The Subtle Knife (16 page)

She stopped to gain her breath. There was a tall hedge in front of one of the gardens, with a low wall at its foot, and she sat there tucked closely in under the privet.

“She helped us!” Pantalaimon said. “Dr. Malone got in their way. She’s on our side, not theirs.”

“Oh, Pan,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said that about Will. I should’ve been more careful—”

“Shouldn’t have come,” he said severely.

“I know. That too . . . ”

But she hadn’t got time to berate herself, because Pantalaimon fluttered to her shoulder, and then said, “Look out—behind—” and immediately changed to a cricket again and dived into her pocket.

She stood, ready to run, and saw a large, dark blue car gliding silently to the pavement beside her. She was braced to dart in either direction, but the car’s rear window rolled down, and there looking out was a face she recognized.

“Lizzie,” said the old man from the museum. “How nice to see you again. Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

And he opened the door and moved up to make room beside him. Pantalaimon nipped her breast through the thin cotton, but she got in at once, clutching the rucksack, and the man leaned across her and pulled the door shut.

“You look as if you’re in a hurry,” he said. “Where d’you want to go?”

“Up Summertown,” she said, “please.”

The driver was wearing a peaked cap. Everything about the car was smooth and soft and powerful, and the smell of the old man’s cologne was strong in the enclosed space. The car pulled out from the pavement and moved away with no noise at all.

“So what have you been up to, Lizzie?” the old man said. “Did you find out more about those skulls?”

“Yeah,” she said, twisting to see out of the rear window. There was no sign of the pale-haired man. She’d gotten away! And he’d never find her now that she was safe in a powerful car with a rich man like this. She felt a little hiccup of triumph.

“I made some inquiries too,” he said. “An anthropologist friend of mine tells me that they’ve got several others in the collection, as well as the ones on display. Some of them are very old indeed. Neanderthal, you know.”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard too,” Lyra said, with no idea what he was talking about.

“And how’s your friend?”

“What friend?” said Lyra, alarmed. Had she told
him
about Will too?

“The friend you’re staying with.”

“Oh. Yes. She’s very well, thank you.”

“What does she do? Is she an archaeologist?”

“Oh . . . she’s a physicist. She studies dark matter,” said Lyra, still not quite in control. In this world it was harder to tell lies than she’d thought. And something else was nagging at her: this old man was familiar in some long-lost way, and she just couldn’t place it.

“Dark matter?” he was saying. “How fascinating! I saw something about that in
The Times
this morning. The universe is full of this mysterious stuff, and nobody knows what it is! And your friend is on the track of it, is she?”

“Yes. She knows a lot about it.”

“And what are you going to do later on, Lizzie? Are you going in for physics too?”

“I might,” said Lyra. “It depends.”

The chauffeur coughed gently and slowed the car down.

“Well, here we are in Summertown,” said the old man. “Where would you like to be dropped?”

“Oh, just up past these shops. I can walk from there,” said Lyra. “Thank you.”

“Turn left into South Parade, and pull up on the right, could you, Allan,” said the old man.

“Very good, sir,” said the chauffeur.

A minute later the car came to a silent halt outside a public library. The old man held open the door on his side, so that Lyra had to climb past his knees to get out. There was a lot of space, but somehow it was awkward, and she didn’t want to touch him, nice as he was.

“Don’t forget your rucksack,” he said, handing it to her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’ll see you again, I hope, Lizzie,” he said. “Give my regards to your friend.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and lingered on the pavement till the car had turned the corner and gone out of sight before she set off toward the hornbeam trees. She had a feeling about that pale-haired man, and she wanted to ask the alethiometer.

Will was reading his father’s letters again. He sat on the terrace hearing the distant shouts of children diving off the harbor mouth, and read the clear handwriting on the flimsy airmail sheets, trying to picture the man who’d penned it, and looking again and again at the reference to the baby, to himself.

