The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  “You were known to be skeptical about the manifestations of the spirit world,” said the voice. “I thought that would be the best way of inclining you toward belief. The medium had no idea, though, that I actually meant to use her body as a vessel through which to communicate with you.”

  “But I still don’t see what you wanted with me!” Sophie said, almost more confused than before.

  “My life’s work has been to give the world peace,” said the voice. “Fifteen years ago, we were on the verge of making what I’d dreamed of, a weapon so powerful that the very threat of its use would cause grown men to quake in their boots: the holy grail of deterrence and the necessary precursor, or so it seemed to me, of world peace.”

  The voice fell silent. It was still hard to think of it as belonging to Alfred Nobel; Sophie was trying not to concentrate on the whole “brain in a jar” end of things.

  “What happened then?” Sophie asked.

  “A tragedy,” said the voice. “The work had been conducted in the utmost secrecy in an enclave within a Russian munitions factory. For security reasons, there were no records outside the facility of the key mechanism; even I myself had only a vague idea as to how the thing worked. And then the factory blew up, destroying all records and killing its creator, along with many others.”

  “Fifteen years ago,” Sophie said slowly. “Was that—”

  The voice cut her off. “Yes, Sophie. That was the factory explosion that killed your parents, and your father was the inventor of the miraculous weapon. All these long years, I have believed there to be no way of recovering what was lost. But recently I learned that a second set of plans survived the blast. We must lay hands on it before it can be used by the wrong people, people who wish to dominate the world rather than give it peace.”

  Sophie’s head whirled with a million questions. She didn’t know where to start.

  “I will tell you more,” said the voice, “when you arrive at my estate. Petersen will instruct you about the journey. Meanwhile, I ask you to give him your complete confidence. Au revoir, Sophie.”

  “Wait!” Sophie shouted.

  But the voice had gone.

  When the operator came on the line to ask if she needed to place another call, Sophie put the receiver back in its cradle and slumped onto the shelf at the side of the booth, head in her hands.

  A knock came at the door.

  Sophie opened it partway and saw Mr. Petersen peering through the gap.

  “Well?” he said.

  Sophie shook her head and glared at him. “I can’t believe you’ve been keeping all this from me,” she said.

  “I was afraid you’d feel like that,” said Mr. Petersen. “All I can do is apologize and say—”

  But at this juncture they were interrupted by the same guard who’d appeared to summon Sophie and Mr. Petersen for the telephone call.

  They could see at once that something was wrong.

  “Sir?” he said, his face pale and sweaty.

  “What is it?” said Mr. Petersen, sounding annoyed.

  Sophie crossed her fingers and prayed there hadn’t been an accident. Surely they would have heard the explosion?

  “We’ve got a, well, a situation,” the man said.

  “A situation?”

  “Well, what I’d call a situation, sir.”

  “Can’t you be more specific? What kind of a situation?”

  “There’s an intruder in the dynamite house.”

  “What sort of intruder?”

  “We don’t know yet,” said the guard, “but it doesn’t look good. The ladies had just got to that spot on the tour, so we’ve got a high civilian presence even beyond the workers.”

  Mr. Petersen turned to look at Sophie. “Every bone in my body’s telling me to get you away safely out of here, but I’m going to do you the courtesy of treating you as an adult. Do you want to come with me?”

  Sophie nodded.

  They raced outside and hopped into one of the carts for transporting people and goods. En route, Mr. Petersen told Sophie what to expect in the dynamite house, a long wooden cabin where liquid nitroglycerin soaked into the porous siliceous earth called kieselguhr to become dynamite. The mixture was transported in a wooden box on a handcart known as a bogie to the mixing area at the other end of the building. There the young women would give the boxes another stir and then tip the blend into smaller boxes with brass sieves in them, rubbing the dynamite through small holes in the sieve. The loose, crumbling, coffee-colored dynamite went next to the cartridge houses, where the workers pulled pump handles to force rods through hoppers, jamming the dynamite down brass tubes at the bottom. A parchment square was wrapped around the bottom of each tube, folded off at the lower end, and tamped down. Each three-inch cartridge had its top folded over and was then dropped through a slide in the wall, where it rolled into a box of finished cartridges. The five-pound boxes would be grouped into fifty-pound wooden cases and taken by bogie down to the beach, where the narrow-gauge lines ran straight to the sea. From the jetty at the southeast end of the peninsula, the cases would be loaded into boats and then into the company’s own steamers for shipment all over the world.

