.

“Yes, I think so,” she said after a minute.

“So what we must do now is get a list of Edinburgh hotels,” Mikael said, “and then I can check whether she’s registered at any of them.”

“Surely she won’t have registered under her own name? It would be pretty idiotic to go to all that trouble not to be found and then leave your name for anyone who thought to come looking.”

“No, but the wretched woman cuts such a distinctive figure, she won’t find it easy to conceal herself,” said Mikael. “Even if I don’t have the right name, I’ll be able to describe
her—you know, jet beads, heavy build, that sort of thing, just like you said—and explain to the people at the front desk why they should let me up to see her. By pretending she’s the only person who can help me get in touch with the ghost of my dead mother, for instance.”

“You’d pretend
that
?” Sophie said, surprised that the séance-despising Mikael would even fake a belief in spiritualism.

“All in a day’s work,” Mikael said. “Seriously, if you really mean to find things out, you can’t stand on principle.”

He seemed to have grown up quite a bit since his last time in Scotland. He even looked quite handsome, Sophie thought, if not altogether up to the Mr. Petersen standard.

“Let’s get the list of hotels from the telephone book in the main reading room,” she said.

“Good idea.”

They left an hour later with a list of thirty hotels.

She felt remorseful that obligations at school would stop her from being much use, but Mikael waved away her apologies.

“It’s my pleasure, Sophie,” he said. “Things get pretty quiet at the professor’s, and at least this will keep me out of trouble.”

A sharp shooting pain made itself felt above Sophie’s left eye. “What if it gets you into trouble instead?” she asked, feeling
slightly sick. For some reason thinking about the medium made Sophie’s head hurt.

“I’m used to getting in trouble,” Mikael said. “You could even say I like it.”

“Oh, if this goes wrong, your aunt will never forgive me!” said Sophie.

“Nonsense. Stop worrying. You’ll see, I’m good at this.”

Just then Sophie’s headache came on so strongly that she decided not to fuss any more over Mikael, who promised to let her know as soon as he found anything out. She walked home in a daze, her head so painful that she hardly noticed the figure on the cart following her back to Heriot Row.

At home, Peggy took one look at Sophie’s face and put her straight to bed with an aspirin and a mug of hot lemon-barley water. She wouldn’t even listen to Sophie’s pleas to be allowed to finish her homework. Secretly this was a relief, though Sophie would never have admitted it.

O
N
M
ONDAY NEITHER
J
EAN
nor Sophie mentioned having seen Sheena, in unspoken agreement that it had been too troubling to turn into a funny story. It was Priscilla, that evening, who put into words the strangest thing about their having seen their old chemistry mistress.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Miss Rawlins wasn’t
pretty
enough to be a kept woman, not the kind of kept woman who gets given fur coats and electric cookers, at any rate. I don’t dispute what you say about her not really being married, but there’s got to be some other explanation.”

“Perhaps her fiancé stood her up and she’s buying furs and electrical appliances now in order to console herself,” Sophie suggested, though she could hear how thin it sounded.
Really it was what had happened to Sheena that Sophie considered the greater mystery—a mystery she could hardly bear to contemplate.

“That can’t be it,” said Priscilla. “If you don’t mind my being blunt, women usually become better off when they marry. Miss Rawlins didn’t have any money when she was our teacher, and if she hasn’t married after all, where’s the money come from?”

“How do you know she didn’t have any money?” Nan asked.

“Oh, she hadn’t a penny beyond her salary,” Priscilla said, confident in the way of someone who came from money herself. “Don’t you remember that awful caoutchouc mackintosh we used to joke about when we had her for first-form science? No self-respecting woman with a private income would wear a raincoat like that for a day longer than she absolutely had to.”

“Yes,” said Sophie, “but couldn’t she have had her mind on higher things? Some people don’t mind what they wear.”

“Sophie, we all know
your
mind’s on higher things,” Priscilla said, laughing in an annoyingly superior way, “but even that dreadful cardigan of yours must once have been quite good. At least good clothes age gracefully. Don’t you remember the revolting carnation scent Miss Rawlins used to wear, and the amber brooch that looked like something out of
the lucky dip at a village fête? I’m not at all surprised to hear of her wearing a fur jacket in June. She hadn’t good taste, and yet she hankered after expensive things.”

“Yes,” Jean interjected, “that jacket must have cost fifty guineas or more!”

“I think Miss Rawlins lied when she said she was leaving to be married,” Priscilla continued. “And here’s a thought: what if somebody paid her off to leave her job partway through the school year?”

“Why would someone pay her to leave her job, though?” said Nan.

Instead of giving a direct answer, Priscilla asked another question.

“Who benefited from her leaving like that?” she said.

“Priscilla, you’re not saying—,” said Jean, drawing in a breath and then falling silent.

“I most certainly am,” said Priscilla, an evil glint in her eye.

Sophie had a bad feeling about what was coming next.

“Let’s suppose,” Priscilla said, “that Mr. Petersen paid off Miss Rawlins so that he could take her place. This job gives him the perfect cover for his secret life! And of course it explains why she might have come into money—the false marriage story would have simply been a pretext for her change of fortune.”

Sophie groaned. The whole business about Mr. Petersen leading a double life was absurd. Priscilla was doing this just to torment her.

“Are you harking back to the notion that Mr. Petersen might have had something to do with the bombings?” Nan asked, looking up from her history essay. “I don’t see a school providing very good cover for a terrorist, if that’s what you’re getting at. Surely there are other jobs where one might come and go more freely without anybody noticing?”

