8

Little Clarendon Street

‘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 coffee houses, cocktail bars, and coloured 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 colours. 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 scepticism: 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 mountain top, 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 recognised 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 realised 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 favourite 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 labelled 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 …’

There was a catch in her voice and a glitter in her eyes. This was an invasion, after all.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll put the books back and the papers on your desk and I can deal with the furniture in here. You go and put some clothes in a bag. Leave the bed. We’ll tell Bill that the removal men were a couple of opportunistic thieves and he should have had more sense than to let them in.’ He took a cotton shopping bag from the coat hook behind the door. ‘Can I use this for the rucksack stuff?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll go and get some clothes.’

He picked up a book that lay on the floor. ‘Are you reading this?’ he said.

It was Simon Talbot’s The Constant Deceiver.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure about it.’

‘That should please him.’

He put the three folders, the two books, and the handful of small bottles and boxes in the bag. Later that night they’d be in Hannah’s safe. He’d have to contact Oakley Street, the obscure division of the secret service to which he and Hannah both belonged, and then go to the Botanic Garden, where they must have been expecting the unfortunate Dr Hassall to have returned by now, with these specimens, whatever they were.

He stood up and began putting the books on the shelves, and presently Lyra came through.

‘Ready?’ he said. ‘I’ve just put the books anywhere. You’ll have to sort them out later, I’m afraid.’

‘Thanks. I’m glad you were with me when we came back. Fooling them with the rucksack trick is all very well, but I hadn’t understood how disgusting it would feel to— I don’t know. Their hands all over my clothes …’

Pan had been talking quietly with Asta. No doubt she could tell him all about their conversation later, and no doubt Pan realised it; and no doubt Lyra did too.

‘Actually,’ Malcolm said, ‘we won’t say a word to Bill. He’d want to call the police and we’d have to explain why he mustn’t. So he’d remember it and wonder about it. Much better to say nothing. If he asks, they were removal men, but they had the wrong date.’

‘And if the police did get involved with this, they’d put two and two together. They’d know I know about the murder … But how did they trace the rucksack anyway? Nobody was following us.’

‘The other side’s got an alethiometer.’

‘They must have a good reader then. This is a very specific address. It’s hard to get that sort of detail. I’ll have to assume I’m being watched all the time. How loathsome.’

‘Yes. It is. But now let’s get you up to Godstow.’

She picked up The Constant Deceiver, made sure her bookmark was still in place, and put it in the rucksack to take with her.

Mr and Mrs Polstead were not in the least put out when their son appeared with Lyra. They agreed at once to let her stay at the Trout, gave her a comfortable room, agreed that she could work in the bar or the kitchen, wherever she would be most useful, and altogether seemed the most agreeable parents in the world.

‘After all, he took you away,’ said Mrs Polstead, putting a dish of beef casserole in front of Lyra at the kitchen table. ‘Only right he should bring you back. Nearly twenty years!’

She was a large woman with something of Malcolm’s warm colouring and eyes that were bright blue.

‘And I’ve only just heard about it,’ said Lyra. ‘Being taken away, I mean. I was too young to remember anything. Where is the priory? Is it very close?’

‘Just across the river, but it’s a ruin now. The flood destroyed so much, and it was simply too expensive to repair. Besides, a number of the sisters died that night; there wouldn’t have been enough of them left to get it going again. You won’t remember Sister Fenella, or Sister Benedicta? No, you were far too young.’

Lyra, mouth full, shook her head.

‘Sister Benedicta was in charge,’ Mrs Polstead went on. ‘Sister Fenella looked after you most of the time. She was the sweetest old lady you could ever meet. Malcolm loved her dearly – he was devastated when he came back and found she was gone. Oh, I thought I’d never forgive him for making me worry so much. Just vanishing like that … Of course we thought he must be drowned, you too, and Alice. The one good thing was that his canoe was gone. He might have had time to get in that, we thought, and we clung to that hope till he came back, all knocked about and shot and bruised and exhausted …’

‘Shot?’ said Lyra. The casserole was very good, and she was hungry, but she was even hungrier to hear everything Malcolm’s mother could tell her.

‘Shot in the arm. He’s still got the scar. And so worn out – completely drained. He slept for, ooh, three days. He was ill for a while, actually. All that filthy floodwater, I suppose. How’s that casserole? Like another potato?’

‘Thank you. It’s delicious. What I don’t understand is why I never knew about this. I mean, I wouldn’t remember anyway, but why didn’t anyone tell me?’

‘Good question. I suppose at first the problem was just looking after you – problem for the college, I mean. Mouldy old place full of scholars, never had a child running around, and none of them knew what had happened, and Alice wasn’t going to tell them. What did Mal tell you about when they took you to Jordan with Lord Asriel?’

‘I’ve only just heard for the first time this afternoon. And I’m trying to adjust … You see, I only ever knew Alice as Mrs Lonsdale. She was always there when I was little, always keeping me clean and tidy and teaching me manners. I thought … Well, I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I thought she’d always been there.’

