The Explosionist

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The Explosionist Page 14

by Jenny Davidson


  “But this isn’t like losing your leg or even your eyesight,” Sophie said. “Those girls—they’ve lost their selves. Even the healthy ones. Surely that’s the worst fate of all?”

  “Nothing I have ever felt in my life,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, the words strong and unadorned, “has persuaded me that I wouldn’t give up all my feelings, every single one of them, assuming the effects on the intellect to be negligible.”

  Sophie felt this like a blow. Did Great-aunt Tabitha really have any fondness for Sophie at all, if she would speak like this of sacrificing it?

  Great-aunt Tabitha cleared her throat and took on a brisker tone.

  “I’ve got a meeting with Augusta Henchman next week to talk about your future,” she told Sophie. “I expect you’ll do very well on your exams, assuming you’re allowed to sit them. But if Parliament passes the bill that’s currently under review, the government will have the right to dispose of you as it sees fit, exams or no. And with that academic profile, IRYLNS’ll snap you up in a flash. Girls like you are just what’s needed.”

  “But couldn’t you somehow get me exempted?” Sophie asked, though she knew that Great-aunt Tabitha didn’t believe in bending rules.

  “Imagine what the newspapers could do with that,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, shaking her head. “One of the most stalwart supporters of IRYLNS pulling strings to get her ward exempted from the scheme? Why, it might even be enough to topple the government! And that’s where I draw the limit. Sophie, I would lay down my life for you without a moment’s hesitation, but in the scenario I’ve just laid out, it wouldn’t be my own life at stake, it would be the safety of the country as a whole.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” Sophie asked. “To protect myself?”

  “Stay away,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. She had picked something up from the top of the chest of drawers, where Sophie always dumped the contents of her school satchel, and fiddled with it as she talked. “Stay out of trouble and stay away from IRYLNS. I took you there to show you what’s at stake. I don’t want you even to think about telling anyone what you saw.”

  Sophie said nothing.

  “The sleep of reason makes us all monsters,” said Great-aunt Tabitha in the special voice she used to mark a quotation, though Sophie had no idea where the words came from. “What about finishing your homework before bedtime, Sophie?”

  She set down on top of the chest of drawers the little thing she’d been playing with. After she had gone, Sophie got up to see what it was: that small token Mrs. Tansy had pressed into Sophie’s hands—the iron…IRYLNS! Had the object itself been a concrete warning, a signal that Sophie simply hadn’t had enough information to understand at the time? But how would Mrs. Tansy have known about IRYLNS, and why would it have mattered to her that Sophie should be warned?

  Sophie felt like Bluebeard’s wife. When Bluebeard gave his wife the keys of the wardrobes and strongboxes and caskets of jewels, when he handed her the master key to all his apartments, when he told her that she could go into any one of them except the little closet at the end of the ground-floor gallery, Sophie’s whole body always flared up in scorn, though she knew this wasn’t the real moral of the story, for the weak-willed wife. Why couldn’t she have kept her promise? Sophie always wanted to cry out, “Don’t! Just don’t unlock the door! Be perfectly obedient and you won’t get hurt!”

  Could Sophie live with herself, though, if she didn’t try to find out what really happened behind the closed doors of IRYLNS—find out and perhaps try to put a stop to it?

  NINETEEN

  ON TUESDAY AFTER LUNCH it was Sophie’s turn to supervise the younger girls on the playground. She’d been walking around like a zombie since Saturday. Fortunately playground duty didn’t involve much beyond making sure the children didn’t actually kill one another, and though Sophie’s eyes rested on a group of girls playing hopscotch, her thoughts were elsewhere. The other little girls were scampering over the climbing frame or running around playing tag, one particularly noisy bunch amusing themselves by shooting one of their playmates back and forth across the tarmac on some kind of cart.

