The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (20 page)

So, having swallowed some pills to protect against travel sickness, in case the nausea struck again, he sat in his little apartment as the evening lights came on in the city, turned all three wheels to the image of the owl, and focused his attention on the scrap of photo paper with the picture of Lyra. But that didn’t work either, or not as he’d hoped it would. In fact, it generated a blizzard of other images, each of them pin-sharp for a moment and then succumbing to vagueness and blur, but each of them resembling Lyra for the second or so he could see them clearly.

Bonneville narrowed his eyes and tried to keep the pictures in focus for a little longer against the inevitable vertigo. They seemed to have the quality of photograms: all monochrome, some faded or creased, some on photographic paper, some on newsprint, some well lit and professionally taken, others informal, as if taken by someone who wasn’t used to a camera, with Lyra screwing up her eyes in the glare of the sun. Several of them seemed to have been taken surreptitiously when she was unaware, showing her lost in thought in a café or laughing as she walked hand in hand with a boy or looking around to cross the road. They showed Lyra at various periods in her childhood as well as more recently, her dæmon always in view. In the later pictures his form was clearly that of some large rodent: that was all Bonneville could tell.

Then with a lurch he seemed to fall into an understanding of what he was looking at. They
were
photograms. They were pinned to a board: he could see a cloth folded back at the top of it, so they were probably kept under cover. Gradually some details of the background emerged: the board was leaning against a wall papered in a faint floral pattern; it stood next to a window across which a curtain of lustrous green silk had been drawn; it was lit by a single anbaric lamp on a desktop below; but whose eyes was he looking through? He had the impression of a consciousness, but—

Something was moving—a hand moved and made Bonneville lurch again and almost vomit, as the viewpoint swung around instantaneously and showed him a white form sweeping across in a blur of wings that set some of the pictures stirring on the board—just a swift dash—a bird—a white owl, just for a moment, and it was gone again….

Delamare!

The owl was Delamare’s dæmon. The hand was Delamare’s. The floral wallpaper, the green silk curtain, the board of pictures was in Delamare’s apartment.

And although Bonneville couldn’t see Lyra herself for some reason, he could see pictures of her because it wasn’t her he was focusing his mind on but a
picture
of her….All this came to him in a second, as he sank back into his armchair, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply to settle the nausea.

So Marcel Delamare had collected dozens, scores of pictures of Lyra. He’d never mentioned them.

And no one knew. He’d thought that his employer’s interest in the girl was professional, so to speak, or political, or something. But this was personal. This was bizarre. It was obsessive.

Well, that was worth knowing.

Next question: why?

Bonneville knew very little about his employer, mainly because he wasn’t interested. Perhaps it was time to find things out. The new method would be little use for that, and besides, Bonneville’s nauseous headache made him reluctant to think of using the alethiometer again for a while. He’d have to go and ask people: be a detective.

With no clue about where Lyra might have gone, Malcolm and Asta went over and over his conversation with her at La Luna Caprese in Little Clarendon Street.

“Benny Morris…,” said Asta. “That name came up at some point.”

“Yes. So it did. Something to do with…”

“Someone who worked at the mail depot—”

“That’s it! The man who was injured.”

“We could try the compensation stunt,” she said.

So after some work with Oxford city directories and voting registers, they found an address in Pike Street in the district of St. Ebbe’s, in the shadow of the gasworks. In the character of a personnel manager from the Royal Mail, Malcolm knocked on the door of a terraced house the next afternoon.

He waited, and no one answered. He listened, but heard only the clanking of railway trucks being shunted into a siding on the other side of the gasworks.

He knocked again. Still there was no response from inside. The trucks had begun to empty their coal, one by one, into the chute below the railway line.

Malcolm waited till the whole train had gone through and the series of distant thunders was replaced by the hollow clank of shunting again.

He knocked a third time, and then heard a heavy limping step inside, and the door opened.

The man standing there was thickset and bleary-eyed, and a strong smell of drink hung around him. His dæmon, a mongrel with mastiff in her, stood behind his legs and barked twice.

“Mr. Morris?” said Malcolm, smiling.

“Who wants me?”

