Invisible Things (7 page)

Sophie hated feeling emotions of any sort. She had a strange kind of shame at how strongly affected she was by the news of Great-aunt Tabitha’s death. If only she could remain coolly unaffected by bad news, pain, and loss—if she could choose, she thought she would go and live on a desert island so as never to have to suffer the pain of losing somebody ever again! But of course it was not possible.

Her eyes felt swollen and sore, and she wished she could stay in this little room without having to talk to anyone ever again, but it was cowardly not to make herself go out and face the others. She felt unpleasantly grumpy and sad as she pushed Trismegistus off the bed and rolled her legs over onto the floor.

At school on Monday morning, the teacher must have said something to the class while Sophie was receiving condolences from the headmistress, for two very snooty girls who had hitherto hardly given Sophie the time of day invited her to sit with them at lunch, and a rather grubby but pleasant Russian boy—a diplomat’s son—offered her half his bar of chocolate.

Riding the tram home after school, Sophie was so thoroughly lost in thought that she almost failed to get off at Blegdamsvej. Only the driver’s friendly reminder prevented her from riding all the way to the terminus.

She understood why it would be impossible to go to Great-aunt Tabitha’s funeral. Sophie had barely gotten out of Scotland
once
—it would be tempting fate to hope to do so a second time. But the person Sophie would have given anything to see just now—the person who would be terribly pained by Sophie’s absence from the funeral, since she loved the proprieties almost as much as she loved Sophie—was Tabitha’s housekeeper, Peggy, who had raised Sophie from when she was very young. She must write Peggy a letter at once, Sophie resolved, and get a stamp from Fru Petersen to post it.

It was difficult to concentrate on even the easiest bits of homework. Sophie’s attention kept drifting, and she felt sick to her stomach when she thought of that last brief conversation she had had with her great-aunt at Ardeer. Great-aunt Tabitha had told Sophie she must go, but Sophie still felt guilty about leaving.

After an hour and a half, Sophie had written a grand total of zero pages of her history essay, and she laid down her pen and went to the kitchen to ask Fru Petersen about postage.

The kitchen was empty, but Sophie heard voices in the sitting room. It couldn’t be Mikael and his mother talking, though, could it? He had football practice after school four days a week and rarely got home until just before supper.

Fru Petersen jumped up from her seat as Sophie came into the room. Her companion, Sophie was startled to see, was Niels Bohr himself. He had never visited the flat during Sophie’s stay, and she felt curious or even a little worried as to why he’d broken the unwritten law that kept him from the Petersens’ apartment.

“Sophie, Professor Bohr would like a word with you,” said Fru Petersen in some agitation, leaving Sophie alone with the physicist, who slouched in an armchair with his feet up on the coffee table, a large brown envelope in his hand.

“I would have been happy to come downstairs,” Sophie protested, feeling distinctly unworthy of Bohr’s visit.

“I thought we’d have more privacy up here than downstairs,” Bohr said, sounding almost as unhappy as Sophie felt, “and Fru Petersen was kind enough to suggest we borrow her sitting room.”

Sophie took a chair opposite him; Trismegistus had followed her into the room and now leaped up in several stages onto the high bookshelf perch he seemed to prefer.

“Sophie, I’m afraid I’m not here simply to offer my condolences in person,” said Bohr, “though I hope you will believe me when I say that I am most heartily sorry for your loss. I met Miss Hunter several times—we were both on the program at the ISPPS conference in Estonia several summers ago, and I liked her very much—or perhaps I will say I
appreciated
her. She was far too tough a customer to merit something as ordinary as mere liking!”

Sophie muttered something, and was appalled to realize that the tears had come to her eyes again. It would be too, too awful to cry in front of Niels Bohr! She leaned down and fiddled a bit with the buckles of her school shoes to cover her confusion.

“I got a telephone call this morning from Miss Hunter’s solicitor,” Bohr continued. He seemed oddly reluctant to proceed, the words coming very slowly from his usually precipitous tongue.

“What did he say?” Sophie asked.

Bohr resettled himself in his chair and gave Sophie a mournful look.

“Frankly, I found it hard to believe myself,” he said slowly.

“Believe what?”

“I’d have sworn she’d never—but then, my thoughts don’t come into the matter. Last night, when Fru Petersen telephoned to tell me of Miss Hunter’s death, I assumed it must have been a heart attack or a stroke—something of that sort.”

“Was it not, then?” Sophie asked, aware that she had made exactly the same assumption as Bohr.

“I am very sorry to have to tell you this, Sophie, but Tabitha Hunter took her own life.”

It was the last thing Sophie had expected him to say.

“You mean to say she committed suicide?”

It was just about possible to imagine someone else killing Great-aunt Tabitha—she had always taken pride in her willingness to stand up for unpopular causes, and many powerful people must have felt the sharp edge of her tongue over the years. But what on earth could have driven that old battle-ax to kill
herself
?

“I’m afraid so,” Bohr said. “As I mentioned, I could hardly believe it myself, but I’ve got some supplementary evidence here that, though circumstantial, tells a story that makes some kind of sense, however grim. The solicitor assembled this packet for you—I was able to call in a favor and have it sent in the diplomatic pouch. It includes an article from the
Scotsman
—that’s the only thing I’ve looked at, as the other materials are sealed and marked as confidential, for your eyes only. Apparently Miss Hunter read a proof copy of the article before publication and then took an overdose of a sleeping draft her doctor had prescribed for her a few months earlier. She was dead not long after midnight as Friday night led into Saturday morning, or so the coroner guesses. They’ll do a full postmortem later this week.”

A postmortem . . . But Sophie put aside the thought of her great-aunt’s body being dissected. She took the packet that Bohr was holding out to her.

