The Falklands Intercept (17 page)

If the Verney case was unfolding as she thought it might, she was going to be
thankful
for absolutely secure communications with the people she needed to speak to. She might have to issue some very austere and uncompromising instructions – bleak even. Illegal even. Worse, the instructions might have to contravene some of the basic ground rules of British intelligence work. And then a terrible feeling of foreboding overtook her. Who guards the guardians?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodies
? The phrase went round and round inside her head like the scrap of a pop tune or a jingle that just won't go away. It was Juvenal she remembered from her undergraduate days and he used the phrase about trying to keep randy Roman wives faithful. If only it were about that today she thought. It was a simple question and it never went away. Suddenly she felt alone. What if Jacot was wrong? In a way she hoped he was.

The Scott-Wilson Austral Studies Institute had been founded with the excess money from the various popular appeals to help the relatives of those who died with Scott. Scott's last written words had been after all ‘For God's sake look after our people' and those in authority certainly had done so. Jacot had an appointment with its director, another Cambridge professor, a Professor Stapley. Apparently, he had something of interest – he had certainly sounded excited on the telephone. Jacot left the warm fire in his rooms reluctantly and set off for his meeting.

It was an icy night. A sharp wind from the east cut across Cambridge making it feel even colder – a good night to be abroad on Antarctic business. Jacot walked briskly towards the Institute, about half a mile from St James'. Looking up as he walked through the gate a few minutes later he saw the institute's motto carved into the wall and
illuminated
by spotlights.
Quaesivit Arcana Poli Videt Dei
– translated it meant: “He sought the secret of the Pole but found the hidden face of God.” Part Edwardian sentimentalizing, part moving tribute to Captain Scott, it was certainly not the feeling Scott himself
experienced
at the Pole. His journal entry for Wednesday, January 17th 1912 the day they reached the Pole was bleaker altogether:

“Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”

If anything, Scott found the power of humanity and comradeship in his Antarctic travels and the wonder of the natural world rather than any sense or glimpse of an Almighty. It is not at all clear who Scott's “Great God” was. To be frank it was more likely some kind of oath than an address to any deity. Scott was a great man undoubtedly, but not a Christian in the conventional sense.

Professor Stapley ushered Jacot into his office. On the back wall was a huge oil
painting
of the moment that Captain Oates staggered from the tent to his death. The tent looked tiny and insignificant against the immense white background of an Antarctic storm, but the artist had somehow managed to portray an identifiable human being – Oates's handsome features were clearly there, half-hidden by his reindeer skin hood. His mother never forgave Captain Scott whom she, unfashionably then, blamed for the
disaster
.

Professor Stapley shook Jacot by the hand and ushered him to a chair by the side of his desk. ‘Thank you for coming. Terrible business about young Charlotte Pirbright. Awful and here in the institute too. I hope the authorities find the culprit. I understand
that you are sort of attached to the investigation. Hush, hush and all that because of Verney. Dreadful. She was a sweet girl. Awful. Do you have any idea who could have done such a cruel thing? First let me give you a glass of whisky. It's a raw and grim night even for polar scientists. Whyte and Mackay – it's the modern version of the stuff Shackleton took with him in 1909.'

Stapley drank his whisky in one gulp and poured another. He looked pretty shaken up, poor man. Jacot looked him straight in the eye and said ‘I have a theory, yes. But if we are going to get to the bottom of this I need to know more about her research. There might be something about what they were looking into that could have contributed to both Verney's, and now Charlotte Pirbright's, deaths.'

‘I think I can help', said Stapley drinking his whisky. ‘In general terms they were looking into the navigational instruments used by both Amundsen and Scott – the
techniques
, metallurgical properties, records and so on with a view to pronouncing on their accuracy. I have had a look at the documents recovered from the memory stick you gave me. They are extraordinarily interesting. I may have worked out what it was in their research that was so startling – but I can't prove it and it's only a theory. If I am right, then I can see quite clearly why they went to some lengths to protect the information. They had stumbled upon one of the most stunning secrets or misunderstandings about Antarctic exploration. It was dynamite and would have made any book they had written a global bestseller. The historical importance of such a revelation would have led to fame and fortune.'

