Death in a High Latitude, page 5
After dinner we went for a long walk along the Cam, the scent of cut lawns and flowers in the college gardens adding to the magic of Ruth’s presence. I told her the whole story, and while one part of me was being a reporter another was wondering what her keen analytical mind would make of the extraordinary sequence of events. Mathematics is partly a search for patterns, partly an understanding of them – perhaps that is one reason why so many people who are good at maths (including Ruth) are particularly drawn to Bach’s music. But what pattern could she find here? There must be a pattern of some sort, but so many pieces were missing that there seemed no way of putting it together.
One of Ruth’s special qualities is the rare one of listening to other people. She let me talk without interrupting until I came to the inspector’s remark that he knew nothing of any domestic problems in the late Dr Jackson’s life.
‘If Dr Mitchell is as intelligent as you make out and she said he had domestic problems then I’d believe her rather than the inspector or the evidence at the inquest,’ she said.
‘I agree. I’m going to see Mrs Jackson tomorrow. I rang her from the police station. She’s off work this week because she hurt her ankle. She teaches history, but she’s also got a qualification in physical education and it seems she helps out from time to time in the gym. Anyway, she twisted her ankle or something, and she’ll be at home tomorrow and can see me in the morning.’
We were walking hand in hand, and Ruth gave my hand a small squeeze. ‘I ought to know you, Peter. Your Dr Mitchell said another funny thing – when she told you that her amber beads came from Baffin Bay.’
‘It was just a chance remark. She was rather pleased, I think, that I’d noticed the necklace.’
‘I’ve never heard of amber coming from the Arctic. It’s fossilised resin, and it comes originally from trees. Most of the world’s amber has been found round the Baltic, whose shores were thickly forested in the right geological period. It has cropped up in other places, but the Baltic is the main home of amber. Either she was trying to mislead you, or she was wrong, or the Arctic was forested in a way we don’t know anything about.’
‘Or it was populated by a race of traders we don’t know anything about. I wonder Ruth, I wonder . . .’
Typically she didn’t ask me what had come into my mind and we walked on in silence for some minutes. Then I said, ‘I don’t think she was trying to mislead me. My impression was that she was proud of her amber, pleased that I’d noticed it, and made her remark without thinking of anything except that it was interesting. But you’ve made me think. All along I’ve been racking my brains to try to find some point of contact between the modern oil industry and a map drawn over three centuries ago. The amber may have nothing to do with it, but you’ve given me a sort of amber light. Dr Braunschweig is or was an expert in oil distribution – could old William Baffin have recorded something on his map that might produce some new ideas on Arctic navigation? If so, it could be important to an oil company. There’s oil in the Arctic all right, but the main fields found so far seem to be in Alaska, which is about the worst possible place for shipping oil to Europe or the eastern seaboard of America. If there were a practicable North-West Passage it would be different. If Dr Mitchell is right, old Baffin’s original discoveries seem to have been largely forgotten for a couple of centuries. Could there have been some more discoveries that haven’t been remembered yet? If so, is there anyone who’d so much want them to remain undiscovered that they’d go to the length of kidnapping Dr Braunschweig to try to get hold of the map? But again if so, why has the map disappeared? No, it doesn’t make sense.’
‘It makes a sort of sense, Peter. There could be two or three organisations not knowing what the other’s doing, or working against each other.’
‘I suppose there could be . . . But this is more your field, Ruth. Can anything have happened to the earth’s surface in the Arctic that we don’t know about?’
She laughed. ‘All sorts of things have happened in the Arctic, and we probably know about less than one per cent of them. The shape of the globe has changed from time to time, and the North Pole has shifted about all over the place – or at least it seems quite likely to have done so. The magnetic pole does shift, as you know from elementary navigation, though that is a rather different matter. If there’s anything in the theory of change in the crustal shape of the globe – and there probably is – then there would have been big climatic changes with the shifting of the poles and what is now the Arctic Ocean might have been like the Mediterranean. But all this would have been millions of years ago – you’re talking of three centuries. I don’t think Baffin’s Arctic could have been much different from ours.’
‘No, but he might have found things that we don’t know about. Do you know anything about what’s called the North Water in Baffin Bay?’
‘Oh, Peter, I’m a mathematician, not a geographer. I have to know a bit about ocean floors because they’re concerned in earth movements, and I know a little about major ocean currents, but not much. As a matter of fact I have heard of your North Water because it’s a curious exception to normal ice formation in the polar region. As far as I know nobody’s ever found a satisfactory explanation for such a considerable area of water so far north remaining more or less ice-free, but it’s not really in my field and I’ve never gone into it.’
‘Could you find somebody who has?’
‘I daresay. The geographers at your museum are on the doorstep, but I suppose you don’t want to talk to them.’
‘No.’
‘Well, it would be easier in Oxford, then. I know the Reader in Oceanography, Jeremy Vaughan – he’s a fellow of our college. When do we go back to Oxford?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got to see this woman tomorrow morning, and what happens next depends on what turns up, here, in London or in Hamburg. I wish you’d come with me to see Mrs Jackson.’
