Death in a High Latitude, page 22
‘Oh yes, but I don’t care now.’ She came back to consciousness, but seemed utterly detached from what she was saying. ‘Do you understand what Gustav and Jackson and everybody mixed up in their wild Arctic imaginings were trying to do? They wanted to kill Mid-East oil, they wanted to ruin everybody with interests in the Middle East. Naturally we couldn’t let that happen. I don’t know if their mad theories would have worked, but it was bad enough that they should start people thinking of the Arctic as a real alternative to the Middle East. If we could finish them, we should have power throughout the Middle East. If anyone was difficult, all we had to do was to hint that we had the secret of the North-West Passage . . . And if you have power over the Middle East you have power over the whole world.’ Her voice trailed off again.
‘You talk about “we”. Who do you mean by “we”?’ I asked.
She did not answer but lay back with her eyes closed. I called the doctor. He felt her pulse, lightly lifted one eyelid. He looked concerned and puzzled. He put his stethoscope to her chest, listened for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I think she’s dead,’ he said. ‘There was no reason for her to die.’
‘Can you die of sheer frustration – and, perhaps, a broken heart?’ I asked.
‘For all our knowledge, death, and life, remain mysterious. She had a severe shock, of course. But nothing else, her wound was trivial. And the sleep I gave her should have eased the shock. She is beyond help now.’
‘She is beyond a lot of other things. She was an evil woman, and death is merciful. At the least she would have faced many years in prison. She could have told us much more; now she has slipped away. Well, it can’t be helped. And she did tell me something. What will you do about her death when the Canadian police arrive?’
‘I can do nothing but report it. There ought to be an autopsy, but that is a matter for the Canadian authorities.’
I went back to Keller. ‘Frau Baumgarten has cheated justice,’ I said. ‘She has just died, for no apparent reason.’
Keller ran a hand through his hair. ‘That is awkward for us,’ he said in a worried way.
‘She did tell me a little.’ I reported my conversation with her. ‘That seems to clear up the mechanics of Dr Jackson’s death in Cambridge. We shall have to check what we can, of course, but it should be possible to confirm whether she was in Cambridge that night, and with luck there’ll be some photographs of her at her home in Hamburg. Mrs Jackson may be able to say whether she looks like the woman she saw talking to her husband at the party. For myself I have no doubt about it – and she confessed readily enough when I put it to her.
‘There’s another useful bit of information – I think we’ll find that the hijack party, who were employed to do away with Dr Braunschweig, belong to an organisation called LAPI – it stands for League Against Political Injustice. I don’t know why they have an English name when they all seem to be German – perhaps, as we say, that’s just put in to make it harder. It adds to confusion, anyway.’
‘I’m familiar with all our known terrorist groups, but I have never heard of LAPI,’ Keller said.
‘You couldn’t have heard of them. They appear to have been invented by Heinrich Baumgarten for the purpose – I don’t think for a moment that they’re a real terrorist group. They would have claimed responsibility for Braunschweig’s “execution”. And I daresay they would have been used again in various ways. We’re dealing with some very nasty people.’
*
Thirteen hours after our call to Ottawa the Canadians arrived. That was good going, for they had some three thousand miles to come, over some of the most inhospitable country in the world. We heard their aeroplane before we saw it, and were thankful to watch it come into view, grow bigger, and touch down safely. The German commander, Keller and I walked out to meet them. I took to Commissioner Macdonald at once. ‘I’ve brought six men, the doctor and the nurse you asked for,’ he said. ‘It’s only a ten-seater plane, and with the pilot we couldn’t manage any more. I’m relying on your plane to take the wounded and the prisoners. One of my men is an experienced pilot. Who does the plane belong to?’
‘It belongs to Universal Oil, and was stolen in Alaska by the people who brought it here,’ I told him. ‘But we have Dr Gustav Braunschweig, the deputy chairman of Unol with us, and in the circumstances he will gladly put the plane at your disposal.’
