The Explosionist
Page 10
“You won’t find it difficult, you know, Sophie,” he told her as they got out of the car and switched seats. “Just remember, left foot on the accelerator, right foot on the brake, right hand for the manual brake. Your left hand should always rest on the navigation wheel.”
The car’s electrical system included a dynamo, a starter motor, and a battery. Sophie put her hand on the plastic knob of the starter and pulled it out as far as it would go. Then she took a deep breath, released the knob, and felt the car’s motor spring to life.
“Harder on the accelerator. That’s right, rev it a bit. Feel the power?”
Sophie experimented with different levels of acceleration. It was certainly comforting to think of the hand brake holding the car in place even if she did something stupid.
“All right, let the hand brake go. Go on. You know, the car’s not going to run away with you, you can take it a bit faster than that….”
Once she had pulled out of the lay-by and around the first corner, Sophie relaxed a little. Mr. Petersen continued to talk, a stream of babble that calmed Sophie down rather than teaching her anything she didn’t already know.
“Most motorcars in Scotland are powered by fuel cells. A fuel cell is similar to a battery, except that whereas batteries run down, you can keep fuel cells going indefinitely by pumping in more chemicals. Thomas Edison invented this particular version in the 1880s; you put in hydrogen and oxygen, and the cell converts them into electricity, the only by-product being perfectly pure drinking water.”
Sophie had a moment of panic when she pressed the accelerator by accident instead of the brake and the car surged forward, but Mr. Petersen didn’t stop his monologue, and she soon calmed down again.
“Ironically, given that Edison was an American, his invention never really caught on over there. You’ll find a few fuel-cell enthusiasts in the Americas, of course, but most of their motorcars are powered by a filthy and wasteful method called internal combustion. All very well if you’re an American sitting on top of huge petroleum reserves, but that kind of reckless consumption doesn’t suggest a very sensible attitude toward the future!”
Mr. Petersen proved better at teaching practical things than abstract ones. He did not object when Sophie asked him to draw a diagram to clarify the principle behind the three-point turn or get angry when she couldn’t make the car go in reverse.
“It’s an old car, and the transmission’s a bit dodgy,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to take it in to be serviced. Consider this a useful reminder.”
After an hour and a half, Mr. Petersen checked his watch.
“Ready to drive us back to school?” he asked.
“No!” Sophie said. Her hands were aching with the strain of holding the navigation wheel, and the muscles in her legs felt extremely shaky.
If only she hadn’t had to concentrate so hard on driving! It certainly wasn’t at all what the phrase romantic tête-à-tête brought to mind.
“Sophie, I’m disappointed in you! I thought you had a more adventurous spirit. I’ll take over, shall I?”
“Thank you,” Sophie said.
They switched seats and drove back toward school.
“I hope we’ll have time for another lesson before the end of term,” Mr. Petersen said.
Oh, he must think Sophie a complete idiot for being so tongue-tied! She forced out a few words at exactly the same moment as Mr. Petersen started speaking again.
“I’d like that—”
“I’ve been meaning to ask—”
The wheel jerked in the teacher’s hands and they narrowly missed hitting a lady crossing the road at the corner.
As the lady shook her fist at them, Sophie suddenly realized that Mr. Petersen was at least as nervous as she was.
“Good thing I wasn’t the one driving just now, eh, Mr. Petersen?” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound too quavery. “What were you about to ask me?”
“I’m looking for someone to help me for a few hours a week in the laboratory,” he said hurriedly, his eyes fixed on the road. “Would you be willing to put in some time reorganizing the supplies in the balance room?”
This was so much the kind of invitation that Sophie received in her daydreams, she was afraid at first she must have misheard him.
“Would I?” she said.
But Mr. Petersen was shaking his head.
