Death in a High Latitude, page 1
DEATH IN A
HIGH
LATITUDE
J.R.L. ANDERSON
CONTENTS
I.The Cambridge Map
II.An Amber Necklace
III.Death of a Geographer
IV.A Trip to Hamburg
V.A Theory of the Arctic
VI.Ingrid Mitchell’s Story
VII.The Second Note
VIII.An Expedition
IX.Accident
X.Our March
XI.In the Robeson Channel
XII.Diplomacy
XIII.Two Telephone Calls
XIV.Out of the ruins of Troy . . .
About the Author
Copyright
THE J.R.L. ANDERSON COLLECTION
The Peter Blair Mysteries
Death on the Rocks
Death in the Thames
Death in the North Sea
Death in the Desert
Death in the Caribbean
Death in the City
Death in the Greenhouse
Death in a High Latitude
The Piet Deventer Investigations
A Sprig of Sea Lavender
Festival
Late Delivery
Other J.R.L. Anderson Mysteries
Reckoning in Ice
The Nine-Spoked Wheel
Redundancy Pay
For
Dick Squires
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My Arctic climatic theory and William Baffin’s map are imaginary, but the wonderful sub-polar voyage of the USS Nautilus in 1958 is real, and so are the finding of a seam of coal by the Nares Expedition in 1876 and the report by the Oxford University Ellesmere Island Expedition in 1935 of flat ground suitable for landing aircraft near Gould Bay. All the human characters in my story are imaginary.
I
The Cambridge Map
RUTH IS NOT what might be called a passionate supporter of women’s lib; indeed, she seems to enjoy being feminine. But as Caval Professor of Mathematics at Oxford she is properly conscious of her identity and not at all disposed to feel that her role in life is to cook for me. Secretly, and perhaps not really as secretly as all that, I am immensely proud of her, though when I am introduced at academic functions as ‘Professor Blair’s husband’ I can understand the feelings of men married to Prime Ministers.
I had not in fact needed much cooking for since our marriage, partly because I am a fair cook myself, more because I was in and out of hospital. When we were married in Africa at the end of the strange affair of Eustace Quenenden*, I was just about able to walk after two operations for the wound inflicted on me by his murderer. Ruth took me home to my cottage near Salcombe in South Devon and nursed me back to something approaching fitness when my wound went bad on me and I was rushed off to hospital in Exeter. Since Ruth had to be in Oxford I was transferred from Exeter to Oxford, where I had yet another operation. I got out after a few weeks but kept on having to go back for what the surgeons called ‘examinations’. I got through the whole of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In theory I was still on the strength of Sir Edmund Pusey’s Police Liaison Department at the Home Office, which acts as a kind of General Staff in the war against crime and deals with those complex cases where different authorities – police, services, customs, ministries and other bodies – overlap. I was still supposed to represent the Armed Services in the Department and continued to draw my pay as a colonel, but in practice I did nothing except go to the office occasionally when I was not in hospital to have lunch with Sir Edmund.
At last I seemed on the way to more than temporary release from surgeons. It was near the end of what Oxford calls Trinity and the rest of us the summer term. Ruth and I were determined to use the long vacation first to find a house in the countryside near Oxford, and then to get away from everything by going to Devon to play with my boat. We were not exactly homeless. Being an ancient institution King Alfred’s College, of which Ruth is a Fellow, owns several charming houses in the middle of Oxford and we were able to live in one of these. But it was a house normally used for academic guests and although the College put no pressure on us we both felt it a little unfair to go on occupying it. Also, we wanted a place in the country, preferably on the river, where I could have some sort of boat. That evening we had finished supper and were looking through house agents’ advertisements when the telephone rang. Ruth answered it. ‘For you,’ she said. ‘It’s your boss.’
I was partly pleased, partly alarmed. I was bored with myself and rather fed up, but I didn’t want our plans for the vacation to be upset. ‘Peter Blair here,’ I said cautiously.
‘Nice to hear you, Peter. I have good reports of you from various medical sources.’ (He would, I thought. So much for the Hippocratic Oath and confidentiality about patients when Sir Edmund Pusey is around.) ‘Don’t think that I’m unsympathetic to wounds so gallantly endured,’ he went on. ‘But I was wondering if you were fit enough to undertake a small job of work.’
‘I’d consider it. But the long vacation’s coming up, Ruth and I are house-hunting, and she needs a holiday.’
‘Of course. But there’s still a bit to go before the end of term,’ (he would know exactly how much, I thought a trifle bitterly) ‘and what I had in mind should not occupy you for long. We could at least discuss it. Can you get to London tomorrow? We’ll lunch at my flat, I think. Don’t come to the office.’
‘All right. But I warn you that for all your medical reports on me I can produce enough eminent doctors to convince even the Treasury that I’m entitled to an immediate pension, and I don’t want my summer to be messed up.’
