Death in a High Latitude, page 10
I still had the bead in my pocket and I handed it across to him. ‘She didn’t mention this to me,’ he said.
‘No reason why she should – she didn’t seem to think anything of it. And perhaps she regarded it as a reflection on her housekeeping, though it’s understandable that she shouldn’t have wanted to go into the room more than she had to.’
He turned over the bead in his fingers, studying it with a slightly puzzled look. ‘I’ve a feeling that I’ve seen a bead like this somewhere fairly recently,’ he said.
‘Yes. Dr Mitchell wears an amber necklace – at any rate she was wearing one when I met her.’
‘That’s it.’ He was suddenly excited. ‘You know, she could have a motive of sorts – after all, she got Dr Jackson’s job.’ Then his face fell. ‘But you must have thought of all this already,’ he said.
‘I’ve thought about it, but as with everything else in this case I don’t know what to think. If we are now treating Dr Jackson’s death as murder then that bead needs explaining, and Dr Mitchell may have a lot of explaining to do. But like the rest of the picture it bothers me – somehow it seems just too pat.’
‘In my own experience the obvious often turns out to be what did happen.’
‘It didn’t in the first explanation of Dr Jackson’s death . . . We thought what somebody meant us to think, and it’s wrong. I can’t help wondering if the bead is meant to direct us to Dr Mitchell.’
The inspector looked rather unhappy. ‘Are you telling me about the bead officially, sir?’ he asked. The return of the ‘sir’ was a measure of his unhappiness as the CID man in charge of the case.
‘Yes. Probably I ought to have told you sooner, but there was so little time before I left for Hamburg.’
‘You may be right in feeling that it could be a plant, but I don’t see how I can ignore it. Dr Mitchell is already mixed up in the case to some extent, and she’s got to be questioned about it.’
‘I agree. But if you don’t think I’m interfering too much I wonder if you’d let me do the questioning? I’m going to try to see her first thing tomorrow. You can come with me if you like, though if you feel you can trust me my instinct is that we may do better without too formal a police invasion.’
‘I’m sorry. For someone in your position you’ve been wonderfully good to me, and now it looks as if I’m picking holes in what you say. I’m not, but I’ve got to report to my own Superintendent and already he’s feeling a bit let down because none of our force went into the matter of the glass as well as we should. The bead is evidence of a sort involving Dr Mitchell and while I take your point that somebody may be trying to hoodwink us again I’d be failing in my duty if I did nothing about it. If you’re going to see Dr Mitchell, sir, there’s no problem. You’ll be far better with her than I could be, and of course I won’t come with you. I’ve never met a boss before who asked if I could trust him.’
I was much moved by this. Richards had been remarkably good. I had been impressed by his thoroughness, and I was now even more impressed by his courage in telling me that I might be being too clever by half. I was quite ready to believe him right. I slipped back into slight formality myself. ‘I do not think for a moment that I can handle Dr Mitchell any better than you could,’ I continued, ‘but I’ve been making the most detailed study I can of what is known of the map and of modern charts of the area, and I hope – I can only say I hope – there may be a better chance of listening between the lines, as it were, if I talk to her alone. I can promise you that when the time comes for our own report on the case I shall take particular pleasure in recording the ability with which you have dealt with things.’
*
Dr Mitchell was dictating letters to her secretary, whom she had taken over from Dr Jackson. She did not seem enthusiastic about my visit but appeared to accept it as one of the inevitable chores of life. ‘That will do for the moment, Joan,’ she said to the secretary. ‘I’ll ring through as soon as I’m free.’
When the young woman had gone she asked frostily, ‘Have you recovered our map?’
I took a long shot. ‘Actually, no. But then I scarcely could without breaking into your house,’ I said.
VI
Ingrid Mitchell’s Story
HER COLOURING WAS not the sort to go white. Her rather dark honey-tinted skin turned an unhappy grey, and she put a hand to her throat. She was not wearing her amber necklace. Then, instead of protesting, she said, ‘If you know so much perhaps you can solve my problem.’
‘If I knew what your problem was, perhaps. I am rather looking to you to help in solving mine.’
‘Aren’t you going to arrest me?’
‘I don’t think so – not immediately, at any rate. You have committed a number of offences, including wasting police time. Did you know that that is an offence? You could be held on various counts if necessary, but whether you are or not depends mainly on you. I should warn you that you are not compelled to say anything. If you prefer it so, I can take you to the police station, where you will be detained. But I have a curious feeling that we are really on the same side, and my private view is that it will be much better for you in the end if you cooperate. I can’t make you any promises, I can merely give my own opinion. Whether you accept it or not is a matter for you. I must add that I think the map will be safer in my possession than in yours, and I shall want you to hand it over. I’ll give you a receipt for it.’
‘You guessed quite rightly – the map is in my house. I don’t think I can stay here any more today. Would you be willing to come home with me?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Then I’ll just tell my secretary. Will you agree to come in my car?’
‘Why not?’
