XII

Diplomacy

THE GERMAN AIR FORCE doctor and nurse came with me when I went across to Ruth. He examined Heinrich Baumgarten first. ‘I can do nothing,’ he said. ‘I fear that he is dead.’ Hilde Baumgarten was huddled on the floor beside him. ‘I think he died a few minutes ago. At least we were together,’ she muttered. Skilfully folding some blankets the nurse made two of the aircraft seats into a bed and persuaded Frau Baumgarten to lie down. Taking a hypodermic syringe and a capsule from his bag the doctor prepared an injection and left the nurse to give it to her while he looked at the other wounded men.

The man shot in the shoulder by Keller was in a bad way. ‘I think he will live,’ the doctor said, ‘but I shall have to operate. I cannot do it here – he must be moved to the bigger aircraft.’ He asked the nurse to collect two men to carry him across. The pilot and the man I’d hit in the leg were in considerable pain, but neither was in any particular danger. The doctor dressed their wounds and gave them both injections.

Then it was my turn. The doctor did not much like the look of my old wound, but when the nurse had cleaned it up I thought it might be a lot worse. The doctor put in a couple of stitches where the wretched thing had opened up and gave me some pills which, he said, would help to prevent infection. I should have to go back to my own surgeon when I got home, but for the moment he thought that I would do. Ruth disapproved. She wanted to use the smaller plane to have me flown to hospital somewhere forthwith, but I said that it was out of the question. There was urgent work for Keller and me. I was sorry about Hilde Baumgarten’s injection because there was so much that I wanted to ask her, but she was a woman and a patient as well as a prisoner, and I did not try to interfere with the doctor’s treatment. In addition to the shock of her husband’s death she had a flesh wound in her thigh, where my bullet had hit her. It was not a serious wound, but it was painful. I could not help admiring her for taking no notice of it in her concern for her husband. The doctor thought that she might be fit for questioning in the morning.

*

While the doctor and nurse tackled the emergency operation Keller and I had a conference with the Air Force commander. He was grieved to learn of the crash and loss of life in the helicopter party. He did not know that we had met disaster because he was hijacked before the helicopter became overdue. The hijacking was, as we had thought, carried out in total sudden surprise. He had only the doctor, nurse and a radio operator with him when the other plane appeared, because he had let the rest of the party go off to see if they could hunt a polar bear. There was nothing for them to do while waiting for us, and he did not want them to sit around playing cards. The arrival of the other aircraft was a welcome bit of excitement. The commander was walking across to offer the visitors a drink when armed men jumped down from the plane and seized him. After that he could do nothing. There were nine men in the party and they forced the doctor, nurse and radio operator into the navigator’s compartment on the big aircraft, and locked them in. When the others came back from their hunt – they had seen no sign of a bear – they were seized and overpowered as they entered the plane. They were allowed no access to radio, and thus lost contact with the helicopter. The raiders knew nothing of the helicopter – had they known that it was at large they might have changed their own plans. When Keller and I turned up the commander thought that we must have come back in the helicopter.

The account of the hijacking was interesting, but it didn’t answer any questions. Who were the armed men, prepared to seize a German Air Force plane, and to open fire on anybody who happened to be in what they seemed to regard as their private part of the Arctic?

‘Did you get any idea of who this gang is, and what they are doing here?’ I asked the commander.

‘Not really. They were more concerned to question us.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘As little as we could. I said that we were on an Arctic exercise, primarily concerned with detailed air-navigation in the vicinity of the Pole.’

‘Did you identify the leader of the gang?’

‘I think so – at least he was the man who did most of the questioning, and who seemed to give instructions to the others. He has not come back.’

‘Then either he is the man we left on the yacht, or the man who was shot when they opened fire on us on leaving their plane. I’m inclined to think he is probably the dead man. The man we left on the yacht seemed a rather spineless individual.’

‘I should recognise him if you recover the body. What are you going to do about the man on the yacht?’

‘He will have to be collected and taken back to Germany.’

‘When do you think we ought to collect him?’ Keller asked.