  In her mental haze, Sophie at first hardly noticed the police arriving, but within minutes the entire playground was overrun with uniformed officers. What on earth was going on? Recognizing the woman nearby as the constable from the week before, Sophie took a chance that she would be friendly.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “The interrogation of the man who assaulted the minister of public safety here on Saturday has yielded information that may lead to a breakthrough in another case,” said the young woman, smiling at Sophie. “We’re here to pick up a crucial piece of evidence, but they’ve sent the bomb squad as well, in case it’s booby-trapped.”

  “I’ve found it!” shouted an officer.

  A team of men with Alsatians ran to join him. Once the bomb-sniffing dogs gave the all clear, the men moved away far enough for Sophie to see.

  It was the cart the girls had been playing with, and a second later she realized it must be the Veteran’s transport, left behind the other day after his arrest.

  “Why didn’t they take it away on Saturday?” Sophie asked, since the woman constable hadn’t moved away.

  The woman shrugged and laughed a little. “Nobody ever said we were perfect,” she said, sounding quite human.

  If there had been a bomb, Sophie couldn’t help thinking, several of the little girls might easily have been killed. She felt a surge of anger, the kind that was a mixture of scaredness and relief at surviving a danger one hadn’t even apprehended.

  The bell rang to mark the end of recess, but most of the girls ignored it to watch the police, now huddled together.

  By nighttime, everyone knew the Veteran was to be charged with the medium’s murder, but the story in the evening paper wasn’t very forthcoming, and nobody was at all sure how the police had linked him to that crime or why he had attacked the minister.

  Nan thought he might have been angry because of the government’s decision to reduce pensions for veterans. She had also heard that the minister had annoyed the school servants by not tipping any of them after the lavish ceremonial breakfast. (Miss Hopkins had supposedly caused an uproar afterward in the staff lounge by commenting that she wouldn’t turn down a tip herself if a parent tried to give her one.) Nan wondered whether the minister might have offended the Veteran by not giving him money. That was easy enough to imagine, but it didn’t really seem grounds for actually attacking a person, Sophie decided, even if the Veteran had a screw loose.

  Jean hadn’t heard anything.

  Priscilla had learned from a well-informed friend that the police had now definitely tied the Veteran to the murder at the Balmoral, but that he still refused to tell them why he’d attacked the minister.

  “A friend!” Jean said, curling her upper lip and turning away. “Boyfriend, more like.”

  Priscilla smiled her pretty, teasing smile.

  “James isn’t really a boy,” she said. “He’s a man; at least, eighteen’s old enough to be allowed to get married.”

  Jean slammed her chemistry textbook shut, knocking a small china dog off the desk and smashing it on the floor.

  “You’re not going to marry him, though, are you?” she asked Priscilla. “Promise me you won’t!”

  “Surely you’re not going to stand in the way of my union with my one true love?” said Priscilla, in the same light tone she might use to reproach someone for not passing the sugar for her tea.

  Sophie and Nan exchanged glances, but there was nothing they could do to avert the inevitable clash.

  “Priscilla, you made me a promise that when we leave school, you’ll share a flat with me while we both do our certificates at the School of Electric Cookery,” Jean said. She was almost in tears by now.

  “I said we might share a flat,” Priscilla said, calm as always. “I never made any promises. It’s important to keep my options open at this point; that’
s what Daddy always says.”

  “But what about me?” Jean cried out. “I can’t possibly afford a flat on my own. Besides, it wouldn’t be the same without you. Why do you like those wretched boys so much?”

  Now Priscilla looked really annoyed.

  “You’re acting like a baby,” she said to Jean. “You talk as though you’d like to stay a schoolgirl all your life. Now, that’s all very well for girls like you and Sophie, but I know there’s better stuff waiting when we leave this place, and nine-tenths of the fun will involve men. I want to have a good time before I settle down. But James is truly sweet, Jean; I wish you could have seen him last weekend, kneeling on the ground in front of me and holding my hand and telling me he adores me….”

  The image of James at Priscilla’s feet was more than Jean could bear. She uttered a strangled yell and fled.

  Priscilla began laughing. “Oh, it’s almost too easy,” she said. “I really shouldn’t, but poor Jean does expose herself so, and I simply can’t resist….”