‘I’ve been in touch with your Sir Edmund Pusey in London,’ Macdonald went on. ‘He tells me that you are investigating crimes committed in England and in Germany, and, from what you tell me, on Canadian territory as well. If the plane was stolen in Alaska that brings in the Americans. What a muddle! Is there anything useful that we can do here?’
‘Apart from collecting the wounded and the prisoners, I think nothing at all,’ I said. ‘Our German friends are most anxious to return to Germany, and the sooner the rest of the party can be taken to your headquarters, the better. If you approve, my wife and I will go with you, while my colleague Rolf Keller goes back to Germany.’
‘I’ll be thankful to have you. I don’t begin to understand what’s been going on, and I’ll certainly need you. Did you say your wife was with you?’
‘Yes. She’s an Oxford professor, by the way. At the moment she’s helping to nurse the wounded in the big aircraft. Why she’s here is a long story, which I’ll tell you later.’
*
The Canadian doctor and the nurse, with the guards for the prisoners, went off in the Unol plane. Macdonald had arranged for them to refuel at a depot of the Hudson’s Bay Company en route for Ottawa. Ruth and I were to travel in the smaller plane with him.
As soon as the Unol plane was away the German party left. Keller would be back at the centre of things before I could be, and we arranged that as soon as he had reported to his Government, and Dr Braunschweig had had a chance to see his wife, he and Braunschweig would go to London to meet Pusey. I did not know how long I might be kept in Canada, but I could, of course, be in touch with Pusey from Ottawa. When the time came for Ruth and me to say good-bye to Keller our parting was brief and rather formal. We had no words and didn’t need them.
*
The big German transport roared into the sky, circled, dipped its wings in salute, and soon became a speck on the flight that would take it home across the wastes of Greenland. I held Ruth’s hand, drained of all feeling except of love and pride in her. Sadness for the toll of death would come later, and anger at the human ambition, greed and selfishness that caused it. Would justice be done? Could justice be done?
I was roused from gloomy reverie by Macdonald. ‘I’ve called up my people and arranged for a party to find the wreck of the helicopter and recover the bodies,’ he said. ‘There’ll have to be a Canadian inquiry, but it was a military plane and the inquiry can be discreet. There will be no difficulty about repatriating the bodies to Germany for burial. We shall have to recover the body from your battle by the yacht, but again I think there will be no difficulty. Now that’s fixed up, Colonel, is there anything to keep us in this forsaken place?’ There wasn’t, and a few minutes later we were airborne too.
Macdonald was a kindly host, and he fed us Canadian whisky, cold ham and bread that had been fresh that morning, until he was satisfied that we were in no immediate danger of death from hunger or thirst. Not until then did he begin asking questions. ‘How come we weren’t called in before you went to Ellesmere Island?’ he said politely. This was an awkward one, but we’d taken some precautions.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ I explained. ‘Until we found the yacht at the end of the Robeson Channel we weren’t at all sure that we were looking for our gang in even the right continent, and we didn’t want to waste your time. There was evidence of a sort pointing to the Arctic, but our interpretation of it was all supposition. If we were right, we had to act quickly, because Dr Braunschweig’s life was in danger from his kidnappers. But there was nothing we could ask you to do, because we had no idea of what was likely to happen. We weren’t all that guilty of diplomatic bad manners. Our authorities, and the German Government, agreed on an exploratory expedition, and we decided that it could be regarded as an Arctic training exercise for a special detachment of the German Air Force. The German military people duly cleared the exercise with the Canadian Ministry of Defence. For all we knew it might be a matter only of flying out to Gould Bay, landing on the gravel plain, and conducting a few helicopter sorties without finding anything.
‘We were caught up by events. Unknown to us, the kidnap gang was in process of taking off the people who’d sailed with Dr Braunschweig from Hamburg. Before leaving they’d have liquidated him, and doubtless sunk the yacht. When they saw the German plane at Gould Bay they seem to have panicked. Had they left it alone, they could have carried out all their plans without our being any the wiser. An announcement would have been made that Dr Braunschweig had been executed by a group called LAPI – that stands for League Against Political Injustice, and seems to have been a put-up terrorist group invented for the purpose. They wouldn’t have said where the execution had been carried out, and nobody would have known anything of the goings-on in the Canadian Arctic.
