Chapter Sixteen Out of Bounds #2
“We’d better wait here,” she said. There was an empty bench close to the clock, and she sat down with the rucksack on her lap. Asta jumped up and sat beside her. “Sorry to make you sit on my shoulder,” Lyra went on.
“No choice. Anyway, it was perfectly comfortable.”
“But, you know…I don’t…”
She had no idea what she was going to say. Suddenly it had become awkward between them.
“In an emergency…” Asta said.
“Yes, of course.”
“Don’t worry about it. But…look who’s coming.”
They hadn’t finished the lighting on Platform One.
Fluorescent tubes hung from bare wires at seemingly random intervals, and gave patches of light between wider stretches of darkness.
In one of those dark areas, to their right as they sat on the bench, a man was walking slowly towards them.
When he came to one of the patches of light, the first thing Lyra saw was a cloth cap.
His face was lit for a moment before the peak of the cap shaded it, and then was lost in darkness again, but there was no doubt.
“Dumitriu,” she said.
She loosened the flap of her rucksack and felt for the stick.
There it was, the hard cord binding the handle, comfortable to her hand, smooth and heavy.
Dumitriu came steadily closer, and he was looking at her; she knew her face was in the light, and she tilted it a little towards him so he could see that she was ready to fight. Asta stood up, her tail waving slowly.
The man was walking in the middle of the platform, but when he came closer he moved out slightly, towards the edge. Was he going to turn in towards her and run up before he attacked? Did he have a gun? How would it happen? And where was Ionides?
Lyra drew the stick slightly out of the rucksack. Dumitriu saw her move, and looked ahead again and carried on walking slowly past, and away down the platform. She realized she’d been holding her breath, and released it.
“He saw what you were doing,” said Asta. “With the stick.”
“Good. He’s turning around.”
But he only made for the timetable on the nearest wall.
He ran his finger down a column, presumably of departure times, and then looked at his wristwatch, and then at the clock above the platform, and then took off his watch and adjusted it.
He didn’t look at Lyra once. Then he sauntered to the nearest bench and sat down.
“Miss Silver,” said Ionides, and Lyra jumped.
He was standing just a yard away, easy and relaxed.
“But—look, he’s just over there,” she said, and nodded in the direction of Dumitriu.
“Him? No, that’s not him. You see a man with briefcase and big glasses?”
“That wasn’t him, was it?”
“It was, but not now.”
“You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“No need. When you see bad guy and nearby also policeman and also young woman with open bag, what you do is you take purse out of her bag and drop it in bad guy’s pocket and then tell policeman you see him stealing it.
They argue for long time, and then policeman’s got to arrest him. The evidence is clear. Undeniable.”
“And all the time we thought…”
She looked at cloth-cap man again. He looked entirely innocent.
“Well,” said Asta.
“Thank you!” said Lyra. “That was very clever.”
“Right, Miss Silver. What we do now? You want to find hotel?”
“It’s nearly eleven…Too late to call on Mr. Green now. Yes, let’s find a cheap hotel.”
Ionides had an instinct for that sort of search. Within fifteen minutes they had checked into a clean but shabby place only a step from the station, and Lyra was falling asleep in a very small bedroom. Asta sat on the windowsill, just watching the street.
—
Alice Lonsdale’s lift took her to St. Clement’s, just before Magdalen Bridge and the beginning of Oxford High Street.
The driver was agreeable enough, but taciturn, and not at all curious about what this young woman was doing on her own; after a few attempts at conversation they sat more or less in silence till the van drew up at the end of the Iffley Road and she said thanks and goodbye.
“Now what should we do, Ben?” she said.
“Find something to eat,” he said.
“Don’t be a fathead. Got no money, have we. I mean, Jordan or the Trout?”
“Jordan’s closer. They’ll be serving lunch about now. If we go to Brasenose Lane in about half an hour some of the kitchen staff’ll be coming out for a smoke.”
“Worth a try. But we’ll have to go to Godstow eventually.”
“To hide, you mean?”
“For a while. Probably not long. Actually,” she added, “maybe give Jordan a miss.”
“Gossip?”
“Yeah. If they know I’m back, it’ll be all round the college in five minutes. And I don’t trust that place now.”
“Right. Long walk, then.”
“Lazy bugger.”
“I wish I was a mouse or a bird sometimes.”
“Bloody mouse wouldn’t keep my feet warm, would he?”
