He was too late. He got to the house to learn that Sir Anthony had been found dead in his bed that morning. Being Sir Edmund he was at once immensely helpful to the distressed household, but natural kindliness did not suppress his intense curiosity, and he soon began to learn things that shook even his long experience of human corruption. After helping the board of Unol to compose a guarded statement about the sudden death of their chairman he had two telephone calls in quick succession. One was from Inspector Richards to say that he was coming from Cambridge and needed to see Sir Edmund urgently; the other was from Keller in Hamburg with the news that he and Gustav Braunschweig were on their way to London.

  I had rushed off to Hamburg and the Arctic leaving Inspector Richards with the murder of Ingrid Mitchell on his hands. Most criminal cases are solved by routine detective work, sometimes with the help of a bit of luck – but the luck doesn’t come without the patient routine. Richards knew all that I could tell him of my visit to Ingrid Mitchell on the morning of her death, and acting from first principles he set out to establish the pattern of events concerning her before my visit. That took him to the museum and a long interview with Miss Benson who, apart from me, was the last person known to have seen Dr Mitchell alive. Richards had no reason to suspect Miss Benson, but as a matter of routine he asked about her own movements on the day of Dr Mitchell’s death. She told him that a Mr Blair (I had abandoned army rank in my dealings with the museum) had called to see Dr Mitchell, and that Dr Mitchell had gone out with him, saying that she would not be back that day.

  ‘Was it usual for Dr Mitchell to go off like that?’ Richards asked.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t unusual. I mean, she didn’t often leave the office for a whole day, but visiting scholars would come from time to time, and sometimes she’d go out with them, maybe for lunch.’

  ‘Who is Mr Blair?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly. He’d been here before. I think he belongs to some institution in London, but I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Did Dr Mitchell seem disturbed?’

  ‘Not particularly. She wouldn’t have any reason to be, as far as I know.’

  Knowing what had brought me to see Dr Mitchell, Richards was a little puzzled by that last remark, because Ingrid Mitchell had been very much disturbed by my visit, and an apparently intelligent secretary who knew her well might have been expected to notice it. Her lack of observation, however, or reluctance to speculate might mean nothing, though they alerted a small detective nerve. He continued his polite questioning.

  ‘What did you do after Dr Mitchell left?’

  ‘Got on with my work. There’s always a lot of typing. She left several letters, and we’re re-cataloguing the department, so there’s a load of work to do. Oh, and I made a couple of phone calls.’

  ‘Do you remember who you telephoned?’

  ‘Yes. I rang the printers asking them to hurry up with proofs of a paper on aerial surveying that Dr Mitchell is giving – was giving, I should say – to the Institute of Geographical Research, and I tried to ring a Mr Jeffery at Clare College about a list of maps he wanted, but he wasn’t in.’

  ‘Where did you go for lunch?’

  ‘Nowhere. I hardly ever go out to lunch. I have a glass of milk and an apple here.’

  ‘So you were in your office all the time until the police sergeant came with the news of Dr Mitchell’s death – that would have been about four o’clock?’

  ‘Yes.’

  *

  He did not know it at once, but that was the Inspector’s piece of luck, though he could not have benefited from it without more routine. Having left Miss Benson he decided in his careful way that he ought to try to confirm her telephone calls, and went to the museum’s switchboard operator. She was an efficient middle-aged woman, working in a tiny telephone room that would have been condemned if the museum had been a factory. ‘Do all outside calls go through you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s a tiresome system, but there’s no direct dialling from any of the departments and I have to get the numbers they want. This switchboard’s hopelessly out of date and I’m always asking them to do something about it, but the Curator’s an old man and he doesn’t like telephones. He’s due to retire soon, and I hope to goodness we’ll get a new outfit when he goes.’

  ‘Do you keep a record of the calls you make?’

