The Explosionist (17 page)

“A ridiculous question,” Miss Hopkins said. “There’s no reason to see any conflict between the two. Myself, I think the latest development’s more exciting than ominous.”

“It all depends,” said Mr. Petersen, “on what you think of the procedure itself. I remember—”

But Sophie was not to hear what Mr. Petersen remembered. A loud snort caused her to look around and see the unmistakable looming figure of Miss Henchman.

“I
ASSUME A TEACHER GAVE
you permission to use the janitor’s equipment?” the headmistress said frostily.

“I’m sorry to get in your way, Miss Henchman,” said Sophie. She’d never seen the headmistress in the science wing; she hoped it wouldn’t set a precedent. “I bumped into Miss Chatterjee and spilled her coffee, and Miss Hopkins told me to clean up.”

“Quite right, too,” said Miss Henchman.

Miss Henchman was surprisingly fair when it came to real accidents. She didn’t have the irritable and unjust temper that led some teachers to punish one for mishaps resulting from carelessness rather than disobedience.

“Aren’t you meant to be elsewhere by now?” the headmistress added.

“Yes, Miss Henchman,” said Sophie, thinking that she’d better not rush off until Miss Henchman actually dismissed her.

The headmistress nodded, and Sophie trundled the bucket as fast as she could back to where it belonged, then hurried to class.

There Miss Botham, rapt to the point of passion, was already in the midst of praising to the girls the nineteenth century’s innovations in standard office practice, down to improvements in ordinary writing tools (the mass-produced lead pencil, the steel-nibbed pen, the patented reservoir pen with its ink stored in a kind of fountain inside the barrel).

“Typewriters, invented in the 1860s, shortly became indispensable,” said Miss Botham, sounding like a braying donkey, “and the word
typewriter
soon came to be used interchangeably with
secretary
or
clerical assistant
. The machine became even more valuable with the introduction of the Dictaphone, which allows an employer to dictate a draft of a letter or a memorandum at any hour of the day or night in a medium the secretary may transcribe later on the typewriter.”

The woman sounded like a paid advertisement, Sophie thought. Meanwhile Miss Botham drew a diagram of the Dictaphone on the blackboard.

“Girls who go to IRYLNS, girls who go modestly and without complaint to work in a local office, girls who stay at home to help their fathers with secretarial tasks,” she rhapsodized, “all these girls do the country a service that may add up to precisely the difference between victory and defeat. Remember, your outlook is just as important as the skills you learn. To be a really first-rate secretary, one must know far more than shorthand and typewriting.”

“And what’s the correct outlook, Miss Botham?” asked Harriet, leaning forward in her seat with a disgustingly angelic smile.

“The perfect secretary experiences a sense of pleasure and excitement about each piece of work she undertakes,” said Miss Botham, smiling at Harriet in a way that made Sophie want to be sick. “The perfect secretary is without morbid self-consciousness or sensitivity. She is a miracle of tact and discretion, and she is always in a good mood.”

It was a relief when Miss Botham finally stopped and showed them how to put on the headphones and operate the foot pedal for slowing down or speeding up the rate at which the machine played back.

Sophie surprised herself by adjusting to the new technology with something like delight. She rapidly figured out how to turn herself into a highly efficient automaton—one had to leave one’s brain entirely out of it, becoming a linked circuit of
ears and hands and eyes without any conscious input. Thinking about any individual part of the procedure would only slow one down.

After a little practice, she was able to type the memorandum recorded on her particular cylinder (a terribly dull set of revisions to the school out-of-bounds rules—it was just like Miss Henchman to kill two birds with one stone by getting the girls to do her typing for free) without touching her foot to the slow-down pedal more than once every thirty seconds. Then she sped the recording up even faster than the ordinary speaking voice. Now her fingers flew over the keyboard, typing faster and faster until a pair of hands wrenched off her headphones.

