Chapter Six Eagle Works Terrier 1500 #2
No! It wasn’t Pan—how could she ever think that? There was no Pan. It was Olivier Bonneville—he was shouting about the alethiometer, his face red, eyes wild, spittle flying. Lyra hit him with both fists and immediately cried out in anguish herself, because her left hand—
Bonneville had one hand around Lyra’s neck.
She twisted her head this way and that, trying to reach his wrist to sink her teeth into it, while with her right hand she slashed and tore and pummeled at the young man’s face, and slammed her knees and feet into his thighs and shins.
His hawk daemon swept and dived and wheeled close above them, and Lyra managed to seize a wing for one anbaric second and wrenched it hard and the daemon fell fluttering and screaming beside them, so Bonneville let go of her throat and turned to scoop the daemon up and Lyra kicked him in the back, below the ribs, and he sprawled gasping onto the gravel.
The target was still there: she kicked it again, merciless, smashing a foot with all her force right where his kidneys were.
She would have killed him if she could. But he had enough strength to scramble away, and she hadn’t enough to follow, so she stood shaking and panting and holding tight to her left hand and watched as the young man dragged himself upright on a cedar branch before stumbling away and out of the garden, his daemon hanging limp in his hands.
Lyra fell back on the bench in the empty garden and sobbed.
—
Alice Lonsdale, asleep on a hard bunk in a commandeered and nearly derelict barracks, found herself shaken awake before dawn. She pushed the hand away violently.
“Alice Lonsdale, get up,” said a man’s voice.
“Don’t you touch me again,” she said, heavy with sleep.
The sheet (dirty) and the blankets (thin) were suddenly snatched away. She was sleeping fully clothed because of the cold. Her dog daemon, Ben, who had been asleep by her feet, immediately leapt forward to guard her, snarling, and Alice sat up and put her arms around him tightly.
There were two men in the room: she could see them against the dim light from the window. They both carried heavy batons.
“Get up, Alice,” the same voice said. “Someone needs to talk to you.”
“D’you want to put your coat on?” said the other man, taking it down from the hook behind the door.
“What’s happening?” said the girl in the upper bunk, only just awake. “Alice, who is it?”
“ ’S all right, Sonia. You stay there. Here—have these blankets. I don’t suppose I’ll be back for a while.”
Alice threw her blankets up and the girl murmured her thanks before pulling them up and turning over.
“Here, put it on,” said the man holding out the coat. “It’s cold out there.”
“Where we going?”
“You’ll find out. Come on.”
He pulled at her arm and she snatched it back.
“Let me put my bloody shoes on,” she said.
“Manners,” said the first man.
“Fuck off.”
The sleepers in the other two bunks were awake now, Alice could tell, but none of them dared make a sound. The shoes were not her own, but loose gym shoes with fragile laces. She sat on the bunk and tied them, carefully in case they broke.
She tugged the coat around her shoulders and wrenched her arm away from the man who tried to hold it.
“I en’t going to run away. Take your hands off.”
They locked the barracks door and marched her along the pitted road between the other buildings. In the faint dawn light she could see that most of them needed repair, and in one the roof had entirely collapsed. The road led up to a high steel fence shutting off the barracks from the woods beyond.
“Where we going?” Alice said, again.
“Inspector Mackenzie.” It was the second man who spoke.
“Who’s he?”
“He wants to ask you some questions.”
“Yeah, but who is he? Is that a police rank or what?”
“If he wants you to know, I expect he’ll tell you.”
“So you don’t know, then. What about your boss here? Does he know?”
“He en’t my boss.”
“Shut up,” said the other man to Alice. “One more word and you can go there in handcuffs.”
Not far from the fence they came to a junction.
They turned left, parallel to the edge of the woods, where the road was wider and better maintained.
The darkness was retreating every minute, as if it was withdrawing from the buildings and sifting into the trees.
One building actually had some lights on in the windows.
It was made of brick, like the dormitory buildings but bigger and in a better state of repair.
“Is that where Inspector Mackenzie is?” said Alice.
“Yes,” said the second man.
“What’s this building called, then?”
“I told you to shut up,” said the first man.
“Just asking.”
“You don’t need to know,” he said, but by that time they were outside the front door and Alice could read the brass plate beside it. It was new and highly polished, and it said:
brYTSEC
ORD Corrective Division
Southern Region
“That’s not straight,” Alice pointed out.
