Death in a High Latitude, page 24
This story – wholly fictitious – was cleverly calculated to impress Charles Jackson who, with his wife, was making considerable sacrifices to keep his own mother in a private home. He asked Miss Benson how much she needed, and at first her requests were quite modest. It was a struggle, but he found the money for her. Then the demands were increased, culminating in the suggestion that he should steal the Baffin Map from the museum. By this time Jackson was himself ill and desperate, but he couldn’t contemplate stealing the map and, as we had learned from Ingrid Mitchell, he had given it to her to keep safe. When Miss Benson discovered that the map was missing and that Dr Jackson had not taken it she, Brotherton and Baumgarten became greatly worried. They decided that Dr Jackson was probably about to go to the police, and that he would have to follow Adrian Stowe into oblivion. They also wanted to get the copies of Stowe’s notes from him. Miss Benson knew all about his treatment for depression, and she knew the name of the drug that his doctor had given him. Brotherton or the Baumgartens – again we could never know which – obviously had access to pharmaceutical information, for they learned of its fatal combination with alcohol. Miss Benson knew of the forthcoming Cambridge party from Dr Jackson’s diary, and the conspirators worked out a quick plan for getting rid of him. Hilde Baumgarten came over from Germany, gate-crashed the party with no trouble – there were people coming and going all the time – and Dr Jackson was delighted to meet one of his old students. She kept his glass liberally supplied with gin, and when his wife and Ingrid Mitchell took him home she must have followed them in a car she had hired for the occasion. She had more or less admitted to me that my reconstruction of events in Dr Jackson’s bedroom was right and although we could get no farther because of her own death, the Cambridge police found a car-hire firm which had hired a car to a lady on the day of the party, and on being shown a photograph of Hilde Baumgarten thought that it was like what they remembered of their customer. There was damning incidental evidence in the amber bead, which Miss Benson had picked up when Ingrid Mitchell’s necklace broke, and had kept in case it might come in useful. She admitted that she had given it to Hilde Baumgarten.
Here oil politics became rather mixed with personal emotion. Miss Benson lived in hopes that Brotherton would divorce his wife and marry her, but she knew well enough that Sir Anthony had an eye for attractive women – and that plenty of women had found him attractive. She was jealous of any other women who might come into his life, and when she told Brotherton that Ingrid Mitchell had been appointed to succeed Dr Jackson at the museum he remarked that he had met her when she was doing a thesis on Alaska, and had thought her a most interesting girl. There is no evidence that Ingrid Mitchell ever met him again, but the remark was enough to make Miss Benson dislike and distrust her, and if she could have been involved as a suspect in any way, Joan Benson would have been delighted.
As things turned out, no one was suspected of Dr Jackson’s murder, but Hilde Baumgarten had been disappointed on going through his desk. She had the twenty-five minutes that Mrs Jackson was away driving Ingrid Mitchell back to Cambridge, and she was a cool, efficient woman. There was plenty of time to get the pills into the half-drunk Jackson, and then to tackle his desk. There were some notes, but nothing like as many as she expected, and she knew enough about the Arctic theory to realise that Adrian Stowe’s papers were not among them. She took what she could find and – fortunately for us – had time to stage the setting for Dr Jackson’s accident a little too perfectly by wiping his glass and imprinting only his own fingerprints on it. But this wasn’t noticed at the time, there was the amber bead to lay a false trail if necessary, and from the conspirators’ point of view everything worked splendidly.
But they still didn’t have the copies of Stowe’s notes that they felt sure must exist. There seemed two possibilities, first that Dr Braunschweig had them, secondly that they might be in the possession of Ingrid Mitchell, who was known by Joan Benson to have been working with Dr Jackson on the Arctic theory; indeed, it seemed quite likely that both might have copies of the all-important Stowe papers.