“I could sit in your pocket, though.”
She had to try to look as if she was busy, and it would have helped a great deal to have a bag of some sort so she could have pretended to be shopping; she knew she’d never look like a lady of leisure out for a stroll, and even if she was, she’d have something to carry, a shoulder bag or a handbag.
Well, have to do the best we can, she thought.
They crossed the bridge and turned left down Rose Lane, past the Botanic Garden, and into Cardinal’s Meadow.
It was a gray, still sort of day, too early in the year for tourists or cricket or punts.
There were children playing in their lunch hour in the school ground nearby, but few people on the Broad Walk: an elderly man in tweeds who might have been a Scholar; a couple of young men dressed for football on their way to the Iffley Road sports ground, who gave her an appraising look (one) and a faint smile (the other), both of which she ignored; and further off, just coming into the Broad Walk from St. Aldate’s, a woman with a basket of groceries.
“Turn left,” said Ben, quiet and urgent. “To the river.”
“Who is it?” muttered Alice as she did what he said and turned onto the path called the Poplar Walk.
“Hunch your shoulder or something. Limp. Keep your head bowed.”
“Who is it?”
“Sheila Murphy.”
“Shit…”
The woman was still too far off to have recognized Alice, but they were old friends and it would be hard to avoid a conversation if she saw her.
They moved a little faster, with Ben trotting ahead, so it looked as if they were going somewhere for a definite purpose. From time to time Ben stopped and looked around impatiently, but he was really looking to see if the other woman was following.
But she wasn’t. She went straight on along the Broad Walk and up towards the High Street.
When she was out of sight, Ben said, “We could just carry on along the river. Not so many people.”
“Yeah…Let’s do that. Better have some explanation ready just in case, though.”
It would probably be a little quicker too; the river led along the edge of Port Meadow, and then it was only a step to Godstow and the Trout.
“I wonder if there’s a search on for us,” said Ben as they skirted the area near the Royal Mail depot, where Pan had seen the murder of Roderick Hassall earlier in the year.
“Not important enough.”
“We stole a truck, though. Broke a fence.”
“Still not very important.”
“What are we going to say when someone we know sees us?”
“Say they did arrest us, just rounded us up with lots of other people, but they couldn’t find anything to charge us with and let us go.”
“That might work, I suppose…”
“Thing is, no one knows what they do or why they do it. Don’t suppose they know themselves, really, most of ’em. Just following orders they don’t understand.”
“He was really trying to frame Malcolm, though, that officer.”
“Bastard.”
“An accusation like that…It’s impossible to clear it, really.”
Alice thought of Malcolm now, and wondered where he was; and then of Malcolm the boy, and the canoe and the flood, and how cold and scornful she’d been to him at first, and how he’d risked everything to save the baby Lyra, and how much she’d come to realize that and admire him.
“Round by the river or straight across?” said Ben.
They had come to the edge of the great meadow.
There was a small group of horses further up, cropping the grass, and a couple of cows nearby drinking from the river.
A woman with a toddler was making her slow way towards the bridge at Aristotle Lane off to the right, two girls were walking by the riverbank and talking closely together a few hundred yards away, a couple of men were busy in the boatyard at Medley to the left, but otherwise there was no one else in sight.
“Straight across and keep our heads down,” said Alice.
The meadow was a big place. It would take a good hour to reach the other end, where the Trout stood beside the bridge she and Malcolm had hurried over twenty years ago, just before the flood carried it away.
They set off, walking fast and steadily.
“What are we going to do, anyway?” said Ben.
“Haven’t thought of that yet.”
“Can’t just go back to work.”
“Brenda’ll have something for us to do. Be out of sight in the kitchen.”
“Not for long, though. We could go to London and hide there.”
“Don’t be daft. We’ll stay at the Trout till we know what the CCD are doing, whatever they call themselves now—Brytsec, was it?”
She felt ignorant, out of touch with the world she used to know. Things had happened in the world, and she’d seen no newspapers, and the women who’d arrived in the camp more recently had brought little knowledge with them.
They’d been walking for five minutes or so when she saw something ahead.
“Is that a man on a horse?” she said.
“Can’t see…Yes,” Ben said. “A soldier.”
The rider was certainly in uniform, and he had a rifle sheathed by his saddle, and his horse was moving towards them at a canter. He was close enough already for them to hear clearly when he called:
“Halt! Stop where you are!”