‘Lord, no. I’ll tell you how I know about it – the old Master of Jordan, old Dr Carne – asked me and Reg to come in and see him: that would have been maybe six months after the flood. We didn’t know what it could be about, but we put on our best clothes and went there one afternoon. It was in the summer. He gave us tea in the garden and explained all about it. It seems that Mal and Alice had done what they set out to do, and taken you to Lord Asriel, where they thought you’d be safe. I never heard of anything so blooming reckless in all my life, and I let Mal know how senseless I thought he’d been, but I was proud of him really, and I still am. Don’t you dare tell him, mind.

‘Anyway, it seems that Lord Asriel claimed that protection thing – sanctuary—’

‘Scholastic sanctuary.’

‘That’s it – on your behalf. And he told the Master he’d have to make you into a scholar so you’d be properly entitled to it. Then Dr Carne looked at Mal and Alice, half drowned, worn out, filthy dirty, bleeding, and said, “What about these two?” And Lord Asriel said, “Treasure them.” And then he left.

‘So then Dr Carne set about doing that. He arranged for Mal to go to Radcliffe School, and paid for it, and then later on admitted him to Jordan as an undergraduate. Alice wasn’t a great one for education, but sharp as a tack, very bright, very quick. The Master offered her a place among the staff, and she soon took over looking after you. She married young – Roger Lonsdale – carpenter – lovely boy, decent, steady. He died in a building accident. She was widowed before she was twenty. I don’t know all that happened on that ruddy voyage to London in Malcolm’s old canoe, he’s never told me half of it – says I’d be too frightened – but one thing was, him and Alice came back fast friends. Inseparable, they were, as far as it could happen, him being at school and all.’

‘Weren’t they before?’

‘Deadly enemies. She sneered at him and he ignored her. Hated each other. She could be a bully – she’s four years older, remember, and that’s a lot at that age. She used to tease him, pick on him – I had to tell her off once, but he never complained, though he used to set his lips – like this – when he took the dirty dishes in to her to be washed. Then that winter they gave her a bit of work at the priory, helping out with you, letting poor old Sister Fenella take it a little bit easier. Well, you made short work of that casserole. Like some more?’

‘No, thanks. It was just what I wanted.’

‘Baked plums? I put a bit of liqueur in with them.’

‘Sounds lovely. Yes please.’

Mrs Polstead dished them up, and poured double cream over them. Lyra looked to see if Pan had seen that – before their coldness, he used to tease her about her appetite – but he was sitting on the floor talking to Mrs Polstead’s dæmon, a grizzled old badger.

Mrs Polstead sat down again. ‘Malcolm’s told me a bit about this new Master of Jordan,’ she said. ‘He’s treated you badly.’

‘Well, you see, I really can’t tell if he has or not. I’m so confused. Things have been happening so quickly … I mean, if the money I was living on has run out, as he said, I can’t challenge that, because I don’t know anything apart from what he told me. Did, um, Malcolm tell you about the Master making me leave my rooms?’

It was the first time she’d referred to him as Malcolm, and it felt awkward for a moment.

‘Yes. That was a wretched shabby thing to do. That college is as rich as Ali Baba. They didn’t need your rooms for a ruddy student. Throwing you out of a place you’d lived in all your life!’

‘All the same, he is in charge, and I … I don’t know. There are so many complications. I’m sort of losing my grip. I thought I was more sure of things …’

‘You stay here as long as you like, Lyra. There’s plenty of room, and it’ll be useful to have an extra pair of hands. The girl I was expecting to work over Christmas has decided to work in Boswell’s instead, and good luck to her.’

‘I worked there two winters ago. It was non-stop.’

‘They think it’s glamorous at first, perfumes and lotions and whatnot, but it’s sheer hard work.’

Lyra realised that she must have sold some of Miriam’s father’s products during her time at Boswell’s, but since she didn’t know Miriam then, she wouldn’t have noticed. Suddenly the world of undergraduate friendships, the calm and frugal life of St Sophia’s, seemed a long way away.

‘Now let me help you with these dishes,’ she said, and soon she was up to her elbows in soapy water, and feeling very much at home.

That night Lyra had a dream about a cat on a moonlit lawn. At first it didn’t interest her, but then with a start that nearly woke her up (and certainly woke Pantalaimon) she recognised Will’s dæmon Kirjava, who came directly across the grass and rubbed her head on the hand Lyra held out. Will had never known he had a dæmon until she was torn away from his heart on the shores of the world of the dead, just as Pan was torn away from Lyra. And now Lyra seemed to her dreaming self to be recalling things she knew from another time, or perhaps from the future, whose significance was as overpowering as the joy she and Will had felt together. The red building in the journal came into it too: she knew what it contained! She saw why she had to go there! That knowledge was part of everything she knew, immovably. It seemed in her dream-memory only yesterday when all four of them had wandered together in the world of the mulefa, and that time was surrounded, suffused, with such love that she found herself weeping in her dream, and woke with her pillow soaked with tears.

Pan watched from close by, and didn’t say a word.

Lyra tried to recall every image from the dream, but it was vanishing by the second. All that was left was that intense, intoxicating, saturating love.