‘I’ve been thinking about that. Timing is a critical problem. We ought to report our casualties as soon as possible, and I think we should try to recover the bodies for burial in Germany. That could be done on foot, but it would take days, and we haven’t really got a strong enough party. It could be done much more easily with another helicopter. That means getting one brought out.’

‘There would be no difficulty about that,’ the commander said.

‘I’m sure there wouldn’t be. But the moment these deaths are reported there will be a tremendous news story, and we don’t know yet who is behind it all. Do you think we could maintain silence for another twelve hours, until tomorrow morning? That would enable us to recover the man from the yacht, and give time for some hard questioning.’

The commander didn’t like it much – all his instincts were to report our situation forthwith. I didn’t like it either; it was hard on the next of kin that they should remain ignorant of what had happened. But Keller supported me. Neither he nor I could give orders to the Service people, but the commander’s own orders were to assist us and after some discussion he agreed to do as we asked. Then we had to decide who should collect the man from the yacht. I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want Keller to go, for he was needed to question our German-speaking prisoners. In the end the commander decided to go himself, with three airmen. He could pilot the smaller plane, and we showed him on the chart precisely where the yacht was.

Ruth, Keller and I then got down to work with Dr Braunschweig. He still knew next to nothing about how we had come to look for him. He also wanted to send a radio message to tell his wife that he was safe. I hated the thoughts of his wife’s continued agony but I had to steel myself and tell him he must wait.

I gave him a quick summary of events since Sir Anthony Brotherton had come to us with the first ransom note. ‘So,’ he said – he spoke excellent English, but this was the expressive German ‘Zo’ – ‘I do not understand everything, but now I understand much more than I did. You know something of the Arctic climatic theory. I took it very seriously, and I wanted my company to investigate it in the utmost detail. Consider the advantages to the western world if it were no longer dependent on oil from the politically turbulent Middle East. There is plenty of Arctic oil – we have but touched the fringe of development there. The difficulty is in getting it out. There is a pipeline now from Alaska to the west coast of America, but such pipelines are hugely expensive, and there is always trouble with those who do not want the ecological balance of wild places to be upset. I am indeed sympathetic to them, but they are often ignorant and create alarms that are not justified. Big oil companies are, of course, much hated and distrusted – yet even those who hate us depend on what we do. We are not the soulless vandals we are made out to be . . . But no matter, there is no time for this. Imagine the value of a sea route for oil from the Arctic to Europe and the east coast of North America – quick, clean transport with no interference with anybody’s land.

‘To my astonishment Sir Anthony did not support me, and since he is by far the most powerful man on our board I could not hope to persuade a majority to go against him. Nor did I want to quarrel openly with him and others of my colleagues. So I determined to find out for myself whether a North-West Passage in the far north offers a feasible route. I had a most able mathematician on my staff in an Englishman called Adrian Stowe. He shared my enthusiasm, and gave invaluable help on the theoretical side. As his work progressed I became more and more convinced that a far northern passage does exist.’

‘It might exist mathematically and yet not be of any practical use,’ Ruth said.

‘That is just what Adrian Stowe used to tell me. I am not a mathematician in your’ – he gave a little bow to Ruth – ‘or Adrian Stowe’s class, but I spent many years as a chemical engineer, and I am not wholly ignorant of maths. It was, indeed, because I understood the limitations of a theoretical approach that I was determined to investigate the passage physically. Fortunately I was equipped to do so. I am a navigator, I have had much to do with sea transport, and I had my own oceangoing yacht. Then Adrian Stowe died.’

‘He was almost certainly murdered,’ I said. ‘In England, two other experts in the Arctic climatic theory, who were his friends and colleagues in his work, have also been murdered. Did you suspect that Mr Stowe’s death was not the suicide it was made out to be?’

Dr Braunschweig was silent for what seemed a long time. Then he said slowly, ‘I cannot say that I suspected . . . sometimes I feared. You must understand that all my life I have been immersed in my work, I have not thought of such things as the murder of a colleague. What has happened since makes me realise that I ought to have thought of such matters, but I did not.’