“Yes,” said Priscilla, “but this place is so respectable, it makes up for not allowing you the freedom of movement you’d have as, say, an insurance salesman. Besides, my father says the police have tests now to find out whether you’ve recently handled explosives. Since he’s teaching chemistry, he’s got a perfectly good excuse for the tests coming back positive if they arrest him and find traces of chemicals on his hands.”

Sophie stood up. “I’m going to bed,” she said. It would be too awful if the others could tell how upset she was.

“Sophie, you can’t pretend you don’t suspect him yourself, just a little bit,” Priscilla called after her as she retreated to the bedroom.

Sophie couldn’t help giving it some serious thought. Was Priscilla right? Sophie had Mr. Petersen’s handkerchief under her pillow. Her hand went to it involuntarily now, and she
twisted the muslin into a knot around her fingers.

As for suspecting him in the bombings, it was impossible to see Mr. Petersen either as a political ideologue or as a criminal mastermind. But what if the teacher had some quirk in his mental makeup that made him know he was doing something wrong without being able to stop himself?

It took Sophie a long time to fall asleep.

Miss Chatterjee started class the next morning by holding her left hand up in the air, fist clenched, and asking the girls to guess what she was holding.

“It has something to do with what we’re learning this week,” she said when the girls begged for a hint.

“Is it a key?” Jean said doubtfully. “A key to a museum of historical exhibits?”

Miss Chatterjee shook her head.

“A coin,” Fiona suggested, “a coin with Napoleon’s head on it!”

“You’ve both come close—it’s certainly a small metal object—but you haven’t yet fastened on the right thing….”

In fairy tales, two wrong answers always came before the right one. Sophie closed her eyes for a moment and let her mind go blank. The picture of a small metal thing swam into view.

“It’s a bullet,” she said, opening her eyes in time to see
Miss Chatterjee smile as if Sophie had said something very clever. It wasn’t at all clever, of course, just a good guess.

“It is indeed a bullet, and not just an ordinary bullet but one that was actually fired on the battlefield at Waterloo,” the teacher said, holding up the slug for them to look at. “It lodged in the shoulder of our school’s founder and was removed later on by an army surgeon; if you look closely, you can actually see the marks of the doctor’s tweezers and the distortion that comes when soft lead meets solid flesh.”

Some of the girls looked sick.

“Yes, stomach-turning, isn’t it?” said Miss Chatterjee. “But we mustn’t be high-minded about violence. If we woke up tomorrow and the world had no more use for top-quality munitions, the days of the Hanseatic League would be numbered. But how does Scotland reconcile its identity as a leading exporter of arms and explosives with its commitment to peace?”

There was a long silence. It took some nerve for Sophie to speak up, but she felt she had to.

“Is that a rhetorical question, Miss Chatterjee, or a real one?” she asked.

“A real one,” said Miss Chatterjee, her voice silkier than ever.

Sophie took a deep breath and readied herself to talk the thing through. “Arms are compatible with peace,” she said
slowly, “because we’ve adopted a philosophy of deterrence. If there are two great powers, and each one can release enough force to destroy the other, it produces a stalemate.”

“If we start bombing each other,” said Priscilla, “people are going to die.
Lots
of people.”

Sophie saw Nan’s face go quite pale. She must be thinking of her brothers.

“When we observe Waterloo Day, let’s say, as we will do this weekend,” said Miss Chatterjee, tilting her head to one side as she looked at the class, “how do we orient ourselves toward the war dead?”

“We celebrate their sacrifice,” said Harriet.

“We mourn their loss,” Fiona added, her fair, freckled skin flushing with embarrassment at having said something that might sound pompous.

“How do you think it looked, then, to the Duke of Wellington that day in June, a hundred and twenty-three years ago?” Miss Chatterjee said, her voice quiet and passionate. “Say you’re Wellington, in charge of the Allied Army. You’re a few days away from what you already suspect will be a decisive engagement, one that will determine whether you crush Napoleon and preserve Britain’s status as the world’s great imperial power or instead precipitate the long slow loss of English sovereignty in years to come.”

“You’d do anything to stop him,” Sophie said, her voice
sounding too loud in her ears.

“And what if you were Wellington,” said Miss Chatterjee, “and a time traveler from the future arrived in your tent the night before the battle and told you that you could save tens of thousands of lives by retreating?”

“When it comes to a decision like that,” Nan said, “a general couldn’t listen even to a very respectable time traveler. It would be treason. Besides, if history had unfolded differently, Wellington might have actually
beaten
Napoleon at Waterloo. Imagine: Scotland and England might still be one country, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire a major European power. Why, by now the world might have achieved universal peace!”

They all sat for a moment contemplating Nan’s vision of world peace.

“Might one lesson of Waterloo, then,” said the teacher softly, “be that a heroic but ultimately self-defeating gesture, though it may guarantee the deaths of many thousands of men, is sometimes preferable to diplomatic means as a way of resolving conflicts between nations?”

But Miss Chatterjee was a pacifist! She
couldn’t
be saying this.

“It sounds as though you’re suggesting that war is sometimes more effective than peace,” Nan said, her outrage audible. “That’s certainly what
I
think, Miss Chatterjee, but you’ve
always wanted us to believe that peace is better than war!”

Her eyes accused Miss Chatterjee of betrayal.

“It is not my job,” said Miss Chatterjee, raising one eyebrow, “to indoctrinate you in the ideology to which I personally subscribe.”

“But you’re a pacifist! That’s not an ideology, it’s a belief,” said Fiona, clearly at least as crushed as Sophie and Nan.

“Pacifism is an ideology like any other,” said the teacher, “and you would do well to remember it. Four sides, please, for tomorrow, on the lessons of Waterloo for our own time.”