  Still a few minutes short of their destination, Mr. Petersen showed no sign of stopping his bizarre account of how dynamite was manufactured.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Sophie said finally.

  “Oh, gods,” said Mr. Petersen. “I’m sorry, Sophie. I suppose rambling on like this is the way I calm myself down in times of trouble. What I wouldn’t do right now for a cigarette! But obviously that’s out of the question….”

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” Sophie asked.

  “Whatever we can,” said Mr. Petersen, suddenly sober.

  Inside the dynamite house, they could see at once that the situation had escalated. This wasn’t a simple question of an unidentified intruder. The unexpected arrival—of all people in the world!—was Nicko Mood. He had a gun in his hand, his clothes were disheveled, and in short he looked remarkably like a man about to blow up hundreds of people (including himself) without a second thought.

  “Sophie Hunter!” he said when he saw her.

  On the other side of the room, all the workers and lady visitors stood with their hands on their heads.

  Mr. Petersen pushed Sophie behind him, but Mood wrenched her arm almost out of her socket and dragged her to his side.

  Great-aunt Tabitha looked on dispassionately as he held his gun to Sophie’s head.

  “It’s still possible for you to escape with your life,” Sophie’s great-aunt told Mood. “If you commandeered one of the ships at the jetty, you could be away in no time. Even if you don’t give a fig for the rest of us, surely you’d rather live than die?”

  “It may be hard for you to believe, Tabitha, but I have nothing left to live for. The deal you cut with Joanna leaves no place for me. She has forced me to write a letter of resignation, and made me promise to retire from the public eye. Life as I know it is over, and with my career ruined, I don’t know that I care much for the little bit of living that’s left to me. I might as well take a few of you with me when I go.”

  Mr. Petersen was making faces at Sophie while Nicko looked in Great-aunt Tabitha’s direction. His gestures and her own common sense told Sophie they should try to keep the man talking to spin things out as long as they could. It would take Mr. Petersen quite a while to come back with help.

  As the teacher crept away, Mood fell silent.

  “What I want to know,” Sophie said hastily as Nicko Mood began fiddling with his gun (it had just occurred to her that a bullet puncturing a tank would be enough to set off an explosion), “is why you thought you’d be able to get away with the murders on top of everything else. When you hired the Veteran to kill Mrs. Tansy, you left a trail of evidence that any halfway decent investigator could have uncovered. How did you think you’d ever get away with it?”

  Nicko looked angry, but at least he stopped
waving the gun around.

  “The plan was flawless but not foolproof,” he said. “The Veteran was supposed to frame Nobel’s man for the medium’s murder, but he flubbed the business, as he fouled up everything he put his dirty little hands to.”

  So that was how Mr. Petersen’s knife had ended up at the hotel!

  “We had set up all the evidence to implicate Europe in the terror attacks,” Nicko said. “All I had to do was wait for a discreet interval to pass, and the minister would have had the whole government in the palm of her hand. But your wretched great-aunt has foiled me! Joanna will stay in office, and I will serve as scapegoat.”

  “One of you was always going to have to pay the price,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, coming forward and giving him a scornful look. Her courage was heartening. “How did you think you would get away with it?”

  “Once the Veteran was found dead in his cell,” said Nicko, “all traces of our part in the affair were gone.”

  “Nonsense!” said Great-aunt Tabitha.

  Nicko bristled, and Sophie wished her great-aunt would approach the conversation with a bit more tact. If the man got really annoyed, he was capable of blowing them all up at any moment—or of shooting Sophie in the head!