  ‘I’m supposed to, as a check against people using the museum phone for personal calls, but there’s only me, and a part-time girl who takes over when I’m off, and we can’t do it. I’ve told the Curator several times, but he says it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t know of any calls that came from Dr Mitchell’s office on the day she died?’

  ‘Well, I might. It’s not a proper record, but you see this pad? When I’m asked for a number I jot it down so that I know what to dial. I tear off the used pages every day, and put them in this old box file, where they stay until the box gets full. Nobody seems to want them, so then I just throw them away. But you’re asking about yesterday, and the pages are still there. Let me have a look.’

  From the box she took the top dozen pages, covered with scribbled telephone numbers. ‘I tear off the pages in a batch, so the top ones are the beginning of each day,’ she said. ‘You’re asking about the morning, so they should be on the first couple of sheets. Yes, here we are – 119, that’s the extension for Dr Mitchell’s office, or rather, it’s for the phone in her secretary’s room, her own extension is 120. I have to put the extension so I know who I’m dialling for. There seems to be only one call during the morning, a London number – 01 836 8365.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know who it was?’

  ‘No. I just get the number. But there was an incoming call. I remember now, because I couldn’t put it through. I rang Miss Benson’s extension, but I didn’t get any reply. I tried Dr Mitchell’s extension as well, but she didn’t reply either, so they both must have been out. When I said there was no reply a man’s voice asked me to get Miss Benson to ring 01 836 8365 as soon as she could. See, I’ve got the number written here, with my note, Miss Benson to ring.’

  ‘It’s the same number that she herself rang earlier,’ Richards said.

  ‘So it is. I have such millions of numbers that they don’t mean a thing – that’s why I have to write them down.’

  ‘You haven’t got a time for the call.’

  ‘No, I don’t bother with times. But it must have been before lunch because it’s my writing. I go to lunch at one thirty, when the part-time girl takes over for an hour.’

  ‘Did you get the message to Miss Benson?’

  ‘Yes, but not until the afternoon – I’d say about three thirty. I remember ringing her extension several times up to just before half-past one, when I went off, but she didn’t answer. I tried again as soon as I got back, but she still didn’t answer – I remember thinking that she must have gone out for a long lunch. It was at least half-past three before I got her.’

  ‘Did you get the London number for her then?’

  ‘No. She said thank you, but she knew what it was about, and it could wait until tomorrow – that’s today, I suppose.’

  ‘Has she rung the number today?’

  The operator looked at her current pad. ‘No, she doesn’t seem to have rung anyone today,’ she said.

  *

  The Inspector had had a heavy day, driving to Cambridge from London after leaving me in the early morning, calling on Mrs Jackson, as I’d asked him to inquire again about Dr Jackson’s papers, and then putting in several hours at the museum. Mrs Jackson could tell him nothing – she could only repeat that as far as she knew her late husband’s papers were at the museum. By the time he had finished talking to the switchboard operator it was late in the afternoon. He tried to get hold of me, but I was already in Hamburg, and he decided to concentrate on the inconsistencies in Miss Benson’s story to him. Inconsistencies was a polite way of putting it; by next morning he was as sure as he ever had been sure of anything that they were lies. But why? The two invented local telephone calls seemed pointless, unless she did not know the ins and outs of the switchboard operator’s methods and wanted to disguise the fact that she’d made a call to London – the operator might have remembered that she’d telephoned somebody, but not the number. Clearly she had not lunched on a glass of milk and an apple in her room – unless for some reason the switchboard operator was lying. Was there any way of checking? It was maddening that the switchboard lady was so vague about times, but really he had been lucky to have got so much out of her. He could go again to Miss Benson and challenge her statements, but there were several arguments against this. First, unless he could prove that she was lying she had only to stick to what she’d said, and he’d be no for’arder. More important, if he showed that he was suspicious of her she could alert other people, and he knew enough about the case to realise that there might be many others involved. He discussed things with his Superintendent, and they decided that they must try to find some independent evidence of Miss Benson’s movements on the day of Dr Mitchell’s death before doing anything else.

