Reckoning in Ice Read online

  There was a lot more in this vein, and the piece concluded:

  Homer P. Reggio, who took over from his uncle – the founding father of Lake Erie Chemicals – last year, is coming to London shortly, and a discreet visit to Moorgate seems more than a little probable.

  There had been no takeover bid from Lake Erie Chemicals and of this particular speculation no more had been heard. The recent cutting was shorter. It was a paragraph from the Business Diary of the Financial Chronicle headed ‘Icy Mountains’. It ran:

  Truly worldwide means just that for the head of a big modern conglomerate engaged in worldwide business. Homer P. Reggio, of Lake Erie Chemicals, is currently in Greenland discussing mineral deposits with officials of the Danish prospecting agency there. Under the notorious Greenland ice cap mineral wealth in abundance may well lie, but in roadless terrain covered by ice anything up to a mile thick the economics of getting at it are a problem. However, workable ores of various kinds are said to have been found not too far inland from Frederickshaab on the West Coast, and if Greenland in December is worth a week of Mr Reggio’s time there may yet be gold in them thar’ icy mountains.

  I normally do read the Financial Chronicle but I couldn’t remember having noticed that paragraph. There was no reason why it should have stayed in my memory if I had. I gave back the folder to Mr Villeneuve.

  ‘What do you make of them?’ he said.

  ‘Offhand, not very much,’ I replied. ‘They both relate to Lake Erie Chemicals, and there’s a connection with International Metals because of speculation about a possible takeover bid. But as no bid was made – at least, as far as I know – the connection doesn’t seem very close.’

  Mr Villeneuve was silent for a full minute. When he spoke he did so slowly and deliberately, as if considering the exact meaning of each word.

  ‘The Financial Chronicle is not badly informed,’ he said. ‘There was not exactly a bid, but Mr Reggio did come to see me. He came here. Gil Morgan-Jones came with him. It is no particular secret that Lake Erie would like to take us over, or to amalgamate with us in some way. In strictly financial terms it would make a good deal of sense – for them, anyway. Mr Reggio’s uncle tried to talk me into it some years ago, and he renewed the invitation again a few months before he died. I’ve nothing against Lake Erie, it is one of the best of such groups in the world. And I had great respect for old Julius Reggio. But I don’t think I want International Metals taken over. There are many reasons. My family is of French extraction but my father was born in England, so was I. My mother was English, Paula’s mother was Scottish. I don’t want to act the aged patriot, but there’s something in it. Western Europe, Britain and France were civilised once. We still stand for something. The Americans dominate so much. We can still compete with them – indeed, there is nothing in the United States quite on a par with International Metals. That, of course, is why they want us. It may come. But it will not come yet.’

  He paused, then went on more briskly. ‘However, none of this is really relevant. Lake Erie uses many of our processes, it is one of our major licensees. The Reggios are as entitled to suggest a closer relationship, as I am to decline it. I must get back to Homer Reggio’s visit.

  ‘It was at the end of March, nearly a year ago. We had a week of wonderful early spring weather, and the two days that Homer Reggio and Morgan-Jones were here came in the middle of it. Paula took them in the launch on the loch – it was more like early summer. They came up on the night train to Inverness and I sent a car to meet them. You may wonder why I did not do this for you. Paula wanted me to, but – forgive me – I was testing your initiative.’ He smiled. ‘Simple route-finding is not a great skill,’ he said, ‘but as far as it goes you did all right.

  ‘To return to the visit. They got here for lunch and after lunch Paula took them on the loch while I had my rest. In the evening we had a long discussion in this room, breaking off for dinner and then coming back here until midnight. Homer Reggio had brought a mass of figures which he wanted to go through with me. We spent most of our time on Reggio’s figures, and did not finish our discussion. At midnight I pleaded an old man’s privilege and said that I must go to bed. We arranged to continue our talks in the morning.

  ‘I do not normally sleep for more than a few hours at night. I get up early, often at four or five o’clock; most of my best work has been done before midday. I try to rest, and often sleep, for a good two hours after lunch and work again until dinner. Usually I go to bed fairly early and read for an hour or two before going to sleep. That is my time for what I call recreational reading. I suppose I found Reggio’s figures exhausting, but I was exceptionally tired that night and I slept – for me – extraordinarily well. I did not wake up until Paula came in with the post at nine o’clock.

  ‘It did not matter, for my adjourned meeting with Reggio and Morgan-Jones was not until ten o’clock. It did not last long. Reggio wanted what he called a formal answer to his request. I told him that a formal answer could come only from the board, but that as far as I was concerned I was not willing to consider amalgamation. Morgan-Jones thought –and thinks – that I was wrong. On this, as on one or two other matters where I have been able to go my own way, we agree quite amicably to differ. He is much younger than I and his turn may come.

  ‘So we concluded our discussion in less than an hour, after which Paula collected us for a stroll to the loch. We had an early lunch to allow comfortable time for our guests to be driven to Inverness for the train back to London. That was that.’

  Mr Villeneuve got up and walked across the room, as if to relax his muscles mentally as well as physically. Standing by the window, he went on.

