La Belle Sauvage, Page 9

  "I expect you're right. What was the other thing?"

  "Oh, yes..."

  Malcolm told her what Eric's father, the clerk of the court, had passed on about the man in the canal. Her face grew pale.

  "Good God. That's appalling," she said.

  "D'you think it might be true?"

  "Oh. Well--don't you?"

  "The thing is, Eric does exaggerate a bit."

  "Oh?"

  "He likes to show off about what he knows, what his dad's heard in court."

  "I wonder if his dad would have told him that sort of thing."

  "Yes, I think he would. I've heard him talk like that about things that have happened, trials and that. I think he'd be telling the truth to Eric. But maybe Eric...I dunno, though. I just think that poor man--he looked so unhappy...."

  To Malcolm's intense embarrassment, his voice shook, his throat tightened, and he found tears flowing from his eyes. When he'd been moved to tears at home, when he was much younger, his mother had known what to do: she gathered him into her arms and rocked him gently till the crying faded away. Malcolm realized that he'd wanted to cry about the dead man since the moment he'd heard about him, but of course he couldn't possibly tell his mother about any of this.

  "Sorry," he said.

  "Malcolm! Don't say sorry. I'm sorry that you're mixed up in this. And actually, now I think we'd better stop. I've got no business asking you to--"

  "I don't want to stop! I want to find out!"

  "It's too dangerous. If anyone thinks you know anything about this, then you're in real--"

  "I know. But I am anyway. I can't help it. It certainly en't your fault. I'd have seen all those things even if it weren't for you. And at least I can talk to you. I couldn't talk to anyone else, not even Sister Fenella. She wouldn't understand at all."

  He was still embarrassed, and he could tell that Dr. Relf was embarrassed too, because she hadn't known what to do. He wouldn't have wanted her to embrace him, so he was glad she hadn't tried to do that, at least, but it was still an awkward little moment.

  "Well, promise me you won't ask anything," she said.

  "Yeah, all right, I can promise that," he said, meaning it. "I won't start any asking. But if someone else says something..."

  "Well, use your judgment. Try not to seem interested. And we'd better get on and do what our cover story says we're doing, and talk about books. What did you think of these two?"

  Malcolm had never had a conversation like the one that followed. At school, in a class of forty, there was no time for such a thing, even if the curriculum allowed it, even if the teachers had been interested; at home it wouldn't have happened, because neither his father nor his mother was a reader; in the bar he was a listener rather than a participant; and the only two friends with whom he might have spoken seriously about such things, Robbie and Tom, had none of the breadth of learning and the depth of understanding that he found when Dr. Relf spoke.

  At first, Asta sat close on his shoulder, where she'd gone as a little ferret when he had found himself crying; but little by little she felt easier, and before long she was sitting beside Jesper, the kind-faced marmoset, having their own quiet exchange while The Body in the Library was discussed and A Brief History of Time touched on with wary respect.

  "You said last time that you were a historian of ideas," said Malcolm. "An historian. What sort of ideas did you mean? Like the ones in this book?"

  "Yes, largely," she said. "Ideas about big things, such as the universe, and good and evil, and why things exist in the first place."

  "I never thought about why they did," said Malcolm, wondering. "I never thought you could think things like that. I thought things just were. So people thought different things about 'em in the past?"

  "Oh, yes. And there were times when it was very dangerous to think the wrong things, or at least to talk about them."

  "It is now, sort of."

  "Yes. I'm afraid you're right. But as long as we keep to what's been published, I don't think you and I will get into much trouble."

  Malcolm wanted to ask about the secret things she was involved with, and whether they were part of the history of ideas, but he felt that it was better to stick to books for now. So he asked if she had any more books about experimental theology, and she found him one called The Strange Story of the Quantum, and then she let him scan the shelves of murder stories, and he picked out another by the author of The Body in the Library.

  "You got lots of hers," he said.

  "Not as many as she wrote."

  "How many books have you read?"

  "Thousands. I couldn't possibly guess."

