Death in a High Latitude, page 8
‘Unless he knew whoever stopped him,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think there are slight indications that he knew, or thought he knew, what he was doing, stopped, and later went out to his boat quite willingly?’
‘Perhaps. I think I would agree with you about the stopping. It was in the morning, there must have been plenty of people about, and there is no evidence that anyone heard a shout for help. As for going out to the boat – we don’t know. That may have been at night, and he may have been drugged.’
‘Open mind on that, then. But there’s a more positive question. How did they know that the house where they put the car was empty?’
‘Earlier reconnaissance – they wanted an empty garage, and looked for one.’
‘Do we know who the house belongs to?’
‘Yes, Schumann’s man went into that while the car was being brought in. The house belongs to a man called Baumgarten, who is a director of an engineering firm. He is youngish – in his middle thirties – married, with no children. He is a professional engineer himself and often travels abroad to supervise work done by his company. Sometimes his wife goes with him. He is at present in Brazil, and he travelled accompanied by his wife. They have been away about a fortnight, and are not expected back for another month.’
‘Where is the Baumgartens’ own car?’
‘In a garage near the airport. If he goes away alone his wife drives him and brings back the car.’
‘So the people making your preliminary reconnaissance would have had to find out not only about Herr Baumgarten, but about his wife’s movements, too. It wouldn’t have done for her to come back to find the garage occupied. High-grade intelligence on their part and, if I may say so, high-grade work by Hamburg police in learning so much about the Baumgartens so quickly.’
‘That wasn’t difficult – we had only to get in touch with his firm. Franz is a good policeman, though. He won a scholarship that took him to a college in the United States – as a matter of fact, so did I. It was a useful experience. I’d already graduated at Heidelberg but it was a help to get a US doctorate. The most valuable thing, though, was to be able to talk in English as we are talking now.’
‘You put me to shame. The English aren’t much good at languages. Too lazy, perhaps.’
He laughed. ‘You are not bad at logical deduction.’
‘We may get all the answers wrong. Still, I’d like to know a bit more about Herr Baumgarten. You’ve been to see Frau Braunschweig – could you find out if they know the Baumgartens? And I may think of one or two other things when I get back to England.’
‘When are you going back?’
‘I shall stay in Hamburg tonight in case anything else turns up, but I’d like to get the first flight to London in the morning. Could you get me booked on that?’
‘Yes, and I’ll arrange a car to take you to the airport. I’ll try to see Frau Braunschweig later this afternoon. Can you have dinner with me tonight?’
‘That’s nice of you. If you go off to Frau Braunschweig I think I’ll call on Herr Schumann.’
*
Schumann was delighted that our theories about the car had worked out so well and he had more news for me – the dinghy, or at any rate a dinghy, had also been found. ‘It was adrift off the mouth of the Elbe not far from Cuxhaven,’ he said. ‘The marine police spotted it and brought it in. It has no name or number so there’s no means of identifying the owner yet, but the forensic people may come up with something.’
‘Can I have a look at it?’
‘Of course. It’s been put in one of the Customs boathouses, some distance from here. I’ll take you out.’
The dinghy was a fourteen-foot boat, clinker-built of good planking, not plywood. There was a mast-step in the forward thwart, but no mast. She had clearly been built for sailing for she had a centre-plate, but the plate was up, and without a mast she could not have been sailed when she went adrift. She had rowlocks but no oars on board – indeed, she was remarkably bare for she did not even have a painter. Marks on the wood of the transom indicated the use of an outboard bracket, but there was no outboard engine in her. She seemed generally in good condition, and a boat that an owner would have tried to recover if he knew she had gone adrift. ‘Dinghies do break loose from moorings, and I suppose in Hamburg as in England boats are sometimes stolen. Has anyone reported the loss of a boat like this?’ I asked.
‘We have a number of reports of missing dinghies. I’ve been through the list but there’s nothing whose description matches this,’ Schumann said.
‘The absence of a painter is curious. If she’d broken loose from a mooring I’d have expected the painter to come away from the mooring rather than the boat,’ I said. ‘If she’d been left carelessly hauled up on some beach where the tide could reach her she’d normally have had her painter with her. An owner leaving a boat moored or hauled up might reasonably take away mast and gear but he wouldn’t take away the painter – if she was on a mooring, he couldn’t.’
‘What do you think happened?’
‘Well, all sorts of things might have happened, but the condition of the boat fits the possibility that she was abandoned from a yacht. At fourteen feet she’s biggish for a tender, and I’d say she was used as a sailing dinghy in her own right. If there’s anything in our theories of the boarding of Apfel, and this was the dinghy used, she could scarcely have been rowed back because there are no oars. She’d be too big to be carried with the other dinghies on Apfel’s deck, so she would have been cast off when they’d towed her far enough to feel it safe to abandon her. The absence of anything on board rather suggests that she was abandoned – the people on the yacht would have kept warps, line, oars, outboard, anything which might come in useful, before casting her off. If she was the dinghy used for Apfel she’ll have been at sea for a week. I don’t know anything about tides and currents at the mouth of the Elbe. You might ask your marine police if they can work out from where she was found where she might have been set adrift a week ago.’