He was shaken and distressed. I let him recover himself and asked, ‘What happened on the day you left Hamburg?’

‘I was driving to my office when I saw Heinrich Baumgarten standing by the roadside. He recognised my car and waved at me to stop. I thought he was my friend, so I did stop. He said that his car had broken down some distance away and he had walked to the main road to try to get a lift. Could I drive him to his home? Of course I said yes. I ought to have realised that his story was improbable – a man in his position had only to telephone his office and a car would have been sent out to him at once. I thought of that later, not at the time.’

He paused, and went on, ‘I suppose it took about twenty minutes to get to his house. He asked me in for a cup of coffee, but I wanted to get to work and declined. However, he pressed me, saying that Hilde would be most disappointed if I did not go in, that I need stay only a few minutes, and that he wanted particularly to show me a photograph of a boat he was thinking of buying. Stupidly I gave way.

‘Hilde was very friendly, asked if my wife and I could have dinner with them one day in the following week, and made coffee for us. I remember nothing more until I woke after dark, lying fully dressed on a bed. I had a severe headache. I know now that the coffee was drugged, but at the time I thought I must have had a heart attack and that the Baumgartens were looking after me. A few minutes after I woke Heinrich came in, accompanied by another man. Both had pistols. Heinrich said he was sorry to upset me, but that he needed my help. He had, he said, to go to England secretly, and he wanted to go on my yacht. I asked why he needed a pistol, and why he could not simply have asked me to help him as a friend. He said I did not understand. I said I would have nothing to do with it, and wished to go home. He then said “That is why we have pistols. I’m afraid you must do as I tell you.”

‘I had little choice. Heinrich and the other man – he is called Arnold, but I do not know his other name, and he is the man who was wounded when he was ashore from Apfel – made me get into a car, and drove me to the waterfront. I thought of shouting for help, but it was late at night and there was nobody about. And the man Arnold kept his pistol pressed into my side. We got into a biggish dinghy, and Heinrich rowed. It was some distance from Apfel’s mooring and we must have been in the dinghy for nearly an hour. I wondered why we did not use an outboard, but realised that he did not want to make a noise. He brought us to Apfel and the three of us went on board. Hilde was in the saloon, still friendly, and gave me coffee and some food. I was hungry then, and glad to eat.

‘After this Heinrich said that we must leave, and that we must go out under sail because he did not wish to attract attention with the engine. He told me that I must handle Apfel because I knew her. He and the other man helped to get up the sails, and now it was Hilde who kept close to me with a pistol.

‘Perhaps I should have wrecked Apfel . . . Somehow I couldn’t. I was still very much in a daze. We sailed out and when we were well away from the mooring the dinghy was cast off and left to drift. Heinrich said that we would set a course for Harwich in England, and that as we were now standing out to sea he could handle Apfel and I could go to bed. I was permitted to use my own cabin, but they locked me in.

‘I suppose I was still affected by the drug, for, surprisingly I went to sleep, and slept until nearly six a.m. I looked out of my porthole, but could see no sign of land, nor anything to indicate where we were. I banged on my door, and soon afterwards Heinrich came. He was still polite. “I’m afraid I misled you yesterday,” he said. “We are not going to England.”

‘I asked, “Where are we going?”

‘He told me that it depended on me, but that he hoped I would cooperate. I asked what the devil he meant, and he said he understood that I was planning a voyage to the Arctic. If I was prepared to navigate, he and Hilde and his friend would help me to get there.

‘It was my own fault. I had liked Heinrich and Hilde, they had sailed with me for weekend cruises on Apfel, and while I think I was always discreet about my real purpose I made no particular secret about wanting to sail to Greenland. He told me that he and Hilde had been on board Apfel several times without my knowledge, and stored her for a long voyage. We need not put in anywhere save, perhaps, for water, and we could do that when we got to Greenland. All they wanted me to do was to navigate, though if I would help to work the ship we should all get on better.

‘What could I do? I was totally in their power, and I did want to go to the Arctic. I thought that the best thing I could do was to play along with him, bide my time, and escape when I could.’

