They were witches.

Yes, Jim, I heard you.  You're suggesting, aren't you, that Professor Belacqua and Miss Morley were both witches.  'It all adds up, doesn't it,' I heard you say.  'Funny stuff with daemons that aren't there when you expect them to be, or turn up when they shouldn't.'  Like the dream-Pantalaimon who must have been real after all.  Or Miss Morley's missing daemon.  'They were both of them witches all along!'

All right, I see your point.  Witch-daemons can wander about pretty much as they like. There's two things, though.  First, the last time I heard, witches were all at least four hundred years old and fabulously beautiful.  Miss Morley was certainly not fabulously beautiful (and why would she have a fake daemon?) and Professor Belacqua, although she held my heart in her hand, was beautiful in a different sort of way.

The other thing is that it turned out that they weren't witches.  Neither of them.  You'll have to believe me for now, Jim.

We met, all of us, in Professor Belacqua's rooms the following night.   It felt like a conspiracy.  There was me, the Professor, Mr Shire and a younger man who was his partner on the boats.  No, not Stan, Maggie Tulliver's younger brother who I knew had once worked with Mr Shire.  He'd returned to the land and settled years before.  I only ever knew this man as Harry.

The Professor kicked off the proceedings:

'We're here because, except for Peter, we were all once at Bolvangar.  Peter knows something of what happened there.  He is someone I trust.'  I blushed.  'One day he may be a great alethiometrist.'  I blushed a deeper red.  'If he continues his studies and pays attention to what I teach him,' she continued, mock-stern.

We talked for two hours.  I listened more than I talked, and I hope I learned something.  I heard names that I had not heard before – "Will" and "Kirjava" and "Mrs Coulter", who was the Professor's mother.  I learned that she had disappeared many years before, and nobody knew for sure what had happened to her, or to the Professor's father Lord Asriel (Lord Asriel!  There was a famous name from the past!)  but that Mr Shire had had a vision of her death, falling into a deep pit of darkness.  It seemed that the Professor believed this vision to be true and that Mr Shire was regarded as an oracle among his people.  Something of a mystic, too.

I heard another word – Dust.  That's right, with a capital D.  It didn't mean much to me at the time (that was to change) but the others thought that it was very important.  Oh yes, I remember there was one other name.  Elizabeth Boreal.  The Professor had had dealings with her, too.  By this stage, I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd told me that she'd been the Pope's mistress, or the King's; the way everything was expanding around me.  I felt as if, all my life, I'd been walking down narrow corridors, the walls close by and comforting and visible – nothing hidden, everything plainly in view – and suddenly the corridor had opened out into a vast cavern.  The walls, so to speak, were dark and distant, the ceiling hundreds of feet above me and, in the shadows… what?  There could be anything there, hiding, waiting.  Possibly hostile, possibly friendly.  Who could say?  I had a choice.  I could stop there, safe and warm, or turn back into the corridor.  Or I could walk out into the darkness of the great cave and explore it.

One day, if I'm spared, I may look back at that evening and say, 'That was it.  That was the moment when everything changed and I stopped being a boy and started to grow up.'  You might think that that's a funny thing for a fifteen years old clockmaker's apprentice to write down, but I've seen things and done things that nobody could possibly see and do without being changed by them.

I chose to go forward, into the unknown.  They asked me to make sure that when Master James was next summoned to Cropredy, I went with him.  I should look out for strange, wrong, things.

'What we fears is this,' said Mr Shire.  'We fears they is building a new Bolvangar there in Cropredy.  But we needs to be sure.'

'You'll be careful, Peter, won't you?' said the Professor, her pale blue eyes clouding over with concern for me.  'These people won't worry about the law, or right and wrong.'

'Be like us.'  That was Mr Shire.  'Unimportant.  Insignificant.  Invisible.  Nobody notices us little people.'

I've noticed that I've not said much about my work for a page or two.  You can be sure that ordinary life carried on as usual while we conspirators worried about what was going on inside the Boreal Foundation.  My next opportunity to do a bit of amateur detective work came up a couple of weeks later.

Master James and me were summoned to Cropredy just as before, by letter.  We took the autobus, got off at the green, walked up the gravel road and went through the same boring procedure at the gates.  There was no sign of Miss Morley this time round.  One of the security guards told us what we had to do.

Our task was to regulate the all the clocks in the house.  This sounds like an enormous job, but it was made simpler by the way the clocks worked.  Instead of having lots of clocks around the place, each of them needing to be wound up and adjusted, there was one master clock which was fixed to the wall in the room where they kept all the keys.  The house was all offices on the ground floor, you see.  This master clock had wires running from it to slave clocks in all the other rooms.  Anbaric impulses from this master clock went to all the slave clocks, along the wires, so that they all ticked (and tocked) together.  It was an odd feeling, to stand in a hallway and see the second hands of two clocks in two different rooms moving together, as if they were both part of one big clock, connected by wires instead of cogs and gears and spindles.  (Master told me afterwards that he had seen a similar arrangement in big government offices).