The Benson woman kept a close eye on all Dr Mitchell’s movements, reporting everything to Brotherton via the secret telephone line. He knew at once of my original visit to the museum – indeed, when he brought us the first of the Baffin Map demands I had told him that I intended to go to Cambridge. My second visit seemed more sinister, and when Dr Mitchell hurriedly went off with me it appeared more dangerous still. Miss Benson denied that she had overheard any of my conversation with Dr Mitchell about the map, and there was no listening device linking her office with the secretary’s room that we ever found, though there would have been plenty of time for Joan Benson to have removed one. I didn’t believe her denial – without a listening device she could easily have overheard us by opening the door to her room slightly, and listening behind it. It did not matter. What did was that as soon as Dr Mitchell had gone off with me she rang Brotherton, and he told her that she must follow us to Ingrid Mitchell’s home, get in as soon as I had left and search the place for the Stowe papers, dealing with Ingrid as might seem necessary.
Miss Benson appeared completely frank about her part in the murder, but neither Inspector Richards nor I wholly believed her. Her story was that Brotherton had given her a pistol for contingencies when she first went to the museum, and that she had shot Ingrid Mitchell because it seemed the only way to search the house. I think her motives were more complex. She hated Ingrid Mitchell, partly because she was afraid of her in relation to Anthony Brotherton if they ever met, which was always a real possibility in her mind, partly because she was jealous of her position in Cambridge. She herself was a geographer, and at the back of her contorted mind I think there may have been an idea that she might succeed to the post of Keeper of the Arctic Maps. The amber bead seemed significant here. It was Joan Benson who gave it to Hilde Baumgarten, in the hope that Dr Mitchell might somehow be implicated in Charles Jackson’s death.
Why was Brotherton so upset when he heard of my second visit to Ingrid Mitchell? Here we were still left only with conjecture. Joan Benson was an important cog in the anti-North-West Passage intrigue, but she was no more than a cog. She could explain the use of the Baffin Map in an attempt to get an unbreakable hold on Charles Jackson, but its later use as a ransom demand for Dr Braunschweig remained puzzling. Did Brotherton and Baumgarten really want the map in order to destroy any possible hint of the existence of a North-West Passage farther north than anyone else had apparently ever looked? Dr Mitchell said that the map had really very little bearing on the Arctic calorific theory, except in indicating navigable water for William Baffin three centuries ago. But then she was an expert, understood the immense range of seasonal variation in the ice, and knew infinitely more about modern theories of warm currents than did Brotherton or Baumgarten. I think they did regard the map as important, and for mixed reasons. They did not want any reminder of Baffin’s last voyages, and they did not know what had happened to the map when its disappearance was finally reported to the Cambridge police by the museum. They judged Charles Jackson by their own standards, and when he refused to have anything to do with purloining the map they assumed that he must be mixed up with Dr Braunschweig in some way. But Jackson was a pure scholar, knew nothing more than he may have learned incidentally from Adrian Stowe of Dr Braunschweig’s commercial interest in the Arctic theory, and after Stowe’s death rather distrusted Braunschweig. The map was of a piece with all the other planning that went into the affair – it was over-subtle. A plain demand for money on Dr Braunschweig’s kidnapping would have explained his intended murder well enough, and would not have taken us at once to the Cambridge Museum. Of course, the Brotherton-Baumgarten partnership would have had to put up with ignorance of the whereabouts of the map, but no one investigating an apparently political killing of Dr Braunschweig as an industrialist would have had any reason to go looking for him in the Arctic. Only exceptionally clever plotters would have thought of involving the map. Brotherton and the Baumgartens were exceptionally clever. Were they too clever? And why was this dreadful puzzle contrived at all?
XIV
Out of the ruins of Troy . . .
THE ONLY PERSON left alive with first-hand knowledge of the conspiracy was Joan Benson, and although she had played a major part in events at Cambridge her knowledge of the inner politics of Universal Oil and the oil industry was a little out of date. Dr Braunschweig knew much more about recent events, and detailed financial investigations by Keller in Hamburg and George Seddon in London suggested that the original impetus to stop the development of a North-West Passage for the transport of oil at any price came from Heinrich Baumgarten. He had a profitable engineering business founded by his father, but he was ambitious for power in the oil industry itself, and invested heavily in the Arabian Sands company. When that company ran into difficulties he saw his only hope of avoiding personal ruin in a takeover by a larger group, and as things turned out the only group with whom he had a practical chance of doing business was Unol. Any hint of geographical discovery which might damage the value of shareholdings in the Middle East, even temporarily, would, as he saw it, have devalued his investment in Arabian Sands to a point which would have meant bankruptcy for him personally. But how did he get Sir Anthony Brotherton on his side?