‘You would not have been allowed to escape,’ I said. ‘You would not have returned from the voyage. I’m inclined to think that we found you in the nick of time – that the aeroplane was to evacuate the Baumgartens and the other man and that you would have been shot out of hand. I think you had given them what they wanted, and that they had finished with you.’

‘You may be right . . . even if you are only partly right I am infinitely in your debt.’

‘That does not matter. Rolf Keller and I were simply doing our duty. What does matter is whether you have formed any idea of why they kidnapped you and made you take them to the Arctic.’

‘Heinrich was never explicit, but you cannot live with a man on a boat without getting some impression of his motives. Heinrich controlled – largely owned – a flourishing oil engineering business. Much of his work was in the Middle East, and in our conversations I gained the idea that he was also interested financially in oil production in the Middle East. From one or two things he said I think that he was a considerable shareholder in the Arabian Sands Oil Company, a smallish independent company that we took over. The majority of the shares were held by banks as nominees. I was against our making any further investment in the Middle East, but I was outvoted by my colleagues on the board. Finance is not my own field, and I did not know the details of the shareholdings we bought out in taking over Arabian Sands – maybe they were so well disguised that nobody outside the nominee banker actually knew. I suspect that Heinrich was deeply involved, but I don’t know.’

‘You said that you thought the plane that brought the raiding party belonged to your company.’

‘I don’t think it – I know it belongs to Unol. Shipping is my chief administrative job in the company, but all transport comes under me, and I was concerned in buying a fleet of those aircraft for service in Alaska and other areas where we need to transport personnel by air.’

‘Could it have been used as it was without the connivance of someone in the company – someone in a senior position?’

‘You are implying what I do not want to think about.’

‘It has got to be thought about.’

‘I suppose the plane could have been stolen, but it would not be easy.’

‘Let us go one stage farther. Do you consider it probable that the murder of experts in the Arctic climatic theory and your kidnapping were organised by people in the company fearful of the effects in the Middle East if a new North-West Passage could be found?’

‘Within the company, perhaps . . . within the oil industry, certainly. There is very much at stake.’

‘Have you any idea who the people in the plane are?’

‘No.’

*

Keller and I next turned our attention to the pilot of the invading aircraft and the other members of his party who were fit to be interviewed. We got nowhere, because all refused to say anything except to demand lawyers. ‘There’s no point in wasting time on them,’ I said to Keller. ‘They’ll have to be turned over to the Canadian police, and they can be searched and interrogated later. I think we ought to radio the Canadian authorities now. It would be simpler to keep everything in our own hands, but we can’t. Various crimes have been committed on Canadian territory, and while the Baumgarten woman and the man who sailed with them from Hamburg can be extradited to face trial in Germany, the others will have to be dealt with by the Canadians. There’d be appalling diplomatic trouble if we just took the whole lot back to Hamburg.’

Keller agreed and we called in our own radio operator. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police maintain a number of posts in the Arctic. The nearest seemed to be on Baffin Island, and we had a radio frequency for it, but the post was at least seven hundred miles away from us and we did not know what sort of transport they had available. Also the whole affair was so complicated that it seemed best to get in touch directly with Ottawa, and to leave it to the Canadian authorities to decide what to do. Sir Edmund Pusey’s department at the Home Office has a liaison officer in the Canadian police, as it has with most of the world’s major police authorities, and I’d taken the precaution of putting his name and his position at Canadian police headquarters in my diary.

So we duly called up Ottawa, established a good RT link, and were lucky enough to find that Commissioner Tom MacDonald was in his office. He was intelligent and understanding, and didn’t waste time asking questions. I gave him a brief outline of what had happened and he said ‘Right, I’ll come myself. How many prisoners do you have?’

I told him, and explained that some were injured and in need of medical attention. I also said that if he could provide a pilot we had a plane available which could take the prisoners, doctor and nurse, and a Canadian police guard. He thought that might be helpful, and told us to stand by.