‘This is still conjecture, but I think it’s safe to assume that the appearance of the German plane upset them so much that they decided it would have to be put out of action while they dealt with Dr Braunschweig and the yacht. From their point of view there was far too much at stake, nothing less than total domination of the whole Middle East oil industry.’
‘What do you think they would have done with the German air crew?’ Macdonald asked.
‘I don’t suppose we shall ever know. The man who appears to have been their leader was killed. When the rest of them are questioned they’ll say that they intended no harm to the crew, but I don’t believe it. Hijacking a German Air Force plane is a grave matter. All the resources of the German Government and of the NATO alliance would have gone into the hunt for them, and they wouldn’t have wanted men left alive who could recognise them if any of them were caught. They showed no hesitation in opening fire on us the moment they saw us near the yacht. I think they’d have taken the airmen one by one out of the plane, shot them, and hidden the bodies. They’d have left the empty plane where it was. It would have been found, of course, but they could hope that nobody would ever discover what had happened to the crew – it would have been yet another of the unsolved mysteries of the Arctic.’
‘If your helicopter hadn’t crashed, you’d have gone back and been captured, too.’
‘Possibly. But I think we’d have found the yacht first – in flying time we weren’t far from it when we crashed. There’d have been no one there but Dr Braunschweig and his kidnappers, and we had ample strength for dealing with them. We’d have reported by radio, and what they’d have done then, goodness knows. If they’d tried to bluff us over the radio, we might have smelt a rat. Or they might have come in force to attack us, in which case anything might have happened. We won as we did because we had every advantage of surprise, and used it. They knew nothing about the helicopter, remember, and they didn’t know who we were, nor how many of us there were.’
Macdonald considered this, ‘Surprise or not, the three of you didn’t do badly,’ he said.
‘The more important thing is what we’re going to do next,’ I said.
*
We came down at a police post to refuel – the bigger Unol plane had to go via the Hudson’s Bay station, because it could not have landed on the police airstrip. We were offered beds for a proper rest, but attractive as the offer was we declined it, and only stayed for a cup of coffee while the plane was fuelled. Both Macdonald and I were anxious to press on to Ottawa. When we were on our way again Ruth, who was utterly exhausted, curled up on a seat and managed a little restless sleep. I shut my eyes, but it was no good – my mind went over and over what had happened, trying to extract some meaning from it. Whom had Hilde Baumgarten meant by ‘We’? She and her husband were obviously leading figures in the conspiracy, but they must have had powerful support. I considered what we knew about Dr Jackson’s murder. Maybe we could never prove it, but there seemed little doubt that the Baumgarten woman had acted as she had admitted. But something was wrong. I’d mentioned the amber bead to her, and she hadn’t denied it. But how on earth could she have got hold of one of Ingrid Mitchell’s amber beads?
I went back to what Dr Mitchell had told me. I had the sharpest memory of her on that last day of her life, all defences down, and a growing understanding that if she had trusted the police much suffering might have been prevented. She wore the beads frequently, partly, perhaps, because of their association with Dr Jackson, but probably more because the rich glow of the amber suited her clear, dark skin. One day at the museum the string of the necklace had broken, and the beads scattered on the floor. All but one had been picked up – the remaining one was never found.