‘Again of course, Peter. I wholly understand. Shall we say 12.45? There’s an excellent train from Oxford at 11.15 getting to Paddington at 12.20. I’ve already arranged for a car to meet you.’
*
For a man with an active finger in so many pies Sir Edmund gives a curious impression of having nothing whatever to do. That is not quite true; the impression he gives is of having all the time in the world for whoever he may be talking to at any given moment. That is part of his charm, and of his uncanny success in getting what he wants. He gave me a delicious lunch, cooked by a Cordon Bleu-trained young woman, and accompanied by just the right Moselle. He talked of my affairs, of Ruth, and of house prices around Oxford, on which he seemed remarkably well-informed. It was not until lunch had been cleared away and we were sitting over coffee that he even mentioned the Department. ‘You know, Peter, we’ve missed you,’ he said.
‘Not noticeably.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t notice, would you? It’s not so much in what we’ve done: we’ve got along all right, no one is indispensable. It’s more in the things we haven’t tackled. This particular small problem that I hope you’ll look into cropped up six months ago.’
‘Why the delay?’ He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, ‘Even now it’s not quite clear that there’s really any problem to go into. You know that I am an Oxford man. I suppose that you, too, would be considered an Oxford man now.’
‘When the time came for me to go to Oxford I went to Sandhurst to be trained to fight a war.’
‘I know that. Don’t be so prickly. I was going to ask if you’d spend a few days at the other place, in Cambridge.’
‘As an outsider, I’m not sure that I don’t prefer Cambridge. In many ways it’s more beautiful than Oxford.’
He gave a theatrical small wince. ‘You have some barbaric qualities, Peter. They come in useful sometimes, maybe. Anyway, the case, if there is a case, starts in Cambridge, if it doesn’t start somewhere else.’
‘Don’t be so damned mysterious. What’s it all about?’
‘That’s what I want you to find out, Peter. I told you it goes back six months. What happened then was that a valuable seventeenth-century map disappeared from the Museum of Cartography in Cambridge – I should say seems to have disappeared, for it is not quite certain that it has actually been taken from the museum.’
‘Surely that’s a matter for the Cambridge police. How on earth do we come into it?’
‘We don’t – yet. For all my natural Oxford instincts I have to admit that Cambridge has some things that Oxford hasn’t. One of them is the Museum of Cartography. It was started with a gift from the Hudson’s Bay Company in the seventeenth century and it is the finest institution of its kind in the world. The Company of Merchants Trading into Hudson’s Bay was chartered in 1670, and one of the more farsighted of the founding fathers was concerned to build up a collection of accurate maps of the Arctic regions. He gave some money to a geographer friend of his at Cambridge to do the job. The museum has long ceased to be limited to the Arctic, and now houses what is probably the most important collection of world maps since Ptolemy’s at Alexandria in the third century BC. The museum is associated with the university, but is not part of it; it is an independent institution with its own trustees who appoint the Curator, at present Dr Charles Wilding. His special field is early medieval cartography though he is, of course, an authority on maps in general. The missing map is outside his own particular period; it is supposed to have been made by William Baffin around 1616, during the last of his great Arctic voyages in search of the North-West Passage. It is known as Baffin’s map, and although it is of somewhat specialised interest it is worth a lot of money.’
‘You say it is not certain that the map has been taken from the museum.’
‘That’s one of the maddening things about the case. The map belon
‘How was the loss discovered?’
‘It wasn’t until some months later. An American scholar, Dr George D. Longworth, is writing a book on the mapping of the Arctic. He was given permission to study the museum’s collection of Arctic maps. When he wanted to look at Baffin’s map it couldn’t be found. The new Keeper hadn’t any occasion to take out that particular map before. The maps are kept in drawers, in huge filing cabinets. She – the new Keeper is a woman, Dr Ingrid Mitchell – went to the drawer where the map should have been, and it was empty. The Arctic Division of the museum has a staff of four – the Keeper, her secretary, and two assistants. Between them they made a thorough search to see if the map could have been put in some other drawer, but it didn’t turn up. The Keeper then reported to the Curator that the map was missing, and the Curator called in the police.’
‘Fairly sensational, but nothing to do with us. Odd that I don’t recall reading anything about it.’
‘Nothing was published. The museum was rather ashamed of itself, and kept hoping that the map would turn up somewhere or other in its archives. It’s a big building, and stores hundreds of thousands of maps. It was possible that on coming back from Hamburg the map was put in the wrong place, and would ultimately be found. So far it hasn’t been found.’
‘What do the police think?’
‘They don’t know. They made what inquiries they could, and got nowhere.’
‘Was the late Keeper’s death at all suspicious?’
