“Why are we doing this? Really? Copying these things down?”
She looked at him for a moment and then turned back to the wallet. “Just being curious,” she said. “It’s none of our business, except that we know how it came to be there in the rushes. So it is our business.”
“And he did say it was all up to us. Don’t forget that.”
She turned off the fire, locked the door, and they set off for the main police station in St. Aldate’s, with the wallet in her pocket.
* * *
* * *
Twenty-five minutes later, they were waiting at a counter while the duty sergeant dealt with a man who wanted a fishing license and who wouldn’t accept that it was the river authority that issued them, and not the police. He argued at such length that Lyra sat down on the only chair and prepared to wait till lunchtime.
Pan was sitting on her lap, watching everything. When two other policemen came out of a back office and stopped to talk by the counter, he turned to look at them, and a moment later Lyra felt his claws dig into her hand.
She didn’t react. He’d tell her what it was about in a moment, and so he did, flowing up to her shoulder and whispering:
“That’s the man from last night. That’s the killer. I’m certain of it.”
He meant the taller and heavier of the two policemen. Lyra heard the man say to the other, “No, it’s overtime, completely legitimate. All done by the book. There’s no doubt about it.”
His voice was unpleasant, harsh and thick-sounding. He had a Liverpool accent. At the same moment, the man who wanted the fishing license said to the duty sergeant as he turned away, “Well, if you’re sure, I’ve got no choice. But I’ll want it in writing.”
“Come back this afternoon, and my colleague who’ll be on the desk then will give you a document all about it,” said the sergeant, winking at the other two.
“All right, I will. I’m not giving up.”
“No, don’t do that, sir. Yes, miss? How can I help you?”
He was looking at Lyra, and the other two policemen were watching.
She stood up and said, “I don’t know if I’ve come to the right place, but my bicycle was stolen.”
“Yes, this is the right place, miss. Fill in this form and we’ll see what we can do.”
She took the paper he handed her and said, “I’m in a bit of a hurry. Can I bring it back later?”
“Anytime, miss.”
Her inquiry not being very interesting, he turned away and joined the conversation about overtime. A moment later, Lyra and Pan were out in the street again.
“Well, what do we do now?” said Pan.
“Go to the left-luggage place, of course.”
* * *
* * *
But Lyra wanted to see the riverbank first. As they walked across Carfax and down towards the castle, she went over the story with Pan again, each of them being so scrupulously polite and attentive to the other that it was almost painful. Everyone else Lyra could see in the streets or the shops, everyone she’d spoken to in the market, was perfectly at ease with their dæmon. The café owner George’s dæmon, a flamboyant rat, sat in the breast pocket of his apron, passing sardonic comments on everything around her, just as she’d done when Lyra was a small child, completely content with George as he was with her. Only Lyra and Pan were unhappy with each other.
So they tried very hard. They went to the allotment gardens and looked at the gate in the high fence around the Royal Mail depot, where the second attacker had climbed over, and at the path from the railway station that the victim had come along.
It was a market day, and as well as the sound of railway cars being shunted in the sidings, and the noise of someone using a drill or a grinder to repair a machine in the Royal Mail building, Lyra heard the mooing of cattle from the pens in the distance. There were people everywhere.
“Someone might be watching us,” she said.
“I suppose they might.”
“So we’ll just wander along as if we’re daydreaming.”
She looked around slowly. They were standing in the area between the river and the allotments, a roughly tended open meadow where people strolled or picnicked in the summer, or bathed from the riverbank, or played football. This part of Oxford wasn’t home territory for Lyra, whose allegiance had lain mostly with the urchins of Jericho, half a mile north. She had fought many battles with the gangs from around here, from St. Ebbe’s, in the days before she went to the Arctic and left her world altogether. Even now, a young woman of twenty, educated, a student of St. Sophia’s, she felt an atavistic fear of being in enemy territory.
She set off slowly, crossing the grass to the riverbank, trying to look as if she were doing anything other than looking for a murder site.
They stopped to look at a train loaded with coal coming slowly down from their right towards the wooden bridge over the river. Trains never crossed it fast. They heard the trundle of the coal trucks over the bridge, and watched the train swing away to the left on the branch line that made for the gasworks, and into the siding next to the main building where the furnaces roared day and night.
Lyra said, “Pan, if they hadn’t attacked him, where was he going? Where does the path lead to?”
They were standing at the southern edge of the allotments, where Pan had been when he first saw the men hide under the willow. The two trees were exactly ahead of them as they looked towards the river, about a hundred yards away. If the man hadn’t been attacked, the path would have taken him further along the bank, where the river curved around to the left. Without discussing it, Lyra and Pan moved slowly that way to see where he would have gone.
The path made directly along the bank towards a footbridge over the stream, which in turn led to the narrow streets of back-to-back houses around the gasworks, and the parish of St. Ebbe’s proper.
“So that’s where he was going,” said Pan.
“Even if he didn’t know it. Even if he was only following the path.”
“And that’s where the other man must have come from—the one who didn’t come from the mail depot.”
“You could get to anywhere from there,” Lyra said. “All those tangled old streets in St. Ebbe’s, and then St. Aldate’s and Carfax…Anywhere.”
“But we’ll never find it. Not by guessing.”
They both knew why they were talking like this, at the end of the footbridge over the stream. Neither of them wanted to go and look at the place where the man had been killed.