  “Are you really going to marry James?” asked Nan, who approved of James because he was captain of the boys’ cadet corps at the Edinburgh Academy.

  “Of course not!” said Priscilla. “I’m much too young. I think twenty-one’s the perfect age to get married, don’t you? I’m not one of those awful Brides-to-Be!”

  The Brides-to-Be were the girls who dropped mathematics, science, and classics in their fifth year to take the Housewife’s Certificate. Priscilla was scathing about them. “I certainly don’t expect to do my own cooking and mending and washing once I’m married,” she’d said in class once when the domestic science instructor begged her to keep her mind on the lesson. “Talk about a waste of time!”

  “My father thinks I should take a degree in law,” Priscilla said now. “He says that even if I’m married, it can’t hurt to have another string to my bow.”

  “I don’t mean to criticize,” said Nan, “but it’s quite cruel of you to torment Jean like that. Won’t you go and find the poor girl and tell her you’re sorry?”

  “But I’m not sorry,” said Priscilla, sounding surprised. “She asked for it. She’s got no business being so jealous. Let her stew.”

  And with that remark, Priscilla returned to her English essay, leaving Sophie rather impressed with her ruthlessness.

  When the housemistress came by to tell them to begin getting ready for bed, the three girls put their things away, turned out the study lights, and went into the bedroom, where they found Jean sitting shamefaced on Priscilla’s bed, her hands clasped together in her lap, her eyes swollen and red.

  “Priscilla, I’m so sorry,” she blurted out. “It’s none of my business what you do when we leave school. I promise I’ll never pester you about this again. Only I would love it if we could share that flat….”

  “Well, let’s wait and see,” said Priscilla, sitting down next to Jean and putting an arm around her shoulders. “You’re a goose sometimes, but you’re my best friend. I won’t do anything without telling you first. Don’t worry, all right?”

  “All right,” said Jean, forcing a smile.

  Thinking about possible futures made Sophie’s mind run again over everything she’d seen at IRYLNS. What if Jean decided to go there? How would Sophie persuade her not to, without breaking the injunction to secrecy laid upon her by Great-aunt Tabitha? Would Sophie be able to save even herself from IRYLNS?

  TWENTY

  ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON Sophie went for tea at the professor’s. She had to nerve herself up for it. Assuming Mrs. Lundberg was still angry with her, she went around the front way, with a vague sense that she’d forfeited the privilege of entering through the garden.

  She rang the doorbell and waited. What if they didn’t want to see her?

  But when the housekeeper opened the door, she threw her arms around Sophie and hustled her into the sitting room toward a particularly lavish spread of cakes and sandwiches, just as if nothing had happened.

  When Mikael came in, Sophie’s mouth went all dry and she couldn’t swallow. It wasn’t as though they’d actually had an argument, but there had been something painful and unpleasant about the end of their last telephone conversation.

  “Sophie?” he said quietly, speaking into her ear as his aunt piled his plate high with food.

  “I don’t know what was wrong when we talked the other day,” Sophie said, the words tumbling out. She licked her lips and swallowed. “I didn’t mean it. I—”

  “Don’t be silly! You’ve got nothing to apologize for. I was in a bit of a mood myself. Pax?”

  “Pax,” said Sophie, and as he squeezed her hand, the relief made her want to shout.

  Over tea the professor told them about an Uppsala colleague who kept a pack of colobus monkeys in a two-acre enclosure, artificially heated at quite amazing expense, where the monkeys lived as they would in the wild. Nobody else said much. When Mikael had eaten his fill, he sprang up out of his seat and invited Sophie to join him in the garden, where, he said, a huge number of weeds awaited them.

  Sophie looked at the professor to see if he wanted them to stay inside and keep him company, but he waved her away.

  “If you two go outside now, I may finish with the proofs of my article in time for the last post,” he said. “Sophie, I trust to see you again before many days pass?”

  Sophie assenting, the professor retreated to his study, and she and Mikael went through the glass doors into the garden.