  "Do you remember them all?"

  "No. I remember the very good ones. Most of my murders and thrillers aren't very good in that way, so if I let a little time go by, I find I've forgotten them and I can read them again."

  "That's a good idea," he said. "I prob'ly better go now. If I hear anything else, I'll save it up and tell you. And if you get another broken window--well, you can prob'ly mend it yourself, now I showed you about glazing sprigs."

  "Thank you, Malcolm," she said. "And please--once more--be careful."

  --

  That evening, Hannah didn't go into her college for dinner as usual. Instead, she took a note to the porter's lodge at Jordan College and went home to make herself some scrambled eggs. Then she drank a glass of wine and waited.

  At twenty past nine, there was a knock at the door, and she opened it at once and let in the man who was waiting outside in the rain.

  "I'm sorry to bring you out on a night like this," she said.

  "Sorry to be brought," he said. "Never mind. What's this about?"

  His name was George Papadimitriou, and he was the professor of Byzantine history who had first recruited her for Oakley Street two years before. He was also the tall scholarly-looking man who had had dinner with Lord Nugent at the Trout.

  She took his coat and shook off the worst of the rain before hanging it on the radiator.

  "I've done something stupid," she said.

  "That's not like you. I'll have a glass of whatever that is. Go on, then, tell me."

  His greenfinch daemon touched noses courteously with Jesper and then perched on the back of his chair as he sat down by the fire with his wine. Hannah filled her own glass again and sat down in the other chair.

  She took a deep breath and told him about Malcolm: the acorn, her asking the alethiometer, the Trout, the books. She edited it very carefully, but she told him everything he needed to know.

  He listened in silence. His long, dark, heavy-eyed face was serious and still.

  "I read about the man in the canal," he said. "Naturally, I didn't know he was your insulator. I hadn't heard about the strangling either. Any chance that this is just a child's fantasy?"

  "It could be, of course, but not Malcolm's. I believe him. If it's a fantasy, it's his friend's."

  "It won't be reported in the press, of course."

  "Unless it's not the CCD behind it. Then they won't be afraid and it won't be censored."

  He nodded. He hadn't wasted time agreeing with her that she'd been stupid and chastising her for it and threatening reprisals; all his intellect was focused now on dealing with the situation, with this curious boy and the position she'd put him in.

  "Well, he could be useful, you know," he said.

  "I know he could be useful. I saw that from the start. I'm just angry with myself for putting him at risk."

  "As long as you cover it all, there won't be much risk to him."

  "Well...it's affecting him. When he was telling me about the strangling, he found himself crying."

  "Natural in a young child."

  "He's a sensitive boy....There's something else. He's very close to the nuns at Godstow Priory, just across the river from the Trout. And it seems that they're looking after the child who was the subject of that court case, the daughter of Lord Asriel."

  Papadimitriou nodded.


  "You knew about it?" she went on.

  "Yes. In fact, I was discussing the matter with two colleagues in a room at the Trout. And it was your Malcolm who was serving us. That'll teach me a lesson."

  "So it was you--and the lord chancellor? Was he right about that?"

  "What did he tell you?"

  She went over it briefly.

  "What an observant boy," he said.

  "He's an only child, and I think he was fascinated by the baby. She's--I don't know--six months old or thereabouts."

  "Who else knows she's there?"

  "The boy's parents, I suppose. Presumably some of the customers of the pub, the villagers, servants...It didn't seem to be a secret."

  "Normally a child would be in the care of its mother, but in this case the woman didn't want it and said so. Custody would then fall to the father, but the court forbade it, on the grounds that he was not a fit person. No, it's not a secret, but it might become important."

  "One more thing," said Hannah. She told him about the CCD men who tried to arrest George Boatwright, and their interest in the men who had been in the Trout. "That must have been you and Lord Nugent," she said. "But they were asking about another man."

  "There were three of us," said Papadimitriou. He finished the wine.

  "Another glass?" she said.