It had been put up in a hurry: the light was getting clearer every minute, and in any case an anbaric lamp had come on over the door, and Alice could see the scratches on the brass where a screwdriver had slipped.
“Just shut up,” said the first man again as his colleague rang the bell.
“It wouldn’t have cost much to get a spirit level. Even I could do it straighter than what that is. And what’s brYTSEC? And ORD?”
“Ask Inspector Mackenzie.”
“I will.”
A key turned in a lock, and the door opened narrowly. The first man showed a pass or a badge, and the door opened fully. The second man urged Alice forward with a hand on her back. She twisted away from the touch.
“Inspector Mackenzie,” said the first man.
The officer at the door nodded. “Name?”
“Alice Lonsdale. B5. Mind she behaves herself.”
B5 was the dormitory building where Alice slept. The officer ticked something off on a clipboard and said, “Follow me.”
Alice turned and looked at the two men who’d taken her from the cell, memorizing their faces.
“Go on. Follow the officer,” said the second man.
Ben nudged her knee, and she sauntered towards the officer, who was standing at the foot of the stairs tapping his fingers on the clipboard. Alice heard the front door close behind them, and caught Ben’s eye. They both thought: They didn’t have the key. It’s not locked.
“Where we going?” said Alice.
“Second floor.”
“Who’s Inspector Mackenzie?”
“ORD Special Services.”
“What’s ORD?”
“None of your business. Save your breath, and get a move on.”
His daemon was a crow, and she watched them with a cold eye as they followed him.
The stairs were bare concrete, with a wooden handrail on both sides.
On the second floor they went along a drably painted corridor under flickering overhead lights, and passed no windows, no pictures, no notice boards; just an endless row of numbered doors, painted the same institutional cream as the walls.
The officer knocked at number 239 and opened the door straightaway.
“Mrs. Lonsdale, B5, for you, sir,” he said.
A man’s soft voice said, “Thank you. Show her in.”
When Alice entered the room she found that the inspector was a plump man in his fifties, with brilliantined gray hair, pale blue eyes, and an expression of kindly understanding.
His daemon was a gray Persian cat. Something about him reminded Alice of the librarian at her school, who had been the only member of staff to take an interest in her, but it was an interest she hadn’t enjoyed.
“Sit down,” he said as the officer left and closed the door.
There was a single upright wooden chair in front of a light, flimsy desk.
The window on the inspector’s left showed the steel fence on the other side of the road and the wood beyond, where the first light of dawn was developing into a damp gray.
Apart from that, the only lighting was a fluorescent anbaric tube overhead.
Alice sat down. The inspector had been leafing through a file, turning the pages and making an occasional note in pencil.
There was nothing else on the desk, no shelves on the wall, not even a filing cabinet.
An iron radiator under the window put out a thick oppressive heat, which seemed to intensify the musky kind of cologne the man was wearing.
The inspector went on looking through the file; Alice kept on looking at him.
It was a paradoxical face: patience and even friendliness, as her first impression had shown, but there was something pitiless there too.
It was the kind of soft face that would take pleasure in watching someone else being very cruel.
His white uniform shirt was a little grubby around the cuffs: this was so early in the day that he must either be wearing yesterday’s or have worked all night.
There was a little redness around his eyes.
Alice took all this in, and then stared at the cat daemon, but cats were inscrutable; this one’s flat face and half-closed eyes gave nothing away.
Inspector Mackenzie closed the file and laid his pencil down beside it, precisely parallel to the edge. He raised his eyes to look at Alice.
“Do you know a man called Malcolm Polstead?”
Alice was only slightly surprised. “He’s an old friend.”
“Lover?”
“Mind your own business.”
“Known him long?”
“Since we were kids. Twenty years, more or less.”
“Where is he now?”
“Buggered if I know.”
“You might want to watch your tongue. When did you last see him?”
“Early January, far as I remember.”
“When did he go away?”
“Soon after that.”
“He didn’t tell you where he was going?”
“Why would he?”
“You’re old friends. You see him often?”
“Every few weeks, I suppose.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s a scholar. An archaeologist.”
“What, you can do that for a living?”
“If you’re good at it.”
“Does he do a lot of traveling?”
“A fair amount.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Well, if his job involves digging up old ruins, he’s got to go where the ruins are, hasn’t he? Why are you asking about him, anyway?”
“Has he got any family? Wife, kids?”