‘Would someone murder for it?' asked Jacot.

‘That's more difficult', replied Stapley. ‘But let me take you through my theory. So Colonel Jacot, what do you know about Scott's last expedition?'

‘Quite a lot, I think. Anyone who has travelled South feels the pull of the Antarctic and the heroic age of its first explorers. If you are a patriotic Englishman, Captain Scott is the logical man to look into. In any case, English boys born before the iron curtain of political correctness descended over our past would be familiar with aspects of the Scott epic – just about every preparatory school in the sixties and seventies had a dormitory or a house named after Scott. My particular institution certainly had one. Plus a Wellington, a Nelson, a Wolfe and a Havelock. I was in Wolfe I remember and rather proud of it. Most of us had seen the 1948 film with John Mills in the lead role. Not my idea of Scott at all – too tortured, too wooden. And casting James Robertson Justice as poor old Petty Officer Evans was a piece of vandalism.'

‘But the music was extraordinary, and the photography too', said Stapley.

‘Yes, but watching it again as an adult I can see that there was no effort made to understand Scott. His character is at the heart of the tragedy and we come away from the film none the wiser. It wasn't a heroic portrayal but there were no other signposts about what sort of a man he was. Most unsatisfactory. In some ways the enigma remains. You know as well as I do that despite private criticism at the time Captain Oates, whose last
moments grace the back wall of your office, in particular, seemed to have fallen out with him. His letters to his mother were most uncomplimentary. Nevertheless, despite the torrent of aggressive revisionism since the 1960s it remains true that many of the
heavy-weights
on the last expedition were absolutely devoted to him, including Wilson and Bowers who perished alongside their leader. But anyway.'

Professor Stapley smiled. ‘What do you know about Amundsen, the man who
actually
made it to the Pole first?'

‘Not much at all. Except that rather tense scene in the film when Scott receives the telegram: “Going South – Amundsen”. I rather agreed with Scott's comrades that it was a bit ungentlemanly but to be honest I can't remember why.'

‘Amundsen was originally heading for the North Pole. But just before he mounted his expedition news came through that an American, Robert Peary, had bagged it
supposedly
on April 6, 1909. But the news only got to the outside world after Scott had set off. So Amundsen turned South. But guess what? We now know that Peary had got nowhere near the Pole and was in fact a fraud. No one in his polar party except himself was trained in navigation and he couldn't possibly have made it to the pole in the time he said.'

‘Oh well, there you go then. No doubt he went on to a lucrative second career in
politics
.'

Stapley smiled. ‘The point about the Peary scandal is that it is very easy to claim that you have been at the Pole but difficult to prove. Equally, it's quite difficult to disprove unless in your account you commit some egregious error as Peary did about timings and distance.'

Jacot said, ‘Are you suggesting that Amundsen made it all up? After all Scott does arrive at the same spot some weeks later. There are photographs of Amundsen's tent there and Scott picks up a letter for the King of Norway from Amundsen.'

‘No, not at all. By any account and any standard Amundsen was a fine man, a great man. But Verney and Pirbright were definitely onto something. The mysterious figures you recovered from Dr Pirbright's body after her death. I have an explanation. It's a bit like a crossword and a bit like deciphering an incomplete ancient text – Linear B stuff.'

Stapley unfolded a map of the Antarctic on his desk showing the routes taken by Amundsen and Scott to the Pole. By its side he put a print out of some figures from the Verney-Pirbright paper. ‘It all looks easy and obvious now but in fact until the advent of GPS navigating at high latitudes close to the poles was enormously difficult. Even now GPS is not always reliable – the satellites are too low on the horizon very often to be of much use. It is an additional aid rather than a reliable means. Sensible explorers still use sextant and compass and chronometer. Even then it's not easy.

‘There have always been immense problems. Long periods of overcast skies make solar observations difficult to obtain. It's daylight throughout the summer of course which makes it difficult to see the stars. Abnormal refraction may cause or introduce unknown errors into the sights. To top it all off the weather is often horrendous, even in
summer, making it difficult to see the horizon. As if that were not enough the magnetic compass is not reliable in all parts of the Antarctic because of the proximity of the
magnetic
Pole in addition to all kinds of weird localized magnetic anomalies. And all this stuff relies on accurate time.