  She lived in a flat in Cambridge, and normally drove to work in a blue Mini which she owned. The museum had a car park for staff and visitors, with one end marked off by white lines for the staff. There was no attendant and no check on the coming and going of cars, so the only hope was to try to find out if anyone had noticed Miss Benson’s Mini leaving or returning to the car park during working hours on the day in question. Hers was the only blue Mini among staff cars, so it was reasonably noticeable. Richards felt free to make exhaustive inquiries about cars because they could be related to Dr Mitchell – he himself knew that she had driven to her house with me, but the museum people could assume that the police were trying to work out her movements on the last morning of her life.

  He got nowhere. Miss Benson had had her Mini for two years, and it was so familiar in the staff part of the car park that other users simply thought it had been there at the normal times. No one seemed to have been looking out of a window to see either Dr Mitchcll or Miss Benson drive away. Inquiries round Dr Mitchell’s home were equally fruitless.

  What of the London telephone number? It was traced through the Post Office and turned out to be a call box. Since Miss Benson had apparently rung it and been asked to call back this was puzzling, and the Inspector was even more puzzled when he learned that it had been out of action for several days because of vandalism – the box was on a housing estate notorious for its social problems, and it seemed that it was out of action almost more often than it was usable. Had the switchboard lady written down the number wrongly? That seemed unlikely, because Miss Benson was apparently put through without trouble when she made her call, and the same number had been written a second time when the operator had been unable to get a reply from Miss Benson’s extension. The caller then had asked for a message to ring the number to be given her – that seemed ridiculous if the number was a call box, even one in working order. It was reasonable to ask someone to ring a call box at a given time when you can make a point of being there, but to ask for a call at a call box without any pre-arranged time makes no sense. Could it have been a code, and not a telephone number at all? That was possible, but if so how had the number apparently worked when Miss Benson asked for it in the first instance? Richards could make neither head nor tail of it, but the mystery increased his suspicion that Miss Benson knew something of Dr Mitchell’s murder, even if she herself had not been directly involved. He reported all this to Seddon at the Yard, and concentrated on trying to find someone who might have seen the blue Mini.

  There things rested while Keller, Ruth and I had our adventures in the Arctic. On the day that we were flying to Ottawa there were two dramatic developments. First, Richards had a second stroke of luck. A taxi driver who had been on holiday came home to learn that the police were inquiring about a blue Mini which might have been in the vicinity of Dr Mitchell’s cottage on the day of her death. He had had a fare which took him past her house, and he remembered nearly running into a blue Mini which in his view had been parked dangerously under a hedge where there was no footpath, round a bend in the road about a hundred yards from Dr Mitchell’s drive. He was a good witness; moreover, he knew his fare, who was a man he took home quite often. This man confirmed the near-accident with the blue Mini. He and the taxi driver were taken to the museum car park to look at Miss Benson’s Mini, and while neither could swear that it was the car they had seen, both thought that it was like it. Richards and his Superintendent decided that thin though this evidence was, it justified bringing Miss Benson to the police station for questioning. They also got a warrant to search her flat, and in a drawer of her dressing-table found a bundle of papers which looked like notes on the Arctic Calorific Syndrome. That was enough to detain her.

  An even more dramatic development came on the morning that Sir Anthony Brotherton was found dead. Seddon had been puzzling away at the mystery of the call-box telephone, and with the help of skilled Post Office engineers he suddenly solved it. There was nothing in the box itself to indicate anything but frequent vandalism, but examination of an underground cable some distance from the box showed that the line serving its number had been diverted. As long as the box was in use the diversion would not work, but the box could be put out of action by a simple switch and the line then served a telephone that was traced to Sir Anthony Brotherton’s house. All that had to be done to make use of this means of secret communication was to put the box out of order.

