29

News from Tashbulak

The message brought to Glenys Godwin by the Cabinet Office messenger was brief and to the point:

The Chancellor of the Private Purse would be obliged if Mrs Godwin would attend on him this morning at 10.20.

It was signed with what looked like a contemptuous and indecipherable scribble, in which Godwin recognised the signature of the Chancellor, Eliot Newman. It arrived at her Oakley Street office at 9.30, giving her enough time to cross London to the Chancellor’s office in White Hall, but not enough to consult her colleagues or do very much more than to say to her secretary, ‘Jill, the time’s come. They’re going to close us down. Tell all the Heads of Section that Christabel is now in operation.’

‘Christabel’ was the name for a long-standing plan to withdraw and conceal the most important of all the active papers. Christabel status was constantly reviewed, and only the Section Heads were aware of it. If the word got around as quickly as it could, the papers concerning the bulk of Oakley Street’s current projects would be on their way to various locations – these to a locked room behind a laundry in Pimlico, those to the safe of a diamond merchant in Hatton Garden, others to a cupboard in the vestry of a church in Hemel Hempstead – by the time Godwin entered the office in White Hall to which she’d been summoned.

The assistant private secretary who met her at the door was so young he could hardly have been shaving for more than a year, she thought, and he regarded her with exquisitely polite condescension; but she treated this junior functionary like a favourite nephew, and even managed to extract a little information from him about what she could expect.

‘Frankly, Mrs Godwin, it’s all arisen from the forthcoming visit of the new President of the High Council of the Magisterium – but of course I didn’t tell you that,’ the young man said.

‘A wise person knows when to keep things dark. An even wiser person knows when to let the light in,’ Glenys Godwin said gravely as they climbed the stairs. It was the first she’d heard about Delamare visiting London.

The assistant private secretary was duly impressed by his own wisdom, and showed her into the outer office before softly knocking at the inner door and announcing the visitor in deferential tones.

Eliot Newman, the Chancellor of the Private Purse, was a large man with slick black hair and heavy black-rimmed spectacles, whose dæmon was a black rabbit. He had been in office less than a year; Glenys Godwin had met him only once, and had had to listen to a lengthy and ignorant explanation of why Oakley Street was useless, expensive, and counter-modern – that being the latest way of describing anything His Majesty’s Government did not like. Newman didn’t stand up to greet his visitor, and didn’t offer to shake her hand. It was precisely as she had expected.

‘This little department of yours, what d’ye call it, the …’ The Chancellor knew perfectly well, but he picked up a paper and peered down at it as if to remind himself of the name. ‘The Intelligence Division of the Office of the Private Purse,’ he read fastidiously.

He sat back as if he’d finished a sentence. Since he hadn’t, Godwin said nothing and continued to look at him mildly.

‘Well?’ said Newman. Every tone of his voice was designed to express barely controlled impatience.

‘Yes, that’s the full name of the department.’

‘We’re closing it down. It’s disrecognised. It’s an anomaly. Counter-modern. A useless money-pit. Besides which, the political tendency is iniquitous.’

‘You’ll have to explain what you mean by that, Chancellor.’

‘It expresses a hostility to the new world we’re in. There are new ways of doing things, new ideas, new men in charge.’

‘You mean the new High Council in Geneva, I take it.’

‘Yes, I do, of course I do. Forward-looking. Not bound by convention and propriety. HMG is of the opinion that that’s where the future lies. It’s the correct way to go. We must reach out the hand of friendship to the future, Mrs Godwin. All the old ways, the suspicions, the plotting, the spying, the gathering of endless pages of useless and irrelevant so-called information, must come to an end. And that very much includes the ramshackle outfit you’ve been battening on to for years past. Now we’re not going to treat you badly. Staff will all be reassigned positions in the domestic civil service. You’ll have a decent pension and some sort of bauble if that’s what you fancy. Accept with good grace and no one’ll be any the worse. In a year or two Oakley Street – yes, I know what you call yourselves – Oakley Street will have vanished for ever. Not a trace left.’

