Death in a High Latitude, page 7
‘Until this morning – or rather until yesterday – I thought that too,’ I said. ‘Now I am less sure. We have no known linkages, but we have a train of circumstance which, if we could understand it, offers the possibility of a clear link of events. Dr Braunschweig is concerned with the distribution of oil, and that is primarily a matter of sea routes. He is himself a sailor, in possession of an ocean-going boat. That boat has disappeared with him. Whoever has taken him is demanding a map of a little-known part of the world for his ransom. The map has also disappeared, in circumstances that suggest that its value to someone is so great that he or she is prepared to stick at nothing to get it. To go farther we must make certain assumptions. I think we can reasonably assume that at least two different sets of people are concerned, those who stole the map, and those who have taken Dr Braunschweig. If his kidnappers already have the map, or even know that it has been stolen, the demand for it as a ransom would seem absurd.’
The three Germans were listening intently. Keller, who was the most experienced policeman, shook his head. ‘That is not necessarily so, Herr Colonel,’ he said. ‘They might know that the map is stolen and seek the resources of the oil company to recover it.’
‘That is a good point, but such facts as we have suggest that if those responsible for the ransom note know that the map is missing they must think that the oil company has possession of it. That is not impossible, but from what we know of Dr Braunschweig it seems unlikely that he would be concerned in a criminal conspiracy to get hold of the map. Besides, the ransom demand refers specifically to “the Baffin Map from the Cambridge Museum of Cartography”.
‘There is another possibility – that what was originally one group determined to steal the map has split into two factions, one of which has the map while the other has Dr Braunschweig. That would imply that someone has reason to think that threatening Dr Braunschweig’s life may influence whoever has the map. It would imply further that Dr Braunschweig has some direct interest in the map and that link in the chain of evidence is so far missing.’
‘If your reasoning is anywhere near the truth it is the vital link,’ said the Ministry of Justice man. ‘You have constructed an ingenious theory – but why should any modern terrorist group have any interest in a seventeenth-century map?’
‘Again, I am not sure. I have no more facts, but I can see a possible connection between Baffin’s map and the present-day oil industry. Instability in the Middle East is a constant threat to oil supplies to Western Europe and the eastern part of North America. There are rich oilfields in the Arctic, but all that have been developed so far offer relatively easy routes only to the Pacific coast of North America. The search for a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific dominated the thinking of navigators for centuries. It sent Baffin to the Arctic. For various reasons the apparent value of such a passage subsequently declined and its final achievement by Amundsen in 1905 was a sort of historic footnote. It was followed by no commercial development – indeed, his route is one so difficult that it offers no prospect of practical use. Suppose there is another, unknown, route? Suppose that something in Baffin’s map provides a clue to it? That would be of immediate importance in two ways: it would be of immense direct value to the oil industry, and anyone intent on destroying western civilisation would wish to deny Europe easy access to Arctic oil.’
No one spoke for several minutes. Then the Special Branch man said, ‘It is a breathtaking suggestion, Herr Colonel, but it seems to me capable of proof or disproof almost at once. Have you consulted copies of the map? For scientific purposes they would be as good as the original.’
‘That is the trouble – as far as I can discover there are no known copies. Although the map has been used to illustrate one or two textbooks the illustrations are only small-scale photographs. The most recent was used in the catalogue of the Hamburg exhibition. I wonder if they still have the negative?’
‘I shall talk to the Director this evening – I know him slightly, and I can ask him about the photograph without explaining precisely why we want it,’ said Schumann, the police chief.
‘Excellent. It will be interesting to have an enlargement but it may not help us much. The photograph is in black and white, and one of the important features of the map is its use of coloured tints to indicate soundings. Since Baffin had no echo-sounding devices his soundings imply the existence of open water, which may be of significance. It may also be significant that the map disappeared before an American scholar who is making a study of the region was able to see it.’
‘The School of Geography here is considered one of the best in the world,’ Schumann said. ‘To what extent can I disclose your theories about the map? Their experts may be able to give practical help.’
‘It is your territory, and primarily your case,’ I said. ‘I should not presume to suggest how you handle an interview. My own feeling is that as we have not so far disclosed Dr Braunschweig’s disappearance, and no one in Hamburg, apart from yourselves, knows that the map is missing, we should still keep quiet about it. To disclose our line of thought might be to warn one of the very people we want to find, and perhaps still further endanger Dr Braunschweig.’
‘I agree – I was only seeking your opinion,’ replied Schumann. ‘I shall tell the Director that we have learned of the possibility of forgeries of old maps being put on the market, and ask if he can put us in touch with experts who can tell us what to look for. I have a catalogue of the exhibition, and I can talk about the photograph quite naturally.’
‘That will be splendid. Now I want your advice on a number of matters concerning Dr Braunschweig’s yacht.’
