The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (11 page)

“Eleven.”

Just a little younger than Will, she thought, when the alethiometer had told her that he was a murderer. She looked at Dr. Polstead now with eyes that seemed never to have seen him before. She imagined a stocky ginger-haired boy killing an experienced secret agent, and then she saw another pattern too: the man Will had killed had been a member of the secret service of his country. Were there other correspondences and echoes waiting to be discovered? The alethiometer could tell her, but oh, how long it would take! How quickly she would have done it once, her fingers racing her mind as she flicked the hands around the dial and stepped unhesitatingly down the rungs of linked meanings into the darkness where the truth lay!

Hannah said, “And we must think about keeping that safe too.”

Lyra blinked. “The alethiometer? How did you know I was thinking about that?”

“Your fingers were moving.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’ll have to hide everything. I’ll have to suppress every movement, every word…I had no idea. Not the slightest flicker of an idea about all this. I don’t know what to say….”

“Pantalaimon will help you.”

But Hannah didn’t know about the strain that existed between them these days. Lyra had told no one about that; who would understand it, after all?

“It’s getting late,” said Dr. Polstead. “If we want any dinner, we’d better be getting back into town.”

Lyra felt as if a week had passed. She stood up slowly and embraced Alice, who held her tightly and kissed her. Hannah stood up and did the same, and Lyra kissed her in return.

“This is an alliance now,” said Hannah. “Don’t ever forget that.”

“I won’t,” said Lyra. “Thank you. I’m still reeling, frankly. There’s so much I just didn’t know.”

“And that’s our fault,” said Dr. Polstead, “and we’ll have to make it up to you. But we will. Are you dining in Hall tonight?”

“No, I must eat with the servants. The Master made that very clear.”

Alice muttered, “Bastard,” which made Lyra smile a bit. But then she said, “I’m going to the Trout. I’ll see you both later.”

She set off towards Godstow, and then Lyra and Dr. Polstead began to head back towards the city center, through the streets of Jericho, still busy with shoppers, where the well-lit shop fronts shone warm and safe.

“Lyra,” he said, “I hope you won’t forget that my name is Malcolm. And Mrs. Lonsdale is Alice.”

“That’ll take some getting used to.”

“I expect many things will. This servant business—it’s deliberately designed to humiliate you. There isn’t a single Scholar who doesn’t value your presence among them. Even though I’m part of Durham now, I know that full well.”

“He said that several voices had told him that my dining in Hall, and so on, was no longer appropriate.”

“He’s lying. If anybody did say that to him, it wasn’t one of the Scholars.”

“Anyway, if what he wants to do is humiliate me,” she said, “it’ll fail. It’s no humiliation at all to eat with my friends. They’re as much family as anything else. If that’s what he thinks of my family, so much the worse for him.”

“Good.”

They said nothing for a minute or so. Lyra thought she would never feel easy in the presence of this Malcolm, no matter what he’d done nineteen years before.

Then he said something that made her feel even more awkward.

“Er—Lyra, I think you and I have something else to discuss, haven’t we?”

“Dæmons,” she said quietly. He could hardly hear her.

“Yes,” he said. “Did you have as big a shock as I did the other night?”

“I think I must have done.”

“Does anyone know you and Pantalaimon can separate?”

“No one in this world,” she said. Then she swallowed hard and said, “The witches of the north. They can separate from their dæmons. There was a witch called Serafina Pekkala, who was the first I knew about. I saw her dæmon and spoke to him a long time before I saw her.”

“I met a witch once, with her dæmon, during the flood.”

“And there’s a city with an Arabic name…a ruined city. Inhabited by dæmons without people.”

“I think I’ve heard of that too. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it.”

They walked on a little further.

“But there’s something else,” Lyra began to say, and at the same moment he said, “I think there’s—”

“Sorry,” she said.

“You go first.”

“Your dæmon saw Pantalaimon, and he saw her, only he wasn’t sure who she was till yesterday.”

“In Alice’s room.”

“Yes. Only…Oh, this is so difficult.”

“Look behind,” he said.

She turned and saw what he’d already felt: both dæmons walking along together, heads close, talking intensely.

“Well…,” she said.

They were at the corner of Little Clarendon Street, which led after a couple of hundred yards to the broad avenue of St. Giles. Jordan College was no more than ten minutes away.

Malcolm said, “Have you got time for a drink? I think we need to talk a bit more easily than we can in the street.”

“Yes,” she said, “all right.”

Little Clarendon Street had been adopted by Oxford’s jeunesse dorée as a fashionable destination. Expensive clothes shops, chic coffeehouses, cocktail bars, and colored anbaric lights strung overhead made it seem like a corner of another city altogether—Malcolm couldn’t have known what made tears come to Lyra’s eyes at that point, though he did notice the tears: it was her memory of the deserted Cittàgazze, all the lights blazing, empty, silent, magical, where she had first met Will. She brushed them away and said nothing.