*

Waiting on that desolate, snow-flecked gravel plain was nerve-racking, but we had no choice. The commander’s return with the prisoner from Apfel broke the monotony, though this man, like the others, refused to say anything. Keller reported our dealings with the Canadian police to the commander. He was unhappy at the delay in starting back for Germany, but accepted its necessity. He was also relieved that we had at least done something to straighten out the complexities of waging what amounted to a private war on someone else’s territory.

Ruth had been helping the German Air Force nurse to look after the wounded. Soon after the commander’s return she came to tell me that Frau Baumgarten had woken up and was asking for me. ‘I wonder what she wants,’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ Ruth replied, ‘but maybe it’s because she is English. She is shattered by her husband’s death and she probably wants to know what her own future is likely to be.’

‘I don’t think I can be of much comfort there,’ I said grimly.

*

I was now certain of at least one thing in the maze of events, and I put it to Hilde Baumgarten as soon as I saw her. She looked pathetic lying on a cot under air force blankets, but I could not let sentiment get in the way of questioning her.

‘Tell me why you helped in the murder of Dr Jackson,’ I said to her.

She did not attempt denial. She said wearily, ‘So you know about that. Who, exactly, are you?’

‘I represent the British police. My colleague is a high-ranking German policeman. You were engaged in an international conspiracy, and it had to be met internationally.’

‘How much do you know?’

‘I know that you were at a party attended by Dr Jackson on the night he died, and that you persuaded him to drink far more than was good for him. Later on that same night I think you went to his house, entered his bedroom through the french window, and helped him to take an overdose of pills. Oh, and you deposited an amber bead under the carpet near the door.’

‘You might have been there . . . You know, I liked Charles Jackson – I was a student of his once. It was a long time ago . . . Yet he had to be eliminated . . .’

‘Why?’

She did not answer for several minutes. Then, as if she were talking to herself, she went on, ‘You never think of retribution, that it can happen to you . . . It seemed so safe. There was all the money in the world, and the League Against Political Injustice to make it safer. You won’t have heard of LAPI, but you soon would have. Heinrich invented them to take care of the liquidation of Gustav Braunschweig. Now Heinrich is dead, and I don’t know what will happen to LAPI. They would have been so useful . . .’ Her voice trailed off, and she went into a trance-like state. I had to shake her out of it, and said roughly. ‘You talk of murder and kidnapping as if they were a sort of private game. Do you realise how serious your own position is?’

‘Oh yes, but I don’t care now.’ She came back to consciousness, but seemed utterly detached from what she was saying. ‘Do you understand what Gustav and Jackson and everybody mixed up in their wild Arctic imaginings were trying to do? They wanted to kill Mid-East oil, they wanted to ruin everybody with interests in the Middle East. Naturally we couldn’t let that happen. I don’t know if their mad theories would have worked, but it was bad enough that they should start people thinking of the Arctic as a real alternative to the Middle East. If we could finish them, we should have power throughout the Middle East. If anyone was difficult, all we had to do was to hint that we had the secret of the North-West Passage . . . And if you have power over the Middle East you have power over the whole world.’ Her voice trailed off again.

‘You talk about “we”. Who do you mean by “we”?’ I asked.

She did not answer but lay back with her eyes closed. I called the doctor. He felt her pulse, lightly lifted one eyelid. He looked concerned and puzzled. He put his stethoscope to her chest, listened for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I think she’s dead,’ he said. ‘There was no reason for her to die.’

‘Can you die of sheer frustration – and, perhaps, a broken heart?’ I asked.

‘For all our knowledge, death, and life, remain mysterious. She had a severe shock, of course. But nothing else, her wound was trivial. And the sleep I gave her should have eased the shock. She is beyond help now.’

‘She is beyond a lot of other things. She was an evil woman, and death is merciful. At the least she would have faced many years in prison. She could have told us much more; now she has slipped away. Well, it can’t be helped. And she did tell me something. What will you do about her death when the Canadian police arrive?’

‘I can do nothing but report it. There ought to be an autopsy, but that is a matter for the Canadian authorities.’

I went back to Keller. ‘Frau Baumgarten has cheated justice,’ I said. ‘She has just died, for no apparent reason.’

Keller ran a hand through his hair. ‘That is awkward for us,’ he said in a worried way.