She rang through to the secretary and picked up her handbag. We went out through a door opening straight to the passage, not through the secretary’s adjoining office by which as a visitor I had been taken to her. As we got into the car she asked. ‘Aren’t you afraid of letting me drive? I could easily kill both of us.’
‘You could, but I don’t think you will. I think you want to solve your problem.’
‘You’re a strange person. But I’ve not met many policemen.’
‘I’m not a proper policeman. As you know, I’m attached to a special department of the Home Office.’
Her colour had come back as we talked. She was on edge, but she did not seem particularly worried. She drove well, and in spite of Cambridge traffic we were at her house in under half an hour. It was an attractive place, two eighteenth-century cottages knocked into one, standing back from the road with a short semi-circular drive and a white painted gate at each end.
I got out to open the gate for her and she drove up to the front door. As I walked up to the car she leaned out of the window and said, ‘If you are going to arrest me it would be tidier to put the car away. If you open the garage door for me I’ll go in – the door just swings up.’
‘I should leave the car where it is for the moment.’
‘Come into the house, then.’
As with many converted cottages there was no hall. The front door was sheltered by a substantial porch, doubtless built on during the conversion, and it opened straight into a lounge. All the paintwork was white, which set off the black beams exposed across the ceiling, and a staircase of dark wood in one corner of the room. There was a door in the opposite wall of the room.
‘Entertaining the police is outside my experience,’ she said. ‘If you were anybody else I’d offer you a cup of coffee, but I don’t know if you’d consider that suitable.’
‘I’d love a cup of coffee.’
‘Then I shall have to go into the kitchen – it’s through that door. You can watch me to see that I don’t run out at the back, and don’t put poison in the coffee.’
‘A woman of your intelligence could poison a cup of coffee without being noticed. You may have made the necessary preparations, but I shall go on trusting you.’
She smiled. ‘I’m a geographer, not a toxicologist, though there are times when toxicology might come in handy. This isn’t one of them. I’m going to grind the beans – I always grind them fresh, so don’t be startled by the noise.’
She left the kitchen door open, but I didn’t particularly watch her. I looked at her bookshelves and pictures. ‘Is this the only sitting room?’ I asked.
‘No. It was the kitchen of one of the old cottages. I have a study upstairs which I use as a kind of drawing room when I have people. But mostly I use this downstairs room – it’s handy for the kitchen and the garden.’
‘Why haven’t you got married?’
‘That’s part of the problem.’
*
When she had brought the coffee she said, ‘It would help if you would tell me just how much you know.’
‘I know that you were rather in love with Charles Jackson once, but that was some time ago, when you were a student. He was a bit in love with you, but you were both exemplary and I suppose old-fashioned in your views on marriage, and as Charles Jackson was married you decided that yours could be only an academic friendship. I suspect that Charles Jackson gave you your amber necklace, but I don’t know.’ She nodded, and I went on, ‘Fortunately your iron self-discipline worked and you fell out of love, though you retained a high regard for Jackson’s work, and I think for the man himself.’ Again she nodded. ‘Then you met someone else with whom you fell quite desperately in love, and with whom you had a passionate affair. I don’t know who he was, and I think he passed out of your life.’
‘He was murdered.’
‘Can you tell me about it?’
‘I know he was murdered, but it was supposed to be suicide. His death was a bit like Charles Jackson’s, but there was no history of depression and he died from an overdose of barbiturates. That’s one of the reasons why I know it was murder, because he was not on any kind of sleeping pill, and why he should have had the drugs at all was never satisfactorily explained. He left a letter to his parents saying that he had decided to take his own life and he was sure that they would understand and forgive. They were just shattered, and didn’t understand.’
‘There was no doubt about his handwriting?’
‘There was doubt about everything. Adrian was in the habit of typing letters, and this was typed. The signature seemed all right, but I was never convinced by it.’
‘Where did this happen?’
‘Adrian was working in Hamburg, and it all happened there. I tried to get our Embassy in Germany to have the case reopened, but I think they didn’t want to get involved. From their point of view a British subject had committed suicide, the German police were satisfied, and the less said about it the better. And I had no real standing in the matter.’
‘Why weren’t you and Adrian married?’
She took a sip of coffee, put down the cup and clenched and unclenched her hand. ‘Because I was silly, I suppose. It is not easy to be a woman sometimes. Adrian was a mathematician, and a really brilliant one. He had a job with a big oil company, Universal Oil, which is partly German – at any rate it has big offices in Hamburg. Adrian was concerned with economic forecasting and he was so good at his job that he had his own department and could run things as he liked. I wanted to stay in Cambridge, to get on with my own job. I didn’t want to be tied down in marriage. I still don’t know if I was right or wrong. Adrian might have been murdered anyway, but as his widow I’d have been better placed to get justice done to his memory.’
‘What was his surname, and when did he die?’
‘Does it matter? It’s got nothing to do with the map.’
‘It may matter very much indeed – and you may be nearer justice than you think.’
‘He was Adrian Stowe, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and he died in February last year, not quite eighteen months ago.’