‘I see.’

‘A team from the Cabinet Office will come over this afternoon to begin the transition. You’ll be dealing with Robin Prescott. First-class man. You’ll hand over everything to him and be out of your office and home pruning the roses by the weekend. Prescott will deal with all the details.’

Godwin said, ‘Very well, Chancellor. The authority for this comes entirely from this office, I take it?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘You represented it as a move towards modernity and away from the habits of the past.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And that turn towards streamlined efficiency is strongly identified with you in the public mind.’

‘I’m pleased to say it is,’ said the Chancellor, a little suspicion creeping into his manner. ‘Why?’

‘Because unless you manage the announcement with some caution, it will look like appeasement.’

‘Appeasing who, for God’s sake?’

‘Appeasing the High Council. I gather the new President is visiting soon. To do away with the very body that’s done more than any other branch of government to curb Geneva’s influence on our affairs would look to those who know about these things like an act of extraordinary generosity, if not actually abject self-damage.’

Newman’s face had darkened to a dull crimson. ‘Get out and put your affairs in order,’ he said.

Godwin nodded and turned to go. The assistant private secretary opened the door for her and accompanied her down the marble stairs to the entrance, seeming all the way to be on the point of saying something, and not to be able to find the words.

As they reached the great mahogany doors that opened on to White Hall, the young man finally found something to say. ‘Can I – er – could I perhaps call a taxi for you, Mrs Godwin?’

‘Kind of you, but I think I’ll walk part of the way,’ she said, and shook the young man’s hand. ‘I wouldn’t tie yourself too closely to the Office of the Private Purse if I were you,’ she added.

‘Really?’

‘Your chief is cutting off the branch he’s sitting on, and he’ll take the whole office down with him. That’s an educated guess. Cultivate some alternative sources of power. Always a wise precaution. Good day.’

She left and walked up White Hall a little way before turning into the War Office and asking a porter to take a message to Mr Carberry. She wrote a few lines on one of her cards and handed it to the man before leaving and making her way down to the gardens on the Embankment that faced the river. It was a clear bright day, with big dazzling clouds moving busily across the sky, and the air felt almost sparkling. Glenys found a bench near the statue of some long-dead statesman and sat down to enjoy the river. The tide was high; a string of barges pulled by a sturdy little tug was moving upstream, carrying a cargo of coal.

‘What will we do?’ said her dæmon.

‘Oh, we’ll flourish. It’ll be like the old days.’

‘When we were young and full of energy.’

‘We’re wilier now.’

‘Slower.’

‘Cleverer.’

‘More easily damaged.’

‘We’ll have to put up with that. Here’s Martin.’

Martin Carberry was a Permanent Secretary at the War Office and an old friend of Oakley Street. Glenys stood up to greet him, and by unspoken agreement and long habit they began to stroll along together to talk.

‘Can’t stay long,’ Carberry said. ‘Meeting with the Muscovite Naval Attaché at twelve. What’s up?’

‘They’re closing us down. I’ve just been with Newman. Apparently we’re counter-modern. Of course we’ll survive, but we’ll have to go a little undergroundish. What I want to know now, quite urgently, is what the new High Council in Geneva is up to. I gather the chief man’s coming here in a couple of days.’

‘Apparently so. There’s talk of a memorandum of understanding, which will change the way we work with them. What they’re up to – well, they’re assembling a large strike force in eastern Europe. That’s what the Muscovite chap’s coming here to talk about, not surprisingly. There’s been a lot of diplomatic activity in the Levant – Persia too – and further east.’

‘We’ve been aware of that, but our own resources are stretched, as you can imagine. If you had to put a fiver on it, what would you say this strike force was being set up to do?’