‘She did tell me a little.’ I reported my conversation with her. ‘That seems to clear up the mechanics of Dr Jackson’s death in Cambridge. We shall have to check what we can, of course, but it should be possible to confirm whether she was in Cambridge that night, and with luck there’ll be some photographs of her at her home in Hamburg. Mrs Jackson may be able to say whether she looks like the woman she saw talking to her husband at the party. For myself I have no doubt about it – and she confessed readily enough when I put it to her.

‘There’s another useful bit of information – I think we’ll find that the hijack party, who were employed to do away with Dr Braunschweig, belong to an organisation called LAPI – it stands for League Against Political Injustice. I don’t know why they have an English name when they all seem to be German – perhaps, as we say, that’s just put in to make it harder. It adds to confusion, anyway.’

‘I’m familiar with all our known terrorist groups, but I have never heard of LAPI,’ Keller said.

‘You couldn’t have heard of them. They appear to have been invented by Heinrich Baumgarten for the purpose – I don’t think for a moment that they’re a real terrorist group. They would have claimed responsibility for Braunschweig’s “execution”. And I daresay they would have been used again in various ways. We’re dealing with some very nasty people.’

*

Thirteen hours after our call to Ottawa the Canadians arrived. That was good going, for they had some three thousand miles to come, over some of the most inhospitable country in the world. We heard their aeroplane before we saw it, and were thankful to watch it come into view, grow bigger, and touch down safely. The German commander, Keller and I walked out to meet them. I took to Commissioner Macdonald at once. ‘I’ve brought six men, the doctor and the nurse you asked for,’ he said. ‘It’s only a ten-seater plane, and with the pilot we couldn’t manage any more. I’m relying on your plane to take the wounded and the prisoners. One of my men is an experienced pilot. Who does the plane belong to?’

‘It belongs to Universal Oil, and was stolen in Alaska by the people who brought it here,’ I told him. ‘But we have Dr Gustav Braunschweig, the deputy chairman of Unol with us, and in the circumstances he will gladly put the plane at your disposal.’

‘I’ve been in touch with your Sir Edmund Pusey in London,’ Macdonald went on. ‘He tells me that you are investigating crimes committed in England and in Germany, and, from what you tell me, on Canadian territory as well. If the plane was stolen in Alaska that brings in the Americans. What a muddle! Is there anything useful that we can do here?’

‘Apart from collecting the wounded and the prisoners, I think nothing at all,’ I said. ‘Our German friends are most anxious to return to Germany, and the sooner the rest of the party can be taken to your headquarters, the better. If you approve, my wife and I will go with you, while my colleague Rolf Keller goes back to Germany.’

‘I’ll be thankful to have you. I don’t begin to understand what’s been going on, and I’ll certainly need you. Did you say your wife was with you?’

‘Yes. She’s an Oxford professor, by the way. At the moment she’s helping to nurse the wounded in the big aircraft. Why she’s here is a long story, which I’ll tell you later.’

*

The Canadian doctor and the nurse, with the guards for the prisoners, went off in the Unol plane. Macdonald had arranged for them to refuel at a depot of the Hudson’s Bay Company en route for Ottawa. Ruth and I were to travel in the smaller plane with him.

As soon as the Unol plane was away the German party left. Keller would be back at the centre of things before I could be, and we arranged that as soon as he had reported to his Government, and Dr Braunschweig had had a chance to see his wife, he and Braunschweig would go to London to meet Pusey. I did not know how long I might be kept in Canada, but I could, of course, be in touch with Pusey from Ottawa. When the time came for Ruth and me to say good-bye to Keller our parting was brief and rather formal. We had no words and didn’t need them.

*

The big German transport roared into the sky, circled, dipped its wings in salute, and soon became a speck on the flight that would take it home across the wastes of Greenland. I held Ruth’s hand, drained of all feeling except of love and pride in her. Sadness for the toll of death would come later, and anger at the human ambition, greed and selfishness that caused it. Would justice be done? Could justice be done?