  “Miss Grant and I had already assembled a dossier,” Great-aunt Tabitha continued, “and you can be assured that we would have been able to demonstrate your involvement in the murders as well as the bombings. I don’t know why you thought the minister wouldn’t cut you loose at the least sign of trouble; it was bound to happen. Of course I believe her when she says that she had no idea at the time what you were doing out of that misguided impulse to protect her.”

  Miss Grant took over the narrative. “It was only after Tabitha witnessed the attack on Waterloo Day that we really became suspicious again and started to dig around,” she said. Her words seemed to cut into Nicko, who visibly slumped as he listened. “The less said about the minister, the better—but you’d left your fingerprints all over the business, metaphorically speaking.”

  “All I needed was a little more time!” Nicko cried. “I almost pulled it off!”

  He tucked the revolver under his arm—Sophie wished she thought she could get the gun away from him, but it wasn’t worth the risk, not with the chance of a stray bullet blowing them all to kingdom come—and felt in his pocket for his cigarette lighter. He flicked it on and held the flame up high.

  The women of the NTWSA and the dozen scarlet-clad young women who worked in the hut gazed at him with horror.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Sophie saw Mr. Petersen moving toward them from about twenty feet away, silently but frantically gesturing for her to keep Mood talking. Fanned out behind him were a half dozen guards.

  “How did you manage to get past the searchers,” Sophie asked, desperate to fend off the explosion, if only for a few more seconds, “without them finding the gun and the lighter and taking them away from you?”

  “It was child’s play,” Nicko boasted, preening. His responsiveness to flattery was the only thing that helped Sophie hope they might after all escape with their lives. “I showed them my identification from the ministry—it hasn’t yet been taken away from me; Joanna gave me a week to straighten out my affairs. And that’s precisely what I’m here to do. I’m not sorry, either, Sophie, to take you with me as well as your wretched great-aunt; you and your little friend gave me considerable anxiety, and it was only a matter of time before you’d have had to be put out of the way.”

  Mr. Petersen and his men slunk a little closer.

  Sophie crossed her fingers and prayed. All things being equal, she really would prefer not to die in an explosion.

  “Those searchers are extraordinarily careless,” Nicko added with satisfaction. “I can’t think why they don’t get properly qualified people to do the job.”

  “Don’t you have any qualms,” Sophie asked, trying very hard not to look in the direction of the guards, “about taking all these innocent people with you? What about sending away some of the women who work here before you blow us all up? None of them ever did anything to hurt you.”

  “Why should I want to save any of them?” said Nicko, looking genuinely surprised. “A few factory girls are no great loss!”

  And at that moment one of the young women simply threw herself forward at him, four or five others instantly following, yelling as they went. In the blink of an eye, they had knocked him to the ground, and he vanished (so did the lighter!) beneath the heap of flailing limbs.

  Everything happened next in a blur. Mr. Petersen and his men could do nothing without risking Mood letting off a bullet that would send them all to their deaths. They rushed up and simply stood in front of the heap—with all the girls, it was like the picture of Orpheus and the Maenads in Sophie’s book of Greek myths.

  A minute later, Mood lay supine on the floor, a woman holding down each of his arms and legs, while the girl who’d first thrown herself on him had jumped up and was waving the extinguished lighter and gun in the air.

  “Give those to me,” said one of the guards, struggling to keep his voice calm.

  He took them and left the building, his deliberate pace more than anything else reminding everybody what a close shave they’d just had.

  Two other guards handcuffed Mood in special plastic manacles and dragged him away with them. Sophie had to look aside as he wept and pleaded with the officers to let him go. He must have gone a bit mad in the end, she realized. Only a madman would have thought he could successfully orchestrate such a complex plot. Mr. Petersen went with them to escort Mood to the vehicle that would take him to jail.

  Great-aunt Tabitha strode over to the girl who’d saved them—she had an amazingly pretty pink and white complexion, the result of breathing nitroglycerin every day—and pumped her hand.