He led the way to a mock-Italian café with candles in straw-wrapped wine bottles and red-checked tablecloths and travel posters in splashy colors. Lyra looked around warily.

“It’s safe here,” Malcolm said quietly. “There are other places where it’s risky to talk, but there’s no danger in La Luna Caprese.”

He ordered a bottle of Chianti, asking Lyra first if that was what she’d like, and she nodded.

When the wine was tried and poured, she said, “I’ve got to tell you something. I’ll try and keep it clear in my head. And now I know about you and your dæmon, it’s something I can tell you, but no one else. Only I’ve heard so many things in the last couple of days and my mind’s in a whirl, so please, if I don’t make sense, just stop me and I’ll go over it again.”

“Of course.”

She began with Pan’s experience on the Monday night, the attack, the murder, the man giving him the wallet to take to Lyra. Malcolm listened in astonishment, though he felt no skepticism: such things happened, as he knew well. But one thing seemed odd.

“The victim and his dæmon knew about separating?” he said.

“Yes,” said Pan at Lyra’s elbow. “They weren’t shocked, like most people would be. In fact, they could separate too. She must have seen me up the tree when he was being attacked, and thought it would be all right to trust me, I suppose.”

“So Pan brought the wallet back to me at St. Sophia’s…,” Lyra went on.

“And that was when Asta saw me,” Pan put in.

“…but other things got in the way, and we didn’t have a chance to look at it till the next morning.”

She pulled her bag up to her lap and took out the wallet, passing it to him unobtrusively. He noticed Pan’s tooth marks, and noticed the smell too, which Pan had called cheap cologne, though it seemed to Malcolm something other than that, something wilder. He opened the wallet and took out the contents one by one as she spoke. The Bodleian card, the university staff card, the diplomatic papers, all so familiar; his own wallet had held very similar papers in its time.

“He was coming back to Oxford, I think,” Lyra said, “because if you look at the laissez-passers, you can trace his journey from Sin Kiang to here. He’d probably have gone on to the Botanic Garden, if they hadn’t attacked him.”

Malcolm caught another faint trace of the scent on the wallet. He raised it to his nose, and something distant rang like a bell, or gleamed like the sun on a snowy mountaintop, just for the fraction of a second, and then it was gone.

“Did he say anything else, the man who was killed?”

He addressed the question to Pan, and Pan thought hard before saying, “No. He couldn’t. He was nearly dead. He made me take the wallet out of his pocket and told me to take it to Lyra—I mean, he didn’t know her name, but he said to take it to your…I think he thought we could be trusted because he knew about separating.”

“Have you taken this to the police?”

“Of course. That was almost the first thing we did next morning,” Lyra said. “But when we were waiting in the police station, Pan heard one of the policemen speak.”

“He was the first killer, the one who wasn’t wounded,” said Pan. “I recognized his voice. It was very distinctive.”

“So we asked about something quite different and then left,” Lyra went on. “We just thought we shouldn’t give the wallet to the very man who’d killed him.”

“Sensible,” said Malcolm.

“Oh, and there’s another thing. The man who was cut on the leg. He’s called Benny Morris.”

“How d’you know that?”

“I know someone who works at the mail depot, and I asked him if there was anyone there who’d hurt his leg. He said yes, there was a big ugly man called Benny Morris, who sounds just like the man we saw.”

“And what then?”

“In the wallet,” Lyra said carefully, “there was a left-luggage key—you know, the sort you get with those lockers at the station.”

“What did you do with that?”

“I thought we ought to go and get whatever was in it. So—”

“Don’t tell me you
did
?”

“Yes. Because he’d sort of entrusted it to us, the wallet, and what was in it. So we thought we ought to go and look after it before the men who killed him realized and went to look for it themselves.”

“The killers knew he had some sort of luggage,” said Pan, “because they kept asking each other if he’d had a bag, if he’d dropped it, were they sure they hadn’t seen it, and so on. As if they’d been told to expect one.”

“And what was in the locker?” said Malcolm.

“A rucksack,” Lyra said. “Which is under the floorboards in my room in Jordan.”

“It’s there now?”

She nodded.

He picked up his glass and drained it in one, and then stood up. “Let’s go and get it. While it’s there, you’re in great danger, Lyra, and that’s no exaggeration. Come on.”

Five minutes later, Lyra and Malcolm turned out of the Broad into Turl Street, the narrow thoroughfare where the main entrance to Jordan College stood under the lodge tower. They were halfway to the lodge when two men, dressed in anonymous workers’ clothing, stepped out of the gate and moved away towards the High Street. One of them had a rucksack slung over his shoulder.

“That’s it,” said Lyra quietly.

Malcolm started to run after them, but Lyra instantly caught his arm. Her grip was strong.

“Wait,” she said, “keep quiet. Don’t make them turn round. Just let’s go inside.”

“I could catch them!”