“What am I thinking? Of course you wouldn’t. You’re probably absolutely swamped with work between now and finals—forget I ever mentioned it; I’m sure I can find someone else—you must think I’m a thoughtless idiot—”
“No,” said Sophie, finding her voice, “that wasn’t what I meant at all. Oh, please let me do it!”
“Are you sure, Sophie?” said Mr. Petersen. Sophie thought he sounded both guilty and relieved. “I’m confident you’re the best one for the job,” he went on, “but the last thing I want is to put you in a difficult position. I won’t think any less of you if you say you won’t do it, you know.”
“I really want to do it!” Sophie said. She would simply die if he refused her services out of misguided scruples.
“Well, if you’re sure, I’m going to accept,” said Mr. Petersen in an apologetic manner, “but you can always back out later if you find the arrangement’s more trouble than it’s worth. When will be the best time for you to fit the work in? Tuesdays and Thursdays, perhaps?”
Inwardly glowing, Sophie agreed to meet him at half past two on Thursday afternoon. This must have been what he meant to ask her the morning the bomb went off. Surely Mr. Petersen was the kindest and most gentle person imaginable!
By now they were back at school. Mr. Petersen let Sophie out at the side door and drove off.
THIRTEEN
“DID MR. PETERSEN REVEAL his dark secrets while you were in the car together, Sophie?” said Priscilla.
Sophie grunted a denial and kept her head buried in her history textbook.
“Perhaps Sophie used her feminine wiles to get him to tell her about the bombings?” Jean added.
“What feminine wiles?” countered Priscilla.
Both girls went into fits of laughter.
While Sophie tried hard to ignore them, a knock came at the study door. Jean opened it, letting in one of the younger students.
“I’ve got a message for Sophie,” said the girl, eyes fixed on the floor. Sophie took the folded note from her hand and began reading.
“Where did you get this?” she asked the little girl.
“From a boy,” the girl said. “He came up to the fence at the back of the playground and called me over to him. When I told him we weren’t allowed to receive messages from boys, he said he was a good friend of yours and that Matters of the Utmost Importance depended on your getting it.”
“What did he look like?” Sophie asked, ignoring the others’ snickering.
“Tall and fair, I suppose,” said the child doubtfully. “Oh, and he sounded as if he might be a tiny bit foreign, though he had very good English.”
“Thank you,” said Sophie. “If you see that boy again tomorrow, tell him I’ll be there when he says. Not a word to any of the teachers, mind.”
“Oh, no,” said the little girl, looking absolutely terrified.
As soon as she had gone, the others demanded to know what was going on.
“It’s a friend of mine,” she said reluctantly. “You know, that Hanseatic boy I see sometimes at the professor’s house, the housekeeper’s nephew.”
“Sophie, you never said anything about a boy!” Nan said. “You were supposed to go to the professor for language lessons, not for secret assignations!”
“Don’t be such a bad sport, Nan!” Priscilla said. Priscilla was often accused of being boy-crazy while Sophie was famous for not being interested in boys, so it was natural for her to leap at the possibility of Sophie coming over to the boy-liking side of things. “I think it shows real initiative, Sophie, going off like that to meet a boy. Are you in love with him?”
“Sophie’s meeting a boy!” Priscilla crowed. “Sophie, is he desperately in love with you?”
“No, he’s not,” said Sophie, hating how stiff she sounded. How nice it would be if someone was desperately in love with her—but it seemed a wildly unlikely prospect, and Mikael had certainly never thought of such a thing. “Mikael does want me to meet him tomorrow at four o’clock in the groundsman’s shed,” she said. “You’ll help me do it, won’t you?”
In the end, though Sophie waited in the shed for more than half an hour, Mikael never came. How maddening of him to be so careless about the time! She would be in hot water if she didn’t hurry back to the dormitory, and think of how mortifying to have to explain to the others that she’d been stood up.
Beneath the irritation, though, Sophie felt a twinge of worry. What if something had happened to Mikael?
It was with a horrible sense of inevitability at supper that Sophie looked up to see a pair of uniformed police constables enter the refectory.