Sophie looked up to see Nan staring at her, Sophie’s headphones in her hands, a circle of girls surrounding them and Miss Botham fuming at the front of the classroom.

Sophie was bewildered. She’d really been in the flow of things. It was most annoying of Nan to interrupt!

“Sophie, you were typing so fast we thought you must be pretending,” Nan said. “Fiona used her stopwatch and clocked you at a thousand keystrokes per minute—you were ripping those sheets out of the platen like nobody’s business! I can’t believe the machine didn’t jam. Miss Botham thought you must be putting it on. She asked me to stop you and see whether you were really typing what was on the recording.”

“Why should there be a problem?” Sophie said.

Her brain had been so far out of the loop of activity that she couldn’t even remember what she’d just typed. It was always faster to type that way, even if one sometimes introduced awkward mistakes. Still, since Nan seemed worried, Sophie rolled the page out of the typewriter and hastily glanced at the first few lines.

“It looks fine to me,” she said.

Nan took it from her hand, no longer so certain as before that something must be wrong. A few minutes later, though, she started laughing.

“All right, I admit it’s a good joke,” she said. “For a minute there, I really thought you’d acquired superhuman prowess as a typist, or crossed over into the fifth dimension or something. I still don’t see how you got the machine to work so fast. What’s the trick?”

“There’s no trick,” said Sophie, snatching the page back from Nan and reading it more slowly from the top.

Nan jabbed a finger at the middle.

“That’s what you’re looking for, I think,” she said. “I must say, Sophie, I don’t approve of that kind of language.”

Many of the other girls had gone back to their work, but a few still stood nearby, Miss Botham hovering at the periphery.

Sophie followed the direction of Nan’s finger and gasped. How had she made such an awful mistake? Would she ever
survive the shame of Nan having seen it?

A quick look suggested that the previous pages were just as they should have been. This one, though, contained an appalling swerve from the straight and narrow.

In the numbered list of instructions she’d been typing, the break was painfully obvious:

• 48. No girl shall wear slippers outside the dormitories.
  
• 49. No girl
  

if the bloody bitch hadn’t interfered i’d not be here at all i’d be living it up in one of the baltics damn them all to hell and the girl too for all she looked so young and that other harpy who paid me off in the first place and the gentleman too both of em up to no good i’d say but the young un worse than the old un and what’s happened to my favorite little fellow i’d like to know

xajiodgoihovhoiahdoifhdaoifnoidasngoidnagoinadgoinagsoin doignadoignado;isgnoadsingoai;sdnaoisdhfiuoahughdoiaugna dskjnfgasdngdasiohgoiadshgoia

mind me girl it’s not the one you think it’s the other one make sure th

And the rest of the page was blank from where Nan had cut her off.

Sophie crumpled the paper into a ball and stuffed it into her pocket so that the teacher wouldn’t be able to read it.

“Nan, I swear I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said urgently. “It must have been some kind of a fit. I think it might be related to what happened in Mr. Petersen’s class just now. I’ll explain—”

But Miss Botham had marched up to them, gathered up the stack of typed pages beside Sophie’s machine, and laid her meaty hand on Sophie’s shoulder.

“You’ll not get away with creating a disruption in my classroom,” she said, “not after being so disrespectful as to arrive late without an apology.”

“But—,” Sophie started to say.

Miss Botham jostled her so hard that Sophie almost fell, her leg crumpling under her.

“Put your things together,” the teacher said in a cold voice, “and go straight to Miss Henchman’s office. You’ve distracted the other girls and willfully created a nuisance.”

Sophie waited wretchedly by the door as Miss Botham scribbled a note and sealed it in an envelope.

“That’s for the headmistress,” said the teacher, “and above and beyond whatever punishment she metes out, you’ll type me ten clean copies of page three hundred and fifteen of
Walter Scott’s
Redgauntlet
. A fine way for a big girl like you to behave! I expect to see a thoroughly reformed character the next time I lay eyes on you, Sophie Hunter.”

