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the river curved around to the left. Without discussing it, Lyra and Pan moved slowly that way to see where he would have gone.
    The path made directly along the bank towards a footbridge over the stream, which in turn led to the narrow streets of back-to-back houses around the gasworks, and the parish of St. Ebbe’s proper.
    “So that’s where he was going,” said Pan.
    “Even if he didn’t know it. Even if he was only following the path.”
    “And that’s where the other man must have come from—the one who didn’t come from the mail depot.”
    “You could get to anywhere from there,” Lyra said. “All those tangled old streets in St. Ebbe’s, and then St. Aldate’s and Carfax…Anywhere.”
    “But we’ll never find it. Not by guessing.”
    They both knew why they were talking like this, at the end of the footbridge over the stream. Neither of them wanted to go and look at the place where the man had been killed.
    “We ought to, though,” she said, and he said, “Yes. Come on.”
    They turned back and wandered along the bank of the river, making for the willow and the oak, where rushes grew thickly and the path was muddy. Lyra looked casually all around, but there was no one sinister or threatening: just some children playing by the stream further back, a few men working their allotments, and an elderly couple on the path ahead, walking arm in arm and carrying shopping bags.
    They passed the old couple, who smiled and nodded when Lyra said, “Good morning,” and then they were under the oak tree. Pan leapt up from Lyra’s shoulder and showed her where he’d lain along the branch, and then sprang down again and flowed along the grass towards the willow.
    She followed him, looking for signs of a struggle on the ground, but seeing only grass and trampled mud that was no different from the rest of the path.
    “Anyone coming?” she said to Pan.
    He jumped up to her shoulder and looked around. “A woman with a small child and a shopping bag coming over the footbridge. No one else.”
    “Let’s look in the rushes. About here, was it?”
    “Yes. Right here.”
    “And he pulled the dead man down to the water?”
    “In among the rushes, but not all the way down. Not when I was watching, anyway. He probably came back later and did that.”
    Lyra stepped off the path and down the slope where the rushes grew. They were tall, and the slope was steep, and only six feet or so from the path she was invisible from anywhere in the meadow. It was hard to keep her footing and her shoes would be ruined, but she found her balance and crouched down low and looked around carefully. Some of the rushes had been bent over, their stems broken, and something had been pulled down over the mud, something that might easily have been the size of a man.
    But there was no sign of a body.
    “We can’t lurk about here too long,” she said, clambering out. “We really will look suspicious.”
    “Station, then.”
    As they walked along the path next to the mail depot, they heard the great bell of Cardinal’s College tolling eleven, and Lyra thought of the lecture that she should be attending just then, the last of the term. Annie and Helen would be there, though, and she could borrow their notes; and perhaps that good-looking shy boy from Magdalen would be sitting at the back, as before, and perhaps this time she could have gone to sit right next to him and see what happened; and everything would go back to normal. Except that as long as that locker key was in her pocket, nothing would be normal.
    “It used to be you who was impulsive,” said Pan, “and me who kept holding you back. We’re different now.”
    She nodded. “Well, you know, things change….We could wait, Pan, and go back to St. Aldate’s when that policeman goes off duty. Like this evening, about six, maybe. They can’t all be in a conspiracy with him. There must be someone honest there. This isn’t…this isn’t just shoplifting. This is