‘To invade Central Asia. There’s talk of a source of valuable chemicals or minerals or something in a desert in the middle of some howling wilderness, and it’s a matter of strategic importance for the Magisterium not to let anyone else get at it before they do. There’s a very strong commercial interest as well. Pharmaceuticals, mainly. It’s all a bit blurred, to tell you the truth. Reports rely too much on rumour, or gossip, or old wives’ tales. Our interest at the moment lies in keeping the peace with Geneva. We haven’t yet been asked to contribute the Brigade of Guards, or even some second-hand water cannons, but no doubt we’d regard it favourably if we were.’

‘They can’t invade anywhere without an excuse. What’ll it be, d’you think?’

‘That’s what all the diplomacy’s about. I heard that there is or was some sort of science place – a research institute or something – at the edge of the desert concerned. There were scientists from various countries working there, including ours, and they’ve been under pressure from local fanatics, of whom there are not a few, and the casus belli will probably be a confected sense of outrage that innocent scholars have been brutally treated by bandits or terrorists, and the Magisterium’s natural desire to rescue them.’

‘What are the local politics?’

‘Confused. The desert and the moving lake—’

‘A moving lake?’

‘It’s called Lop Nor. Really an immense area of salt marshes and shallow lakes where earth movements and changes in the climate play old Harry with the geography. Anyway, national borders are flexible, or changeable, or negotiable. There is a king who claims to rule there, but he’s really a vassal of the empire of Cathay, which is as much as to say that it depends on the current state of the emperor’s health whether Peking feels like exercising power or not. What’s Oakley Street’s interest in this?’

‘There’s something going on there, and we need to know about it. Now that we’ve been officially disrecognised—’

‘Lovely word.’

‘A coinage of Newman’s, I think. Anyway, now we’ve ceased to exist, I want to cover as many angles as I can reach while I still can.’

‘Of course. But you’ve got a contingency plan? You must have seen this coming?’

‘Oh yes. This just adds another layer of difficulty. But this government will fall in the end.’

‘Very sanguine. Glenys, if I need to contact you at any point—’

‘A note chez Isabelle will always find me.’

‘Right. Well, good luck.’

They shook hands and parted. Isabelle was an elderly woman who had been an agent herself until arthritis had forced her to retire. She now ran a restaurant in Soho often used as an informal post office by people in the trade of intelligence.

Glenys walked on along the Embankment. There was a tourist boat moving slowly past, with a loudspeakered voice pointing out the sights. The sun shone on the river, on the arches of Waterloo Bridge, on the distant dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Carberry had confirmed much of what she’d already suspected. The Magisterium under its new President was intent on capturing and possessing the source of this rose oil, and was willing to muster an army and take it several thousand miles to do so. Anyone who was in the way could expect to be crushed without mercy.

‘Pharmaceuticals,’ said Godwin.

‘Thuringia Potash,’ said her dæmon.

‘Must be.’

‘They’re enormous.’

‘Well, Polstead will know what to do,’ said Godwin, and anyone who didn’t know her would have heard nothing in her voice but boundless confidence and certainty.

The doorman at the New Danish consulate in Smyrna said, ‘Mr Schlesinger is busy. He cannot see you now.’

Malcolm knew the procedure. He took a small-denomination banknote from his pocket, and picked up a paperclip from the desk.

‘And this is my card,’ he said.

He clipped the card to the banknote, which vanished at once into the doorman’s pocket.

‘Two minutes, sir,’ the man said, and set off up the stairs.

It was a tall building on a narrow street near the ancient bazaar. Malcolm had been here twice before, but this was a new doorman, and something about the district had changed. People were watchful now; an air of casual well-being had vanished. The cafés were largely empty.

He heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to greet the consul, but Bud shook his head, set his finger to his lips, and came down to meet him.

A warm handshake, and Schlesinger nodded towards the door.

‘Not safe?’ said Malcolm quietly as they walked along the street.

‘Listening wires everywhere. How are you, Mal?’

‘Fine. But you look a wreck. What’s been happening?’

‘The apartment was fire-bombed.’

‘No! Is Anita all right?’

‘Got out just in time. But she lost a lot of work, and – well, there’s not much left. You found Lyra yet?’