“Your name is Morris? Benny Morris?”

“What if it is?”

“Well, I’ve come from the personnel department of the Royal Mail—”

“I can’t work. I got a certificate from the doctor. Look at the state of me.”

“We’re not disputing your injury, Mr. Morris, not at all. It’s a matter of sorting out the compensation you’re due.”

There was a pause.

“Compensation?”

“That’s right. All our employees are entitled to injury insurance. Part of your wages goes towards it. All we have to do is fill in a form. May I come in?”

Morris stood aside, and Malcolm stepped into the narrow hall and shut the door behind him. Boiled cabbage, sweat, and pungent smokeleaf joined the smell of drink.

“May we sit down?” said Malcolm. “I need to get out some papers.”

Morris opened a door into a cold and dusty parlor. He struck a match and lit the gas mantle on a wall bracket. A yellowish light seeped out of it but didn’t have the energy to go far. He pulled out a chair from under a flimsy table and sat down, taking care to demonstrate the pain and difficulty the process caused him.

Malcolm sat on the chair opposite, took some papers from his briefcase, and uncapped a fountain pen. “Now, if we could just be precise about the nature of your injury,” he said cheerfully. “How did it happen?”

“Oh. Yeah. I was doing some work outside in the yard. Clearing a gutter. And the ladder slipped.”

“You hadn’t braced it?”

“Oh, yeah, I always brace a ladder. Common sense, innit?”

“But it still slipped?”

“Yeah. It was a wet day. That’s why I was clearing the gutter, like, ’cause there was all moss and dirt in it and the water couldn’t flow proper. It was all gushing down outside the kitchen window.”

Malcolm wrote something down. “Did you have anyone helping you?”

“No. Just me.”

“Ah. You see,” said Malcolm in a concerned tone, “for full compensation to be paid, we need to be sure that the client—that’s you—took every sensible precaution against accident. And when working with ladders, that normally involves having another person to hold the ladder.”

“Oh, yeah, well, there was Jimmy. My mate Jimmy Turner. He was with me. He must’ve gone inside for a second.”

“I see,” said Malcolm, writing. “Could you let me know Mr. Turner’s address?”

“Er—yeah, sure. He lives in Norfolk Street. Number—I can’t remember his number.”

“Norfolk Street. That’ll do. We’ll find him. Was it Mr. Turner who went for help when you fell?”

“Yeah…This, er, this compensation…how much is it likely to be?”

“It partly depends on the nature of the injury, which we’ll go into in a minute. And on how long you’re likely to be away from work.”

“Right, yeah.”

Morris’s dæmon was sitting as close as she could get to his chair. Asta was watching her, and already the dog was beginning to twitch and look away. The faint beginning of a growl came from her throat, and Morris’s hand reached down automatically to grasp her ears.

“How long has the doctor recommended you to stay off work?” Malcolm said.

“Oh, two weeks, about. Depends. It might heal quicker, it might not.”

“Of course. And now the injury itself. What damage did you actually do?”

“Damage?”

“To yourself.”

“Oh, right. Well, I thought at first I’d broke me leg, but the doctor said it was a sprain.”

“Which part of your leg?”

“Er—the knee. Me left knee.”

“A sprained knee?”

“I sort of twisted it as I fell.”

“I see. Did the doctor examine you properly?”

“Yeah. My mate Jimmy helped me inside, right, and then he went to fetch the doctor.”

“And the doctor examined the injury?”

“That’s what he did, yeah.”

“And said it was a sprain?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you see, this is a little confusing for me, because the information I have is that you were rather badly cut.”

Asta saw the man’s hand tighten on the ears of his dæmon. “Cut,” said Morris, “yeah, I was, yeah.”

“It was a cut as well as a sprain?”

“There was glass around. I repaired a window the week before and there must have been some broken glass….Where’d you get this information from anyway?”

“A friend of yours. He said you were rather badly cut behind the knee. I can’t quite picture how you came to be cut there, you see.”

“Who was this friend? What’s his name?”