  “Are we really going to weed?” she said to Mikael once they were alone.

  “Do you know how to tell weeds from flowers?” Mikael asked.

  “No,” Sophie admitted.

  “Neither do I. I really just wanted to get you out of earshot.”

  They sat down on the bench beneath the tree at the bottom of the garden. Mikael pulled a branch from a bush and began to strip its leaves off one by one.

  “Sophie,” he said, his uneasiness making Sophie fidgety, “the real reason I was in a bit of a state when we talked the other day is that there’s something I still haven’t told you about what happened in that hotel room.”

  Remembering Mikael’s mix of self-possession and panic that night in the Vaults, Sophie realized she wasn’t really surprised.

  “What was it?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “It didn’t seem wise.”

  “Well, what made you change your mind, then?”

  “I can only tell you if you promise to keep it a secret.”

  “I promise,” Sophie said, though the words seemed to scrape in her throat.

  Rather than saying anything, Mikael took a pocketknife out of his trousers. Sophie remembered seeing it with the rest of his things at the police station.

  “So?” she said. “It’s your pocketknife. What about it?”

  “Sophie, this knife isn’t mine, though I said it was. When I finally got myself out of that awful wardrobe at the Balmoral and found Mrs. Tansy’s body on the floor, I sort of staggered back and sat down on the couch. I didn’t mean to, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up properly. And then something hard pressed into my leg, and I felt for it without even thinking, and it was this.”

  Sophie still didn’t understand.

  “Sophie, this isn’t just any old knife,” he said, turning it over in his palm. “I recognized it at once. Look where it’s chipped. You can see the spot’s just the shape of the British Isles.”

  Sophie examined it.

  “So it is,” she said, “but what does it matter?”

  “The knife isn’t mine,” Mikael said again. “But I’m one hundred percent sure it’s my brother’s. It was our father’s, before he died, and then it passed down to him.”

  “It’s your brother’s?” Sophie said, feeling stupid. “Your older brother, the one who’s so exemplary? But that’s impossible. What on earth would your brother have been doing in Mrs. Tansy’s hotel suite? Are you sure you didn’t somehow have the knife with you, and drop it yourself w
ithout knowing?”

  “Quite sure,” said Mikael.

  “Your brother’s not in Scotland, anyway,” Sophie said. “He lives in Denmark, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, Sweden, usually, but he could just as easily be in Scotland,” said Mikael. “Nobody’s heard from him for months.”

  It didn’t take Sophie long to see what this meant. “You don’t think—”

  “I do,” said Mikael, a grim look on his face. “It’s unmistakably his. And the knife wasn’t there before. I’d been sitting in exactly the same spot on the couch before the murderer got there, and I’d have felt it beneath me if it was there.”

  “How do you think it turned up?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s just within the bounds of possibility that my brother himself actually came to the room and killed Mrs. Tansy.”

  “Surely not!”

  “I agree, it’s pretty much inconceivable. Whatever else he’s been doing, I simply can’t imagine my brother’s become a murderer. What’s more likely is that someone took the knife off him and planted it there to incriminate him. But how did they get the knife from him in the first place? I must face it: there’s a real chance he’s hurt or even dead.”

  “Dead! But Mikael, he can’t be; wouldn’t you have heard something?”

  “Normally, yes, but he’s been completely out of touch with everyone in the family for several months now.”

  “Even so, I simply can’t believe it. Pretend for a minute that we’re in a detective novel: If he was actually dead, someone would have found the body and the police would have identified him and got in touch with your mother.”

  “Believe me, I hope you’re right. I’m pretty worried, though.”

  “I can see it’s terribly worrying. But you know, Mikael, you really can rule out the idea that your brother committed the murder himself. Didn’t you see in the papers? The police are holding the Veteran, that homeless man who’s always hanging around, for the murder. They seem quite certain he did it; in fact, they were at school just the other day to pick up the trolley he left behind after he attacked the minister of public safety on Waterloo Day.”

 

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