‘Have you seen her?’

Schlesinger told him how he’d first seen Lyra in the café, and recognised her from the photogram.

‘Anita helped her change her appearance a little. But … she went out before the place was bombed, and we never saw her again. I say we never did, but I’ve asked around, and it seems she went to a nearby café and read a letter, which would have been the one from you that I passed on, and then went to the railroad station and caught a train towards the east, but not the fast Aleppo train. One that stops everywhere and crawls to … I think Seleukeia is the final stop, near the border. That’s the last I’ve managed to find out.’

‘And she still hadn’t found her dæmon?’

‘No. She had this idea he was in one of the dead towns outside Aleppo. But listen, Malcolm, something else has just come up. This is urgent. I’m going to take you to see a man called Ted Cartwright. Just up here.’ Malcolm was aware that Bud was checking in all directions, and he did the same, seeing no one. Schlesinger turned into an alley and unlocked a shabby green door. When they were inside he locked it again, and said, ‘He’s in poor shape, and I don’t think he’s got long. Up the stairs.’

As Malcolm followed he tried to place the name Ted Cartwright. He knew he’d heard it before: someone had spoken it, in a Swedish accent, and there’d been a pencilled scrawl on tattered paper … Then he had it.

‘Tashbulak?’ he said. ‘The director of the research station?’

‘Yup. He arrived yesterday, after God knows what sort of journey. This is a safe house, and we’ve arranged a nurse and a stenographer … But you need to hear it from his own lips. Here we are.’

Another door, another lock, and they were inside a small neat studio flat. A young woman in a dark blue uniform was taking the temperature of a man lying on the single bed. He was covered in nothing but a sheet. His eyes were closed, and he was sweating, and emaciated, and his face was blistered with sunburn. His thrush-dæmon clung to the padded headboard, dusty and weary. Asta jumped up beside her and they whispered together.

‘Is he any better?’ asked Bud quietly.

The nurse shook her head.

‘Dr Cartwright?’ said Malcolm.

The man opened his eyes, which were red-rimmed and bloodshot. They flickered constantly without focusing on anything, and Malcolm wasn’t sure if Cartwright could see him at all.

The nurse put her thermometer away, made a note on a chart, and stood up to let Malcolm have her chair. She went across to a table where boxes of pills and other medical supplies were neatly stacked. Malcolm sat down and said, ‘Dr Cartwright, I’m a friend of your colleague Lucy Arnold, in Oxford. My name is Malcolm Polstead. Can you hear me clearly?’

‘Yes,’ came in a hoarse whisper. ‘Can’t see much though.’

‘You’re the director of the research station at Tashbulak?’

‘Was. Destroyed now. Had to escape.’

‘Can you tell me about your colleagues Dr Strauss and Roderick Hassall?’

A deep sigh, ending in a shuddering moan. Then Cartwright took another breath and said, ‘Did he get back? Hassall?’

‘Yes. With his notes. They were immensely helpful. What was this place they were investigating? The red building?’

‘No idea. It was where the roses came from. They insisted on going into the desert. I shouldn’t have let them. But they were desperate, we were all desperate. The men from the mountains … Shortly after I sent Hassall home … Simurgh …’

His voice faded. From behind him Schlesinger whispered to Malcolm, ‘What was that last word?’

‘Tell you in a minute – Dr Cartwright? Are you still awake?’

‘The men from the mountains … they had modern arms.’

‘What sort of arms?’

‘Up-to-date machine guns, pick-up trucks, all new and plentiful.’

‘Who was funding them? Do you know?’

Cartwright tried to cough, but couldn’t summon the strength to clear his throat fully. Malcolm could see how it hurt him, and said, ‘Take your time.’

He was aware that Bud behind him had turned to talk to the nurse, but his attention was focused on Cartwright, who was gesturing, asking for help to sit up. Malcolm put his arm round the man’s back to lift him up, feeling how hot he was, and how light, and again Cartwright tried to cough, racked with wheezing, hacking efforts that seemed to strain his very skeleton.

