The Falklands Intercept (15 page)

Charlotte Pirbright thought life was good. She hadn't liked Verney that much and she was saddened and a little frightened by his death. But the impact on her was very slight. There was so much else going on. Anyway, it meant that she could take forward their research on “Captain S”. Yes, she could dedicate her thesis and her book to his memory, but the glory would be all hers. She felt a bit guilty but what could she do? At last she would be able to realize her ambition of becoming a proper Cambridge don. Currently she held a very junior, very temporary, research fellowship at St James' but it finished at the end of the academic year.

Verney had wangled the fellowship for her but to have any chance of a permanent post she would have to write a well-received book or publish a piece of original and startling research pretty soon. People just did not understand how difficult it was to get “tenure” as they called it on American campuses. There was great demand for research students to assist with teaching undergraduates and to undertake a range of academically menial tasks around the university, but the goal of a permanent fellowship in a decent college remained elusive for most. But their, her, research on Scott would change everything. A grateful country would ensure that the grind and petty jealousies of academic life would be overcome. Golly, if the world only knew where the research had been taking them – was taking them still. It was going to be one of the biggest stories in Antarctic studies ever. Maybe even a film – with Angelina Jolie or perhaps someone a little younger playing her part and a big star as General Verney – Jeremy Irons or Kenneth Branagh. She was sure of it. Now was the time. She was about to get her big break.

She didn't like older men much but that Jacot fellow seemed sweet. He looked very cool and mysterious in his black silk gloves. She had become used to seeing him around the college in the past few weeks. He dined in hall most nights. But then he had disappeared off to the Falklands on some mission or other. Apparently he was now back, according to the head porter. He had that neatness and smartness of turn-out that you often saw in military men. It was his gloves that attracted her attention though. She knew why he wore them but they had a strange effect, making him seem old fashioned and out of place. They also distracted from his eyes. Despite years of training in a girls' boarding school and a strong natural sense of consideration for others, she had looked long and hard at his hands when they had first met a few weeks before. Strong hands, not slim but not stubby and with long fingers. On the left hand she remembered just
above the cuff of the glove a burn scar, still red after all these years, where the metal of his red-hot watch had seared into the skin.

She was going to miss Verney's intelligence stories. It gave her an insider's frisson of pleasure whenever she read something in the papers that Verney had given her background on. He had been very indiscreet. Jacot would be surprised at what he had told her. Come to think of it maybe she should ring him now, but no, all in good time.

She walked through the cold Cambridge evening. The cold wind straight from the Urals whipping in her face. It was dark, damp and foggy. The street lights had that Jack the Ripper feel. She turned into the Scott-Wilson Institute. Her tiny office as ever was a mess. She shared it with two other graduate students. No one appeared to be around. But then it was a Friday night. They had probably all gone to the pub. She might go along later but first of all she had to check something for an experiment the following week.

She went down to the basement into a large storeroom. Fitted out when the building was put up in the 1920s, it was full of solid mahogany drawers with stout brass handles, filled with dried animal and plant specimens and other Antarcticana. She was always
surprised
by how oddly reassuring the hardware of the past could be. Everything seemed organized and built to last – perhaps it was in the craftsmanship. And yet the world had been hurtling through space just as it always had, and being human on it was the same chancy business it had always been, chancier even. There were no antibiotics and at the time the institute was built the world had just gone through a ghastly war, itself only a pale imitation of an even ghastlier war to follow. And yet Scott's world was the more
reassuring
. He did not have the comforts of religion although his boon companion Dr Wilson certainly did – a deeply devout man who saw all the glories of nature as
expressions
of God's beneficence and glory. You could see it in his beautiful and haunting watercolours. They died with courage – almost indifference according to Scott's own account at any rate. At least they missed the Great War – others on the expedition were not so fortunate. Perhaps that was the fascination with Captain Scott and all his works. No happy ending for sure, but Edwardian and dependable all the way. Somehow for all the harshness of the Antarctic Scott's world was an ordered place – we can see it still in Herbert Ponting's great photographs. A well built, sturdy, warm and tidy hut. There is plenty of food and lots of laughs. Parties even. The officers and men sleep in different parts of the hut – it's a bungalow but an invisible line separates the upper and lower decks. During the long Antarctic winter few venture outside into the raging blizzards. But within there is honey still for tea.

Charlotte had been allocated a drawer by the director, Professor Stapley. It was lined in dark blue baize. Inside were three instruments – the keys to her and Verney's research. One was a theodolite – the surveying instrument used to navigate and fix positions
accurately
while travelling to the pole. There was also a sextant. The third instrument was a watch, or rather a chronometer, a variant of a ship's clock of a type similar to those used by both Scott and Amundsen. Curiously, for a set of navigational instruments there was
no compass. But then compasses don't work well at the poles – for obvious reasons the needles are attracted to the magnetic poles which are neither in the direction of true south or true north. This caused both expeditions considerable problems. Indeed until the advent of the Global Positioning System it was always quite difficult to work out exactly where you were in the polar regions.

There were two key issues she had been working on with Verney. In order to work out latitude – for Scott and Amundsen working out how far south they were – a precise measurement with a theodolite was necessary which involved a measurement of solar, stellar or lunar position above the horizon. It works everywhere on earth but you need both a horizon and something in space to measure from. You need to be able to see clearly. And your instruments need to be unaffected by the extreme temperature,
hardened
against the cold.

