Death in a High Latitude, page 12
‘Let’s turn to the papers on the Arctic Calorific Syndrome. Dr Jackson’s seem to have disappeared, and now Dr Mitchell’s have gone, too. I think there is a third set of papers, dealing with the work of Adrian Stowe. Where are they? Dr Mitchell seems to have suspected Dr Braunschweig, but the note demanding the map in return for his life shook her profoundly. I wish now I’d told her about it before – we can never know just what she thought. Whatever her previous thinking about Braunschweig, certainly the ransom demand changed her mind. But she was genuinely puzzled about the map – in her view it wasn’t really of much importance.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. It must be important in some way, but I think it’s probably not important in the way we’re meant to think it is. We must leave that until we know more about it. Dr Mitchell’s death is a major new fact. What do you make of it, Inspector?’
‘How it fits in, sir, I can’t pretend to guess, but as murder in furtherance of robbery – of those Arctic papers, maybe – it seems straightforward. From the position of the body Dr Mitchell was shot near the foot of the stairs. It looks as if she had just come down, perhaps because she heard someone at the door, and whoever it was walked in and shot her. There were no signs of a struggle.’
‘Whoever killed her must have put the pistol in her hand. Is there anything in the way of fingerprints?’
‘Not on the pistol – except the dead woman’s own. It must have been wiped over before being placed as it was. There are some prints on the desk that don’t belong to Dr Mitchell, but they may be there quite innocently, of course, and if they were made by some friend of hers we may never be able to identify them. But it’s early days yet. I left a photographer and fingerprint expert at work when I came to see you. There’s a good team on the job, making inquiries to see if anyone heard a shot or noticed a car drive up.’
‘It would be around lunch time – that may help people to remember. Perhaps there’s another fact; it seems probable that she knew her killer.’
‘Why?’
‘If your reconstruction is right she was shot by someone standing at the door as she came down from her bedroom or her study upstairs. If someone she didn’t know wanted to steal her papers there was no need to kill her. She lived alone, she was out a good deal, and the cottage would not be difficult to get into. Normally she would not have been at home at the time she was killed – she would have been either at the museum, or having lunch out somewhere. It was pure chance that she was at home today, because she took me there. Assume the murderer wanted to go through her papers. Lunch time would be quite a good time when she was likely to be out. Before breaking into the place the murderer tried the door, and was delighted to find it unlocked – it hasn’t got a snap lock, and she might easily have forgotten to lock it. To be on the safe side he rang – then he heard her coming down. Why kill her? All he had to do was to say that he was selling something, or looking for a house called “The Cedars” and did she know where it was. A minute’s polite conversation and he could have gone off, kept an eye on the house, and returned when he saw her car go out. If she knew her caller the situation was different. It might have been much harder to offer a reason for calling – the murderer may have wanted the fact that he’d visited the house at all to remain unknown. So she was killed out of hand.’
‘He’d come prepared to kill or he wouldn’t have had a pistol,’ Sir Edmund said.
‘True, and that seems to strengthen the case that she knew him. If she was out, well and good, but if she was at home she had to be killed.’
‘I agree with Peter,’ Seddon said. ‘But it’s the inspector’s case – what does he think?’
‘I would say that Colonel Blair has a strong argument, but only if the intention was to steal papers or perhaps to look for the map,’ Richards said. ‘I don’t know enough about the background – someone may have wanted her killed for some quite other reason. I must carry on with all the routine things. She must have had friends, but it’s not easy to know where to start – her colleagues at the museum, I suppose.’
‘Please don’t think I’m trying to interfere with your case, but I’d be very discreet about the museum,’ I said. ‘It may not come into it at all, but I can’t help feeling that the museum side of things has been nowhere near explained. Find out everything you can about the other museum people and where they were at the time of the murder – the Curator, the heads of the other departments, Dr Mitchell’s secretary, everyone. But don’t say anything about the Arctic, or the map. She was an attractive woman – if they like to think that you are looking for a jealous husband, let them.’
It was Seddon’s turn. ‘Peter’s guess that there has been trouble of some sort on the Unol board seems to have something in it,’ he said. ‘I had a bit of luck in getting hold of the right man in the merchant bank which advised the Arabian Sands Oil Company during the Unol takeover. The City thought that Unol needed Arabian Sands to strengthen its position in the Middle East after the various troubles that have upset production in other fields there. The board of Arabian Sands, which is one of the smaller concerns, reputable but a bit short of capital, was quite willing to be taken over, and the Unol deal seemed to them to make sense. But in the negotiations that went on over the price to be paid for Arabian Sands there was a snag – Unol just couldn’t be brought to offer what the Arabian Sands people considered reasonable. At first they thought this was just normal commercial bargaining, but according to my man it gradually became apparent that there was a strong influence in Unol which didn’t want to have anything to do with the deal. Oil companies like to play their cards close to their chest and you must understand that what comes next is largely guesswork. But a good merchant bank’s guesses tend to be well-informed. My man thinks that there was a fairly powerful minority on the Unol board, led by the deputy chairman, Dr Braunschweig, which held that the company was already over-dependent on Middle East oil, and that instead of buying more production there they should be putting everything they could into other parts of the world – the North Sea, Alaska, West Africa, anywhere outside the Middle East. You can make a case for this, but if a company wants oil now, and Unol does, then it’s not easy to get away from the Middle East. Anyway, the Braunschweig policy, if that is what it was, didn’t work, and the full board accepted the Arabian Sands offer at a price which certainly pleased Arabian Sands shareholders. But my man says that this took a lot of hard work and discreet lobbying in the right places. The trouble was that Arabian Sands wasn’t sitting all that pretty. They had to find a large sum for advance royalties on a concession they hadn’t yet worked, and they just didn’t have the cash. No money, no new concession, and they’d have been in big trouble. There were other possible bidders, but they wanted to pay in shares. Arabian Sands needed cash, and Unol was about the only outfit with the cash to spend. So it was important to a lot of people that the Unol merger should go through.’