Malcolm half turned round to ask Bud or the nurse to bring another pillow or a cushion.

There was no one there.

‘Bud?’ he said.

Then he realised that Bud was there, on the floor, unconscious, his owl-dæmon lying on his chest. The nurse had vanished.

He let Cartwright down gently and darted to Bud, and saw a syringe next to him on the carpet. An empty vial lay on the table.

Malcolm flung open the door and ran to the stairs. The nurse was already at the bottom, and she turned to look up at him, and there was a pistol in her hand. He hadn’t noticed how young she was.

‘Mal—’ began Asta, but she fired.

Malcolm felt a crippling blow, but couldn’t tell where he’d been hit, and he fell at once and slid tumbling down the stairs to lie half stunned at the foot, where the nurse had been standing a moment before. He pushed himself up and then saw what she was doing.

‘No! Don’t do it!’ he cried, and tried to scramble over to her.

She was standing inside the front door, holding the pistol under her chin. Her nightingale-dæmon was shrieking with fear and fluttering at her face, but her eyes were clear and wide and blazing with righteousness. Then she pulled the trigger. Blood, bone, and brain exploded against the door, the wall, the ceiling.

Malcolm sank to the floor. A crowd of sensations was gathering around him, among which he could smell yesterday’s cooking, and see sunlight glowing on the blood against the faded green paint of the door, and hear a ringing in his ears from the gunshot and the distant howling of wild dogs and a liquid trickle from the nurse’s blood as the last pulsing of her heart forced it out of her shattered head, and the soft voice of his dæmon whispering next to him.

And pain. There it was. A throb of it, then another and another, and then one long, deep, focused and brutal assault on his right hip.

He felt it, and found his hand wet with blood. It was soon going to hurt a lot more, but there was Bud to see to. Could he get back up the stairs?

He didn’t try to stand, but hauled himself across the wooden floor and then up, step by step, with his arms and his left leg.

‘Mal, don’t force it,’ said Asta faintly. ‘You’re bleeding a lot.’

‘See if Bud’s all right. That’s all.’

He managed to stand up on the landing and made it into the sick room. Bud was still lying unconscious, but he was breathing clearly. Malcolm turned to Cartwright, and had to sit down on the edge of the bed. His leg was rapidly stiffening.

‘Help me up,’ Cartwright whispered, and Malcolm tried to pull him upright, with some difficulty, and leaned him against the headboard. His dæmon fell clumsily on to his shoulder.

‘The nurse—’ Malcolm began, but Cartwright shook his head, which set off another bout of coughing.

‘Too late,’ he managed to say. ‘She’s paid by them too. She’s been giving me drugs. Making me talk. And just now, poison …’

‘Being paid – you mean by the men from the mountains?’ Malcolm was baffled.

‘No, no. No. Them too. All part of the big medical—’ More coughing, and retching too. A dribble of bile left his lips and fell from his chin.

Malcolm mopped it with the sheet and said quietly, urgently, ‘The big medical …?’

‘TP.’

It meant nothing to Malcolm. ‘TP?’ he repeated.

‘Pharmaceut … funding. TP. Company lettering on their trucks …’

Cartwright’s eyes closed. His chest heaved, the breath rattling in his throat. Then his entire body clenched and relaxed, and he was dead. His dæmon drifted into invisible particles and melted into the air.

Malcolm felt the strength drain out of his body as the pain in his hip grew more insistent. He should look at the wound; he should attend to Schlesinger; he should report to Oakley Street. He had never felt the desire to go to sleep so powerful and urgent.

‘Asta, keep me awake,’ he said.

‘Malcolm? Is that you?’ came in a blurred voice from the floor.

‘Bud! You OK?’

‘What happened?’

Schlesinger’s dæmon was standing groggily and stretching her wings as Bud struggled to sit up.

‘The nurse drugged you. Cartwright’s dead. She was drugging him.’

‘What the hell … Malcolm, you’re bleeding. Stay there, don’t move.’