I tried to visualise the incident. What, exactly, had Ingrid Mitchell said? She had been surprised at my knowing – more accurately, guessing – about it, and then said something like, ‘Yes, it did break, one day when I was visiting Charles at the museum. As he’d given it to me he was a bit upset, and helped me pick up the beads.’ That would have been in Dr Jackson’s office, later her own office. I had a clear recollection of it, a pleasant, light room, with a big desk, a fitted carpet, I thought three chairs, though there may have been four, and not much other furniture. The carpet was a paleish fawn; the dark amber beads would have shown up well on it, and with friction from the pile of the carpet could not have rolled far. Dr Jackson had helped her to pick up the beads – with two people looking there seemed even less chance of one’s being missed. Could Dr Jackson himself have kept one for sentimental reasons? Possible, but it seemed hardly likely. Could there have been anybody else in the room? Ingrid Mitchell hadn’t said anything about anyone else, but suppose Dr Jackson’s secretary, afterwards her own secretary, had been there she might easily not have mentioned her.
The more I thought about it the more likely it seemed that some third person must have been in the room, to pick up, and keep, one of the beads. The secretary might have come in while they were hunting for them, or she might have been with Dr Jackson when Ingrid Mitchell called. She was so familiar a figure in the setting of the office that Dr Mitchell might just not have remembered her. What did we know about the secretary?
Next to nothing. I had met her every time I’d been to the museum but had no distinct impression of her, other than of a fair-haired, rather attractive young woman in her late twenties or early thirties. I had a vague recollection of hearing Dr Mitchell call her Joan.
Then I thought of something else – a remark that Sir Anthony Brotherton had made on the morning he’d come to see us about the second ransom note, when we’d told him of Dr Mitchell’s death. He had not heard the seven o’clock radio news, and he was visibly shocked. In telling him about it I’d said that the Keeper of the Department at the museum responsible for the Baffin Map had been found murdered at her home. I had not then told him that Ingrid Mitchell had been shot, and he had asked, ‘Can you be sure she was murdered?’ It was a remark that anybody might have made and I’d thought nothing of it at the time, but now that it came back to me after thinking of the chain of circumstance relating to the amber bead it seemed suddenly a distinctly curious thing for him to ask. We had not told him any details regarding the deaths of Dr Jackson and of Adrian Stowe – both had been murders disguised, for a time successfully, to look like suicide or accident. There had been a similar attempt, though a much clumsier one, to make Ingrid Mitchell’s death look like suicide. Why had Sir Anthony thought there could be any doubt when I’d told him that Dr Mitchell had been found murdered?
All at once I knew what we’d got to do.
XIII
Two Telephone Calls
I’M WRITING THIS in the sadly familiar room in an Oxford hospital where they put me when I have to undergo more surgery. There was a gap of several months between the events narrated in the last chapter and what I am writing now. During these months the rest of a miserable story was cleared up, with little help from me, because after I’d put through a call from Ottawa to Sir Edmund Pusey I collapsed in Commissioner Macdonald’s office and was rushed off to a Canadian hospital, where I was kept for a week until I was patched up sufficiently to return to England to begin another round of hospitals and doctors. So all the work was done by other people, but at least I managed to talk to Sir Edmund on the telephone before I packed up.
It was the early hours of the morning in Canada, but with the difference in the clock it was breakfast time in England. I felt things swimming round me and knew that I had to be brief. ‘There’s no time to explain, but there are two things you must do immediately,’ I said. ‘You must find some way of detaining Sir Anthony Brotherton, and you must get Inspector Richards in Cambridge to detain a woman called Joan Benson, who was secretary to Ingrid Mitchell at the museum. I’m afraid I’m going to pass out for a bit, but Rolf Keller will be back in Hamburg about now and he can explain what’s happened here.’
When Sir Edmund tried to talk to me I couldn’t answer.
*
As a boss Sir Edmund Pusey has some maddening characteristics, but he makes up for all of them by absolute loyalty to his staff. To ask a high Home Office official to detain the chairman of one of the most important oil companies in the world without being able to give any reasons was asking a lot, but Sir Edmund acted at once. He told me later that he was not at all sure what he was going to do, but he is not an ex-diplomat for nothing, and he decided to go himself to Sir Anthony’s house in the hope of catching him at breakfast. ‘A man is often a bit off guard at breakfast time, and I think I hoped that I might make a glimmer of sense out of your extraordinary request by talking to him then,’ he told me afterwards.