Sophie trudged along the corridor toward the head’s office with a strong feeling that the world was against her. It seemed incredibly unfair to get in trouble for something she had done in a trance, and worse to think of having fallen into an altered state without even knowing it.

She thought suddenly of Jekyll and Hyde and the way the transformation came on more and more easily until Dr. Jekyll actually lost his original form and became only Mr. Hyde. Had Sophie somehow opened herself up to this degradation by her own willful meddling in the spirit world?

She told the secretary that Miss Botham had sent her to see Miss Henchman, then took a seat on the bench. It was funny how horrible it felt to have to wait there outside the head’s office, even knowing she had done nothing substantially wrong. It gave her a disconcerting glimpse into what it would be like to be one of those girls who got into trouble all the time.

Her thoughts intent on what had happened in class just now, it took Sophie a little while to notice that the voices in the office had become loud enough for her to hear them.

The person in the head’s inner sanctum was none other than Sophie’s Great-aunt Tabitha.

“I hadn’t thought of it for her, possibly not at all and certainly not yet,” Sophie heard her great-aunt say. “Let her complete the university degree first. There are far too few women in the sciences, and I have always argued that a handful of exceptional young women must be allowed to opt out of the scheme.”

Sophie heard the murmur of the headmistress’s voice, but couldn’t distinguish the words.

“Nonsense!” said Great-aunt Tabitha.

Miss Henchman’s more muted voice responded.

“Certainly not,” said Great-aunt Tabitha.

Another inaudible statement by the headmistress.

“Well,” said Sophie’s great-aunt, sounding rather less certain, “I suppose I can’t stop you.”

They were arguing about what Sophie would do after taking her exams.

Great-aunt Tabitha thought Sophie should go to university.

Miss Henchman thought she should go to IRYLNS. The headmistress was winning.

S
OPHIE DECIDED TO WALK
home from school on Friday afternoon rather than taking the tram. Walking lubricated the thought processes, somehow. She decided that the incidents with the pantelegraph and the Dictaphone had to be related. Both came close on the heels of her using the radio to contact the dead. Had Sophie opened up some kind of doorway? Who wanted to contact her, and why?

The technical diagram from Mr. Petersen’s class remained a mystery. Sophie had consulted a number of reference books without finding anything like it. When she asked Mr. Petersen the next day whether he’d worked out what had gone wrong, he brushed off her questions, avoiding Sophie’s eyes.

Putting aside the drawing for the moment, Sophie could see a pattern.

The first dead bomber had revealed hardly anything. He had been too young, too confused, too remote from the heart of the conspiracy and, Sophie thought, too long dead.

The second voice had been the Veteran’s. The Veteran had told her more than poor Andrew Wallace, but not with the kind of detail that would clear up any mysteries. He’d talked about the minister taking away his pension and someone hiring him for an assignment, probably the murder of the medium. He was clearly trying to say something else about the minister, but Sophie shrank from the idea of contacting him again. Let him rest in whatever peace he could salvage.

Then the next verbal communication, the words on the typewriter in Miss Botham’s class. Sophie still had no recollection of hearing anyone on the recording other than Miss Henchman. She’d gone back afterward and begged Miss Botham to allow her to finish the typing job properly. That was just what Miss Botham wanted to hear, and so she let Sophie listen again to the whole thing, on the condition that she type out a clean copy. And there was nothing out of the ordinary, unless one found it extraordinary that Miss Henchman thought it possible to prevent girls from being seen in town during term time without the full, correct school uniform.

But there was no doubt in Sophie’s mind that the voice
she’d heard belonged to the dead medium. The spirit of Mrs. Tansy had spoken of a bloody interfering bitch—Sophie mentally cringed, but mightn’t she be talking about Great-aunt Tabitha? What if Sophie’s great-aunt had interfered in some crucial way, perhaps by telephoning the ministry to ask for surveillance after that first séance?

