The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (16 page)

The woman next to him, about Malcolm’s age and very pale and anxious-looking, said, “Annabel Milner, Plant Sciences. I—I’d been working with Dr. Hassall on the rose question before he went to, umm, to Lop Nor.”

Malcolm was next. “Malcolm Polstead, historian. I found some papers in a bag at a bus stop. Dr. Hassall’s name and university card happened to be among them, so I brought them here. Like Professor Capes, I’ve worked in the same part of the world, so I was curious.”

The person sitting next to him was a slim, dark-featured man in his fifties whose dæmon was a hawk. He nodded to Malcolm and said, “Timur Ghazarian. My area of interest is the history and politics of Central Asia. I had several conversations with Dr. Hassall about the region before he went there.”

The next to speak was a sandy-haired man with a Scottish accent. “My name is Brewster Napier. Together with my colleague Margery Stevenson, I wrote the first paper about the rose oil effect in microscopy. In view of what’s happened since, I was alarmed and profoundly interested to hear from Lucy this morning. Like Professor Ghazarian, I spoke with Dr. Hassall last time he was in Oxford. I’m shocked to hear about his death.”

The final person was a man a little older than Malcolm, with thin fair hair and a long jaw. His expression was somber. “Lars Johnsson,” he said. “I was the director of the research station at Tashbulak before Ted Cartwright took over. The place where Roderick had been working.”

Lucy Arnold said, “Thank you. I’ll start. The police came to me this morning to ask if I could identify the body that had been found in the river. There was a name tag inside his—inside the dead man’s shirt, and they connected his name with the Garden. Staff lists are easy enough to come by. I went with them, and yes, it was him, it was Roderick. I never want to have to do that again. He’d clearly been murdered. The strange thing is that the motive doesn’t seem to have been robbery. Yesterday morning, Dr. Polstead”—she looked at him—“found a shopping bag in the Abingdon Road which contained Roderick’s wallet and a number of other things, and he brought it to me. Frankly, the police didn’t seem very interested in that. I gather they think it was just a meaningless attack. But I’ve asked you all here because you each have a part of the knowledge we’ll need in order to, to move forward with understanding what, what’s happened. And what’s continuing to happen. This is…the thing is…I think we’re treading on dangerous ground. I’ll ask you each to speak in turn, and then we’ll open it up to a more general…Brewster, could you tell us how it began for you?”

“By all means,” he said. “A couple of years ago, a technician in my laboratory noticed that she was having trouble with a particular microscope and asked me to look at it. There was one lens which was misbehaving in an unusual way. You know when you have a smear of dirt or oil on your spectacles, one part of the visual field is blurred—but this wasn’t like that. Instead, there was a colored fringe around the specimen she was looking at, quite definite in character. No blurring, no lack of clarity; everything we could see was unusually well defined, and in addition there was that colored fringe, which—well, it moved, and sparkled. We investigated, and discovered that the previous user of the microscope had been examining a specimen of a particular kind of rose from a region of Central Asia and had accidentally touched the lens, transferring a very small quantity of oil from the specimen to the glass. Not very good microscopy, to be honest, but it was interesting that it had that effect. I took the lens and put it aside, because I wanted to see exactly what was happening. On a hunch, I asked my friend Margery Stevenson to have a look at it. Margery’s a particle physicist, and something she’d told me a month or two before made me think she’d be interested in this. She was investigating the Rusakov field.”

Malcolm sensed a slight shiver of tension around the table, perhaps because he felt it himself. Nobody spoke or moved.

Napier continued: “For those who haven’t come across it before, the Rusakov field and the particles associated with it are aspects of the phenomenon known as Dust. Which, of course, is not to be spoken about without the specific authority of the Magisterium. I’m assured by Lucy that you are all aware of the constraints this places on our activities. And our conversations.”

He looked directly at Malcolm as he said this.