  "No, thank you. Don't call me again like this. The porter at Jordan is a gossip. If you want to contact me, put a card on the notice board outside the History Faculty Library, saying simply 'Candle.' That will be a signal to go to the next Evensong at Wykeham. I shall be sitting alone. You will sit next to me and we can talk quietly under the music."

  "Candle. I understand. And if you want to contact me?"

  "If I do, you will know about it. I think you did well to recruit this boy. Look after him."

  The headquarters of the secret service that employed Hannah Relf was known to its agents as Oakley Street for the simple reason that that respectable Chelsea thoroughfare was nowhere near it and had nothing to do with it at all.

  That was not known to Hannah, though. She had never been to the headquarters of the service, and as far as she was aware, the words Oakley Street, wherever that was, meant no more than a straightforward address. Apart from Professor Papadimitriou, almost her only contact with the service was the acorn. She gathered it with its query, and left it with her reply, in one of a number of different hiding places that Oakley Street called left-luggage boxes. The person who left it for her and took it away again, the late Mr. Luckhurst, was known as an insulator: neither of them knew the other, which meant that they wouldn't be able to reveal anything if questioned.

  The one other way of talking to Oakley Street was through a cataloger at the Bodleian Library. What she had to do was submit a query about the catalog number of a particular book, which would tell him that she wanted to pass a message to the service. The book didn't matter, but the author's name did: the first letter of the surname was a code that indicated the matter she wanted to talk about.

  Accordingly, she submitted her query on the official form, and the following day she received a note inviting her to meet the cataloger, Harry Dibdin, in his office at eleven a.m.

  Dibdin was a thin, sandy-colored man, whose daemon was a bird of some tropical kind she didn't know. He shut the door and lifted a pile of books off the visitor's chair before offering her a cup of coffee.

  "Cataloging queries can take time," he said. "And we always pay scrupulous attention to the views of distinguished scholars."

  "In that case, I'd like some coffee, thank you," she said.

  He plugged in an anbaric kettle and fussed with some cups.

  "You can talk in here with perfect confidence," he said. "No one can hear us at all. You wanted to contact Oakley Street. What's it about?"

  "My insulator has been murdered. I'm pretty sure of that. By the CCD. For the time being, I've got no way of contacting my clients."

  She meant the four or five Oakley Street officers who sent her questions in the acorn.

  "Murdered?" said Dibdin. "How do you know?"

  She told him the story. By the time she finished, he had poured the coffee and handed her a cup.

  "If you'd like milk, I'll have to go and hunt for some. I've got sugar, though."

  "Black is fine. Thank you."

  "Are your clients in a hurry?" he said, sitting down. His daemon fluttered an exotic tail and settled on his shoulder.

  "If they were in a hurry, they wouldn't be consulting the alethiometer," she said. "But it's not something I want to postpone if I can help it."

  "Quite. Are you sure that Oakley Street doesn't know about your insulator?"

  "No. I'm not sure of anything. But when a system that's worked for eighteen months suddenly goes wrong--"

  "You're worried about what he might have given away before they killed him?"

  "Of course. He didn't know me, but he knew where all the left-luggage boxes were, and they could watch them."

  "How many did you use?"

  "Nine."

  "In strict rotation?"

  "No. There was a code, which--"

  "Don't tell me what it was. But it meant you could pick up or drop a message and go straight to the right box? And he'd do the same?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, nine...They won't have enough agents to watch nine boxes twenty-four hours a day. Wouldn't do any harm to find some new ones, though. Let Oakley Street know through me where they are. And if the insulator didn't know you, you're in no danger."

  "So for the moment..."

  "Do nothing more than look for the new boxes. When Oakley Street's put a new insulator in place, I'll let you know."

  "Thanks," she said. "Actually, there was something else I was wondering about."

  "Go on."

  "Is the lord chancellor, Lord Nugent--ex-lord chancellor--an Oakley Street man?"

  Dibdin blinked, and his daemon shifted her feet.

  "I don't know," he said.

  "Yes, you do. And by the way you reacted, I can tell that he is."