‘I can certainly do that. And the scientists may find something to tell us about her occupants.’
‘We can hope, and while you are about it, you might get samples of dust from the treads of the car’s tyres analysed and see if there are any similar traces in the dinghy. It’s a long shot, and it may not mean anything if there are, but it seems worth trying.’
Keller lived in Bonn but his organisation had a discreet flat for its officers to use in Hamburg, and he had dinner sent in for us from a first-rate restaurant. There were just the two of us – Schumann had to attend a meeting he couldn’t get out of, and the Ministry of Justice man had gone back to Bonn. The food was set out on a hotplate, so there was no waiter or anybody else to overhear our conversation. ‘I’m not clear why you suspected it but the Braunschweigs do know the Baumgartens,’ he said. ‘Baumgarten’s engineering firm does some specialised work on valves for pipelines, so there’s a business connection. There’s another link, too. Baumgarten is also a sailor and they are members of the same yacht club.’
‘I didn’t suspect – it was one of the things I just wanted to know. I’m puzzled by the efficiency of what you called reconnaissance. Of course the absence of the Baumgartens could have been discovered by anyone who really wanted to find out, but they had not only to be absent, but away together, and for some time. Now you’ve established that it could have been discovered through Braunschweig, or perhaps through someone else in Universal Oil. It doesn’t follow that Baumgarten was involved in any way – it’s hard to see how he could be, because he was already in Brazil. But a personal relationship between Braunschweig and Baumgarten seems to strengthen the probability that we are dealing with a somewhat closed group.’
‘Have you talked to any of the Unol people about this?’
‘No. I didn’t even tell them that I was coming to Hamburg. There may be all sorts of politics involved – inter-office politics, and oil politics in the wider sense. There are lots of things that I want to ask his colleagues, but I want to know much more before approaching them.’
Keller was silent for some time. Then he said, ‘You almost make me feel that you regard the kidnapping as a put-up job.’
‘I think I do – but put-up by whom, and for what purpose, I can’t so far even begin to work out. You must remember that I’ve been more directly concerned with the mystery of the map – when, or if, we can relate that to Dr Braunschweig I shall feel that we are really getting somewhere.’
‘Franz and his Hamburg police are in touch with the oil company, and I have met the two senior directors. It is important to our Government that they should feel that we are doing everything we can. You may be right to keep out of sight, but we can’t. What do you think we ought to do?’
‘I shall be in the same position in London – Sir Anthony Brotherton will expect some report on our activities. I feel that until we know a lot more we should keep everything we do know, or even think, to ourselves. We need some play-acting, or to use a politer term, diplomacy. As far as possible we should tell the truth, but not the whole truth. I should be inclined to tell them, in strict confidence, of the finding of the car, but I should not disclose where it was found. Meanwhile I’d like you to go as thoroughly as you can, without giving anything away, into the private lives of Dr Braunschweig’s staff and immediate colleagues. How many of them knew the Baumgartens? Did his secretary have any dealings with them? How many are members of the yacht club, or go in for sailing? These are some of the things that I should like to know, but I can’t instruct you to make the inquiries.’
‘You don’t need to. My instructions are to cooperate in every way possible with you, and I know I speak for Franz as well when I say that the results of our collaboration so far have been impressive. We shall do everything you ask, and when it comes to diplomacy – well, perhaps we are not bad at it.’
*
A big envelope was waiting for me at the hotel, and in it was an enlargement which Schumann had had made of the photograph of the Baffin Map from the catalogue of the Hamburg exhibition. The enlargement gave me a much sharper sense of the map. It was, of course, in black and white, but the coloured tints of the original showed reasonably well as shadings. I wanted to compare the map with charts and globe – and I wanted to know the outcome of Ruth’s researches. I couldn’t discuss things on the phone but although the drive from Oxford meant an early start she insisted on meeting me at the airport.
V
A Theory of the Arctic
RUTH SEEMED MORE concerned about me than about the Arctic. I had to tell her three times that neither of my old wounds was hurting, that I’d been fed more than adequately and that I was not overtired. It wasn’t until she was reassured on these matters that she asked, ‘Where do we go now?’
‘Anywhere I can talk to you. Have you had any breakfast yet?’
‘Well, I had a cup of coffee before I started. What about you?’
‘They gave me the standard continental breakfast on the aeroplane. Why you can’t get a proper breakfast anywhere across the Channel I don’t know. Let’s find somewhere and have breakfast.’
When we’d both eaten and were enjoying our coffee I asked Ruth if she’d managed to get hold of her oceanographer. ‘Yes, Dr Vaughan gave me dinner last night – very respectably, his wife was there too,’ she said. ‘It was a bit difficult because I didn’t really know what to ask him.’
‘About changes in the Arctic climate.’
‘Oh that, of course. But I thought I’d start off with Dr Jackson – I can’t help thinking about that woman you went to see. Dr Vaughan knew Charles Jackson – he said his death was a dreadful loss to polar studies. He asked me if I knew what had happened to his papers.’
‘I didn’t have time to tell you that; according to his widow they are at the museum.’