‘Now tell me about the map.’ I hated to go on driving questions at her, but in a curious way she seemed almost to welcome them. She didn’t reply at once and fiddled with the coffee pot. Then she shook her head, as if trying to shake off some unhappy memory, and went on in the same detached, unemotional way. ‘It’s harder to talk about than Adrian because it’s not my story and I can only guess at some of it,’ she said. ‘You know that Charles was brilliant – that was one of his problems. Sheila, his wife, is an awfully nice person, but intellectually she’s not in the same league as Charles. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a geographical theory known as the Arctic Calorific Syndrome.’
‘As a matter of fact I have. It concerns the possible retention in the Arctic substructure of warmth from an earlier period when the earth’s crustal shape was different, and the North Pole was not where it is now.’
‘That makes it a bit easier.’ She did not ask how I came to be informed on such a specialised subject. ‘Well, Charles really invented the theory. I worked with him on it for a time, but when we decided that there was no future in our own relationship, I got more involved with college work, and he carried on by himself. We kept in touch, though, and after I met Adrian things became rather easier between us, if you can understand that.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve got to understand, too, that Charles was a very good person – exceptionally gentle, and kind to anyone he thought he could help. He should never have taken the museum job, though – he was rotten at admin and not very practical in his own life. He was a tower of strength to me when Adrian died, the more so because there was never any question of going back to our old relationship. I suppose I’d grown out of it, and so in a way had he. His daughter was growing up intelligent, and she meant everything to him.’
She seemed to be talking to herself as much as to me. I didn’t interrupt her, and let her go on in her own way. After a longish pause she sighed, and continued, ‘About a year ago Charles invited me to lunch. He seemed worried about something and I could see that he wanted to talk to me. He said that a friend of his was being blackmailed, that he had been helping with money, but the sums were getting bigger and he couldn’t afford to go on. I told him to go to the police. He said he couldn’t, because it wasn’t his business.
‘That first conversation was rather inconclusive. I went on seeing him from time to time, and he looked iller and iller. Then he told me that he’d been offered a way of settling the blackmail problem once for all – by stealing the Baffin Map from the museum. To anyone like Charles this was unthinkable, but whoever suggested it to him had worked out quite a clever plan. The map was going to the Hamburg exhibition, and it was to disappear when it came back. The insurance company would pay in the end so the Museum wouldn’t really lose anything.’
‘Except the map.’
‘Except the map. That was what worried Charles. He didn’t know just what was being planned so he stayed late on the day the map came back and when the rest of the staff had gone home he took the map himself and gave it to me. I was nothing to do with the museum then, and Charles thought that if anyone was thinking of stealing it they wouldn’t be able to find it. His idea was that I should keep the map safely out of the way until it could be returned. Two days later he was dead.’
‘Why didn’t you return the map when you were appointed to Dr Jackson’s job?’
‘Because I didn’t know enough about it. Charles had been really worried, and for all I knew the map might still be in danger. Nobody noticed that it was missing until that American asked for it, and then I had to do something. I knew that the Curator wouldn’t want a fuss just before his retirement, and as long as the map couldn’t be found it couldn’t be stolen.’
‘Where is the map now?’
‘In my bedroom. I’ll get it for you.’
She went upstairs and was back in a moment with a flat cardboard map-case. She opened it to show me that the Baffin Map really was inside. I longed to be able to study it, but there were a lot more questions to be asked first.
‘Did Dr Jackson tell you who was this friend of his who was being blackmailed?’
‘No.’
‘And you didn’t ask him?’
‘Of course I asked him, but he didn’t want to tell me. He felt that loyalty was concerned, and if you had known Charles you would understand that to him that was final.’
‘Did you suspect anything about his death?’
‘Yes, and I still do, just as I do about Adrian. But I had nothing to go on, no evidence that I could give to the police.’
‘You had the story of the blackmailer and the map.’
‘Can you see the police believing me? And I had the map.’
‘It’s easy to be wise with hindsight, but you gravely underrated the police. You are telling me everything now.’
‘It’s not quite the same. And at the time I was frightfully mixed up. I wanted to be loyal to Charles, and I wanted to keep my job at the museum. I knew the map was safe as long as I had it, and I didn’t know that it was all going to come up again.’
‘Do you know why it has come up again?’
‘No. You came to me with a preposterous story, but having reported the map as missing I had to pretend to believe you.’
‘It was partly because someone as intelligent as you believed such a preposterous story that I thought you probably knew a lot more than you admitted. When did you break your amber necklace?’
‘What on earth has that got to do with it?’
‘You must just accept that it has, and that it may be important.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You really do have an extraordinary amount of information. Yes, the necklace did break, one day when I was visiting Charles at the museum. As he’d given it to me originally he was a bit upset, and helped me pick up the beads.’
‘Was that before the map came back from Hamburg?’
‘Yes, some weeks before.’
‘And you were one bead short.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because I have the bead.’ I showed it to her, but did not let her take it.