“No need.”

The men were walking quickly away. Malcolm wanted to say several things but held his tongue. Lyra was quite calm and in fact seemed quietly satisfied about something. He looked again at the men and followed her into the lodge, where she was talking to the porter.

“Yes, they said they were going to move your furniture, Lyra, but I just saw ’em go out. One of ’em was carrying something.”

“Thanks, Bill,” she said. “Did they say where they were from?”

“They gave me a card—here it is.”

She showed Malcolm the card. It said
J. Cross Removals,
with an address in Kidlington, a few miles north of Oxford.

“Do you know anything about J. Cross?” Malcolm said to the porter.

“Never heard of them, sir.”

They climbed the two flights of stairs to her room. Malcolm hadn’t set foot on this staircase since he was an undergraduate, but it didn’t seem to have changed much. There were two rooms on the top floor on either side of a little landing, and Lyra unlocked the one on the right and switched the light on.

“Good God,” said Malcolm. “We should have got here five minutes ago.”

The room was in utter confusion. Chairs were overturned, books pulled out of shelves and thrown on the floor, papers in a scattered mass on the desk. The rug was pulled back and thrown in a corner, and a floorboard had been taken out.

“Well, they found it,” said Lyra, looking at the floor.

“It was under there?”

“My favorite hiding place. Don’t look so bitter. They were bound to search for a loose floorboard. I’d like to see their faces when they open the rucksack, though.”

And now she was smiling. For the first time for days, her eyes were free of shadows.

“What will they find?” Malcolm said.

“Two books from the history faculty library, all my last year’s notes on economic history, a jersey that was too small for me, and two bottles of shampoo.”

Malcolm laughed. She looked through the books on the floor before handing two of them up to him.

“These were in the rucksack. I couldn’t read them.”

“This one looks like Anatolian,” said Malcolm, “some kind of botanical text….And this one’s in Tajik. Well, well. What else?”

From among the mass of papers spread all over the desktop and half across the floor, Lyra picked out a cardboard folder very similar to several others. Malcolm sat down to open it.

“And I’ll just look in the bedroom,” Lyra said, and went across the landing.

The folder was labeled in Lyra’s hand. Malcolm supposed that she’d taken her own papers out and put the dead man’s in, and so it proved: they seemed to be a sort of diary, written in pencil. But he’d got no further than that when Lyra came back with a battered old smokeleaf tin containing a dozen or so miniature cork-stoppered bottles and some little cardboard boxes.

“This was in the rucksack too,” she said, “but I’ve no idea what’s in them. Specimens?”

“Lyra, that was clever. But this is real danger you’re in. They already know who you are, somehow, and they know you know about the murder, at least, and they’ll soon know that you’ve got the contents of the rucksack. I’m not sure you should stay here.”

“I’ve got nowhere else to go,” she said. “Except St. Sophia’s, and they probably know about that too.”

She wasn’t looking for sympathy: it was said matter-of-factly. The look he remembered so well from when he taught her, that expression of blank insolent obstructiveness, was lurking somewhere at the back of her eyes.

“Well, let’s think about that,” he said. “You could stay with Hannah.”

“That would be dangerous for her, wouldn’t it? They must know we’re connected. In any case, I think her sister is coming to spend Christmas with her, and there wouldn’t be room.”

“Have you got any friends you could stay with?”

“There are people I’ve spent Christmas with before, but that was because they invited me. I’ve never asked. It would look wrong if I did it now. And…I don’t know. I just wouldn’t want to put anyone…”

“Well, it’s clear that you can’t stay here.”

“And this is where I used to feel safest of all.”

She looked lost. She picked up a cushion and held it close with both arms around it, and Malcolm thought: Why isn’t she holding her dæmon like that? And that brought into focus something he’d noticed without seeing it clearly: Lyra and Pantalaimon didn’t like each other. He felt a sudden lurch, as of surprise, and pitied them both.

“Look,” he said, “there’s my parents’ pub in Godstow. The Trout. I’m certain you could stay there, at least over the vacation.”

“Could I work there?”

“You mean—” Malcolm was a little nonplussed. “You mean, is it quiet enough to study?”

“No,” she said, more scornfully than her eyes suggested she meant. “Work in the bar or the kitchen or something. To pay for my keep.”

He saw how proud she was, and how shaken she’d been by the Master’s revelation about the money that was not there.

“If you’d like to do that, I’m sure they’d love it,” he said.

“Good, then,” she said.

How stubborn she was he had more cause to know than most, but he wondered how many others had seen the loneliness in her expression when she wasn’t guarding it.

“And let’s not waste time,” he said. “We’ll go there this evening. As soon as you’re ready.”

“I’ve got to tidy…” She waved at everything in the room. “I can’t leave it like this.”

“Just put the books on the shelves and the furniture back—is the bedroom turned over as well?”

“Yes. All my clothes all over the floor, bed upside down…”