Though the medium had alluded to an old one and a young one, Sophie didn’t know who they might be. But she’d also mentioned a favorite young fellow, and it had come in a flash to Sophie at breakfast that Mrs. Tansy might have been talking about her cat.

She’d seemed to speak directly to Sophie, in any case, when she warned her “it’s not the one you think it’s the other one.” But which was which?

Sophie tried to reason backward from the medium’s words. Two people, a young one and an old one. Who might they be? And who was the man the Veteran had conversed with, the conversation that led him next to mention the attack on the minister?

The strap of Sophie’s satchel pressed painfully into her shoulder, and a blister was forming in the place where her sock had worn through. Absently her hand found Andrew’s green glass piece in her pocket. At the same time her eye fell on the pyramid of fruit in front of the greengrocer’s: punnets of strawberries, raspberries, currants, and gooseberries beside
a few lonely bunches of imported grapes.

The dead boy had said something about a man with eyes the glassy green of peeled grapes, hadn’t he? All grapes were pale green once you peeled them, even red ones—the same green as the softly polished glass under her fingers. Green like gooseberries. Green like glass.

And in a blinding flash, Sophie saw it. What an
idiot
she was not to have thought of it sooner!

The dead boy hadn’t spoken of green grapes, only of green glass. It was
Sophie
who’d met a woman whose eyes reminded her of peeled grapes, a woman whose assistant had eyes the exact same color.

The Veteran had attacked Joanna Murchison in public, asking where his money was. Not his pension, but his rightful payment for a commission?

Murchison’s ministerial portfolio included Scotland’s prisons as well as the army veterans’ association. She would have had no difficulty having the Veteran killed in his cell.

Joanna Murchison—the minister of public safety—responsible for the Veteran’s death, and for the medium’s before that?

The thought struck Sophie like a thunderclap. What if the minister had ordered the medium killed because Mrs. Tansy had discovered she was the puppet master pulling the strings of the Brothers of the Northern Liberties, directing all the
terrorists’ actions from behind the respectable façade of the ministry, perhaps even supplying them with explosives?

What a
fool
Sophie was for not having seen it before! The great thing about the attacks, from the minister’s point of view, was that they provided the perfect pretext for Scotland to go to war with Europe. The minister believed that only war would keep the country safe. That meant she would do just about
anything
to make sure people agreed, even if it meant killing hundreds of innocent citizens. Someone like the minister, Sophie felt certain, could easily persuade herself that giving explosives to terrorists was for the greater good.

Joanna Murchison had probably been tracking the Brothers of the Northern Liberties and planting evidence against the Europeans all along. When her plan came to fruition, she would make the evidence public, arrest all the remaining terrorists, and lead the country to war. Even peace supporters would want revenge for the deaths of so many civilians on Scottish soil.

The most shocking thing, if this was true, was the way the minister hadn’t scrupled to sacrifice the lives of Edinburgh’s citizens. Almost more than the murders of the medium and the Veteran, that showed what kind of person she was.

Wait, though. Was the
minister
the principal villain of the piece, or was it Nicko?
That
must have been what the medium was trying to tell her. It wasn’t the old one, it was the young
one! The green glassy eyes that Andrew’s spirit had mentioned were just as likely to belong to Nicko Mood as to his master. The actual perpetrator, the person who dealt with the terrorists and hired the Veteran to kill Mrs. Tansy, surely wouldn’t have been the minister. It was far more likely to have been Nicholas Mood, Nicko with his insatiable desire to please and his desperate impulse to advance himself. Why, it even seemed possible that the minister herself might not know about all of his stratagems.

Sophie didn’t realize that she’d stopped with her key actually in the lock until the front door fell open, Great-aunt Tabitha on the other side.

“Sophie, what on earth…?” she said. “I thought it might be some sort of salesman—didn’t like the idea of someone lurking on the front doorstep without ringing the bell—thought I’d surprise the villain—never thought it might be
you
. Were you having trouble with the lock?”