  "I didn't say that."

  "Not in so many words. Here's another question: What's the significance of the child of a man called Lord Asriel and a woman called Mrs. Coulter?"

  He said nothing for several seconds. Then he rubbed his jaw, and his daemon chirruped something quietly in his ear.

  "What do you know about a child?" he asked.

  "That child is in the care of some nuns at Godstow. She's a baby--six months old or so. Why is Lord Nugent interested in her?"

  "I can't imagine. How do you know he is?"

  "I think he was responsible for getting her placed there."

  "Perhaps he's a friend of the parents. Not everything's connected to Oakley Street, you know."

  "No. You're probably right. Thanks for the coffee."

  "A pleasure," he said, opening the door for her. "Anytime."

  As she made her way back to Duke Humfrey, she resolved never to mention Oakley Street to Malcolm. He didn't need to know anything about that. And she would have to subdue the guilt she felt about asking him to spy; there was nothing about this business that was comfortable, nothing at all.

  --

  Malcolm spent some time helping Mr. Taphouse with the shutters. He liked the new anbaric drill very much, and when Mr. Taphouse, after much pestering, let him try it, he liked it even more. They put up all the shutters that Mr. Taphouse had made, and then went back to the workshop and made some more.

  "Had to pay a fortune for this oak," the old man grumbled. "Sister Benedicta don't like paying so much, but I says to her deal's deal and oak's oak, and she saw the sense in the end."

  "It's only as strong as the fixing anyway," said Malcolm, who'd heard Mr. Taphouse say those words many times.

  "Yeah, but big wood like this'll hold a big fixing. It'd take a long time with a screwdriver to get them screws out the wall."

  "I was thinking," said Malcolm, "about these screws, right. You know when the
slot gets worn away, it's much harder to undo, because the screwdriver can't bite?"

  "What about it?"

  "Well, s'pose we filed the head of the screw so you could do it up but not undo it?"

  "How d'you mean?"

  Malcolm put a screw in the vise and filed away part of the head to show Mr. Taphouse what he meant.

  "See, you can turn it to screw it in, but there's nothing to turn against if you want to unscrew it."

  "Oh, yeah. That's a good idea, Malcolm. A very good idea. But suppose Sister Benedicta changes her mind next year and tells me to take 'em all down again?"

  "Oh. I hadn't thought of that."

  "Well, let me know when you have," said the old man.

  His daemon cackled. Malcolm wasn't put out; he liked his idea and thought he could work on it to improve it. He put the screw in his top pocket and helped Mr. Taphouse with the next shutter.

  "You going to varnish 'em, Mr. Taphouse?" he said.

  "No. Danish oil, boy. Best thing there is. You know what you got to watch out for with Danish oil?"

  "No. What?"

  "Spontaneous combustion," the old man said roundly. "You put it on with a rag, see, and if you don't soak the rag in water after you've finished and dry it flat, it'll catch fire all by itself."

  "What did you call it? Spon--"

  "Spontaneous combustion."

  Malcolm said it again for the pleasure of it.

  After the carpenter had gone home, Malcolm went to the priory kitchen to talk to Sister Fenella. The old nun was cutting up a cabbage, and Malcolm took a knife and helped her.

  "What have you been up to, Malcolm?" she said.

  "Helping Mr. Taphouse," he said. "You know those shutters he's making, Sister Fenella? Why are you having shutters put up?"

  "It was some advice we had from the police," she said. "They came and saw Sister Benedicta and told her there'd been a lot of burglaries in Oxford recently. And they thought of all the silver and plate and the precious vestments and so on, and advised us to put up some extra protection."

  "Not for the baby, then?"

  "Well, it'll protect her as well, of course."

  "How is she?"

  "Oh, she's very lively."

  "Can I see her again?"

  "If there's time."

  "I made her a present."

  "Oh, Malcolm, that's kind...."

  "I've got it here. I always carry it, just in case I can see her."

  "Well, that's very good of you."

  "So can I see her?"