Malcolm had an acquaintance in the City of Oxford police, a friend from his boyhood—a docile and affectionate child then, and a man of honest decency now. Malcolm had asked him, without saying why, if he knew of a constable at the police station in St. Aldate’s who had a heavy, thick voice and a Liverpool accent. Malcolm’s friend knew the man at once, and his expression told Malcolm what he thought of him. He gave Malcolm the name.

“George Paston,” said Malcolm.

Morris’s dæmon uttered a sudden yelp and stood up. Asta was already on her feet, tail slowly swinging from side to side. Malcolm himself sat quite still, but he knew where everything was, and how heavy the table was likely to be, and which leg of Morris’s was injured, and he was balanced partly on the chair but partly on his feet, ready to spring. Very quietly, as if from an immense distance, and only for a moment or two, both Malcolm and Asta heard the sound of a pack of dogs barking.

Morris’s face, until then heavily flushed, went white.

“No,” he said, “wait a minute, wait a minute. George Pas—I don’t know anyone called George Paston. Who is he?”

Morris might already have lashed out, except that Malcolm’s calm and concerned expression had him utterly confused.

“He says he knows you well,” Malcolm said. “As a matter of fact, he says he was with you when you got that injury.”

“He wasn’t—I told you, it was Jimmy Turner who was with me. George Paston? I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, he came to us, you see,” Malcolm said, watching carefully without seeming to, “and he was anxious to let us know that your injury was genuine so that you wouldn’t suffer any loss of earnings. He said it was quite a bad cut—a knife was involved—but oddly enough he didn’t mention anything about a ladder. Or about a sprain.”

“Who are you?” Morris demanded.

“Let me give you my card,” said Malcolm, and took from his breast pocket a card that named him as Arthur Donaldson, Insurance Assessor, Royal Mail.

Morris peered at it, frowning, and put it on the table. “What’d he say then, this George Paston?”

“He said you’d suffered an injury, and your absence from work had a good reason for it. Your situation was genuine. And as he was a police officer, naturally we believed him.”

“A
police
— No, I don’t know him at all. He must’ve got me confused.”

“His account was very detailed. He said he helped you away from the place where the injury happened and brought you home.”

“But it was here! I fell off a bloody ladder!”

“What were you wearing at the time?”

“What’s that got to do with it? What I normally wear.”

“The trousers you’re wearing now, for instance?”

“No! I had to throw them away.”

“Because they were covered in blood?”

“No, no, you’re getting me confused now. It wasn’t like that. There was me here and Jimmy Turner, and no one else.”

“What about the third man?”

“There wasn’t anyone else!”

“But Mr. Paston is very clear about it. There was no ladder in his account. He said you and he had stopped for a chat, and you were attacked by a third man, who cut your leg badly.”

Morris wiped his face with both hands. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t ask for no compensation. I can do without it. This is all mixed up. This Paston, he’s got me confused with someone else. I don’t know nothing about what he’s saying. It’s all lies.”

“Well, I expect the court will sort it out.”

“What court?”

“The Criminal Injuries Board. All we need now is your signature on this form, and we can go ahead.”

“It’s all right. Forget it. I don’t want no compensation, not if it comes with all these stupid questions. I never asked for this.”

“No, you didn’t, I agree,” said Malcolm, in his most bland and soothing way. “But I’m afraid that once the process has started, we can’t go back and undo it. Let’s just get this business of the third man out of the way, the man with the knife. Did you know him?”

“I never—there wasn’t no third man—”

“Sergeant Paston says you were both surprised when he fought back.”

“He en’t a sergeant! He’s a const—” Morris fell silent.

“I’ve got you,” said Malcolm.

A slow dark red flush moved up from Morris’s neck to his cheeks. His fists were clenched, pressing down so hard on the table that his arms were trembling.

His dæmon was growling more loudly than ever, but Asta could see that she’d never attack: she was mortally afraid.

“You en’t—” Morris croaked. “You en’t nothing to do with the Royal Mail.”

“You’ve only got one chance,” said Malcolm. “Tell me everything, and I’ll put in a word for you. If you don’t do that, you’ll face a murder charge.”

“You en’t the police,” said Morris.

“No. I’m something else. But don’t get distracted by that. I know enough already to put you in the dock for murder. Tell me about George Paston.”