‘I was diplomatic and said that as it was only on the fringe of my field I didn’t know, but that I could probably find out. I explained that an American scholar had been in touch with me about the geophysical mathematics of polar shifting. I’d heard of Dr Jackson as a leading geographer on the Arctic but when I tried to get in touch with him was shocked to learn that he was dead – that was why I’d turned to Jeremy Vaughan.’
‘You couldn’t have done better – the only thing is I must make sure you never get into Pusey’s clutches as a diplomatic – er – diverter of the truth. What did Dr Vaughan say about polar movements?’
‘Well, he told me what I knew already, that there have been changes in the earth’s crustal shape with consequent shifting in the position of the poles and profound effects on the climate of both the Arctic and the Antarctic. What I didn’t know is that there is a new theory that parts of the Arctic seabed remain affected by the older tilt of the earth and are warmer than present surface glaciation would suggest.’
‘Does this have any practical effect?’
‘Yes and no. It upsets some of our present theories about the Gulf Stream. If there is anything in what has been called the Arctic Calorific Syndrome it may mean that certain currents of water relatively warmer than the surrounding sea which occur between Greenland and North America are not, as thought at present, offshoots of the Gulf Stream but are brought about by warm springs welling from the seabed. Such springs may explain your North Water, for instance. But the work has so far been almost wholly theoretical – seabed research in the polar regions would be prohibitively expensive, and extremely difficult, anyway. Some people think that the successful underwater navigation of the North Pole by the US nuclear powered submarine Nautilus in 1958 indicates that there may be something in the theory, but clear water far below the ice may simply mean that there is a natural balance between frozen and unfrozen sea, a temperature gradient if you like, maintained by salinity and the insulating value of surface water and sea ice itself. The unexpected discovery made by that voyage was the immense depth of water underneath the Pole. It goes down to more than thirteen thousand feet, much deeper than had previously been thought likely. That could be a vestige of an older shape of the earth’s crust, but it could equally have been brought about by many other geological factors.’
‘Could William Baffin in the seventeenth century have found open water where there is none now?’
‘I didn’t ask Dr Vaughan that – I thought it might be a mistake to start talking about your Baffin Map. Baffin certainly could have found conditions that no one else has come across since – the Arctic is a huge area, and the tracks of all the ships that have ever navigated, or tried to navigate it cover only a small fraction of the whole region. But you must be careful here, Peter – you mustn’t confuse two quite different things. Surface conditions of the Arctic ice change from year to year, often from day to day – what may be open water today may be completely blocked tomorrow. I’ve been talking about the fundamental structure of the globe. It does change, yes, it’s changing all the time, but changes that separate continents or alter the character of oceans take place over millions or hundreds of millions of years.’
‘But the structure of the globe must determine conditions on the surface.’
‘Of course. There is snow on mountains because those mountains have been thrown up by some structural upheaval. But the mountains have been there through human history.’
‘What is human history? Wasn’t there a land or land-and-ice bridge across the Bering Strait from Asia to Alaska when there were men and women alive to walk over it to populate America?’
‘Probably. But that’s still a matter of surface conditions. And even there the Bering Strait has been much as it is now for twenty or thirty thousand years.’
‘People discover things. Australia was there, but it didn’t mean much until it was discovered by European seamen. I don’t see why a seventeenth-century navigator shouldn’t have come across something that nobody has noticed since. I think there’s some evidence of it in his map. I haven’t shown you this yet – I’ve got an enlargement of a photograph of the map taken for the catalogue of the Hamburg exhibition.’
‘And you think this may be relevant to modern oil transport? Is that your amber light? It’s a good piece of Peter imagination, but as a mathematician I fear the odds are against you.’
‘There must be some connection between the map and the oil industry. Oh, Ruth, why isn’t Dr Jackson alive?’
‘Because you may be right, my darling – or if you are not right somebody else may have made the same mistake. Now the chances of that are mathematically much higher!’
*
That remark of Ruth’s made me feel better. It didn’t really matter whether I was right or wrong, as long as somebody else had had the same sort of ideas about the Baffin Map. But who? And precisely what ideas? My own were still of the vaguest – I merely thought that William Baffin must have come much nearer to discovering a practicable North-West Passage than anyone had given him credit for, and that this could be deduced in some way from his map. But I hadn’t got his map. I hadn’t even got a facsimile of it, for the colouring seemed all-important and I had only a black-and-white photograph. Still, it was a good photograph. ‘Let’s go and talk to Pusey,’ I said, ‘and then I think I’ll have to go back to Cambridge.’
*
I rang Sir Edmund and he suggested an early lunch in his flat. After our excellent breakfast neither Ruth nor I was much interested in lunch, but the flat was a convenient place to talk, and I knew that he had a globe because I’d often admired it. But he wouldn’t have charts of the Arctic. I asked him to get Admiralty charts of the whole Arctic region and to have these ready for us when we came. ‘There’s scarcely time to send out to a chart agent, and in any case I don’t know the sheet numbers, but you can borrow charts from the naval branch of the Ministry of Defence,’ I said. Sir Edmund is good at these things.