A teacher pointed toward Sophie, and a moment later they began to move in her direction. For one frightening moment she was sure they had come to arrest her for breaking the out-of-bounds rule, before realizing how preposterous that was.
Sophie was still chewing a stringy mouthful of gristle when the constables stopped on the other side of the table.
“Sophie Hunter?”
Sophie nodded.
The other girls at the table stared. Priscilla reached for Sophie’s hand and squeezed it in reassurance.
“I’m WPC Taylor and this is my colleague PC Martin,” the woman constable said. “We’ve been sent to fetch you down to the central police station. We believe you may be in a position to clear up certain aspects of the story told by a young man who was apprehended earlier this afternoon at the Balmoral Hotel.”
Sophie folded her napkin and set it beside her plate, carefully adjusting the knife and fork. Her legs felt trembly when she pushed the chair back from the long table and stood up.
“My friend’s not a thief,” she said urgently. “He—”
“Oh, it’s not a question of burglary,” said the other constable, smacking his lips. “The boy was found standing over a dead body. He’s a murder suspect.”
Murder!
“Mikael would never—,” Sophie began to protest.
The woman constable laid a hand on her shoulder to silence her.
“No names, please,” she said, glaring at her partner as if he’d already given too much away. “The investigation has been turned over to the antiterror squad, and as far as they’re concerned, the less said the better.”
Whatever could the antiterror squad want with Mikael? This was worse than Sophie could possibly have imagined.
“Because you’re a minor,” the constable added, “you’ll need an adult to come with you to the station.”
Sophie looked helplessly around her. The teachers all looked as stunned at the girls.
Then Miss Chatterjee stepped forward.
“I will accompany Sophie,” she said. “Miss Hopkins, will you please tell Miss Henchman where we have gone?”
“When will you be back?” asked the biology mistress.
“We can’t guarantee the girl won’t be needed for a considerable amount of time,” said the constable ominously.
“Nonsense,” Miss Chatterjee said with great firmness. “Sophie must be back at school by ten o’clock at the very latest. If you need her for longer, it’ll simply have to wait until tomorrow. You can’t keep the child hanging about the police station until all hours. In fact, it occurs to me that we might be well advised to wait until tomorrow in any case, and to telephone the school solicitor in the meantime.”
The woman constable flinched at the word solicitor. “That won’t be necessary, madam,” she said, her manner more conciliatory than before. “There’s no question of Miss Hunter being considered a suspect. But this is a matter of national security, and it’s essential we resolve matters as soon as we can.”
“Very well, then,” said Miss Chatterjee. “Perhaps I’ll just mention, though, that our headmistress is quite close to the advocate general; I hope she will not feel any need to call upon that friendship.”
Then, as the constables stood speechless, she added, “Well? What are we hanging about here for? I received a distinct impression of there being no time to waste.”
She turned her head and gave Sophie an almost imperceptible wink, a gesture of solidarity that brought tears to Sophie’s eyes.
FOURTEEN
THE POLICE CAR WAITED outside, a massive black Wolseley. Sophie and Miss Chatterjee were put in the backseat behind a metal grille. When Sophie tested the handle, the door wouldn’t open from the inside.
After they passed the Balmoral Hotel, Sophie knew they couldn’t be headed to the central police station in Conan Doyle Close. It would be the Castle, and that meant they really were serious about this national security business. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead, and she was afraid for a minute that she might actually be sick.
They drove in silence across North Bridge into the Old Town. Just before Castlehill, the car pulled off the road into a secure lot, and the woman constable let Sophie and Miss Chatterjee out of the car. They walked together across the esplanade and right up to the main gate, where four soldiers with machine guns stood at attention.