He heard Lyra’s running footsteps from some way off. He put the letters in his pocket and stood up, and almost at once Lyra was there, wild-eyed, with Pantalaimon a snarling savage wildcat, too distraught to hide. She who seldom cried was sobbing with rage; her chest was heaving, her teeth were grinding, and she flung herself at him, clutching his arms, and cried, “Kill him! Kill him! I want him dead! I wish Iorek was here! Oh, Will, I done wrong, I’m so sorry—”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“That old man—he en’t nothing but a low thief. He
stole
it, Will! He stole my alethiometer! That stinky old man with his rich clothes and his servant driving the car. Oh, I done such wrong things this morning—oh, I—”

And she sobbed so passionately he thought that hearts really did break, and hers was breaking now, for she fell to the ground wailing and shuddering, and Pantalaimon beside her became a wolf and howled with bitter grief.

Far off across the water, children stopped what they were doing and shaded their eyes to see. Will sat down beside Lyra and shook her shoulder.

“Stop! Stop crying!” he said. “Tell me from the beginning. What old man? What happened?”

“You’re going to be so angry. I promised I wouldn’t give you away, I
promised
it, and then . . . ” she sobbed, and Pantalaimon became a young clumsy dog with lowered ears and wagging tail, squirming with self-abasement; and Will understood that Lyra had done something that she was too ashamed to tell him about, and he spoke to the dæmon.

“What
happened
? Just tell me,” he said.

Pantalaimon said, “We went to the Scholar, and there was someone else there—a man and a woman—and they tricked us. They asked a lot of questions and then they asked about you, and before we could stop we gave it away that we knew you, and then we ran away—”

Lyra was hiding her face in her hands, pressing her head down against the pavement. Pantalaimon was flickering from shape to shape in his agitation: dog, bird, cat, snow-white ermine.

“What did the man look like?” said Will.

“Big,” said Lyra’s muffled voice, “and ever so strong, and pale eyes . . . ”

“Did he see you come back through the window?”

“No, but . . . ”

“Well, he won’t know where we are, then.”

“But the alethiometer!” she cried, and she sat up fiercely, her face rigid with emotion, like a Greek mask.

“Yeah,” said Will. “Tell me about that.”

Between sobs and teeth grindings she told him what had happened: how the old man had seen her using the alethiometer in the museum the day before, and how he’d stopped the car today and she’d gotten in to escape from the pale man, and how the car had pulled up on that side of the road so she’d had to climb past him to get out, and how he must have swiftly taken the alethiometer as he’d passed her the rucksack . . . . 

He could see how devastated she was, but not why she should feel guilty. And then she said: “And, Will, please, I done something very bad. Because the alethiometer told me I had to stop looking for Dust—at least I thought that’s what it said—and I had to help you. I had to help you find your father. And I
could
, I could take you to wherever he is, if I had it. But I wouldn’t listen. I just done what
I
wanted to do, and I shouldn’t . . . . ”

He’d seen her use it, and he knew it could tell her the truth. He turned away. She seized his wrist, but he broke away from her and walked to the edge of the water. The children were playing again across the harbor. Lyra ran up to him and said, “Will, I’m so sorry—”

“What’s the use of that? I don’t care if you’re sorry or not. You did it.”

“But, Will, we got to help each other, you and me, because there en’t anyone else!”

“I can’t see how.”

“Nor can I, but . . . ”

She stopped in midsentence, and a light came into her eyes. She turned and raced back to her rucksack, abandoned on the pavement, and rummaged through it feverishly.

“I know who he is! And where he lives! Look!” she said, and held up a little white card. “He gave this to me in the museum! We can go and get the alethiometer back!”

Will took the card and read:

S
IR
C
HARLES
L
ATROM,
CBE

L
IMEFIELD
H
OUSE

O
LD
H
EADINGTON

O
XFORD

“He’s a sir,” he said. “A knight. That means people will automatically believe him and not us. What did you want me to do, anyway? Go to the police? The police are after me! Or if they weren’t yesterday, they will be by now. And if
you
go, they know who you are now, and they know you know me, so that wouldn’t work either.”

