The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  Sophie thought of Great-aunt Tabitha’s latest effort and nodded.

  “What you’re wanting to do is something rather more interesting,” Keith said, scribbling another diagram beside the first. “There used to be a superstition that the eyes of a murdered man could actually trap an image of the murderer. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the police have been experimenting with a device that does something rather similar. They’ve mostly given up on it, though, because it won’t work unless you’ve got a good psychic scientist on staff, and all they’ve got is a handful of crackpot spiritualist types. No offense,” he added.

  “None taken,” said Sophie. Keith was exactly Sophie’s kind of person.

  “The basic idea,” Keith said, so earnestly it was almost comical, “is that many serious crimes—murder’s an obvious example—leave no witnesses aside from the perpetrator. So you want to get the dead to testify, but their words are often so vague as to be useless, not to mention that the 1921 decision in Scotland v. Blavatsky affirmed that recordings of the voices of the dead are inadmissible in court. They’re simply too easy to fake.”

  “You really know your stuff, don’t you?” Sophie said, impressed.

  Keith nodded. “Yep, this is something I’m specially interested in,” he said. “The legal aspects are fascinating—you should see the judge’s opinion in—”

  Sophie interrupted him by tapping the face of her watch with her index finger.

  “Oh. Yes. Well, most of the same objections don’t apply to images. Trickery’s far from unknown in spirit photography, but it’s relatively easy to prevent fraud if you know what you’re doing. What you want is a setup capable of recording the last visual memories of the dead person. You get that by creating an arrangement that mimics the workings of the human eye—cornea, iris, lens, and so on—and using photographic paper as an artificial retina for recording patterns of light, which are organized by the psychic scientist and the dead person’s spirit.”

  “Do you mean to say that ordinary spirit photography doesn’t even require a camera, just a simple mechanism for recording images,” Sophie asked, not sure she’d understood him, “but that what I want to do needs a very special kind of camera?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right,” Keith said.

  “Would it be very expensive to get one?” she asked.

  “I think there’s a way around that,” said Keith. “Sophie, it’s funny you came in today. It’s almost as if it was meant.”

  Sophie didn’t like it when people suggested that perfectly ordinary minor coincidences signaled some deep pattern in the universe, but it was true she’d felt an instant connection with Keith.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “I’ve been building cameras like that for years,” he said. “It happens that I’ve got a new prototype I’m anxious to test. And though I’m far from being a medium myself, I’ve got a strong feeling—oh, call it a psychic premonition—that you’re exactly the partner I’ve been looking for. What do you think? Are you willing to serve as medium?”

  Then, when Sophie said nothing: “I haven’t offended you, have I? You are a medium, I’m sure of it. Oh, I’ve got it all wrong as usual, haven’t I? I’m sorry, Sophie, I didn’t—”

  “Be quiet,” Sophie said. “I’m thinking.”

  What did it mean, that someone she’d only just met would guess that Sophie was a medium? She hated the very sound of the word. She wasn’t any such thing. Or was she?

  The struggle showed in her face, and Keith sighed.

  “All right, let me guess,” he said. “You’re worried about whether you can trust me. I’m going to lay out all the advantages. First: you may not realize it, but you’re talking about something technically quite difficult. Second: it’s not a good idea to do this kind of work on your own. You need safeguards to make sure you’re not simply capturing images from your own memory; you need someone to operate the camera, so that you can concentrate on the mental aspects; and you need someone to observe and certify the results.”

  “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea,” Sophie said, discouraged.

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Keith said, more cheerful than ever. “Third: I’m betting you don’t have a license. But I’ve got my certification from the Glasgow Society for Psychical Research, Spirit Photography Division. Look!”

  He whipped out his wallet, withdrew a card, and slapped it down on the counter between them.

  Sophie picked it up and examined it. Printed on the back was the Dodgson Compact, a version of the Hippocratic Oath adapted for spirit photographers by one of the first scientists to enter the field. The text below identified Keith as a fully licensed psycho-photographic consultant, with authority to testify as an expert witness in courts throughout the Hanseatic states as well as to supervise spiritualist investigations by unlicensed practitioners.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me how young I am to have got this?” Keith asked.

  “Certainly not!” Sophie answered. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s bad manners to fish for compliments?”

  Keith started laughing. “I think I’m still allowed to gloat,” he said. “The card only came in yesterday’s post!”

  “Anyway, telling a person how young he is sounds more like an insult than a compliment, doesn’t it?” said Sophie. “I think young people should be treated exactly like older ones.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Keith, contemplating the document with great satisfaction before putting it away in his wallet. “But seriously, Sophie, I’m not fooling around when I say you’ll get much better results this way. You don’t think I’m trying to pull one over on you, do you? I won’t charge you a penny; I’ll even pay for the materials.”

  “No, I’m paying for the materials,” Sophie protested, only realizing this meant she’d agreed to work with him when he whooped with delight.

  He seemed so pleased, she dismissed the remaining scruples from her mind. She would make sure he didn’t end up out of pocket, and she wouldn’t tell him anything that would put him in a difficult or dangerous position.

