They were on the station forecourt already, where taxis and buses set down passengers and picked them up. Thinking about Will, Lyra had hardly noticed how far they’d come.
“What’s he look like?” she said quietly.
“Big. Black woolly hat. Dæmon looks like a mastiff.”
She moved a little faster, making for Hythe Bridge Street and the center of the city.
“What’s he doing?”
“Still watching…”
The quickest way back to Jordan would have been the straightest, of course, but that was also the most dangerous, because she’d be visible all the way along Hythe Bridge Street and then George Street.
“Can he still see us?” she said.
“No—the hotel’s in the way.”
“Then hold on tight.”
“What are you—”
She suddenly darted across the road and ducked under the railings around the coal wharves, where the canal boats came to unload. Ignoring the men who stopped to watch, she ran around the steam crane, behind the Canal Board building, and out across the narrow street into George Street Mews.
“Can’t see him,” said Pan, craning his neck to look.
Lyra ran on into Bulwarks Lane, a pathway between two high walls no further apart than her own outstretched hands. She was out of sight entirely here: no one to help if she ran into trouble…But she came to the end of the lane and turned sharp left along another mews that ran behind St. Peter’s Oratory, and then out into New Inn Hall Street, which was busy with shoppers.
“So far, so good,” said Pan.
Across the street, and into Sewy’s Lane next: a dank little alley next to the Clarendon Hotel. A man was filling a large dustbin and taking his time over it, with his lumpish sow dæmon sprawled on the ground beside him, gnawing a turnip. Lyra leapt over her, causing the man to start backwards and drop the cigarette out of his mouth.
“Oy!” he cried, but she was already out into the Cornmarket, the main shopping street of the city, crowded with pedestrians and delivery vehicles.
“Keep looking,” Lyra said, nearly out of breath.
She darted across the road and down an alley next to the Golden Cross Inn, which led to the Covered Market.
“I’m going to have to slow down,” she said. “This is bloody heavy.”
She walked at a normal pace through the market, watching everyone ahead as Pan was watching behind, and trying to slow her breathing down. Only a short way now: out into Market Street, then left into Turl Street, only fifty yards away, and there was Jordan College. Less than a minute to go. Controlling every muscle, she strolled calmly along to the lodge.
Just as they entered, a figure stepped out of the door into the porter’s room.
“Lyra! Hello. Have you had a good term?”
It was the burly, red-haired, affable Dr. Polstead, the historian, who was not someone she wanted to talk to. He’d left Jordan some years before and moved to Durham College, across Broad Street, but no doubt he had business that occasionally brought him back here.
“Yes, thank you,” she said blandly.
A group of undergraduates came through at the same moment, on their way to a class or a lecture. Lyra ignored them, but they all looked at her, as she well knew they would. They even fell silent as they went past, as if they were shy. By the time they’d gone through, Dr. Polstead had given up waiting for any fuller response from Lyra and turned to the porter, so she left. Two minutes later, she and Pan were in her little sitting room at the top of Staircase One, where she puffed out her cheeks with relief, dropped the rucksack on the floor, and locked the door.
“Well, we’re committed now,” said Pan.
“What went wrong?” demanded Marcel Delamare.
The Secretary General was standing in his office at La Maison Juste, and the person he was addressing was a casually dressed young man, dark-haired, slim, tense, and sulky, who was leaning back on a sofa with his legs stretched out and his hands in his pockets. His hawk dæmon glared at Delamare.
“If you employ bunglers…,” said the visitor.
“Answer the question.”
The young man shrugged. “They messed it up. They were incompetent.”
“Is he dead?”
“Seems like it.”
“But they didn’t find anything. Was he carrying a bag, a case of some sort?”
“Can’t see that sort of detail. But I don’t think so.”
“Then look again. Look harder.”
The young man waved a hand languidly as if shooing the idea away. He was frowning, his eyes half closed, and there was a faint sheen of sweat on his white forehead.
“Are you unwell?” said Delamare.
“You know how the new method affects me. It puts a severe strain on the nerves.”
“You are paid very well to put up with that sort of thing. In any case, I’ve told you not to use this new method. I don’t trust it.”
“I’ll look, yes, all right, I’ll look, but not now. I need to recover first. But I can tell you one thing: there was someone watching.”
“Watching the operation? Who was that?”
“No idea. Couldn’t tell. But there was someone else there who saw it all.”
“Did the mechanics realize?”
“No.”
“That’s all you can tell me about it?”
“That’s all I know. All it’s possible to know. Except…”
He said no more. The Secretary General was used to this mannerism and kept his patience. Eventually the young man went on:
“Except I think maybe it could have been her. That girl. I didn’t see her, mind. But it could have been.”
He was looking closely at Delamare as he said that. His employer sat at the desk and wrote a sentence or two on a piece of headed paper before folding it and capping his fountain pen.
“Here you are, Olivier. Take this to the bank. Then have some rest. Eat properly. Keep up your strength.”
The young man opened the paper and read it before putting it in his pocket and leaving without a word. But he’d noticed something he’d seen before: at the mention of the girl, Marcel Delamare’s mouth trembled.
* * *
* * *
Lyra put the rucksack down on the floor and sank into the old armchair.