Free The Shadow in the North by Philip Pullman Page B

stranger at dinner while unerringly picking up the right knife and fork—^were difficult and embarrassing still, and hampered by the memory of humiliating failures. Away from her balance sheets and her files she was really at home, truly herself, only in the cheerful haphazardness of the Garlands'. She sipped the pale brown nectar, tongue-tied, while he leafed through the papers she'd brought.
    "Nordenfels . . . ," said Mr. Temple. "Whos he? His name's come up more than once."
    "Ah. Bellmann had a partner called Nordenfels—^he was a designer, an engineer. I came across an article only yesterday in the Journal of the Royal Society of Engineers where his name was mentioned. He invented a new kind of safety valve, apparently; it worked at higher temperatures, or higher pressures, or something. I must look it up in more detail. But he disappeared—Nordenfels, I mean—oh, three or four years ago. Perhaps they just parted company. But I've got a feeling about him. ..."
    "Hmm," said Mr. Temple. "I'd avoid feelings if I were you. Go for facts and figures. You're on the track of something with this Anglo-Baltic business—that's quite clear. Have you checked the insurance on the In-gridLindeV
    "It's on that yellow sheet—all in order. It's not an insurance fraud." After a minute she went on: "This Mr.

    Windlesham mentioned a legal threat. Could he mean an injunction?"
    "I doubt it very much. The court would have to be satisfied first that the activity he complained of was wrong in itself, which you would deny; and second that the proper remedy for it would not be damages."
    "So the legal threat is a bluff?"
    "I suspect so. But there are other ways of injuring you, my dear, than by taking you to court, which is why I urge you again: Take care."
    "Yes. I will. But I'm not going to stop looking into his affairs. He's up to something wrong, Mr. Temple. I know he is."
    "You may well be right. Now, I don't want to keep you, but there's a Mr. O'Connor here who's been left a thousand pounds: shall I send him along to you, so that you can tell him how to turn it into something more?"
    At the same time, in the financial heart of the city, ex-Cabinet Minister Lord Wytham was sitting in a corridor outside an imposing office, drumming his fingers on his silk hat and getting to his feet every time a clerk came around a corner or out of a door.
    Lord Wytham was a handsome man, but with that doe-eyed, distinguished masculine beauty seen these days only in photographs of middle-aged male models. On a real face it looks like weakness. When Frederick had seen him the evening before, his first impression had been of a gnawing anxiety, and if he'd seen him

    now, that feeling would have been intensified. His fingernails were bitten to the quick, his large, dark eyes were red-rimmed, and his gray mustache was ragged where he'd chewed it. He couldn't sit still for more than a minute; if no one came along the corridor, he'd get up anyway and stare sighdessly at one of the prints on the walls or out the window overlooking Threadneedle Street, or down the marble staircase.
    Finally a door opened and a clerk came out.
    "Mr, Bellmann will see you now, my lord," he said.
    Lord Wytham snatched his silk hat from the chair, picked up his stick, and followed the clerk through an anteroom and into a large and newly furnished office. Axel Bellmann got up from behind the desk and came forward to shake hands.
    "Good of you to come, W\Tham," Bellmann said, motioning him to an armchair. "Curious evening at Lady Harborough's, was it not?"
    His voice was deep and almost unaccented, his fiice unlined, his blond hair thick and straight. He could have been any age between thirt}^ and sixty. Like his office, he had a factory-finished look about him, being large and smooth and heavy—but it was the smoothness of machined steel, not of pampered flesh. His prominent eyes were direct and disconcerting. They gave no hint of mood, humor, or temper; the)' rarely blinked, yet