  “A quite remarkable effort,” she said. “It’s not necessary for me to say how very much we are in your debt.”

  Then Great-aunt Tabitha turned to Sophie. “I suspect you know rather more about all this than I imagined, but I won’t inquire as to how that came about,” she said.

  “Is everything going to be all right?” Sophie asked, still terribly worried about the consequences of the minister’s politicking. “Surely the minister must be brought to justice as well; it can’t have been only Nicko Mood who plotted those deaths!”

  Great-aunt Tabitha looked quite triumphant. “The minister wants war, I want peace, but we’ve agreed to set aside our differences and work together in the short term for Scotland’s good. There won’t be any more money flowing in the direction of the Brothers, and as a token of her goodwill, the minister has accepted my candidate to replace Nicko Mood. Ruth Grant will make a superb chief of staff….”

  Miss Grant to work for the minister?

  Looking at Miss Grant, Sophie underwent a startling realization: Miss Grant had been looking forward to this moment for months. She’d planned to get Nicko’s job all along!

  It rubbed Sophie the wrong way to think of the minister surviving unscathed. But at least surely now they’d be able to abolish IRYLNS. After pulling off this triumph of investigation and politicking, Miss Grant and Great-aunt Tabitha could do anything they wanted.

  “You’ll be able to do away with IRYLNS!” Sophie said.

  But instead of giving Sophie the ready affirmative she expected, the two women exchanged significant looks and smiled.

  “Do away with it?” Miss Grant said. “Why ever would we do that?”

  “IRYLNS is one of the country’s most precious resources,” Great-aunt Tabitha added. “We need every weapon we can get.”

  “But at least you’ll stop the bill that says IRYLNS has the right to claim any girl once she turns sixteen from being passed into law?”

  Their silence made it clear that neither woman meant to do anything of the sort, although Great-aunt Tabitha had the grace to look slightly ashamed.

  Sophie found herself speechless.

  Mr. Petersen appeared now to
tell them that Nicholas Mood was safely in custody.

  “Sophie, the most important thing is to get you out of here,” he said then. “None of this is necessarily going to prevent Scotland from continuing on a collision course with Europe, and meanwhile the risk that you might be sent to IRYLNS is too great to chance your staying here.”

  “You know about IRYLNS!” Sophie said. “But how?”

  “We have our ways,” said Mr. Petersen, making a wry face. He had taken Sophie slightly aside, though Great-aunt Tabitha and Miss Grant were close enough to listen in. “Sophie, you must leave the country, and now’s the ideal chance,” he said. “You’ve got more than enough time to meet Mikael and sail with him to København. There’s a driver waiting for you outside the gates as we speak.”

  “How will I get out without a visa?” Sophie asked. It was all happening much too quickly—she’d only just decided to leave, and already they were conspiring to send her away without further delay. She had a sudden powerful urge to drag her heels. Wouldn’t she get to say good-bye to Peggy first? And what about her friends? Who would protect them from IRYLNS if Sophie just left?

  “We’ve got a plan,” said Mr. Petersen.

  “Couldn’t I stay until after my exams?” Sophie said, not liking the plaintive note she heard in her own words but unable to suppress it. “Then I could say good-bye to everybody first. Do I really have to decide right now?”

  After looking around to make sure nobody but Miss Grant could hear their conversation, Great-aunt Tabitha unexpectedly joined her voice to Mr. Petersen’s.

  “Sophie, you must leave at once,” she said firmly.

  Sophie looked at her with enormous surprise.

  “If Mr. Petersen whisks you off now and makes you disappear, I’ll be able to deny knowing anything about it,” Sophie’s great-aunt said. “The longer we wait, the riskier it becomes. Seize the day. If you stay, I can’t promise I won’t hand you over to IRYLNS.”

  She leaned over and kissed Sophie’s cheek.

  All Sophie’s energy was focused now on not crying.

  Her eyesight was blurry as Mr. Petersen led her out of the building and across the narrow-gauge tracks, back toward the gatehouse at the main entrance.