  When Miss Benson was told of Sir Anthony Brotherton’s death she broke down under questioning, and the whole – or as much as she knew about the whole – of an extraordinary story came out. In a way it had started in Cambridge years before when she and Hilde Baumgarten, then Hilda Stevenson (she Germanised the spelling of her name to Hilde after her marriage) were both undergraduate students of Dr Jackson. Both got good upper seconds in geography, and got jobs in the Unol office in London, Joan Benson as a secretary, and Hilda Stevenson in the cartographic department dealing with surveys of oilfields. Hilda met Heinrich Baumgarten when he was on a visit to London to discuss a contract for pipeline engineering for a field in the Middle East, married him and went off to live in Germany. Joan was rapidly promoted, and became personal secretary to Sir Anthony Brotherton. She also became his mistress.

  Whether the first alarm about the potential disaster to Middle East oil that a practicable North-West Passage might bring came from Baumgarten or Brotherton was never clear, but both soon became much involved in thwarting any ideas that Dr Braunschweig might have about developing new Arctic shipping routes. Both knew about Charles Jackson’s importance in adding to knowledge of the Arctic Calorific Syndrome, and Brotherton’s first idea was that he should be controlled by blackmail. An opportunity came when his secretary retired, and Joan Benson, a former student of his and now with magnificent references from Unol, applied for the job. She got it, and her combination of a good degree in geography with first-class secretarial experience made her very good at it. She soon became more or less indispensable to Charles Jackson, and she was able to keep Sir Anthony Brotherton informed of all his correspondence on the Arctic, and the general progress of his work. The main danger to the Middle East consortium seemed to come from the mathematical research by Adrian Stowe in Hamburg, and it was decided to eliminate him. The Benson woman said she didn’t know much about this because it had all happened in Hamburg, but she made one damning admission – she had typed the name Adrian Stowe and prescribing instructions for taking one tablet on a chemist’s label sent to her by Brotherton. Hamburg police still had the bottle with the label on it, and when it was shown to her she said it was the one she typed. Chemists’ labels on medicines always have a reference number from which the original doctor’s prescription can be identified. This label duly had a number, but on inquiry at the chemist’s shop it turned out to have no relationship with any series of references in the dispenser’s own files, and was obviously bogus. Joan Benson had sent the typed label to Brotherton, and knew no more about it. Presumably he had sent it to Baumgarten, but whether the barbiturate tablets that killed Stowe were obtained in London or Hamburg was never discovered. Baumgarten, his wife and Brotherton were all dead, so in a sense it did not matter, but Joan Benson’s statement sufficiently established that Stowe’s death was murder.

  After Stowe’s death events moved back to Cambridge. Miss Benson knew that Dr Jackson had been in constant touch with Stowe and had copies of his notes, and Brotherton decided that Jackson would have to be controlled or silenced. The plan adopted was to play on his known sympathies and human decency. Miss Benson came to the office one day looking haggard and distressed, and when Jackson asked what was the matter she confessed a pitiful story to him. Her mother, aged eighty, was in an expensive nursing home. Originally she had enough income from investments to pay the fees, but her investments had been badly managed, the income had all but disappeared, and now there wasn’t enough money to meet the fees. Miss Benson had helped from her salary, but she couldn’t go on. While she was at Unol she had forged shipping documents diverting a large consignment of oil to a friend, who had sold it on the so-called free oil market, making over £200,000. Half of the proceeds had come to her, and she was using the money to maintain her mother in the home. That was the real reason why she had wanted to leave Unol and come to Cambridge. Now there was a chance that the fraud would come to light, and the friend who had suggested it to her was asking for money to keep people quiet. She had paid him everything she had, but he kept demanding more and she didn’t know what to do. As far as she herself was concerned she didn’t particularly mind being sent to prison, but she was worried about her mother. It would be an appalling shock to her to have to leave the private home where she had been well looked after for years. She felt that her mother would die soon in any case, and if only she could keep things quiet for a bit longer at least her beloved mother could die in dignity and peace.

 

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