“We could steal it. We could go to his house and steal it. I know where Headington is, there’s a Headington in my Oxford too. It en’t far. We could walk there in an hour, easy.”

“You’re stupid.”

“Iorek Byrnison would go there straightaway and rip his head off. I wish he was here. He’d—”

But she fell silent. Will was just looking at her, and she quailed. She would have quailed in the same way if the armored bear had looked at her like that, because there was something not unlike Iorek in Will’s eyes, young as they were.

“I never heard anything so stupid in my life,” he said. “You think we can just go to his house and creep in and steal it? You need to think. You need to use your bloody brain. He’s going to have all kinds of burglar alarms and stuff, if he’s a rich man. There’ll be bells that go off and special locks and lights with infrared switches that come on automatically—”

“I never heard of those things,” Lyra said. “We en’t got ’em in my world. I couldn’t know that, Will.”

“All right, then think of this: He’s got a whole house to hide it in, and how long would any burglar have to look through every cupboard and drawer and hiding place in a whole house? Those men who came to my house had hours to look around, and they never found what they were looking for, and I bet he’s got a whole lot bigger house than we have. And probably a safe, too. So even if we did get into his house, we’d never find it in time before the police came.”

She hung her head. It was all true.

“What we going to do then?” she said.

He didn’t answer. But it was
we,
for certain. He was bound to her now, whether he liked it or not.

He walked to the water’s edge, and back to the terrace, and back to the water again. He beat his hands together, looking for an answer, but no answer came, and he shook his head angrily.

“Just . . . go there,” he said. “Just go there and see him. It’s no good asking your scholar to help us, either, not if the police have been to her. She’s bound to believe them rather than us. At least if we get into his house, we’ll see where the main rooms are. That’ll be a start.”

Without another word he went inside and put the letters under the pillow in the room he’d slept in. Then, if he were caught, they’d never have them.

Lyra was waiting on the terrace, with Pantalaimon perched on her shoulder as a sparrow. She was looking more cheerful.

“We’re going to get it back all right,” she said. “I can feel it.”

He said nothing. They set off for the window.

It took an hour and a half to walk to Headington. Lyra led the way, avoiding the city center, and Will kept watch all around, saying nothing. It was much harder for Lyra now than it had been even in the Arctic, on the way to Bolvangar, for then she’d had the gyptians and Iorek Byrnison with her, and even if the tundra was full of danger, you knew the danger when you saw it. Here, in the city that was both hers and not hers, danger could look friendly, and treachery smiled and smelled sweet; and even if they weren’t going to kill her or part her from Pantalaimon, they had robbed her of her only guide. Without the alethiometer, she was . . . just a little girl, lost.

Limefield House was the color of warm honey, and half of its front was covered in Virginia creeper. It stood in a large, well-tended garden, with shrubbery at one side and a gravel drive sweeping up to the front door. The Rolls-Royce was parked in front of a double garage to the left. Everything Will could see spoke of wealth and power, the sort of informal settled superiority that some upper-class English people still took for granted. There was something about it that made him grit his teeth, and he didn’t know why, until suddenly he remembered an occasion when he was very young. His mother had taken him to a house not unlike this; they’d dressed in their best clothes and he’d had to be on his best behavior, and an old man and woman had made his mother cry, and they’d left the house and she was still crying . . . . 

Lyra saw him breathing fast and clenching his fists, and was sensible enough not to ask why; it was something to do with him, not with her. Presently he took a deep breath.

“Well,” he said, “might as well try.”

He walked up the drive, and Lyra followed close behind. They felt very exposed.

The door had an old-fashioned bell pull, like those in Lyra’s world, and Will didn’t know where to find it till Lyra showed him. When they pulled it, the bell jangled a long way off inside the house.

The man who opened the door was the servant who’d been driving the car, only now he didn’t have his cap on. He looked at Will first, and then at Lyra, and his expression changed a little.

“We want to see Sir Charles Latrom,” Will said.

His jaw was jutting as it had done last night facing the stone-throwing children by the tower. The servant nodded.