‘You may ask, Herr Colonel, and we shall do everything we can, but we are none of us ourselves sailors,’ Schumann said. ‘I have heard something of your own record and you will know much more of sailing boats than we do. Of course, we have some good sailors in our police force, and we can call on expert help. What is your particular concern here?’
‘It is not a matter of sailing experience but of straightforward police work,’ I said. ‘The disappearance of Dr Braunschweig’s yacht Apfel at the same time as the man himself is too much to be dismissed as coincidence. I think we must assume that the two events are related. Moreover, to take a kidnapped man to sea in an ocean-going sailing boat that has no need to put in anywhere for fuel is an effective means of keeping him hidden. Then the fact that there is no news of his car suggests that it has simply been left in some garage in or near Hamburg. I agree that a search of private property would be difficult to mount without disclosing our concern for Dr Braunschweig, but it might be done by announcing a hunt for another car. His car was a grey Mercedes: you could say that the police were anxious to find a blue Citroen believed to have been used in a jewel robbery. That would provide a reasonable excuse for house-to-house inquiries. The whereabouts of the car may be important, but of equal importance is the question of dinghies. Your inquiries so far indicate that Dr Braunschweig did not use the club launch to get out to his boat. He has two dinghies of his own, a wooden boat and an inflatable one. Neither has been found, which implies that they are on his boat. But to get there they must have started from somewhere, and since neither seems to have been at the club for some time the probability is that they were on board the yacht. This suggests that a third dinghy must have been used. There is no dinghy left on Apfel’s mooring, so either the dinghy which took Dr Braunschweig to the yacht was rowed ashore afterwards, or it was towed away by Apfel herself. If so, a further consideration follows, because a third dinghy would be a nuisance, and I should expect it to be abandoned on the way out to sea. You will have people with expert knowledge of the mouth of the Elbe – can you find out where a dinghy cast adrift soon after leaving the yacht mooring would be likely to come ashore, and whether any such dinghy has come ashore? We can’t neglect the possibility that it was rowed ashore. If so a boat containing three or four men would have gone out to the yacht and returned with only one man. Someone may have seen this – it is surprising how much is observed on any waterfront. If we can get a line on the dinghy we have at least a starting point for the hunt for the people involved.’
‘That is all realistic deduction, and we ought to have thought of it ourselves,’ Keller said.
‘There was no reason why you should. I happen to have had long personal experience of getting to and from small boats. You were properly more concerned with trying to discover the political motive behind the kidnapping. I have suggested a possible motive, but I have been able to do so only because I have been dealing with the missing map. If my theory is worth pursuing we can assume, I think, that the kidnapping is unlikely to be the work of any known terrorist group, and must concentrate on the logistics of the thing itself. Inquiries about the dinghy and a local search for the car seem to me of the most immediate importance. They can be done only by you, and it is for you to say whether they are worth doing.’
The police chief got up. ‘Keller and I will go to work forthwith,’ he said. ‘Your theories may be wrong, Herr Colonel, but you have given us something to go on and I feel that we can now act. I feel also ashamed that we made no such deductions ourselves.’
‘You couldn’t, because you didn’t have the facts until I brought them.’
‘That may be so, but we had some facts and we deduced nothing from them. Come, Rolf, you and I know precisely what to do. Let us meet here again at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
*
The next step forward was due to Keller, with a fine piece of analytical detection. He greeted me with it when we met at the chief’s office in the morning.
‘I don’t know what, if anything, to make of it, but I’ve come across something rather interesting,’ he said. ‘In my job I have a fairly wide range of contacts, and one of them happens to be a leading chart agent – as a matter of fact we were at school together. Acting on your principle of trying to work out events from the logistics required to bring them about I wondered if we could make a guess at the present whereabouts of the yacht from the charts she might have on board. So I went to my friend. I did not tell him anything about Dr Braunschweig – I said we had reason to believe that a group of international terrorists was planning some sensational piracy of rich men’s yachts this summer. We had no idea which yachts, but in cooperation with other national police forces we’d worked out a list of possible victims and were proposing to ask the NATO naval forces to keep an eye on them at sea. The problem was that we did not know where the yachts were likely to go. We could ask the owners, but that would invite panic and perhaps create publicity. Most cruises are planned in advance and the planning must include purchase of the necessary charts. Could he possibly analyse sales of charts to leading yachtsmen over the past six months? I explained that I was concerned only with German yachtsmen and that similar inquiries were being made in other countries. Of course they could not be conclusive – yachts might already have charts of voyages their owners intended to make. But a yachtsman rich and important enough for the attention of international terrorists might be expected to use only up-to-date charts, and recent purchases would provide at least some idea of forthcoming cruises.