‘It was unexpected, and like everything else in the case it might or might not be a cause for suspicion. He had been under treatment for depression, and was taking some tablets. They were safe enough in the prescribed dose, but dangerous if you took too many, and particularly dangerous if combined with alcohol. It was unusual for him to drink much, but on the night before his death he had been to a party, where apparently he did drink rather a lot of gin. On going to bed he seems to have taken two lots of tablets, and he died in his sleep. He and his wife had separate rooms. There is one child, a daughter, and apart from the man’s depression they seemed a normal family. His wife found him dead when she took him a cup of tea in the morning – her usual custom. The facts were reported to the coroner, there was an autopsy and an inquest. The loss of the map did not come to light until after the man was dead, and at the time of the inquest nobody knew about it. There was no evidence of suicidal tendencies, no apparent reason for suicide, and the obvious finding was accidental death.’
‘If he had known about the map he might have felt that he would be held responsible for its loss. In his depressed state that might have been a reason for suicide.’
‘Quite. But there is no evidence that he did know about the map.’
‘The map may be worth a lot of money but it would seem more or less unsaleable. Any other museum or university which might be interested in buying it would know where it came from.’
‘Yes. The unscrupulous private collector who hoards things for the sake of hoarding them and buys without asking questions no doubt exists, but I suspect that he is a rare bird. And an old map is not quite like a picture, which may be beautiful in itself. The history of cartography is highly specialised.’
‘It’s certainly a queer business. But I still don’t see how we come into it.’
‘I haven’t quite finished. I know that you consider me a fairly ruthless character, Peter, but I wouldn’t have telephoned you last night if I hadn’t felt compelled to. Even I have some concern for your welfare.’
‘Come off it. You’re a beast, but a just beast, as somebody said about some schoolmaster.’
‘Well, thanks for at least part of the observation. Yesterday morning the chairman of Universal Oil came to see me, and he gave me this note. It is the original, exactly as he received it.’ Sir Edmund handed me a white envelope with a Dutch stamp, postmarked ‘Amsterdam’. It bore a typed address to Sir Anthony Brotherton in one of those handsome streets at the back of Park Lane. ‘That is his private address,’ Sir Edmund said.
Inside the envelope was a sheet of plain white notepaper, folded once. Typed on it, in good quality typescript, probably done on an electric machine, was the message
Dr Gustav Braunschweig will be released unharmed within 24 hours of the delivery to an address of which you will be informed of the Baffin Map from the Cambridge Museum of Cartography. Failing this, Dr Braunschweig will be executed. You will be given time to acquiring the map before our next communication.
Sir Edmund gave me a few minutes to study the note. Then he continued, ‘Universal Oil is a British company with a large German holding. The headquarters of the German branch are in Hamburg. Dr Braunschweig is chairman of the German subsidiary, and deputy chairman of the main board. Four days ago he left home for his office in his own car and did not arrive. He is said to have taken precautions in varying his route and times of travel, but he always resisted suggestions that he should have a personal guard on the ground, possibly logical, that this might seem to inflate his importance and invite ideas about kidnapping him. The car has not been found. His colleagues, his family, and the German police fear that he has been kidnapped, but have made no statement about his disappearance. His staff have been told that he was feeling run down and decided to take a sailing holiday – he is a keen yachtsman – to visit various Cornish ports without any planned itinerary. This makes it reasonable that no one should be able to get in touch with him. The police have been expecting one or other of the anarchist groups in Europe to claim that he has been taken hostage, and are a little puzzled that no such claim has been made. This note is the first that has been heard of him. Sir Anthony brought it to me at once. Seddon* went down to Cambridge yesterday morning and learned about the disappearance of the map. As I explained, it had not been reported beyond the Cambridge police because the museum authorities did not wish it. They were confident that if the map turned up in any saleroom they would know about it, and they still have a kind of half that the map is not really lost but astray somewhere in their own collection. The museum, of course, knows nothing about the kidnapping of Dr Braunschweig.’
‘Would Universal Oil try to buy the map to ransom him?’
‘I’m not sure. The German police hold firmly that no ransom demand should be met, but it’s easier for the police to take that attitude than a man’s family and close friends.’
‘It’s utterly damnable. Has he got a family?’
‘Yes, a wife, son of sixteen and daughter of twelve.’
‘Do they know of the ransom demand?’
‘Frau Braunschweig knows that her husband has disappeared, and naturally she fears that he has been kidnapped, but she doesn’t yet know anything about the note. The children, as Sir Anthony understands it, think that their father is away on business. He often is.’
I thought of the appalling cases of decent men kidnapped and murdered for no reason other than some group’s disapproval of society. I thought of a woman sick with anxiety, and of two children who might not know what had happened to their father but who would certainly know of their mother’s distress and almost as certainly put two and two together to make a world of private misery they could share with no one. I thought of the two bullets which had torn my own inside to pieces, and of how blessed I was to be alive and to be married to Ruth. ‘I’d like to see Sir Anthony as soon as possible,’ I said.
‘I knew you’d say that, Peter. We may not achieve anything, but at least we can try. As a matter of fact I’ve made an appointment for you with Sir Anthony at his home for six o’clock this evening.’