After passing through a series of gates and checkpoints, they came to Crown Square, the most secure section of the entire complex, where another team of armed guards searched them for hidden weapons. Even Miss Chatterjee seemed to quail a little as they followed the circuitous path from the Great Hall to the Vaults, which had housed prisoners of war since the eighteenth century and had been lately modernized at great expense as a high-security facility for holding terrorists.
They passed through a warren of empty graffiti-covered cells and then a long underground tunnel.
Passing through an austere waiting room, they were ushered into a spacious room decorated disconcertingly like something out of a luxury ocean liner, including a chrome drinks cabinet, a set of angular couches covered in red leather substitute, and a white fur rug.
The man whose office it was saw Sophie scanning the interior and laughed.
“Yes, it’s a distinctly peculiar style, isn’t it?” he said, grinning at her. Sophie sensed him turning on his charm to warm her up; it made her bristle with irritation and inward resistance. “Particularly in a Gothic hulk like the Castle!”
Though his manner annoyed Sophie, the officer was extremely handsome, with dark hair and a toothbrush mustache exactly like the one worn by the current European chancellor. Unlike the chancellor, who was never photographed except in military uniform, he wore a casual dark lounge suit and shiny leather shoes. He missed being drop-dead gorgeous only because of legs too short in proportion to his top half.
If war were to be declared, Sophie thought, he would definitely have to shave the mustache.
“I’m Commander Brown, by the way,” the man added, in the annoying English drawl lots of Scottish officers still used as a matter of course. Great-aunt Tabitha said that Scottish people who spoke with an English accent should be repatriated south of the border and see how they liked it.
The commander reached his hand out, and Sophie shook it.
“You’re Sophie Hunter, of course, and the lady with you—”
“Mira Chatterjee,” the teacher said.
He held out his hand again, but Miss Chatterjee did not reciprocate, and after a moment he pulled his arm back.
“Sophie—do you mind if I call you that?—you’re here this evening because we need your help. Your friend Mikael was found this afternoon at the Balmoral Hotel standing over the dead body of a Mrs. Euphemia Tansy, whom I believe to have been a medium of your acquaintance. I hasten to say th
at after a brief initial misunderstanding, we quickly abandoned any idea of Mikael’s being an active suspect in the medium’s murder. But we’ve got a strong feeling he hasn’t told us everything, out of some mistaken motive of chivalry.”
“Mikael’s not chivalrous,” Sophie said, too giddy with relief to be polite. The constables must have lied about Mikael’s being a suspect in order to make her more afraid. “Mikael wouldn’t want to get a friend in trouble, it’s true, but he gave you my name, didn’t he? He’s not completely lacking in common sense!”
“Yes, and we’re grateful for it,” the commander said. His barely concealed impatience made Sophie feel suddenly rather frightened. “But all the boy would say was that you’d had some kind of a run-in with the woman, and that he’d promised to find out whether someone had put her up to it.”
“But that’s just right,” Sophie said. She didn’t understand what else he wanted to know. “It’s exactly what happened. Mikael wants to be a private investigator when he grows up, and since he’s here on holiday with nothing much to do, he said he’d look into it for me.”
The commander exhaled loudly, then pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Sophie felt an intense surge of dislike for the man. Surely he did not need to show quite so clearly that he thought her a troublesome encumbrance to his inquiry!
“You don’t seem to understand the difficulty, Sophie,” he said, speaking, Sophie thought, as though to a mentally deficient ten-year-old. “Mrs. Tansy was a distinctly suspicious character. She happened to be on the government payroll, like any number of other spiritualists, but we think she may also have been taking money from several other parties, including the Nobel Consortium and possibly even the Brothers of the Northern Liberties. We’ve had her under surveillance for some time, but she eluded our team several weeks ago in a department store in Princes Street, and by the time my man reached her home, she’d absconded—she must have planned it in advance. We saw neither hide nor hair of her until she turned up with her throat cut in a suite at the Balmoral. Help me out, Sophie. What on earth had an ordinary schoolgirl like yourself to do with that b—”