I was roused from gloomy reverie by Macdonald. ‘I’ve called up my people and arranged for a party to find the wreck of the helicopter and recover the bodies,’ he said. ‘There’ll have to be a Canadian inquiry, but it was a military plane and the inquiry can be discreet. There will be no difficulty about repatriating the bodies to Germany for burial. We shall have to recover the body from your battle by the yacht, but again I think there will be no difficulty. Now that’s fixed up, Colonel, is there anything to keep us in this forsaken place?’ There wasn’t, and a few minutes later we were airborne too.

Macdonald was a kindly host, and he fed us Canadian whisky, cold ham and bread that had been fresh that morning, until he was satisfied that we were in no immediate danger of death from hunger or thirst. Not until then did he begin asking questions. ‘How come we weren’t called in before you went to Ellesmere Island?’ he said politely. This was an awkward one, but we’d taken some precautions.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ I explained. ‘Until we found the yacht at the end of the Robeson Channel we weren’t at all sure that we were looking for our gang in even the right continent, and we didn’t want to waste your time. There was evidence of a sort pointing to the Arctic, but our interpretation of it was all supposition. If we were right, we had to act quickly, because Dr Braunschweig’s life was in danger from his kidnappers. But there was nothing we could ask you to do, because we had no idea of what was likely to happen. We weren’t all that guilty of diplomatic bad manners. Our authorities, and the German Government, agreed on an exploratory expedition, and we decided that it could be regarded as an Arctic training exercise for a special detachment of the German Air Force. The German military people duly cleared the exercise with the Canadian Ministry of Defence. For all we knew it might be a matter only of flying out to Gould Bay, landing on the gravel plain, and conducting a few helicopter sorties without finding anything.

‘We were caught up by events. Unknown to us, the kidnap gang was in process of taking off the people who’d sailed with Dr Braunschweig from Hamburg. Before leaving they’d have liquidated him, and doubtless sunk the yacht. When they saw the German plane at Gould Bay they seem to have panicked. Had they left it alone, they could have carried out all their plans without our being any the wiser. An announcement would have been made that Dr Braunschweig had been executed by a group called LAPI – that stands for League Against Political Injustice, and seems to have been a put-up terrorist group invented for the purpose. They wouldn’t have said where the execution had been carried out, and nobody would have known anything of the goings-on in the Canadian Arctic.

‘This is still conjecture, but I think it’s safe to assume that the appearance of the German plane upset them so much that they decided it would have to be put out of action while they dealt with Dr Braunschweig and the yacht. From their point of view there was far too much at stake, nothing less than total domination of the whole Middle East oil industry.’

‘What do you think they would have done with the German air crew?’ Macdonald asked.

‘I don’t suppose we shall ever know. The man who appears to have been their leader was killed. When the rest of them are questioned they’ll say that they intended no harm to the crew, but I don’t believe it. Hijacking a German Air Force plane is a grave matter. All the resources of the German Government and of the NATO alliance would have gone into the hunt for them, and they wouldn’t have wanted men left alive who could recognise them if any of them were caught. They showed no hesitation in opening fire on us the moment they saw us near the yacht. I think they’d have taken the airmen one by one out of the plane, shot them, and hidden the bodies. They’d have left the empty plane where it was. It would have been found, of course, but they could hope that nobody would ever discover what had happened to the crew – it would have been yet another of the unsolved mysteries of the Arctic.’

‘If your helicopter hadn’t crashed, you’d have gone back and been captured, too.’

‘Possibly. But I think we’d have found the yacht first – in flying time we weren’t far from it when we crashed. There’d have been no one there but Dr Braunschweig and his kidnappers, and we had ample strength for dealing with them. We’d have reported by radio, and what they’d have done then, goodness knows. If they’d tried to bluff us over the radio, we might have smelt a rat. Or they might have come in force to attack us, in which case anything might have happened. We won as we did because we had every advantage of surprise, and used it. They knew nothing about the helicopter, remember, and they didn’t know who we were, nor how many of us there were.’

Macdonald considered this, ‘Surprise or not, the three of you didn’t do badly,’ he said.