‘If I thought it would help of course I’d come. But I feel that I’d be offputting rather than a help. It’s not going to be easy for her to talk about her husband – and you’re not bad at being nice to people, Peter.’
*
I’ve never been a good sleeper, and I owe most of the education I’ve managed to achieve to the books I’ve read in the small hours. That night I couldn’t read with Ruth curled up beside me because the light would have bothered her, and my mind went on trying to make some sort of pattern out of the bewildering case we were landed with. What, if anything, could be called facts? Dr Braunschweig had disappeared – at least he wasn’t at home and he’d not turned up at his office. His boat also seemed to have disappeared. The chairman of Universal Oil had had a letter suggesting that Dr Braunschweig had been kidnapped, and demanding a ransom in the form of a seventeenth-century map of part of the Arctic. Even if the authorities and the oil company were prepared to meet the demand the ransom could not be paid, because the map could not be found. It had been in the Cambridge Museum of Cartography for around two hundred years, and for most of that time nobody had taken much notice of it. As a map it was unique and had a considerable money value, though how that value could be realised was hard to see. Probably it didn’t matter, because money didn’t seem to come into it – if Dr Braunschweig had been kidnapped, and if his kidnappers wanted money, it would have been easier to demand a few million pounds from the oil company.
Why should anybody want the map so much? It had been on exhibition in Hamburg, so if the kidnapping was a Hamburg affair one or other of the kidnappers could have seen the map. Or it might be the other way round – somebody in Hamburg could have seen the map and thought up the kidnapping in order to get hold of it. The Curator’s belief that it had gone astray somewhere inside the museum seemed mere wishful thinking. It could have been stolen in transit, but that would not have been easy, and it seemed more likely that it had been taken after it had been returned to the museum. When? In the evening after Dr Jackson’s secretary had gone home and he was working late? That would imply that it had been taken by Dr Jackson himself, for if it had been stolen by anyone else Dr Jackson would have found the map-case empty and would surely have reported it at once. But there was no reason to suppose that Dr Jackson had had anything to do with it. He might equally well have unpacked the map and put it away in its proper place. A few days later he was dead. Then came a gap of about three months before Dr Mitchell was appointed to succeed him, and then a gap of another couple of months before the visiting American scholar wanted the map and it could not be found. The map could have been taken at any time during those months. With the Curator’s almost hostile attitude to police inquiries Inspector Richards had been handicapped from the start, but Dr Mitchell thought that the map had been stolen and she had not tried to put any obstacles in his way. That he had found nothing suspicious about any of the staff was not conclusive, but he was an experienced detective and it indicated that there was nothing suspicious to find. Yet he himself believed a crime to have been committed. With police resources strained and the scope for inquiries limited by the Curator’s attitude, he had concentrated on Dr Mitchell herself and on what he could learn about her predecessor: that was reasonable, because whoever was in charge of the department had most opportunity of removing, or conniving at the removal of, a map belonging to it. There was slight evidence that Dr Jackson had been living up to the limit of his means, but millions of respectable citizens do that. He was depressed about something, but his widow’s account of things and the doctor’s clinical judgement that such depression was not uncommon among academics around Dr Jackson’s age tallied well enough, and certainly there was nothing so far to invalidate the coroner’s finding that his death was an accident. Well, I should soon be seeing his widow, and it was pointless to speculate on what she might be able to tell me. With that I managed to doze off, and slept until nearly seven.
*
Ruth had been invited to deliver the Granage Lectures at Cambridge in the autumn, and she wanted to discuss one or two details with the university people. She went off soon after nine thirty. My appointment with Mrs Jackson was not until eleven. I rang Sir Edmund. Nothing that seemed important had come in, but he had answers to some of my questions about Dr Braunschweig’s yacht. ‘He disappeared on June 1 and the ransom note was delivered to Sir Anthony Brotherton in London on June 5,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘Hamburg police discovered that the yacht was missing on June 2, but it wasn’t necessarily significant until the ransom note turned up. His staff had been told that he’d gone off on a cruise, and for all the police knew at the time it was just possible that he had. They were chiefly concerned in trying to trace his car, and didn’t begin serious inquiries about the yacht until they learned of the ransom note on the morning of the fifth. They were – they still are – hampered by the need for secrecy. People’s memories about when they last saw a yacht at a mooring are vague at the best of times. However, the police think they have established that she was definitely there on the first, and not there on the morning of the second. Before that they can’t be certain, but they think that she’d been lying at her mooring for about a fortnight, since she came back from a weekend cruise. She has two dinghies – a ten-foot clinker-built tender and an inflatable rubber dinghy. Neither is at the yacht club, and there’s no reliable information on when they were last seen there. As for going ashore from the last cruise, Frau Braunschweig thinks they didn’t take their own dinghy, but used the yacht club tender. She says she can’t swear to it because they’ve been out in the boat so often, but she thinks she’s right about the club boat because she remembers they had to wait a bit after signalling for it. Your questions about fuel are more difficult. The boat has a high-grade diesel auxiliary, but except for going in and out of port he doesn’t use the engine much, and takes a pride in manoeuvring under sail – doubtless you will understand that, Peter. Frau Braunschweig can’t say for certain when the boat was last fuelled, but thinks that it may have been before the weekend cruise in May. She says the engine was used hardly at all on that cruise, so if the tanks were full then they’d be nearly full now. Assuming an average of around six knots she carries enough fuel for about two hundred miles – not a great range, but she’s a sailing boat. She was designed specially for Dr Braunschweig, and he didn’t want to give up space to fuel tanks.’