On the face of it, Sir Anthony had almost everything that a man can hope to obtain from life – money, position, power. A search of his house brought to light a vile collection of obscene books and films, and further police inquiries showed that he was deeply involved in pornographic sex. But he was shielded by an apparently normal marriage, and in a position to pay for discretion. How much Lady Brotherton really knew of her husband’s secret performances never became clear – she seemed to have been content to lead her own life, enjoying her position in the world, and not asking questions. There were no children, and she may have been genuinely ignorant of her husband’s affairs, though how far her professed ignorance really extended we could never determine. There was nothing to indicate that she had played any part in the conspiracy, there was no charge that could be brought against her, and she remained an enigmatic personality, important to her husband socially, but quite possibly unimportant in any other way. There was some evidence that Hilde Baumgarten had indulged Sir Anthony’s tastes from time to time, and Seddon unearthed an undocumented possibility that Sir Anthony had diverted Unol money to support shares in Arabian Sands before the merger. Financial dealings here, however, were of such intricacy, involving nominees from Hong Kong to the Channel Islands, that proof of this could never be obtained. If Sir Anthony had been committed in such a way then he, too, might have faced ruin if the Arabian Sands deal had been upset.
Good work by the Metropolitan Police in London, and by the German force in Hamburg, cleared up the incidental mysteries. The German police reckoned that they rounded up all of those involved in Baumgarten’s League Against Political Injustice who remained alive. The leader, and the one really important man in the outfit apart from Baumgarten himself, had been killed in the shooting round the yacht. He was a promising young engineer working for Unol in Alaska, and had ideological convictions on the need for terrorism to combat big business. It was he who had obtained the Unol plane. The others in the plane were professional crooks, recruited for money. The German authorities obtained their extradition for the attack on a German Air Force plane, and they got stiff prison sentences. None of them seemed implicated in the real conspiracy, or even to know much about it, so it did not come up at the trial.
The only one of the major conspirators left to face trial was Joan Benson. Her case bristled with complexities, for Sir Anthony Brotherton was dead, and although his part in the murders was clear to us, he could not be charged and cross-examined. I was patched up sufficiently to share in the questioning of Miss Benson, and although she was undoubtedly a murderess, I felt a good deal of pity for her – it seemed damnably unfair that she alone should be left to be charged with murder. And her case was different from the rest – her ambitions were in her emotional attachment to Sir Anthony. She had been genuinely in love with him, and believed that one day he would marry her. It was necessary to question her about his sexual practices, but she flatly refused to believe in them. Having admitted her part in the murder of Ingrid Mitchell, her remaining object in life seemed to be to protect Sir Anthony’s memory, and to keep his name out of things. With a plea of guilty there was no need for anything much to come out at her trial. Inevitably she was sentenced to life imprisonment, the judge adding a humane rider that the prison authorities would observe her mental state and see that she got any treatment she might need. Pusey, Inspector Richards and I were all convinced that she had been at least partly out of her mind for some time, and that she was more than likely to end up hopelessly insane. I think I almost hoped so.
Partly fortuitously, partly by the greatest care in handling the prosecutions in both German and English courts, publicity about the North-West Passage was avoided at all the various trials, but it was hard to decide what to do about Sir Anthony Brotherton. An inquest had to be held, and it would have upset Foreign Offices and Departments of Trade throughout the world if it came out that the chairman of one of the greatest of international oil companies had been murdering people, and attempting to murder his own deputy chairman, to prevent research into a possible North-West Passage route for the transport of oil. And the effect on oil markets would be incalculable. With Dr Braunschweig in the chair, the board of Unol was at one with the British and German Governments in wanting nothing to emerge about the North-West Passage theory. But how was Sir Anthony’s suicide to be explained? Legally, no explanation was required – a coroner could return a verdict of suicide without speculating on any reason for it. But the suicide of the chairman of Unol was a news story of vast proportions, and every newspaper and news agency in the world could be expected to assign teams of reporters to cover it.