Malcolm nodded blandly, and Napier went on: “Briefly, Margery Stevenson and I discovered that the oil on the lens made it possible to see various effects of the Rusakov field which had previously only been described theoretically. There have been rumors for a decade or so that something like it had been seen before, but any records had been systematically destroyed by—well, we know who. The question now was whether to keep this discovery secret or make it public. It was too important to say nothing about, but perhaps too dangerous to make much of a noise. Where should we place it? The Microscopical Society of Leiden is not, frankly, a very influential body, and its
Proceedings
are seldom noticed. So we sent a paper there, and it was published a couple of years ago. At first, we heard nothing in response. But more recently both my laboratory and Margery’s have been broken into, very skillfully, and we’ve both been questioned by people we assumed had some connection with Security or Intelligence or something. They were discreet, but quite probing, very persistent, rather alarming, in fact. We told them nothing but the truth in return. That’s all I need say for the moment, I think. Except to add that Margery now works in Cambridge, and that I haven’t heard from her for the past fortnight. Her colleagues can’t tell me where she is, and neither can her husband. I’m extremely anxious about her.”

“Thank you, Brewster,” said Lucy Arnold. “That’s very helpful. Clear and alarming. Dr. Polstead, could you tell us what you know?”

She looked somberly at Malcolm. He nodded.

“As Professor Arnold has told you,” he began—but then there came a soft, hurried knock on the door.

Everyone looked round. Lucy Arnold stood up instinctively. Her face was pale. “Yes?” she said.

The door opened. The porter came in quickly and said, “Professor, there’s some men wanting to see you. I think maybe CCD. I told ’em you was having a meeting in the Humboldt Room, but they’ll be up here soon enough. They en’t got a warrant—said they didn’t need one.”

Malcolm said at once, “Where’s the Humboldt Room?”

“In the other wing,” said Lucy Arnold, almost too quietly to be heard. She was trembling. No one else had moved.

Malcolm said to the porter, “Well done. Now I’d like you to guide everyone here except me, Charles, and the Director out into the garden and away through the side gate before these men realize what’s happened. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Then everyone else please follow. Make as little noise as you can, but go quickly.”

Charles Capes was watching Malcolm. The other four got up and left with the porter. Lucy Arnold, gripping the door frame, watched as they hurried away down the corridor.

“Better come back and sit down,” said Malcolm, who was replacing the chairs to look as if they hadn’t been moved out from the table.

“Nicely done,” said Capes. “Now, what shall we be talking about when they arrive?”

“But who are they?” said the Director, sounding distressed. “
Are
they from the Consistorial Court of Discipline, d’you think? What can they want?”

Malcolm said, “Stay calm. Nothing you’ve done or we’re doing is wrong or illegal or in any way the business of the CCD. We’ll say that I’m here because, having brought the bag to you, I wondered if you’d had any news of Hassall. I didn’t connect him with the body in the river till you told me about it, as you just have done. Charles is here because I’d been going to see him anyway about the Lop Nor region, and I told him about Hassall’s bag, and he mentioned that he knew him, so we decided to come here together.”

“What did you ask me about Lop Nor?” said Capes. He was perfectly calm and composed.

“Oddly enough, I asked about the sort of thing you would have told this meeting if we hadn’t been interrupted. What were you going to say?”

“It was local folklore, really. The shamans know about those roses.”

“Do they? What do they know?”

“They come from—the roses, I mean—from the heart of the desert of Karamakan. So the story goes. They won’t grow anywhere else. If you put a drop of the oil in your eye, you’ll see visions, but you have to be determined, because it stings like hell. So I’m told.”

“You haven’t tried it yourself?”

“Certainly not. The thing about that desert is that you can’t enter it without separating from your dæmon. It’s one of those odd places—there’s another in Siberia, I believe, and I think in the Atlas Mountains as well—where dæmons find it too uncomfortable, or too painful, to go. So the roses come at a considerable cost, you see. A personal cost as well as a financial one.”

“I thought people died if they did that,” said Lucy Arnold.

“Not always, apparently. But it’s horribly painful.”

“Was that what Hassall had been going to investigate?” said Malcolm, who knew full well what the answer would be, but who was interested to see whether she did. Or whether she’d admit it.

But before she could answer, there was a knock on the door. It was much louder than the porter’s, and the door opened before anyone could respond.

“Professor Arnold?”

The speaker was a man in a dark overcoat and a trilby hat. Two other men stood behind him, similarly dressed.