‘A proper attitude, and nice to see it in an oil man,’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t know that it gets you anywhere, but you wanted the information.’
‘Nothing gets anywhere at the moment. The whole of this case is navigating in dense fog – and without a compass or a lead-line.’
I told Sir Edmund that I’d ring him again after I’d seen Mrs Jackson, and probably come back to London in the afternoon. Unless something new turned up I thought I’d probably go on to Hamburg.
*
I had half an hour or so to wait before I needed to get a taxi to go to Mrs Jackson, so I walked into Clare Gardens and found an entrancing little sunken lawn to sit on. I wanted to concentrate on what I was going to say to Mrs Jackson, but I kept thinking about Dr Braunschweig and his yacht. There was nothing to indicate that he was with her, but somebody had taken her from her mooring. Could she have been taken off singlehanded? Probably, but to take a fifty-foot ketch from a crowded mooring singlehanded implied someone with a good deal of experience, and it seemed more likely that at least two people were involved. How had they got out to her? Her own dinghies were not at the yacht club, which fitted Frau Braunschweig’s recollection that Apfel’s party had gone ashore from her last cruise in the club launch. If so, then the dinghies were probably still on board. I had no idea of Apfel’s deck arrangement, but there would be room for a ten-foot tender and a rubber dinghy on a fifty-foot boat. I doubted whether there would be comfortable room for a third dinghy. What had happened to the dinghy that must have gone out to Apfel to put on board whoever sailed her away? She might be towing it, but a towed dinghy is a nuisance, particularly if the towing yacht has only a minimal crew. A simpler explanation was that somebody had stayed in the dinghy and taken it back ashore. Assuming that two people had been put on board to handle Apfel that meant three people in the dinghy, and someone may have noticed a dinghy with three up in the vicinity of the moorings on June 1 or 2. If there hadn’t been anyone left to take away the dinghy it might have been cast off and abandoned as soon as Apfel was safely out of sight from the club – if so, an abandoned dinghy ought to have been washed up somewhere.
*
The Jackson house was Victorian and detached, and it must have had at least six bedrooms. There were signs of neglect – the woodwork needed painting, and the big garden was overgrown and untidy, with weeds in the drive and a lawn beginning to look like a hayfield. Mrs Jackson’s first words on opening the door were to apologise for the lawn. ‘I was going to cut it last weekend, but I couldn’t,’ she said. Her left ankle was in plaster and she was using crutches. When I thanked her for agreeing to see me in spite of her injury she laughed. ‘It’s not nearly so bad as it looks. They think I may have broken a small bone, but it doesn’t hurt now, and I can get around all right. The main trouble is that I can’t drive. If I can find somebody to take me in I shall be back at school next week. I get frightfully bored being on my own. But you don’t want to talk about me. I’ve no idea what you’ve come about, and I probably shan’t be able to help in any way, but do come in. Would you like a cup of coffee?’
I accepted the coffee, followed her into the kitchen and filled the kettle for her. ‘You seem to be house-trained,’ she said.
‘Not really – you don’t need much training to fill a kettle for somebody who’s walking on crutches, particularly when you’re going to share the coffee.’
‘Do you mind if we have it in the kitchen?’
‘Not a bit. You’ve made it a most attractive room.’ Originally it had been a kitchen and scullery; now the scullery part had sink, cooker and refrigerator, and the rest of the old kitchen was furnished as a dining-cum-sitting room. We sat at a nice pine table. ‘My daughter’s away at school, and when I’m on my own this is my living room,’ she explained. ‘I let as much as I can of the rest of the house, mostly to students. It would be better not to have students because there wouldn’t be the bother of vacations, but Charles and I both wanted to help students if we could – that’s one of the reasons we got such a big house. The rent from letting rooms helped to pay the mortgage, and when Charles was alive it was nice to have the place to ourselves in the vacations. It’s different now, but I still haven’t sorted myself out properly. And I still don’t know why you’ve come, or even who you really are, apart from the fact that you have something to do with museums.’
‘I don’t have much to do with museums as such. As I explained when I telephoned yesterday I belong to a small government department that’s concerned with antiquities, and we’re interested in an old map that was in your late husband’s keeping.’
‘But surely they can tell you all about it at the museum?’
She was alert and intelligent. She must have been considerably younger than her husband, no more than in her early forties, and she was, or could have been if she bothered a bit more about her appearance, distinctly attractive. I had to make a quick decision. ‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘that the map, which is a valuable one, is missing.’
She looked suddenly rather haggard. ‘Isn’t that a matter for the police?’ she said.
‘Yes. I was at Cambridge police station when I telephoned you.’