If you want to keep the press away from one story, give them another one. The library of obscene books and films discovered in Sir Anthony’s house, and the lurid aspects of his secret life were enough to give the press a field day, and a prominent man’s fear of being found out was enough to offer a convincing reason for suicide. This was what happened. Tampering with the call box to provide a secret telephone number was a fact, and a man had been duly convicted for it. Police evidence of investigation of the call box, all of which was true, if not quite the whole truth, indicated that Sir Anthony might have good reason to fear that his activities would come to light. Press and television enterprise after the inquest got hold of various girls whose sensational accounts of orgies brought fat cheques for themselves and acres of material for the papers and ‘investigative’ television programmes. In the mass of sensational disclosures the oil industry itself was ignored.
Behind the scenes, the Unol board did what it could to help those who had suffered from its chairman’s crimes. The dependents of the German airmen and policemen who had lost their lives in the Arctic could be helped by substantial grants in addition to their Service pensions. I was back in hospital when Ruth brought Mrs Jackson to see me, and I was allowed to tell her of what was being done for her.
‘I promised to visit you again when I knew more of the story of your husband,’ I said. ‘I can’t keep that promise literally because you have had to come to see me, but I can reinforce what I told you in Cambridge – that you and your daughter can be very proud of your husband. He was an honourable man, killed in doing what he saw as his duty. His illness, which led to so much suffering for you, was the direct result of his own generous behaviour in trying to help a woman who deserved no help – but he could not know that.’
‘There is a lot that I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘but I do realise that Charles genuinely believed the story of that dreadful woman who murdered Ingrid Mitchell. It would have been better if he had told me about it – but then he wouldn’t have been Charles. He thought it was her secret, and he could not talk about it, even to me.’
I kept to the end the thing I most wanted to tell her. ‘There’s something more,’ I said. ‘In recognition of your husband’s work the Universal Oil Company has arranged to endow a Jackson Chair of Polar Geography in the University of Cambridge. That will give him the kind of memorial that perhaps he would most have liked to have.’
At this point she broke down and cried. Ruth put her arms round her. ‘Try to think of the Jackson Professorship,’ she said gently. ‘If your daughter follows her father, as you think she may, perhaps one day she will be the Jackson Professor at Cambridge. That would be something to look forward to.’
‘If I can keep her at school . . . I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking of this now, but Charles spent most of our money on that woman’s blackmail.’
‘It is I who have to say sorry . . . I was so excited about the professorship that I clean forgot to tell you something else,’ I said. ‘In more personal recognition of your husband’s work the board of Unol has decided to make you a grant which will mean at least that you never have to worry about money again.’
*
Money could do nothing for the parents of Adrian Stowe and Ingrid Mitchell, but there was one injustice that could to some extent be righted. Adrian Stowe’s death was formally recorded as suicide, and was felt by his mother and father as a slur on his memory. Hamburg police traced some of the other guests at the Baumgarten dinner party on the night he died, and although it was a longish time ago they established with reasonable certainty that Hilde Baumgarten had been absent for about half an hour during the evening. That would have given her time to drive to Stowe’s flat and put the deadly bottle of false saccharine tablets by his bed. His death was clearly murder, but neither of the Baumgartens was alive to be questioned or charged. In the end the police made a statement saying that further evidence that had come to light made it certain that Stowe could not have taken his own life, but that since important witnesses had since themselves died the matter could not be carried farther. The records of the British Embassy were changed to death by misadventure. This was not very satisfactory, but it comforted his parents a little. The memories of Adrian Stowe and Ingrid Mitchell were perpetuated by Unol with the endowment of a Stowe Readership in the Mathematics of Climatology at Oxford, and of a Mitchell Lectureship in Arctic Studies at Cambridge. ‘I suppose it is not exactly profiting from murder, but the universities haven’t done badly out of all this wretchedness,’ Ruth observed.