Without waiting for an answer, she hustled Sophie into the sitting room and rang for tea.

“I’m off shortly,” she told Sophie, “but I thought you’d like to see the results of last week’s séance.”

Sophie hung back. If only Great-aunt Tabitha would leave her alone!

“Come and see,” coaxed Great-aunt Tabitha, her tone, Sophie couldn’t help thinking, rather like the wolf’s in “Little
Red Riding Hood.” “At last week’s Domestic Photo Circle, we captured a number of the dead on film. Look, this is my dear departed sister Alice, who died of diphtheria when we were children.”

The picture looked like nothing so much as the blurry image of the cirronimbus cloud type in Sophie’s geography textbook. It was hard to understand how even the most fond bereaved person could see a human being.

Great-aunt Tabitha didn’t notice Sophie’s lack of enthusiasm. She chattered away until Sophie’s head ached, then left Sophie drinking a cup of strong, sweet milky tea while she got ready to go out. At least she didn’t seem annoyed with Sophie any longer.

“I won’t be late,” she told Sophie before going upstairs. “If you’re still awake when I get back, I’d like a word before you go to bed.”

Afterward Sophie took the tea tray down to the kitchen, said hello to Peggy, who was grumbling because the price of eggs had gone up again for the third time since March, and went upstairs to her room.

Unpacking her satchel, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Photography! That was the way to prove her suspicions groundless or else get firm corroboration, especially given the need to find out who was more culpable, the minister or her assistant.

Spirit voices spoke in vague suggestive phrases. But if Sophie asked a spirit questions about the crimes and received an actual image of its perpetrator in response, the evidence would be irrefutable. Photos were by far the best way of identifying someone for certain.

In primary school Sophie had made something called a pinhole camera, which was a fancy name for an ordinary cardboard box with a hole poked through the side, used for watching an eclipse without hurting one’s eyes by looking directly at the sun. If she worked out something like that, Sophie wouldn’t need an expensive camera, just a box and some special paper covered with photographic emulsion, a low-budget substitute for the mechanically sophisticated image trappers used by the professionals.

And she knew the perfect place to get what she needed! Checking her watch, Sophie saw it was only half past five. Good. That funny little shop next door to the bookshop in Broughton Street Lane would still be open, the one that sold photographic supplies and spiritualist equipment.

She dug around in her bag to see how much money she had, then sifted through the dish of coins on top of the chest of drawers, superstitiously averting her eyes from the mirror.

That was where it all had started, with that pretty lady in the mirror on the day Mrs. Tansy had come for the séance. There was something painful in thinking about it. She very
much wanted to see the lady again, and learn who she was—surely it must be a connection to Sophie’s dead mother’s family? The resemblance had been striking.

When she finished counting her money, Sophie pulled herself together to face facts. She didn’t have much, she might well need more, and what
that
meant was that she’d have to break open the bank she’d had since age five, a hideous red clay pig with a rather sweet expression on its squashed face. The only way of getting the money out was to smash it open.

For ten years now Sophie had put money into the bank whenever she could spare it—against a rainy day, Peggy would say. It felt satisfyingly heavy when she shook it around, the jangling of coins muffled by a few ten-shilling notes from birthdays and Hogmanay.

Though it seemed to mark the destruction of her childhood, it was the work of only a moment to smash open the pig with the fireplace poker. Amazingly, she had over ten pounds.

She tucked away most of it beneath her underthings in the top drawer, then shoveled several pounds’ worth of coins into the front pocket of her satchel. She’d have to find a dustpan and brush to clean up the wreckage, otherwise Peggy would want to know what she was up to, and Sophie had no intention of telling.

She did stop back in the kitchen to say she’d be out for half an hour. Peggy muttered something about people who didn’t take their meals at regular times, but when Sophie promised to be back for supper at seven, Peggy kissed her on the cheek and told her not to hurry, they’d wait on her, fine lady that she was turning into.