Just a little younger than Will, she thought, when the alethiometer had told her that he was a murderer. She looked at Dr. Polstead now with eyes that seemed never to have seen him before. She imagined a stocky ginger-haired boy killing an experienced secret agent, and then she saw another pattern too: the man Will had killed had been a member of the secret service of his country. Were there other correspondences and echoes waiting to be discovered?
The alethiometer could tell her, but oh, how long it would take! How quickly she would have done it once, her fingers racing her mind as she flicked the hands around the dial and stepped unhesitatingly down the rungs of linked meanings into the darkness where the truth lay!