“I’ll leave you to examine the contents in peace,” he said. “I’ll be in the office downstairs for several more hours this evening, if you’d like to talk about anything afterward, and of course you’re welcome to stop by later this week.

“I’ve spoken with the newsagent,” he added, “and we’ll have the Scottish papers delivered every day until further notice—I fear we may see additional revelations in coming days, and it will be better for us to know what’s going on than to depend on your family’s solicitor for updates.”

Sophie could only stare at him.

The word
family
grated on her ears. Sophie was the only Hunter remaining.

What on earth could be in the envelope?

Her fingers itched to slide under the flap. It seemed impolite to open it while Bohr was still present, but as soon as he had gone, she impatiently slit the fold.

When she shook the contents out onto the table, she found—in addition to the wad of newspaper that had been clipped to the outside of the envelope, presumably the article to which Bohr had alluded—two photographs, an official document sealed in Switzerland, and a fat letter in another smaller envelope, this one addressed to Miss Sophie Hunter in Great-aunt Tabitha’s familiar, slightly crabbed handwriting.

She set the letter and the sealed document beside the newspaper clipping and examined the pictures first.

A young woman, not pretty but with an appealingly lively expression and thick, dark hair coiled up onto her head—it was Great-aunt Tabitha, Sophie realized with amazement, having never before seen such an attractive photograph of her great-aunt as a girl. Tabitha was wearing a well-cut and slightly masculine blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows; her waist was slim, and her long, dark skirt flared out around her ankles. Clasping her arm was an older gentleman, quite dapper in his dress and wearing a straw boater. They stood on a seaside boardwalk or something of the sort—a black-and-gold stamp at the bottom of the photograph said
San Remo, 1895
. San Remo was in Italy, Sophie knew, which had not yet at that time been incorporated into the European Federation.

Though the man in the picture was surely old enough to be Tabitha’s father, it was quite clear that he was no such thing—Sophie had rarely seen a picture of two people more clearly in love with each other.

Tabitha—in love?

She turned over the picture to see if anything was written on the back. Just three words:
Tabitha and Alfred
.

Sophie suddenly felt quite sick. She turned the picture over and took a closer look at the man’s face, surprised that she had not recognized it at once. Now it was unmistakable. Sophie had seen tens or even hundreds of pictures of him over the years, including the likeness on the Scottish five-shilling note.

Tabitha had been in love with Alfred Nobel!

The other picture was of somewhat more recent vintage. The overriding sensation it gave Sophie was rage at her great-aunt for never having shown it to Sophie before, for it was a lovely snapshot of Sophie’s parents in what must have been the very early days of their marriage. They were with another woman, sprawled out on lounge chairs of the garden-furniture variety in a forest grove—the two women had tall glasses of what might have been lemonade and wore light-colored summer dresses, while Sophie’s father held a bottle of beer.

The bottle’s label said
BALTICA
, in Cyrillic script, and Sophie guessed they must have been somewhere in the Russian countryside. But who was the other woman?

Again, on the back of the photograph, in a handwriting that was unfamiliar to Sophie but that she guessed might have been her mother’s, a legend:
Alan, Rosie, and Miss Elsa Blix
, the words read,
enjoying an uncharacteristic day of rest from their labors! August 1921
.

Elsa Blix—Sophie had never heard the name before. She must ask Professor Bohr whether the woman had been another of the cohort of postdoctoral students at the institute—might she not have been a coworker at the Russian dynamite factory where Sophie’s parents had met their end, in an explosion that would occur less than two years after this picture had been taken?

Without more background information, Sophie could make little sense of either picture, so she turned next to the newspaper story, which she read with an increasing sense of disorientation and dismay.

MINISTRY ORDERS INVESTIGATION INTO SECRETIVE AGENCY. DIRECTORS FACE PROSECUTION UNDER HANSEATIC CODE OF HUMAN RIGHTS.

A police raid on the Adam Smith College in Buccleugh Place revealed a horrifying scene: dozens of young girls, many of them bearing grotesque surgical scars and suffering significant mental and physical impairments. They had entered what they thought was an elite training program for the crème de la crème of Scottish girlhood—the much-vaunted Institution for the Recruitment of Young Ladies for National Security, familiarly known as IRYLNS (pronounced “irons”). Instead they found themselves in a hell of electroshock treatments, neurochemical stimulation, and sexual abuse.

The girls of IRYLNS populate the corridors of power throughout this country, managing the offices of captains of industry and parliamentary ministers; their good looks, charming manners, and impeccable professionalism have made them some of the most sought-after female employees in the country. Meanwhile, the program’s “rejects” are hidden away in an archipelago of secret hospitals and institutions, sequestered in sealed units where doctors and nurses work to conceal these damaged girls from the public eye.

The institute’s director, Dr. Susan Ferrier, was not available for comment, but will be required to answer questions should the rumored parliamentary inquiry proceed. Cofounder Tabitha Hunter, former president of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research and a prominent member of Edinburgh society, issued a written statement proclaiming her belief that no sacrifice is too great when it comes to Scotland’s security, and stating that the accusations about abuse have been much exaggerated. She said she had no regrets about her involvement in the scheme, and argued that its failures had to be put in the context of exceptional and widespread success.

Further revelations will doubtless emerge in coming days, not just about the brutalities inflicted upon these innocent young girls but about the scandalous past of one of Scotland’s pillars of respectability.

Was this a veiled suggestion that
Great-aunt Tabitha
had a scandalous past? It seemed nearly inconceivable, but then Sophie still couldn’t understand how even this assault on her great-aunt’s beloved IRYLNS could have driven Tabitha Hunter to kill herself.