‘She injected you with something while I had my back turned. Then she ran downstairs and I ran after her, like a fool, and she shot me before killing herself.’

Bud was holding on to the end of the bed. Whatever drug the nurse had injected into him was short-acting, because Malcolm could see the clarity returning to his friend’s face second by second. He was looking at Malcolm’s blood-soaked trouser leg.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘First thing we do is get you out of here and call a doctor. We’ll go out the back way through the bazaar. Can you walk at all?’

‘Stiffly and slowly. You’ll have to help me.’

Bud stood up and shook his head to clear it. ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Oh, here: put this on. It’ll hide the blood.’

He opened a wardrobe and took out a long raincoat, and helped Malcolm put it on.

‘Ready when you are,’ Malcolm said.

A couple of hours later, after a doctor Bud trusted had examined and dressed Malcolm’s wound, they sat with Anita drinking tea in the consulate, where they were staying while their apartment was being rebuilt.

‘What did the doctor say?’ said Anita.

‘The bullet clipped the hip bone but didn’t break it. Could have been much worse.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes, a lot. But he gave me some painkillers. Now tell me about Lyra.’

‘I’m not sure you’d recognise her now. She’s got short dark hair and glasses.’

Malcolm tried to imagine this dark-haired girl wearing glasses, without success. ‘Could anyone have followed her to your apartment?’ he said.

‘You mean, was that why they bombed it?’ said Bud. ‘Because they thought she was there? I doubt it. In the first place, we weren’t followed when we left the café. In the second place they know where I live anyway: there’s no secret about that. For the most part the agencies leave each other alone, apart from the usual secret service attentions. Bombing, arson, they’re not the local style. I’m worried about what happened to her after she took the train to Seleukeia.’

‘What was she going to do there? Did she tell you?’

‘Well, she had a strange idea … It’s the kind of thing anyone might think was crazy, but somehow as she spoke about it … In the desert between Aleppo and Seleukeia there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of empty towns and villages. Dead towns, that’s what they call them. Nothing there but stones and lizards and snakes.

‘And in one of those dead cities, well: this is what they say. Dæmons live there. Just dæmons. Lyra heard a story about it, oh, way back, in England, from some old guy on a boat. And she met an old woman here in Smyrna called Princess Cantacuzino, who told her about it as well. And Lyra was going to go there and look for her dæmon.’

‘You don’t sound as if you believe it.’

Schlesinger drank some of his tea and then said, ‘Well, I had no idea. But the princess is an interesting woman; there was a huge scandal about her years ago. If she ever writes her memoirs, there’s a bestseller in it. Anyway, her dæmon had left her, like Lyra’s had. If Lyra gets as far as Seleukeia—’

‘What do you mean, if she gets that far?’

‘I mean these are bad times, Mal. You’ve seen the numbers of people fleeing from the trouble further east? The Turks have been mobilising their army in response. They expect trouble, and so do I. That young woman’s moving right into the thick of it. And as I say, if she makes it to Seleukeia she’ll still have to travel on somehow to this Blue Hotel. What’ll you do when you find her?’

‘Travel together. We’re going further east, to where the roses come from.’

‘On behalf of Oakley Street?’

‘Well, yes. Of course.’

‘Don’t try and tell us that’s all it is,’ said Anita. ‘You’re in love with her.’

Malcolm felt a great weariness oppress his heart. It must have shown in his expression, because she went on, ‘Sorry. Ignore that. None of my business.’

‘One day I’ll write my memoirs. But listen: before he died, Cartwright said something about the men from the mountains who attacked the research station. He said they were funded by something called TP. Ever heard of that?’

Bud blew out his cheeks. ‘Thuringia Petroleum,’ he said. ‘Bad guys.’

‘Potash,’ said Anita. ‘Not Petroleum.’

‘Damn, that’s right: Potash. Anita wrote a piece about them.’

