Death in a High Latitude, page 13
‘You mean the Arctic?’
‘Yes. And when I’ve had a couple of hours with the Pilot Book I may be able to narrow down the area. If only Ingrid Mitchell hadn’t been killed . . . Perhaps that’s why she was killed. I think I shall have to go there, but I want to talk to Keller first. If you approve I’ll go to Hamburg this afternoon, and probably to Greenland from there – either your influence or Keller’s should provide an aeroplane. And I must talk to Ruth.’
‘As always, Peter, I’ll back you whatever you do. The thing that bothers me now is whether you’re fit for gallivanting in the Arctic.’
‘You must be getting old! You haven’t worried much about my fitness in the past.’
‘Not for the first time, Peter, you pretend to an ignorance you don’t have. I may appear to take people for granted, particularly, perhaps, those who mean most to me. If I have sometimes seemed to drive you hard it is because we serve a cause greater than ourselves.’
‘I don’t doubt you. If you asked what I really want to do I should tell you that I want to enjoy the summer with Ruth. But there’s some particularly dirty work going on here and a lot of innocent people are going to suffer if we can’t clean it up. So that’s that. My fitness will have to take care of itself.’
*
I was reckoning without Ruth. When I told her on the phone that I was off to Hamburg again and might not be back for some time she knew perfectly well what I was thinking of, and she flatly refused to have it. ‘I shall get your surgeon to telephone Sir Edmund and tell him that you are not up to all this. If necessary, I’ll get him to order you back to hospital,’ she said.
‘My darling, you just mustn’t. I’m not as bad as all that. I agree that no one is indispensable, and that if I dropped dead other people would have to carry on. But I haven’t dropped dead, and while I’m on my feet it isn’t conceited to say that probably I can do one or two things that other people mightn’t think of. And it isn’t conceit that makes me feel it’s my job to carry on. Ingrid Mitchell’s been murdered and other lives are at risk. I wouldn’t be any use to you as a husband if I gave up now. We may not win, but we can try. You’re a trier, too, and it’s no use pretending you’re not.’
‘All right, but wherever you go from Hamburg I’m going with you.’
‘Fine – you’re the best partner in the world, and between us we’re a pretty good partnership. Can you get to London Airport for two thirty?’
‘Yes. What shall I bring with me?’
‘The thickest pullovers you’ve got.’
VIII
An Expedition
KELLER MET US at Hamburg, with two pieces of news. As I’d expected, 16 Ilmgasse in Vienna was the address of a small café. ‘The security people are keeping an eye on it,’ he said, ‘but as far as they know it’s a perfectly respectable place, with a clientele mainly of musicians from the Opera House. If nothing happens before June 30 we can send a man there with a flat parcel the size of the map, but for myself I doubt if it has anything to do with the case except to divert our attention.’ His second piece of news was unexpected – Frau Baumgarten was English, born Hilda Stevenson. She had worked for a time at the Unol offices in London where, presumably, she had met her husband when he was over on some business connected with his pipeline engineering firm. This seemed mildly interesting, but there was no reason why Heinrich Baumgarten should not have married an English girl, and it was hard to see what bearing, if any, it might have on the case.
We learned these two facts in brief conversation while Keller drove us to the hotel where he had booked a room for us. On dropping us at the hotel he invited us to supper, and arranged to pick us up. It didn’t take long to unpack, and we had an hour or so to ourselves before Keller was due back. I was grateful for the chance to talk to Ruth, told her about my meeting with Ingrid Mitchell and outlined the circumstances of her death.
‘Poor woman, she didn’t have much luck,’ Ruth said. ‘I can understand just how she felt about the man Adrian Stowe – wanting to marry him, and not wanting to marry him. If I’d met you differently I think I should have felt much the same about you.* You’ve been very good, Peter, in not trying to stop me being a professor, but what’s so difficult about being a woman is that only half of me really wants to be a professor – or rather I do want to be a professor, but another me wants to cook and make curtains and even knit socks for you.’
‘My poor child, I’ve been ill most of the time since we got married. You’ve looked after me marvellously – and you ought to know how proud I am of Professor Ruth.’
‘I don’t think I’m looking after you very well now.’
‘Well, I think you are. Just as I don’t want to stop you being a professor so you don’t want to stop me from trying to get to the bottom of this appalling case.’
‘Half of me, perhaps more than half, does want to stop you. But there’s a bit that understands. Oh Peter, how difficult life is for practically everybody.’
‘We make things difficult for ourselves. It’s not man’s bad luck or hard struggle that really deserve pity – it’s his sheer damned stupidity. Greed is a form of stupidity. Fortunately the greedy are also stupid in other ways. I think there’s been a certain amount of stupidity in this case, but I can’t see yet where it fits in. You’re a mathematician, Ruth, and so was the man Adrian Stowe Ingrid Mitchell was in love with. Tell me how a mathematician fits in with the geographers in studying the Arctic.’