‘None of this came out at the time?’
‘No. There were ups and downs in Arabian Sands share prices as speculators thought that the deal was on or off, but that’s normal. Naturally Arabian Sands didn’t want to say anything, and it would have been against all Unol tradition for any hint of differences in the board room to be made public. But I think things probably happened much as my man said. What bearing, if any, it may have on the Braunschweig kidnapping is another matter. It’s all over and done with, anyway.’
‘Still, it’s interesting.’
Sir Edmund suggested that we needed another drink, and there was no dissension on our board. The inspector’s earlier tension was now relaxed, and I could ask him without seeming patronising if he wanted any help that we could give in Cambridge. ‘Well, I want all the help anyone can give in getting to the bottom of the Mitchell murder and what looks like the Jackson murder, but you’re doing everything you can already,’ he said. ‘As far as the routine work goes, we can manage. And the Super’s so fed up by what we missed in the Jackson case that he’ll give me every man I can use for the Mitchell business.’
‘I’d like you to see Mrs Jackson about her husband’s papers yourself, if you can fit it in.’
‘Of course. I’ll give that priority as soon as I get back to Cambridge.’
Seddon wanted to get home, and as there seemed nothing more that we could usefully pursue at the moment Sir Edmund took the inspector and me out to dinner. Afterwards I took Richards back to my rooms in the Temple for the night. We were having an early breakfast when the phone rang. It was Sir Edmund. ‘There’s been another Braunschweig letter,’ he said. ‘Sir Anthony Brotherton is bringing it to me straightaway – he should be here in about ten minutes. Can you come?’
Obviously I had to go. There didn’t seem much point in bringing the inspector, and he was needed back in Cambridge. So I left him to finish breakfast and was lucky enough to pick up a cab almost as soon as I got to Fleet Street.
*
Sir Anthony Brotherton may have been disturbed, but he did not show it. He was impeccably dressed for his day in the City, his greying hair beautifully groomed, his air of distinction unshaken. I felt that he would present the same unruffled front whether he had made or lost a few thousand million pounds. His warmth of personality that had impressed me when I first met him was again impressive now. He seemed to convey a feeling that Sir Edmund and I were doing him a favour by letting him come to see us. He took an envelope from his pocket. ‘Here is the letter, just as it was delivered this morning, except that I have opened the envelope,’ he said.
Sir Edmund glanced at the envelope and the note inside it, then handed both to me. Envelope and notepaper seemed precisely similar to those of the first ransom demand. As before, the envelope was postmarked Amsterdam. The note it contained was now more threatening. It read:
You have had time to acquire the Baffin map from Cambridge. It must be delivered by hand to 16, Ilmgasse, Vienna, at noon precisely on June 30. The map is to be packed in a flat case, not rolled up. There must be no attempt at conversation with the person who accepts the map. When these instructions have been carried out Dr Braunschweig will be released. If you fail to carry them out Dr Braunschweig will be executed as an example to other capitalist maggots gorging themselves at the expense of the workers in society. The map must be delivered by a single person acting alone. If any attempt is made to invoke the police the execution will be carried out.
As before, the note was typed, and it was unsigned.
‘What do you make of it?’ Sir Anthony asked.
‘I served briefly in Vienna in my Foreign Office days, but I can’t recall an Ilmgasse,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘That doesn’t mean much. “Gasse” in Vienna is normally used for a small side-street, or alley, and there is no reason why I should have come across this particular one. Do you know Vienna, Sir Anthony?’
‘I have been there, of course. We have offices there, which I visit from time to time. But I have had no business which has taken me into side-streets, and I have never heard of the Ilmgasse. My main reason for wanting so urgently to see you is that I feel the time has come to approach the Cambridge museum in order to buy the map. It may be an interesting old map, and it may be worth a lot of money, but neither is important in relation to Gustav Braunschweig’s life.’
I remembered that Sir Anthony Brotherton knew nothing of the disappearance of the map from Cambridge, and I hoped that Sir Edmund realised this too.
‘Today is June 12 and the note demands the map on June 30, so we have still nearly three weeks,’ I said. ‘It is too soon to contemplate giving in to the kidnappers’ blackmail. I am sure that the German authorities would also take that view.’