‘It wasn’t published,’ Anita continued. ‘The editor was nervous about it. It’s a very old company. They’ve been digging up potash in Thuringia for centuries. They used to supply companies that made fertiliser, explosives, chemical stuff generally. But about twenty years ago TP began to diversify into manufacturing as well, because that’s where the profit was. Arms and pharmaceuticals, mainly. They’re enormous, Malcolm, and they used to loathe publicity, but markets don’t work like that, and they’re having to adapt to new ways of doing things. They had a big success with a painkiller called Treptizam, made a lot of money, and put it all into research. They’re privately owned: no shareholders demanding dividends. And they’ve got good scientists. What are you looking at?’

Malcolm had reached uncomfortably into his pocket to take out a little bottle of pills. ‘Treptizam,’ he read.

‘There you are,’ said Bud. ‘The name of every product they make contains the letters T and P. And Cartwright thought they were funding the terrorists? The men from the mountains?’

‘He saw the initials on the trucks they came in.’

‘They’re after the roses.’

‘Of course they are. That explains a lot. Anita, could I see that story of yours? I’d like to read about the background.’

She shook her head. ‘Most of my files went up with the apartment,’ she said. ‘All that work.’

‘Could that have been the reason for bombing the place?’

She looked at Bud. He nodded reluctantly. ‘One of them,’ he said.

‘I’m so sorry. But for now I’d better follow Lyra’s trail.’

‘I told Lyra to seek out a guy in Aleppo called Mustafa Bey. He’s a merchant. He knows everyone and everything. It’s likely that she’ll go to him first if she gets there. I would. Anyway, you’ll find him at Marletto’s Café.’

Bud bought Malcolm some clothes to replace the blood-soaked ones, and a stick to help him walk, and went with him to the railway station, where he was going to take the express for Aleppo.

‘What’ll you do with the safe house?’ Malcolm asked.

‘The police are there already. Someone reported the sound of the shots. We got out just in time, but we won’t be able to use it again. It’ll all be in my report to Oakley Street.’

‘Thanks, Bud. I owe you a lot.’

‘Say hello to Lyra, if …’

‘I’ll do that.’

As the train left, Malcolm settled himself painfully in the air-conditioned comfort and took out the battered copy of Jahan and Rukhsana from Hassall’s rucksack, in an attempt to take his mind off the pain in his hip.

The poem told the story of two lovers and their attempts to defeat Rukhsana’s uncle, the sorcerer Kourash, and gain possession of a garden where precious roses grew. It was highly episodic; the story had many turns and byways, and brought in every kind of fabulous creature and outlandish situation. At one point Jahan had to harness a winged horse and fly to the moon to rescue Rukhsana, who had been imprisoned by the Queen of the Night, and at another Rukhsana used a forbidden amulet to overcome the threats of the fire-fiend Razvani, and further elaborations followed each adventure, like little vortices of consequence spinning away from the main flow. In Malcolm’s view the story was almost insufferable, but the whole thing was redeemed by the poet’s rapturous descriptions of the rose garden itself, and the physical world as a whole, and of the pleasures of the senses that were enjoyed by those who reached it in a state of knowledge.

‘Either it means something,’ Malcolm said to Asta, ‘or it means nothing.’

‘My bet is on something,’ she said.

They were alone in the compartment. The train was due to stop in an hour’s time.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Because Hassall wouldn’t have burdened himself with it unless it meant something.’

‘Maybe it only meant something close and personal to him, and there’s no other significance.’

‘But we need to know about him. It’s important to know why he valued that poem.’

‘Maybe it’s not the poem so much as this particular book. This edition. Even this copy.’

‘As a code book …’

‘Something like that.’

If two people each had a copy of the same book they could send messages to each other by looking for the word they wanted, and writing the page number, the line number, and the number of the word in the line, and if the book was unknown to anyone else, the code was practically unbreakable.

Alternatively, the particular copy could itself carry a message if the letters or words wanted were indicated in some way, by a pencil dot or something similar. The trouble with that method was that the message was equally readable by the enemy, if it fell into their hands. It was hardly secret at all. Malcolm had spent some time looking for such marks, and several times had thought he’d found some, only to conclude that they were flaws in the cheap coarse paper rather than anything intended.

