The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) Read Online Free PDF

look.”
    On the back there was a timetable showing the dates of arrival and departure at various ports. The ship would leave London on Thursday, April 17, and return to Southampton on Saturday, May 23, calling at fourteen cities en route. And someone had circled the date Monday, May 11, when the Zenobia called at Smyrna, and drawn a line from that to the scribbled words Café Antalya, Süleiman Square, 11 a.m.
    “An appointment!” said Pan.
    He sprang from the table to the mantelpiece and stood, paws against the wall, to scrutinize the calendar that hung there.
    “It’s not this year—wait—it’s next year!” he said. “Those are the right days of the week. It hasn’t happened yet. What are we going to do?”
    “Well…,” said Lyra, “we really ought to take it to the police. I mean, there’s no doubt about that, is there?”
    “No,” said Pan, jumping back onto the table. He turned the papers around to read them more closely. “Is that everything in the wallet?”
    “I think so.” Lyra looked through it again, pushing her fingers down into the pockets. “No—wait—there’s something here….A coin?”
    She turned the wallet upside down and shook it. It wasn’t a coin that fell out, but a key with a round metal tag attached to it, bearing the number 36.
    “That looks like…,” said Pan.
    “Yes. We’ve seen one of those….We’ve had one of those. When was it?”
    “Last year…the railway station…”
    “Left luggage!” Lyra said. “He put something in a left-luggage locker.”
    “The bag they thought he ought to be carrying!”
    “It must be still there.”
    They looked at each other with wide eyes.
    Then Lyra shook her head. “We should take this to the police,” she said. “We’ve done what anyone would have done, we’ve looked to see who it belonged to and—and…”
    “Well, we could take it to the Botanic Garden. The Plant Sciences place. They’d know who he was.”
    “Yes, but we know that he was killed. So it’s really a matter for the police. We’ve got to, Pan.”
    “Mm,” he said. “S’pose so.”
    “But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t copy a few things. The dates of his journey, the appointment in Smyrna…”
    She wrote them down.
    “Is that everything?” he said.
    “Yes. I’ll try and get them all back in the right places, and then we’ll go to the police station.”
    “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