“Yes,” she said. “Who are you, and what do you want?” Her voice was perfectly steady.

“I was told you were in the Humboldt Room.”

“Well, we came here instead. What do you want?”

“We want to ask you a few questions,” he said, stepping further into the room. The other two men followed him.

“Wait a minute,” said Malcolm. “You haven’t answered Professor Arnold’s question. Who are you?”

The man took out a wallet and flipped it open to show a card. It bore the letters
CCD
in bold uppercase, navy blue on ocher.

“My name’s Hartland,” he said. “Captain Hartland.”

“Well, how can I help you?” said Lucy Arnold.

“What are you discussing in here?”

“Folklore,” said Charles Capes.

“Who asked you?” said Hartland.

“I thought you did.”

“I’m asking her.”

“We were discussing folklore,” she said flatly.

“Why?”

“Because we’re scholars. I’m interested in the folklore of plants and flowers, Professor Capes is an expert on folklore, among other things, and Dr. Polstead is a historian with an interest in the same field.”

“What do you know about a man called Roderick Hassall?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, then said, “He was a colleague of mine. And a friend. I had to identify his body this morning.”

“Did you know him?” Hartland asked Capes.

“Yes, I did.”

“You?” to Malcolm.

“No.”

“Why’d you bring his stuff here, then, yesterday?”

“Because I could see that he worked here.”

“Well, why not to the police?”

“Because I didn’t know he was dead. How could I? I thought he’d left it there by mistake, and the simplest thing would be to bring it straight to his place of work.”

“Where are those things now?”

“In London,” Malcolm said.

Lucy Arnold blinked.
Keep still,
Malcolm thought. He saw one of the other two men leaning forward at the far end of the table, his hands on the edge.

“Where in London? Who’s got them?” Hartland said.

“After Professor Arnold had looked at them with me, and I’d heard for the first time that he was missing, we decided that it would be a good idea to ask an expert at the Royal Institute of Ethnology about them. There was a lot of material that had a bearing on folklore, which I know very little about, so I gave it to a friend to take it there yesterday.”

“What’s your friend’s name? Could he confirm this?”

“He could if he was here. But he’s going on to Paris.”

“And this expert at the—what was it?”

“Royal Institute of Ethnology.”

“What’s his name?”

“Richards—Richardson—something like that. I don’t know him personally.”

“You’re being a bit bloody careless with this stuff, aren’t you? Considering there’s a murder involved?”

“As I’ve just pointed out, we didn’t know there was at that stage. Naturally we’d have taken it straight to the police if we had known. But Professor Arnold said the police weren’t interested when she mentioned it to them.”

“Why are
you
interested?” asked Charles Capes.

“It’s my job to be interested in all sorts of things,” said Hartland. “What was Hassall doing in Central Asia?”

“Botanical research,” said Lucy Arnold.

There was a hesitant knock at the door, and the porter looked in. “Sorry, Professor,” he said. “I thought you was in the Humboldt Room. I’ve been looking all over. These gentlemen found you, then.”

“Yes, thank you, John,” she said. “They’ve just finished. Could you show them out?”

With a speculative look at Malcolm, Hartland nodded slowly and turned to go. The other two followed him out, leaving the door open.

Malcolm put his finger to his lips:
Hush.
Then he waited for a count of ten, closed the door, and moved silently to the end of the table, where the man had been leaning. He beckoned the other two to come and look. Crouching down, he looked under the edge and pointed to a dull black object about the size of the top joint of his thumb, which seemed to be stuck to the underside.

Lucy Arnold caught her breath, and again Malcolm put his finger to his lips. He touched the black thing with the point of a pencil, and it scuttled away to the corner by the leg of the table. Malcolm shook his handkerchief open and held it underneath before flicking the creature off with the pencil. He caught it and wrapped up the handkerchief tightly, with the thing buzzing inside it.

“What’s that?” whispered Lucy.

Malcolm held it on the table, eased off his shoe, and hit the creature hard with the heel. “It’s a spy fly,” he said quietly. “They’ve bred them smaller and smaller, with better memories. It would have listened to what we said next, and flown back to them and repeated it exactly.”