  “Ordinarily, my brother helps with the technical part,” he said, “but since he’s away, have you a friend you trust to stand in as our assistant?”

  Sophie’s thoughts went at once to Mikael.

  “Yes, I’ve got someone,” she said. “When shall we do it?”

  “Tomorrow’s good,” said Keith. “I close up the shop around six, so we’d be able to get started soon after. Does that sound all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sophie, amazed and grateful at how smoothly it was all working out. “Do you need me to bring anything?”

  “No, nothing at all,” said Keith.

  “Thank you so much,” Sophie said impulsively. “I can’t tell you how little I was looking forward to this. I’m fine with machines—radios and such—but I’ve no affinity for pictures. And it’s creepy dipping into the spirit world all by yourself!”

  “Yes, that’s something best done in the company of others,” Keith said.

  Then, as Sophie turned to leave: “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your money,” he said, waving a hand at the pile of cash.

  “Won’t you take it toward the supplies for tomorrow?” Sophie asked, feeling magnanimous and rich.

  Keith brushed away her offer, which he seemed ready to take as a reflection on his social standing, so Sophie scooped the money back into her satchel, where it jangled ridiculously loudly during her walk home.

  For supper Peggy gave her a ham sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup heated up out of a tin. Afterward Sophie took a book and went to read on the window seat in the sitting room. It was so private there, it was almost like being in her own little house. The cushions and the curtains completely concealed her from the rest of the room.

  Her eyelids kept drooping, and she jerked herself awake several times before deciding there was no reason not to give i
n and sleep.

  She woke with a start.

  “Minister of public safety, indeed!” said a familiar voice. It took Sophie a minute to realize it belonged to Miss Grant, Great-aunt Tabitha’s ally from the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. She sounded absolutely furious. “It’s a perversion of the language to suggest the wretched woman will bring Scotland to anything other than calamity and mass destruction.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more, Ruth, but we must put our minds to the problem and work out what to do next,” said Sophie’s great-aunt. “What do you think?”

  “I’ve assigned several operatives to see if they can dig up anything to use against Murchison,” said the younger woman. “I’m confident they’ll find dirt, but it’s a question of timing. If she goes public about Europe and the Brothers of the Northern Liberties before we come up with anything substantial, it’s going to be difficult to stop things from moving inexorably toward war.”

  “I’m currently looking into the situation with the Brothers,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “I don’t think she’s told us the whole story, and it may prove a weak point in the defenses.”

  “What about Nicko Mood?” asked Miss Grant.

  “I don’t think he’s capable of doing much on his own,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, “but he may well have become an effective instrument. The real pity is that Joanna’s come down so hard on the side of war. When we were younger, I worried about her politics, but I never thought it would come to this. On almost every other issue she’s completely sound: she’s the only member of the cabinet who agrees with me about the importance of higher education for women, for instance, and she’s admirably tough-minded on the Highland fisheries.”

  “Why do you think she’s come on so strong for war, then?”

  “I’m not sure, though I suppose that if I were the only woman in the cabinet, I too might grow weary of having all the men roll their eyes whenever I spoke about peace. It is awfully tiresome when one’s pacifist side is attributed solely to the fact of one’s being a woman.”

  “A number of prominent men count themselves part of the peace party as well,” Miss Grant objected.

  “In the Hanseatic states as a whole, certainly,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, “but in Scotland, at least over the last ten or fifteen years, willingness to speak boldly of war has become a kind of shibboleth of masculinity. No, if Joanna’s used unacceptable means to put together the case for war, she must be exposed and brought to account, but I’m not saying I don’t feel for her. We must see what we can do to stop her.”

  She fell silent, then spoke again. “One thing’s certain, Ruth.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The program at IRYLNS must be expanded at once. I tell you, those girls provide the single most effective bulwark against the Europeans. There’s not a moment to be lost.”

  They spoke for a few more minutes, then left the room.

  Still in shock at her great-aunt’s continued support of IRYLNS, Sophie wondered if she should confess to Great-aunt Tabitha she’d overheard the whole thing. No, discretion sometimes really was the better part of valor. It was strange how often she’d benefited in the last few days from eavesdropping—though perhaps benefited wasn’t the right word.

  She opened the sitting-room door a crack and heard Great-aunt Tabitha let Miss Grant out, then lock the front door and descend to the kitchen for her evening cup of chamomile tea.

  Sophie slipped upstairs to her bedroom, tore off her clothes, and threw herself into bed. Ten minutes later, when a knock came at the bedroom door, Sophie lay still as a dead mouse. The knock came again, but Sophie didn’t answer. She could hear Great-aunt Tabitha’s breathing outside on the landing. After a few minutes more, the sound of departing footsteps told Sophie that her great-aunt had decided not to disturb her.

  It was a relief in a way to know that Great-aunt Tabitha hadn’t just given in and accepted the ascendancy of the minister of public safety. If anyone could stop Joanna Murchison, surely it was Great-aunt Tabitha. But how could she speak with such approval of expanding IRYLNS? Why was she so willing to give the girls—except Sophie—up to the knife? And would anything intervene to halt the proceedings when Sophie’s turn came?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “WE CAN’T DO IT, we simply can’t,” Mikael said, pacing back and forth on an isolate patch of grass in the Meadows the next afternoon.