‘Could be all sorts of ways, maths comes into everything somewhere. I’ve been doing some work for you. I’ve been reading up the little that has been published on this Arctic Calorific Syndrome and there’s an immense field for mathematical research. Given the shift in the North Pole and a change in climate coupled with heat retention sufficient to affect sea temperatures somewhere still, you’d have to identify and calculate the other variables before you could find out much about it. There was some maths in a paper by Dr Jackson published in the Proceedings of the Geophysical Society about a year ago. He touches on the maths only briefly, simply to show how complicated it is. Among his variables are rock formation and topsoil – that is sand, mud, remains of countless millions of sea-creatures – on the seabed, varying depths and insulating characteristics of this topsoil over the floor of Arctic seas, shelving of the land mass where it meets the sea, which has a bearing on currents and the movement of ice near the shoreline, rate of formation of surface ice, wind, temperature gradients in the atmosphere . . . and a lot more. He doesn’t go into the details but says that promising work was being done by Adrian Stowe, whom he names, up to the time of what he calls his tragic death. He describes Stowe’s work as brilliant and says that it will be the basis of all future work on the subject.’
‘I wonder where it is. I don’t think Ingrid Mitchell had it.’
‘From the Jackson monograph it’s obvious that Jackson himself had been following it closely, and one would expect at least copies of Stowe’s theoretical reasoning and calculations to be among Jackson’s own papers. You said that they were at the Museum, awaiting editing.’
‘That’s what Mrs Jackson told me, but Ingrid Mitchell said that all the papers were still in Mrs Jackson’s possession, and that she hadn’t wanted to worry her about them. Inspector Richards is going into the question of the papers with Mrs Jackson, but it looks to me as if they’re missing. One would think that they may have been stolen on the night of Dr Jackson’s death, and perhaps that was the real reason for his murder.’
‘We don’t know enough about it yet. Stowe must have left papers – what happened to them? Is anybody going into that?’
‘I heard of Adrian Stowe for the first time yesterday and I got on to Keller about him as soon as I could. He promised an investigation of all the circumstances of Stowe’s death. Maybe we shall hear something about it this evening.’
*
In spite of Hamburg traffic Keller was punctual to the minute. Ruth had ignored my suggestion about pullovers, deciding that she could buy what she needed in Hamburg, and had brought only one small suitcase. From this, however, she extracted a dress that looked stunning and I felt immensely proud of her. Keller was considerate and polite as always, but he worried me by seeming slightly ill at ease. Over a drink before supper he came to the point, saying frankly, ‘Tell me, Herr Colonel, to what extent we can discuss highly secret matters before your wife.’
‘I have no secrets from Ruth,’ I said. ‘We have worked together before and although she is not a member of my Department – she is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford – she is accepted as a valuable colleague. I respect your scruples, the more for stating them so openly, but I can assure you that you have nothing to fear from Ruth – indeed, we may all gain from her own intelligence.’
His manner changed and he poured us all another drink. ‘That makes things easier. I should have known that you would not have brought your wife for merely social reasons. But I have known important men who have had to make concessions to their wives.’
Ruth laughed. ‘I sometimes think that men are really happiest in monasteries or ships at sea where there aren’t any women. And yet we have been known to come in useful.’
Keller bowed. ‘Gnādige Frau, you must forgive me. I am a victim of my training in security.’
‘Judging by results it seems to have been an admirable training,’ I said. ‘Before you came this evening Ruth and I were talking about Adrian Stowe, the man whose death I asked you to look into. Have you been able to make any progress there?’
‘I have looked up the files. It was a curious case. He had a good position in the research division of Universal Oil, and he seems to have been much respected. Frau Braunschweig knew him quite well – he worked closely with her husband, and came to their home quite often. She liked him very much. His suicide astonished as well as grieved them. It puzzled the police at first, but the note he left seemed to be genuine. It was his habit to drink a cup of chocolate before going to sleep, and since he was slightly worried about becoming overweight he sweetened it with saccharine instead of sugar. On the night of his death he added a powerful barbiturate drug to his chocolate – a deliberate overdose, which would inevitably prove fatal. There was a small empty bottle that had contained the barbiturate tablets on a table in his bedroom. They were apparently obtained in England, for the bottle bore the label of a London pharmacist. It was thought at first that his death might have been an accident, that he might have put the barbiturate in his chocolate in mistake for his normal saccharine tablets. But there was saccharine in the chocolate, too, so he must have added two lots of tablets. The note he left ruled out accident. It was addressed to his parents and began by expressing his love for them and his sorrow at the distress his death would cause. He wrote that life had become insupportable for reasons he did not wish to explain, though he could promise they were not dishonourable. He concluded by saying he was sure his parents would understand.
‘The note was puzzling in not being more explicit – suicide notes more commonly attempt to justify the action, and tend to be self-pitying, or to blame someone. Inquiries among Mr Stowe’s colleagues, however, showed him to be a man of deep reserve, accustomed to keep his feelings to himself. He did not have a full-time secretary – his work was in mathematical research – but he would sometimes dictate letters and reports. When he needed secretarial help the same girl was accustomed to work for him, and had done so for nearly two years. She got to know him slightly, and said she thought there was a woman in England whom he wanted to marry but for some reason could not. His father came to Hamburg – his mother was too upset to accompany him – and to some extent he confirmed this story. He said he had known that his son wished to get married, but understood that there were difficulties in the way. He described his son as not exactly secretive but reluctant to discuss personal matters, even with his parents. The officer who interviewed Mr Stowe senior found him also exceedingly reserved. He did say he did not understand why his son should have taken his own life, but in the circumstances there seemed no alternative to a finding of suicide.’