Master James cleaned, oiled and adjusted the master clock.  It was driven anbarically, too, but it had the same pendulum and escapement as a normal wind-up or weight-driven movement.  He checked it over and set it against his own pocket chronometer.  Then he closed its airtight case and stood back, satisfied with his work.  'That's fine, Peter,' he said, handing me back his tools to put away.  'Now we've got to set all the slaves right as well.'  He made me check my own watch against his chronometer.  'You take all the offices over there and the outbuildings.  I'll do the other side and upstairs.  See you back here in fifteen minutes.'

The slave clocks had been stopped while Master James worked on the master, so they were all slow, by half an hour or so.  My paper badge got me into all the offices and I had a fine time standing on people's desks, taking the clocks down from the walls and setting them, and trying not to look as if I was peering at their work (which I was).  Actually, it was all boring stuff – official letters and big ledgers full of columns of figures.  Fascinating, I'm sure, if you were interested in the way the Boreal Foundation did their business, but that wasn't what I was after.

When I'd finished with the offices I left the main house and crossed the yard to the brick outbuildings.  I'd seen cables slung from the house to the stables and guessed that there would be slave clocks out there too.  That was my excuse, anyway.

The first building contained, according to the sign on the door, the factor's office.  Sure enough, there was a clock in there and it was half an hour slow.

The second building…

I described it to the Professor later.  I trembled as I did so, even though I knew that her anger, fear and disgust were not aimed at me, but at the people who were doing such terrible things.

'It was an open space and it was lit by those new-fangled tubes.  They were very bright, the walls were all whitewashed and there was a shiny marble floor.  There wasn't anywhere you could hide in there, there was so much light.  On one side there was a set of double doors and that big car – you know, the one that was parked outside the first time we were there – was standing there.  I thought it must have been driven in and left, like it was in a garage.  I noticed that the boot was open and there were what looked like glass cylinders in it.  I wondered where they kept the luggage.

'Leading from the back of the car were a couple of thick cables.  Oh yes, I meant to say that some of the cylinders looked like they had something in them, like a yellow gas.  Or they were painted yellow.  It was hard to tell.'

The Professor nodded to me.  'I see.  Go on, Peter.'

'The cables went up to the ceiling where there was a metal frame they hung from.  They crossed over to the other side of the open space where they were joined to the… the thing that was there.'  I stopped.  I was gulping for air.

'Peter.  You must tell me everything.  Everything you saw.'

'It was… like you said it was in Bolvangar.  There were two cages, over tables, like you see in a hospital.  They were made of a silvery metal.  Cables, covered in black insulation, I suppose led from each cage to a… a guillotine.  It was set up between the cages.  The blade was pulled up to the top.  It was made of a silvery metal too, but it was cloudy as well.  Madam Professor, there were straps on the tables.  Were they for tying people down with?'

'Yes, Peter, they were.'

'I thought so.  There was blood, dried blood, on them.  On the tables and the cages.  They were too small for a grown-up.  They were for kids, I could tell.  They were for little kids.  Little kids…'

The Professor took out a lightly scented handkerchief and gently wiped the tears from my eyes, as I had so wanted to wipe them from hers before.  She was trembling as much as I was, and her Pantalaimon was nuzzling her neck, just as my Viola was comforting me.  Her lips were moving and I caught a few of the words – "Roger", and "Tony" and, again, "Will".

'I was tied to one of those slabs, once,' she said.  'I'll never forget it, the day they tried to take Pan away from me.  Did anything else happen?'

'Oh, not much.  A man burst in the side door and started shouting at me.  I looked as stupid as I could – which wasn't hard, the way I was feeling – and I just kept asking him where the clocks were.  He said there weren't any effing clocks, called me an effing idiot and told me to eff off quickly.  I think he was scared.  He'd left the door unlocked, and I'd got in, and if anyone found out he'd lose his job.'

'That sounds likely enough.'

'I found Master James in the house, and we signed out and went home.  He looked at me a bit oddly, and asked if I was feeling all right – which I obviously wasn't – and I said my stomach was feeling a bit dodgy.  Which was true enough, if not for the reason he supposed.'

'You've been very brave, Peter.'  The Professor kissed me on the cheek, her lips scarcely brushing against my skin.  'Sorry!' she cried, sitting back and grinning like a schoolgirl.  'I do believe I've embarrassed you!'

There were laws, I learned, left over from the days of the Magisterium, which banned theological research into Dust, or Rusakov particles, as they were known.  The Professor said that we could probably use those laws, not to mention the normal everyday laws against kidnapping and killing children ('Yes, Peter, they all died in the end, even the ones who clung on to life for a few days after the operation').  But it would take time, and while we were going to the police and getting a search warrant (assuming we could find a magistrate who would issue a search warrant for Boreal premises) the evidence would have been quietly removed and the whole hideous apparatus set up somewhere else.  Arthur Shire said it best:  'It's no good waiting.  We must go in and shut the bastards down ourselves.'

'I could try talking to Elizabeth…'

'No, Lyra.  It wouldn't work.  She'd deny it. We've only got Peter's evidence against her.'

'I'll talk to Will.'  Again, this mysterious Will, who I'd never met.

'You does that.  Meanwhile, we're going to get ourselves organised.  We're going to burn that damned place to the ground, and we doesn't care how many of those Boreal bastards are inside it when we does.  The more, the better.

'And if that sister of yours is in there too, so much the better…  The bitch can roast with the rest of them.'