  “What’s your objection, though?” Sophie asked. “I know you’re not wild about spiritualism. But you were willing to pose as a client for Mrs. Tansy, and I don’t see how this is different, except that the stakes are an awful lot higher now. You were the one who told me to see if the spirits could tell me anything about your brother!”

  “I was joking!” Mikael shouted.

  Sophie hoped nobody could overhear them.

  “I wouldn’t have actually sat in a séance, besides,” he added in a quieter voice. “Here you’re asking me to take part in exactly the kind of shady transaction I most despise!”

  “It won’t be shady at all,” Sophie said, struggling to keep her temper. “Keith says himself that most of what’s presented as spirit photography is fraudulent. He wouldn’t have anything to do with that sort of thing, he’s mostly just excited about trying out his new invention. In fact, in a way it’s us who’ll be helping him, not the other way around. You’ll see how good he is when you meet him.”

  “What is it with you, Sophie? You meet this chap and all of a sudden it’s Keith this, Keith that. You’re ridiculously impressionable! I don’t think much of your loyalty to your old friends, I can tell you that much.”

  He picked up a large pebble and flicked it toward the ducks in the small ornamental pond nearby. The flock of birds flapped up off the surface of the water and flew away.

  Mikael sounded almost jealous of Keith, though Sophie couldn’t think why. She hadn’t adopted Keith as her new best friend. People were so silly about things like this. Sophie had to push away a strong sense of irritation as she applied herself to the task of soothing Mikael’s injured feelings.

  Half an hour later, Mikael had agreed to help operate the camera that evening and to reserve judgment on the authenticity of the results.

  “After all, we can’t afford to waste time argy-bargying when there’s a murderer running loose,” he concluded, looking smug.

  It took all of Sophie’s self-control not to roll her eyes.

  To seal their reconciliation, they shared a dry hunk of cake pilfered by Sophie from the tin in the kitchen at Heriot Row.

  “Aren’t you going to eat yours?” he asked Sophie, who had picked off the icing and left the cake in several pieces on the greaseproof paper.

  “I don’t like cake very much,” Sophie said. “The one really good thing about cake is that it’s an excellent icing delivery system.”

  “What an extraordinary thing to say! You don’t mean to say you’d rather have icing than cake? Can I have yours if you don’t want it?”

  “It’s all yours,” Sophie said, and the cake vanished into Mikael’s mouth.

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense, then,” Mikael asked through a spray of crumbs, “not to bother with the cake at all, and to eat icing with a spoon straight from the bowl?”

  Sophie passed him the bottle of fizzy lemonade.

  “That wouldn’t be the same at all,” she said. “For one thing, the icing goes all lovely and hard when it’s actually on the cake, with a sort of crust of crumbs on the side where it’s attached. Picking it off and leaving the rest feels naughty and luxurious.”

  They finished the lemonade and put the rubbish into a bin nearby, already overflowing with refuse. In central Edinburgh all the bins had been removed because they provided such ready receptacles for bombs, but the city council had evidently spared this one, probably because the terrorists wouldn’t waste their matériel outside the densely populated city center.

  “How long have we got before our appointment with the Boy Photographic Wonder?”
Mikael asked.

  “Three hours,” said Sophie, ignoring his sarcasm.

  “Good. I’m dead set on seeing the exhibition.”

  “I don’t see why we shouldn’t walk through the displays,” Sophie said. “They don’t charge admission, except for a few of the pavilions.”

  “Right, then. What are we waiting for?”

  Sophie led the way to the Bruntsfield Links, formerly a golf course, now home to the tents and permanent pavilions of the Hanseatic Expo. On the other side of the links were ancient burial pits supposed to contain more than ten thousand plague victims, and Sophie thought for one queasiness-inducing second that she could actually smell the half-decayed bodies. A moment later the smell resolved itself into an agricultural miasma rising from the first display area, a show of prize livestock proclaiming Scotland’s superiority in the matter of pigs, sheep, chickens, and dairy cows.

  They watched a Punch-and-Judy show, Sophie struck by a strong resemblance between the Judy puppet and Miss Henchman (could one of the puppeteers possibly have attended Sophie’s school?), then sampled thirteen different kinds of jam, all made of fruit native to Scotland. Sophie was afraid that Mikael must have seen much better exhibitions in Denmark, but he seemed well entertained by what was on offer, particularly when it was edible.

  The fair was thronged with buskers and beggars, most of them veterans of the armed services. Sophie gave away a few coins, although Great-aunt Tabitha always said not to because the money would just be spent on drink.

  They coughed up the entrance fee for the Grand Pavilion, which housed a rotating set of scientific exhibits designed to demonstrate Scotland’s achievements in technology. Outside it was impossible to tell exactly what they were paying for, but by the time the line snaked forward into the main tent Sophie was no less eager than Mikael to lay eyes on the Miracle of Life Extended.

  Inside, two pretty girls in skimpy one-piece spangled outfits posed on either side of a giant glass box. Mikael whistled his appreciation.