Malcolm rang Hannah’s doorbell. Two minutes later they were sitting by her fireside, and he was telling her about the murder, the wallet, the rucksack, and Lyra at the Trout. She listened without interrupting: he was good at recounting events, giving each its due weight, putting them in the most effective order.

‘And what’s in the bag?’ she said.

‘Aha,’ he said, and set it between his feet. ‘These papers, to begin with. I haven’t had time to look, but I’ll photogram them tonight. These two books – an Anatolian book on botany, and this.’

She took the other book. It was poorly bound and clumsily repaired, and the paper was coarse and fragile, and the typesetting amateurish. It bore the signs of much reading: the boards that covered it were greasy with handling, several pages were dog-eared, and many bore pencilled annotations in the same language as the text.

‘It looks like poetry,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know the language.’

‘It’s Tajik,’ he told her, ‘and it’s an epic poem called Jahan and Rukhsana. I can’t read all of it, but I recognise that much.’

‘And what’s that other group of papers?’

It was Dr Strauss’s diary, the account of his journey into the desert of Karamakan.

‘I think this is the key to the whole thing,’ said Malcolm. ‘I stopped at the Lamb and Flag on the way here and read this, and you should read it too. It won’t take long.’

She took the bundle of paper, intensely curious. ‘And the poor man was a botanist, you say?’

‘I’ll go to the Botanic Garden tomorrow and see what they can tell me. There were some little bottles in the rucksack – here they are – and some boxes of what look like seeds too.’

She took one of the bottles, held it up to the light, sniffed it, and read the label. ‘Ol. R. tajikiae … Ol. R. chashmiae … Not easy to read. Ol. could be oil, I suppose – oleum … R. is Rosa.’

‘That’s my guess too.’

‘And these are seeds, you think?’ She rattled one of the little specimen boxes.

‘I imagine so. I haven’t had time to open them.’

‘Let’s have a look …’

The lid of the box was tight, and took a lot of persuading to open. Hannah tipped the contents carefully into her hand: a few dozen small seeds, irregular in shape and greyish-brown in colour.

Malcolm read the label on the lid: ‘R. lopnoriae … That’s interesting. Do you recognise them?’

‘They look like rose seeds, but I might be thinking that because of the other things. They do look like rose seeds, though. What’s interesting?’

‘The name of the variety. I suppose it’s not surprising to find a botanist carrying seeds. But something’s been nagging at my memory. I really think this is Oakley Street business.’

‘So do I. I’ll see Glenys on Saturday – Tom Nugent’s memorial service. I’ll speak to her then.’

‘Good,’ said Malcolm. ‘It’s important enough to lie behind murder and theft, anyway. Hannah, what do you know about Lop Nor?’

‘A lake, is it? Or is it a desert? Somewhere in China, anyway. Well, I’ve never been there. But I heard it mentioned a few months ago in connection with … What was it?’

‘There’s a scientific research station near there. Meteorology, mainly, but they cover a number of other disciplines as well. Anyway, they’ve lost a number of scientists, inexplicably. They just vanished. I did hear rumours about Dust,’ Malcolm said.

‘I remember now. Charlie Capes told me about it.’

Charles Capes was a priest in the hierarchy of the English church, and secretly a friend of Oakley Street. His position was a risky one; there were severe penalties for apostasy, and there was no appeal from the verdicts of the ecclesiastical courts, which allowed only one defence: overpowering diabolical temptation. In passing information on to Oakley Street, Capes was risking his career, his freedom, and possibly his life.

‘So the Magisterium is interested in Lop Nor,’ said Malcolm. ‘And possibly roses too.’

‘You’re going to take this material to the Botanic Garden?’

‘Yes, but I’ll photo all the papers first. And Hannah …’

‘What?’

‘We’re going to have to tell Lyra all about Oakley Street. She’s too vulnerable. It’s time she knew where to find help and protection. Oakley Street could give her that.’

‘I nearly told her this afternoon,’ she said. ‘But of course I didn’t. I think you’re right, though, and we must. You know, this reminds me of that other rucksack all that time ago, the one you brought me from Gerard Bonneville. So much material! I’d never seen such a treasure trove. And her alethiometer.’

‘Thinking about alethiometers,’ he said, ‘I’m concerned that the other side managed to pinpoint Lyra and the rucksack so quickly. That’s not usual, is it?’

She looked troubled. ‘It sort of confirms what we’d guessed,’ she said. ‘People have been talking for months now about a new way of reading the alethiometer. Very unorthodox. Experimental, partly. The new way depends on abandoning the sort of single-viewpoint perspective you have with the classical method. I can’t explain exactly how it works, because the only time I tried it I was violently sick. But apparently if you can do it, the answers come much more quickly, and you hardly need the books at all.’

‘Are there many people using this new method?’

‘None in Oxford, to my knowledge. The general feeling is against it. It’s Geneva where most of the discoveries have been made. They’ve got a young man there who’s brilliantly gifted. And you’ll never g—’

‘Lyra? Does she use the new method?’

‘I think she’s tried once or twice, but without much success.’

‘And sorry. I interrupted you. What was it that I’d never guess?’

‘The name of the young man in Geneva. It’s Olivier Bonneville.’