‘The more important thing is what we’re going to do next,’ I said.

*

We came down at a police post to refuel – the bigger Unol plane had to go via the Hudson’s Bay station, because it could not have landed on the police airstrip. We were offered beds for a proper rest, but attractive as the offer was we declined it, and only stayed for a cup of coffee while the plane was fuelled. Both Macdonald and I were anxious to press on to Ottawa. When we were on our way again Ruth, who was utterly exhausted, curled up on a seat and managed a little restless sleep. I shut my eyes, but it was no good – my mind went over and over what had happened, trying to extract some meaning from it. Whom had Hilde Baumgarten meant by ‘We’? She and her husband were obviously leading figures in the conspiracy, but they must have had powerful support. I considered what we knew about Dr Jackson’s murder. Maybe we could never prove it, but there seemed little doubt that the Baumgarten woman had acted as she had admitted. But something was wrong. I’d mentioned the amber bead to her, and she hadn’t denied it. But how on earth could she have got hold of one of Ingrid Mitchell’s amber beads?

I went back to what Dr Mitchell had told me. I had the sharpest memory of her on that last day of her life, all defences down, and a growing understanding that if she had trusted the police much suffering might have been prevented. She wore the beads frequently, partly, perhaps, because of their association with Dr Jackson, but probably more because the rich glow of the amber suited her clear, dark skin. One day at the museum the string of the necklace had broken, and the beads scattered on the floor. All but one had been picked up – the remaining one was never found.

I tried to visualise the incident. What, exactly, had Ingrid Mitchell said? She had been surprised at my knowing – more accurately, guessing – about it, and then said something like, ‘Yes, it did break, one day when I was visiting Charles at the museum. As he’d given it to me he was a bit upset, and helped me pick up the beads.’ That would have been in Dr Jackson’s office, later her own office. I had a clear recollection of it, a pleasant, light room, with a big desk, a fitted carpet, I thought three chairs, though there may have been four, and not much other furniture. The carpet was a paleish fawn; the dark amber beads would have shown up well on it, and with friction from the pile of the carpet could not have rolled far. Dr Jackson had helped her to pick up the beads – with two people looking there seemed even less chance of one’s being missed. Could Dr Jackson himself have kept one for sentimental reasons? Possible, but it seemed hardly likely. Could there have been anybody else in the room? Ingrid Mitchell hadn’t said anything about anyone else, but suppose Dr Jackson’s secretary, afterwards her own secretary, had been there she might easily not have mentioned her.

The more I thought about it the more likely it seemed that some third person must have been in the room, to pick up, and keep, one of the beads. The secretary might have come in while they were hunting for them, or she might have been with Dr Jackson when Ingrid Mitchell called. She was so familiar a figure in the setting of the office that Dr Mitchell might just not have remembered her. What did we know about the secretary?

Next to nothing. I had met her every time I’d been to the museum but had no distinct impression of her, other than of a fair-haired, rather attractive young woman in her late twenties or early thirties. I had a vague recollection of hearing Dr Mitchell call her Joan.

Then I thought of something else – a remark that Sir Anthony Brotherton had made on the morning he’d come to see us about the second ransom note, when we’d told him of Dr Mitchell’s death. He had not heard the seven o’clock radio news, and he was visibly shocked. In telling him about it I’d said that the Keeper of the Department at the museum responsible for the Baffin Map had been found murdered at her home. I had not then told him that Ingrid Mitchell had been shot, and he had asked, ‘Can you be sure she was murdered?’ It was a remark that anybody might have made and I’d thought nothing of it at the time, but now that it came back to me after thinking of the chain of circumstance relating to the amber bead it seemed suddenly a distinctly curious thing for him to ask. We had not told him any details regarding the deaths of Dr Jackson and of Adrian Stowe – both had been murders disguised, for a time successfully, to look like suicide or accident. There had been a similar attempt, though a much clumsier one, to make Ingrid Mitchell’s death look like suicide. Why had Sir Anthony thought there could be any doubt when I’d told him that Dr Mitchell had been found murdered?

All at once I knew what we’d got to do.