‘I would put it even more strongly,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘The German Ambassador has conveyed his Government’s opinion that it is imperative to resist demands for ransom, and I may say that that is equally the view of Her Majesty’s Government. To give in to this sort of blackmail can only encourage other blackmailers, and might have lamentable international effects.’
‘I understand the international implications, but as a human being I cannot feel that they really outweigh the value of Gustav’s life,’ Sir Anthony said unhappily.
Sir Edmund tried to comfort him. ‘So far as we know Dr Braunschweig has not yet been harmed and with time in hand we have no reason to abandon hope of finding him.’
‘Yes, but where? It is agony for his wife, as it is for us, his friends. I appreciate that you cannot go into details of the secret work that is doubtless going on but I shall be grateful for anything I can tell my board to relieve our anxiety. We have a treble responsibility. It is in our power to ransom Gustav, and naturally we want to exercise that power. At the same time we must accept some measure of responsibility to the world of international business – you do not need to stress the threat to all business men in senior positions. Thirdly, we feel a human responsibility for Gustav’s wife and family.’
‘I am sorry if our advice seems hard, but we, too, have a heavy burden of responsibility,’ Sir Edmund said gently. ‘As for giving in and trying to buy the map from Cambridge – you have no guarantee that delivery of the map will help Dr Braunschweig. Indeed, past experience of such kidnappings suggests that readiness to meet a ransom leads to the escalation of the demands. In this case the demand for the map is so extraordinary that it seems almost certain that it is merely a preliminary to something else. You can tell your board that they are not being heartless in standing firm – they are doing the best possible thing for your colleague.’
‘You are right, but it is hard.’
‘There is another reason for not approaching the Cambridge museum at the moment,’ I said. ‘I take it you did not hear the seven o’clock news on the radio this morning.’
‘No. My day starts early and I get up soon after six. My post is specially collected, and is brought to me about six forty-five. As soon as I saw the letter I could think of nothing else. Why do you ask?’
‘Because the Keeper of Arctic Maps at the museum, the department responsible for the Baffin Map, has been found murdered at her home.’
For all the power of his personality he seemed suddenly drained. ‘What devilry is going on?’ he asked.
‘We do not yet know. The demand for a map for which she was responsible may have an important bearing on her murder. It is imperative that nothing about the map should get out – the murderer must not be allowed to know what action is being taken about it.’
‘You refer to the Keeper as “she” – is it not unusual for such a post to be held by a woman?’
‘I don’t know enough about museums to know how usual it is, but I should say it is not uncommon nowadays. Dr Ingrid Mitchell is a distinguished geographer.’
‘Can you be sure she was murdered?’
‘Yes. She was shot.’
‘People have been known to shoot themselves . . . I’m sorry, of course you would know the details in the case, and it is not my business. You must forgive me for being so shaken.’
‘You have nothing to apologise for, it is wholly understandable,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘Can we return to your letter? Can you suggest any reason why the scene of action should apparently shift to Vienna?’
‘No. Administratively our Vienna offices come under Dr Braunschweig, but it is our policy to allow our various national companies a high degree of independence, and the Austrian company would not have much to do with Hamburg in day-to-day affairs. We have offices all over the world. I can only suppose that the gang which kidnapped Gustav has some links with Austria. Will this knowledge help in any way, do you think?’
‘It may. Colonel Blair is already in close touch with the German police and he will discuss the Viennese location with them. Is there anything else you would like to say to us now?’
‘I don’t think so – you have been most patient. Thank you again for your consideration.’ He got up to go. Sir Edmund put an arm on his shoulder and went with him to his car.
As soon as they had left the room I rang Hamburg, and was fortunate to get hold of Keller at once. I told him briefly of the letter and said that I should probably be coming to Hamburg later in the day. ‘It’s odd to be given a precise address so far in advance,’ Keller said. ‘I know the head of security in Vienna, and I’ll ask him to have a discreet look at 16 Ilmgasse. Maybe I shall have some news for you when you come.’
*
Sir Edmund returned while I was speaking to Keller. When I put down the phone, he asked ‘Was I all right?’
‘You were marvellous,’ I said, and meant it. ‘We’ve been thinking so much about the disappearance of the map that I was terrified you might say something about it. I should have known you better.’
‘You’re generous this morning, Peter! What a mess it all is – do you think you’re really going to get anywhere?’
‘Well, already I’ve got a man on the way to 16 Ilmgasse. I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘No . . . And I’m surprised that a man as intelligent as Sir Anthony seems to take it all at its face value. But I’ve met this before – men who are supremely able in one field can be simpletons in another. And to be fair, he’s going through a bad time.’
‘Not so bad as Frau Braunschweig, or Mrs Jackson. I wonder to what extent his board does what he tells it to.’
‘If Seddon’s right, not always . . . or rather, not always without a struggle. In this case, though, I should think they’ll do whatever he suggests, which is what we are asking, anyway.’
‘Yes . . . Keller’s getting on to the chief of security in Vienna to have a look at 16 Ilmgasse. My guess is that it will turn out to be a harmless café. I think we’re intended to put in a lot of time watching the place and making inquiries in Vienna while something else goes on somewhere entirely different. I’ve even half an idea where it may be.’