‘The letter was typed, not handwritten?’
‘Yes, but that was in keeping – apparently Mr Stowe always typed in preference to writing by hand. The letter was typed on a machine that was in his bedroom. The signature was accepted by his father, by the bank he used in Hamburg, and by the girl I mentioned who typed office correspondence for him.’
‘The barbiturate tablets were supplied in London – did you discover the doctor who prescribed them?’
‘No. You must understand the circumstances at the time. All that was in England. As far as our police were concerned it seemed a clear case of an unhappy man’s suicide. I think our man made as thorough an investigation as seemed justified. Everything was reported to the British diplomatic mission, and they were satisfied. Knowing what we do now I agree that far more exhaustive inquiries should have been made in England as well as here, but that did not seem necessary at the time.’
‘We must make those inquiries. It is the Cambridge case all over again, a reasonable cause of death and no obvious reason for suspicion. Do you know how Adrian Stowe spent the evening before he died?’
‘Yes, that was gone into. He attended a small dinner party – curiously enough given by the Baumgartens, whom he knew because they are friends of the Braunschweigs. I haven’t been able to talk to the Baumgartens because, as you know, they are abroad, but they were interviewed at the time. They said that Mr Stowe seemed perfectly normal, left shortly before midnight and drove back to his flat in his own car. The doctor’s estimate was that he took the barbiturate tablets at about one a.m., so the times seemed to fit all right.’
‘Everything fits, yet I’m quite sure that it fits an entirely different picture and that Stowe was murdered like Charles Jackson in Cambridge.’
I have no doubt that Keller gave us an admirable supper, but I have no recollection of what we ate. We talked far into the morning, trying to make sense of things. The cases of Dr Jackson, Ingrid Mitchell and Adrian Stowe seemed to be linked with the work that all were doing on the theory of the Arctic Calorific Syndrome and the discovery of a usable North-West Passage, a route that would have as much importance to the world today as Elizabethan seamen realised in their search for an Arctic passage to the riches of the East. We asked Ruth if she could assess the mathematical probabilities of such a route’s existing. She said that given Adrian Stowe’s theories and calculations she might be able to, but without them she didn’t know where to begin. That raised another point – who else may have thought that there was something of the utmost value in the Jackson-Stowe-Mitchell theories? As their records seemed to have vanished, it seemed a reasonable assumption that they had all been murdered by some individual or group of individuals who wanted to get hold of their work. There was a sort of pattern in the killings, with the deaths of Charles Jackson and Adrian Stowe disguised as accident and suicide, and an incompetent attempt to make Ingrid Mitchell’s murder look like suicide. All this seemed reasonable reconstruction, but how did any of it relate to the disappearance of Gustav Braunschweig?
‘The Vienna in the second ransom note seems an absurdity but there is one thing in the note that I think we must take seriously – the date,’ I said.
‘You mean that something is going to happen on June 30?’ Keller asked.
‘Yes. As I see it the kidnappers don’t really expect the map to be delivered, and do intend to murder Gustav Braunschweig on the excuse that their demand has not been met.’
‘The map is now in your possession. The demand could be met.’
‘I don’t think it would make any difference. I think a decision to kill Braunschweig has already been taken, and that the whole kidnap-ransom story is intended to put the blame on some anarchist group that will be named when the “execution” is announced. It may be an entirely imaginary group.’
‘Why demand the map instead of the release of political prisoners, or something more in keeping with the activities of anarchist groups?’
‘Because somebody wants to draw attention to the map. I don’t know why, but I can suggest a variety of possible reasons. When the killing is announced the map will attract enormous publicity. Ingrid Mitchell told me that the map itself is only marginally relevant to the North-West Passage theory. Suppose someone wants to demolish the whole theory – promote interest in the map, and then use it as a basis for showing that wherever old Baffin got to he was no nearer to finding a North-West Passage than anyone else. The three experts on the theory are all dead. There’s opposition to their views, anyway, and a little skilled academic manipulation could do the rest.’
‘Possible, perhaps, and an interesting bit of speculation, but I don’t see any anarchist group going in for kidnapping and murder simply to demolish an academic theory,’ Keller said.
‘They wouldn’t. They could say that they chose the map as a typical example of a useless museum piece maintained in the interests of capitalist culture instead of being sold for the relief of poverty, to provide money for working-class education, for anything else you like. They could go on to say that they’ve deliberately started with a highly specialised old map to prepare for similar demands for the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s Last Supper, Rembrandt’s masterpieces, the treasures of museums and art galleries throughout the world. There’d be terrific publicity, and quite a few people might have a sneaking sympathy for the idea.’
‘You’d be dangerous as an anarchist public relations officer . . . I suppose it could be something like that. But you destroy your own case, because the rest of your theory implies that there aren’t any anarchists involved.’