There was a further complication. In order to measure longitude – how far east or west you are – you need to be able to measure the solar position at noon and at a second known time. So you not only need to be able to see, but also to tell the time accurately. If the conditions are not right and your clock isn't working you cannot be sure exactly where you are – no ifs, no buts the wrong conditions would have turned the early
20th-century
version of Satnav off. No amount of post-expedition checking could make up for this fact. And this is what fascinated her. No one had ever checked how theodolites or Edwardian watches worked in extremely low temperatures. Indeed, Amundsen did not have a theodolite with him when he reached the pole.

Charlotte cleaned and oiled the outsides of the instruments. Scott was always worried about time-keeping. Like all sailors before satellites their lives depended on accurate
arithmetic
and accurate navigation. That life could be split in half: one part depended on
accurate
time keeping, the other half depended on the sun. To back it up they used dead
reckoning
– plotting as accurately as they could their course and speed taking into account tides and currents. Generally the Royal Navy did this well. Scott had his own watch as the primary time-keeper, like a ship's clock. The back up was carried by Birdie Bowers, the stocky and imperturbable officer from the Indian Navy, and we know from Scott's diaries that it went wrong on at least one occasion.

She was hugely excited. She and Verney had nearly achieved their goal – checking and auditing the navigational instruments on both Amundsen and Scott's expeditions. They were not quite there yet and it was possible that their hunch was wrong. These things were difficult to prove either way a hundred years later. But Verney had certainly
intended
to give his audience at the Charles II Lecture a taster of what was to come. It would have electrified the room, with journalists dashing out to make contact with their editors. Both she and Verney would have been instantly famous.

A couple of days before he had died Verney had asked her round for a drink in his rooms. He seemed anxious, distracted and angry. He gave her a file with the learned paper they had nearly finished together, plus all the background data and bits and pieces about
their collaborative research. He told her to keep it under lock and key in her own room. He had then downloaded the same data onto a tiny memory stick. Smiling, he had handed it to her ‘Just to be safe.' It was now slung low on a tiny gold chain around her neck that was tucked into her bra for extra security. Just as well. The police or the military police or the various other people who seemed to be more than ordinarily interested in Verney's death, like Jacot, would no doubt have confiscated them “as evidence”.

The director had agreed that she could conduct a controlled experiment the following week in the cold chamber. The institute maintained a sealed room in which it was possible to conduct experiments at very low temperatures – exactly replicating the conditions at the South Pole. What Charlotte really wanted to do was to exactly replicate the journey to the Pole of both expeditions, but it would take too long. Instead she was going to cool the instruments down to a low temperature, similar to the levels they would have experienced in the long trek to the Pole, and then replicate a single day at the Pole itself for each expedition. It had been much colder for Scott than for Amundsen. Her colleagues thought it hare-brained but science was science and it would give her verifiable data on how instruments of this type would actually have behaved on the day. She could, from the comfort of 21st-century Cambridge, reproduce the conditions exactly as experienced by Amundsen and Scott a hundred years before.

She had been allocated two whole days to herself. Other members of the institute were most put out. They needed the chamber for what they called “more relevant” experiments on materials and structures that might be useful at the Pole today and for experiments on global warming, the dullest in Charlotte's view of all the aspects of polar research. What was it about global warming that seemed to attract the most fanatical and unkempt of her colleagues? Most of modern man's great ideas had originated in Cambridge, originally an obscure market town deep in the fens. But one idea that was unlikely ever to bear fruit in this freezing, college-studded fen was that the world was getting warmer. Perhaps it was, but Cambridge was certainly getting colder.

The theodolite, sextant and chronometer were not only impressive aids to navigation. They had been beautifully made. No plastic bits or computer displays, just solid mainly brass instruments – a joy to hold and operate and always, apparently, accurate.

Her mood changed. Suddenly the room lost its re-assuring character. The rows of trays and drawers going up to the ceiling turned darker, bringing to mind the poverty and difficulties of life a hundred years before and the turmoil in the Edwardian mind. The solid craftsmanship no longer represented the solidity the Edwardians had enjoyed, but underlined what they were about to lose in the carnage of the Great War. Suddenly the polished brass and mahogany seemed threatening – the rows of drawers like the slide-out cabinets in a mortuary. The hum of the cold room and the clinical starkness of its huge white door at the end of the corridor brought to mind both death and the vast
pitiless
coldness of the Antarctic. She was afraid. But the feeling would pass and the breath
of the night-wind would soften. What she needed was warmth, company and a drink. All available at The Eagle, her favourite Cambridge pub and long time haunt of the younger element at SWASI. She would go and join them. She placed her notebook in her handbag and got up. Who knows, The Eagle was already famous as the place Watson and Crick unlocked the secret of DNA, maybe it would become famous in the Antarctic Studies world as well. It was funny how quickly the prospect of a Friday evening get-together cheered her up. Charlotte was calm and optimistic again when she heard light footsteps in the corridor.

‘Hallo. Who's there?' she called out. ‘I am just off to the Eagle. If you are doing some work then lock up and put the alarm on.' She applied some lipstick. There was no reply. ‘Hallo?'

‘Hallo. It's me', replied out a muffled and indistinct voice from the dark corridor outside. She couldn't quite place the voice – probably muffled by a scarf on a night like this, or laid low with a sore throat. She continued looking into the mirror of a small powder compact as she applied the finishing touches to her make-up.

‘Hallo,' from the muffled voice again. The door into the store-room opened. She still couldn't see who it was. The face was in shadow. But the trademark black silk gloves were obvious enough.

‘Ah the good Colonel Jacot. No doubt on some sleuthing task. I am off to The Eagle. Would you like to come along for a drink? Normally a big turnout by us SWASI types on Friday night.'

In the split second of consciousness left to her before the end of her young life a kind of alarm went off. The hands in their gloves looked like Jacot's but there was no burn scar above the left cuff.