‘Delamare is Lyra’s uncle,’ said Asta.

‘So what?’

Sometimes he could be very slow. ‘Kourash is Rukhsana’s uncle. He’s trying to capture a rose garden.’

‘Oh! I see. But who’s Jahan?’

‘Oh, really, Mal.’

‘They’re lovers.’

‘It’s the essence of the situation that matters.’

‘It’s a coincidence.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you say so. But you were looking for a reason to find this book important.’

‘No. I already think it’s important. I was looking for a good reason why. An accidental coincidence or two is just not convincing.’

‘On its own. But when there are lots of them …’

‘You’re playing devil’s advocate.’

‘There’s a good reason for the devil’s advocate. You have to be sceptical.’

‘I thought you were being credulous.’

They were fencing. They often did, with him arguing X and her arguing Y, and then in a flash they’d change sides and argue the opposite, and eventually something would emerge that made sense to them both.

‘That place she’s looking for,’ Asta said, ‘that dead town: why d’you think dæmons live there? Is there somewhere like that in the poem?’

‘Damn it, actually there is. Rukhsana’s shadow is stolen and she has to get it back from the land of the zarghuls.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Devils who eat shadows.’

‘Does she get it back?’

‘Yes, but not without sacrificing something else …’

They sat in silence for a while.

‘And I suppose …’ he began.

‘What?’

‘There’s a passage in which Rukhsana is captured by the enchantress Shahzada, the Queen of the Night, and Jahan rescues her …’

‘Go on.’

‘The thing is that he tricks her by tying her silk sash in a clever knot that she can’t undo, and while she’s trying to do that, he and Rukhsana escape.’

He waited. Then she said, ‘Oh! The fairy of the Thames and the box she couldn’t open!’

‘Diania. Yes, the same kind of thing.’

‘Mal, this is …’

‘Very similar. I can’t deny that.’

‘But what does it mean, for things like that to turn up? It might be just a matter of temperament whether you find it meaningful.’

‘That would make it meaningless,’ he pointed out. ‘Shouldn’t it be true whether you believe in it or not?’

‘Maybe refusing to see is the mistake. Maybe we should make a commitment. Decide. What happens at the end of the poem?’

‘They find the garden and defeat the sorcerer and get married.’

‘And live happily ever after … Mal, what are we going to do? Believe it, or not? Does it mean what it seems to mean? And what does mean mean anyway?’

‘Well, that’s easier,’ he said. ‘The meaning of something is its connection to something else. To us, in particular.’

The train was slowing down as it moved through the outskirts of a town on the coast.

‘It wasn’t going to stop here, was it?’ said Asta.

‘No. It might just be slowing down because they’re working on the next track, or something.’

But it wasn’t that. The train slowed down even further, and entered the station at a crawl. In the fading afternoon light Malcolm and Asta could see a dozen or so men and women gathered around a platform from which someone had been giving a speech, or perhaps saying a ceremonial farewell. A man in a dark suit and a wing-collared shirt was stepping down, hands were being shaken, embraces bestowed. Clearly he was someone important enough for the railway company to change their schedules for. A porter in the background picked up two suitcases and came to put them on the train.

Malcolm tried to move, because his leg was stiffening, but the pain was relentless. He couldn’t even stand up.

‘Lie down,’ said Asta.

The train began to move once more, and Malcolm felt a great resignation settle over him like falling snow. The strength was draining out of him minute by minute. Maybe he’d never move again. His body was failing, and the sensation drew him back twenty years to that dreadful mausoleum in the flood where he’d had to go to the very edge of his strength to save Alice from Gerard Bonneville … Alice would know what to do now. He whispered her name, and Asta heard and tried to respond, but she was dazed with pain as well, and when he fainted, so did she. The ticket inspector found her unconscious on his breast. A pool of blood was gathering on the floor.