‘He could do nothing about cash purchases, but assuming that most rich yachtsmen have credit accounts the information was obtainable from his ledgers. I’ve been up with him most of the night and I’ve filled a notebook with useless lists – but among his customers is Dr Braunschweig. During last winter he made considerable purchases of charts for Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, and the Arctic Ocean. He wrote a letter with his order for charts saying that he particularly wanted the most recent information on the coasts of Ellesmere Island, Smith Sound and Kane Basin. It was such an unusual letter that the clerk handling the order brought it to my friend, who was puzzled because it is a part of the world mostly unnavigable and extremely dangerous for any yacht. However, Dr Braunschweig is an important customer, so my friend did his best, but with the charts he wrote a note stressing the difficulties and dangers from ice. He thought that Dr Braunschweig may have wanted the charts for some study, and not for any possible cruise in Apfel.’
‘Your information may be of the highest importance. The trouble is that it’s a huge and inhospitable area, next to impossible to search, unless one had some indication of where to look. In any case, even if Apfel is bound for the north of Baffin Bay she couldn’t be there yet.’
‘How soon do you think she could get there?’
‘Hard to say – I’d have to work out a detailed route plan. If you have an atlas we could make a rough estimate of time and distance.’
Assuming that Apfel had left Hamburg bound for Greenland I reckoned that her best route would be down the Channel, south of Ireland, and then north-west. But if whoever was navigating her didn’t want to be seen he’d probably keep away from the busy shipping lanes of the Channel and take an alternative passage across the North Sea, sailing on between Scotland and the Faeroes. By any route it was a fairly long way, roughly 2,300 miles to south Greenland, and then another 1,500 miles or so northwards to Smith Sound. And no sailing boat can sail direct to anywhere.
After some work with atlas and ruler I said, ‘I don’t know Apfel, or what she’s capable of doing. She’s fairly new, and I expect fast – at least we know she has gone in for ocean racing. If she takes the northerly route instead of going west about the British Isles she could escape the prevailing westerlies in the North Atlantic – the old sailing ships on passage from Liverpool to the United States used sometimes to go a long way north in the hope of fair winds. But there’s no certainty about the wind. Given some strong easterlies she’d race along, but she couldn’t expect fair winds the whole time, she might run into fog, and I’ve no idea of ice conditions at the moment. We can find out these things from the Met people. At a guess, and it’s a very rough guess, she might do it in a month, but she might take twice as long. A lot would depend on what sort of crew she has, and how many they can use for watchkeeping.’
‘So if she is making for the Arctic and has Dr Braunschweig on board nothing much can happen for another three weeks,’ Keller said.
‘If . . . But it makes some sort of sense. Assuming that Dr Braunschweig had come across something in the Baffin Map, or in some research of his own that we don’t know about, to indicate the possibility of an Arctic route for oil transport, he might well have planned to go there secretly in his own boat to investigate. That would explain his purchase of the charts, and the fact that he did so privately instead of simply asking for charts from the shipping division of Universal Oil. He was in a position to get any charts he wanted, and at first I wondered why he should bother with a chart agent. Now I see that there could be several reasons. If we’re right in any of this, we’ve got to make another assumption – that someone else knows about the route and is determined that Dr Braunschweig and Universal Oil should not use it. There could be a political motive to deny cheaper oil to Western Europe, or it might be commercial rivalry. But something has gone wrong. The map has disappeared, and Dr Braunschweig already knows enough to plan a voyage to the Arctic to see for himself. So he is kidnapped, and the kidnappers decide to use him and his boat to find out just how much he knows and to try to keep him quiet by threatening his life.’
‘But why the ransom note demanding the map?’ Keller objected.
‘Yes, what I’ve just been thinking can’t be right – or it may be on the right lines, but I’ve drawn the wrong conclusions. I don’t know. It might make sense if Universal Oil had the map – but that would imply that Dr Braunschweig or someone acting for him had gone in for criminal conspiracy at Cambridge. And if the company knows anything about possible Arctic oil routes why didn’t the chairman tell us about it when he got the ransom demand for his colleague? None of that makes sense. I feel that we’ve put together one or two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but all the other bits are still a hopeless jumble.’
‘Not hopeless,’ said the police chief. ‘You and Keller have already made something out of nothing. We must find’ – he paused – ‘some more nothings.’
‘That will not be difficult,’ I said.
We all laughed.
*
The first thing to be found was far from being a nothing – it was the car, which was found around mid-day in the garage of a house temporarily unoccupied. It was across the river from the yacht club and barely a quarter of a mile from a piece of hard-standing where a number of dinghies were parked, with a small jetty much used by sailing people. The car showed no signs of a struggle and gave no indication of anything other than completely normal use. Even this, though, was information of a sort, for it suggested that Dr Braunschweig had stopped probably of his own accord, perhaps to give someone a lift. Keller and I discussed this after lunch. ‘I don’t like the idea of stopping to give someone a lift,’ he said. ‘Dr Braunschweig liked to drive himself and refused to go around with guards, but he was an intelligent man and knew well enough that he was sufficiently important to be a candidate for kidnapping. He wouldn’t have stopped for some hitch-hiker, nor for a man or woman standing by an apparently broken-down car. Those are the obvious ways of stopping a driver to attack him.’