‘There was one additional problem for the Antarctic explorers which did not trouble those at the North Pole, bogus or otherwise. That was ascertaining height. The North Pole is at sea level, obviously give-or-take an iceberg or two. But the South Pole sits on top of a flat and windswept plateau at 9,306 feet. It's one of the reasons that getting there was such a nightmare. The second half of the trek takes place at high altitude, or what would be considered high altitude skiing in Europe. It can be difficult to get a horizon.

‘The first set of figures on the paper are temperature readings. Some in Centigrade and some in Fahrenheit but without the degree signs. Their original source were the records made at the time by individuals on both Amundsen and Scott's Polar parties. We believe them to be accurate. In other words we have no reason to suspect that anyone on either expedition would have wished to exaggerate or minimize them. We also believe that for the time the thermometers both expeditions used were reasonably accurate. They are probably accurate measurements on the days they were taken. But we cannot know for sure that they are accurate. We have no real way of checking them.'

Jacot sipped his whisky. ‘Why would anyone murder for temperature readings?'

‘Quite, but hang on, I haven't finished. A lot of research has been done on some aspects of this recently – some of it here at the Scott-Wilson Institute. To cut a long story short, Amundsen and Scott essentially experienced different weather conditions. Amundsen manages to get to the Pole a month before Scott and, guess what, that month was milder than what Scott's people had to endure and much better than what Scott had to put up with on his return journey. We know from the diaries that Captain Oates dies on probably on Friday March 16, 1912, during a terrible blizzard, and that the
temperatures
are much lower than they expected. It really was “The Coldest March”. Now the crux of this is that these different temperatures had different effects on the kit and instruments that the two expeditions were carrying. The cold is, of course, what does for Scott and his companions in the end.

‘What the Verney-Pirbright research was showing is that the temperature made the navigation instruments work in different ways – some were more accurate than others. In particular, that Scott's instruments were in general reading true but Amundsen's may not have been. It would appear that both sets of instruments had been specially machined and designed against the cold but because Amundsen experienced comparatively warmer weather his readings were less reliable. The kit worked best at the extremes. This is what Verney and Pirbright seem to have been onto.'

‘So what?' Jacot checked himself. It was the question army officers were trained to ask from the moment they entered Sandhurst but it sounded wrong. ‘Sorry, Professor I didn't mean it to come out quite like that.'

Stapley was amused. ‘Don't worry, the military and the scientific minds work in similar grooves, I suspect. Do you know who I mean by Elizabeth Hawley?'

‘She's ringing a bell somewhere – an American lady who settled in Kathmandu.'

‘Well done. There is a long section in the paper about her work verifying the ascents of Everest. Very interesting, crucial even, that her name appears in the file. She is an American journalist. She began at least as a journalist. But now she is the sole authority who certifies ascents in the High Himalaya. No certification from her and you didn't get to the summit. Basically, she looks at the photos and interviews the people involved and then decides whether they made it, or not. Usually uncontroversial but there is one nasty case where a South Korean woman climber who swears blind she made it to the top of K2 I think it was, has had her attempt marked as disputed because the photographs didn't add up quite. Verney and Pirbright reckoned they were onto something on similar lines with Amundsen and Scott.'

‘That's why I asked you about your knowledge of Amundsen? Do you know how they took the measurements that told them they were at the Pole? It's all in the chapter of Amundsen's book – “At the Pole” and it's much more Heath-Robinsonish than you might think.'

‘So what does it mean?'

‘Well, in essence, if the figures are right, and they are incomplete, it is extremely important. In fact it would be a startling discovery. A hundred years after the Pole was conquered…'

‘In plain English.'

‘It means in plain English that Amundsen missed the Pole. Scott's famous phrase: “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority”, was wrong. Actually, Amundsen may not have had
priority
at all. And from the figures it wasn't a small miss – maybe by up to thirty or so miles. He certainly got closer than Shackleton did in 1909. Most people accept that he was within a hundred miles of his goal when he had to turn back. But the really astonishing thing about Verney and Pirbright's theory was that if you accept their reasoning Scott did make it.