  ‘I now come to the more difficult part. After they had gone I went to my room to rest, but I had slept so late that I did not lie down for long and I soon went to my laboratory to carry on with some work I was doing. I was absorbed in this and did not break off until it was time for dinner. Paula and I dined, as we normally do, alone. After dinner I went back to the laboratory for a short time and then found that I wanted some notes from my safe. That is the safe, let into the wall by the bookcase.’

  He went over to the safe, took a key from his pocket and opened it. He beckoned to me to join him, and we stood looking at the safe. It was of the highest quality, the contents arranged neatly in box files. He took out one of them and extracted a loose-leaf folder. ‘My notes,’ he said, ‘are in this folder. As soon as I looked at them I felt that there was something wrong. Two pages have been transposed. These are numbered pages, 37 in all, and you will see that 35 is misplaced, coming after 36.’

  It seemed a very small matter. Apparently he sensed that I felt this, for he went on quickly. ‘Of course, it could easily have been my own mistake. And I am old – and old men make mistakes. But to be old can count another way –the old seldom act out of character. All my life I have been meticulous in notekeeping and I do not believe that I made this particular mistake. There was no reason why I should. I write pages consecutively in my notebook – there is my writing book lying on the desk – and when they are written I transfer them to a folder. I am as clear as I can be about anything that I wrote the last three pages – 35, 36 and 37 – at one sitting, and transferred them together to the file. So unless I had dropped them – which I did not – I had no reason for putting in page 36 in front of 35. They should not have been like that.

  ‘The discovery disturbed me, so I subjected all the notes in this file to a close scrutiny. And I found something else – see for yourself, on pages 11 and 19.’

  He showed me the margins of the two pages. They were standard loose-leaf pages, each with two holes punched in the margin to fit on to loose-leaf clips. On each of these two pages there was a minute tear at the edge of one of the holes as if it had caught slightly while being put on the clip. I wondered at his noticing it. Again he seemed to sense my thoughts. ‘I found these imperfections,’ he said, ‘because I was looking for them. The transposing of two pages which I
was sure I had not done myself suggested that someone had taken out my notes. They could have been copied without being taken off their clips, but my writing is small and these notes contain some complex scientific formulae. To copy them by hand would take a long time. That they had been taken out and put back suggested that they had been subjected to some copying process which required their removal from the clips – perhaps for photographing. The transposing of two pages suggested haste, or nervousness. If so, there might be other signs of this. There were, in the damage to pages 11 and 19.’

  ‘The damage is very slight,’ I said. ‘It could be an imperfection in the original stamping of the holes.’

  ‘It could be,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think it is.’ It was a point that obviously he had considered and discounted. A little as if he was delivering a scientific paper, he went on, ‘If the die that cut the holes was at fault, one would expect to find imperfections in all pages from the same pad. But this paper is torn on only two pages, and they are not consecutive. It could be argued that I must have torn the edges of those holes myself, either in taking the pages from my notebook, or in putting them on the clips in the file. Again this is possible, but I have experimented and it is most unlikely. I transfer pages from my notebook usually only one or two at a time, hardly ever more than four. With this small number of pages it is, in fact, easier to match the holes properly than to botch them. If you put a larger batch of paper on the clips, particularly if you try to do it quickly, one or two of the holes may slip a little out of true, and you get exactly the effect you see here.’

  He paused. The physical evidence of tampering with the file was trivial, but subjected to Mr Villeneuve’s intellectual analysis it became impressive.

  ‘Are these particular notes important?’ I asked.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘May I ask what they are?’

  ‘Yes. I have considered, and I propose to tell you. That is why I asked your help.’

  He paused again, and continued.

  ‘You may know of British Petroleum’s work on the extraction of protein from oil. That was the discovery of a brilliant French scientist, Dr Alfred Champagnat. I need not stress its economic, indeed its socio-political importance. Here, for the first time in human history, mankind has a source of edible protein – a source of food – impervious to all the natural hazards, pests, drought, flood, which have affected man’s food supplies from the beginning of time. It does not, however, follow that the man-made protein, if I may call it such, will be much cheaper to produce than food from natural sources of protein, such as the soya bean. Oil-derived protein has the advantage of economic stability in that its price will not be subject to the vagaries of crop failure. But the dream of bountiful supplies of never-failing food cheaper than any foodstuff man has ever known remains a dream.

  ‘I have called oil-derived protein man-made on the analogy of man-made fibres, but of course it is not man-made. It derives from the minute marine organisms, once living creatures, whose fossilised remains form oil. The present process of obtaining, or reconstituting, protein from oil is essentially a bacterial one, roughly similar – though you will understand that I speak only in the broadest terms – to the production of penicillin from certain moulds.

  ‘I think I have come upon a novel and much simpler process by which protein may be obtained directly from crude oil by a straightforward system of catalytic reformation. I shall not try to explain this in any detail. I have some theories on catalysis in the oil-chemical industry and it occurred to me that if platinum can assist in reforming the molecular structure of oil, as in the familiar reforming plants, to produce, say, high octane spirit, it might be possible to devise a chemical catalytic process as an alternative to the bacterial transformation of oil. Dr Champagnat’s discovery was announced in 1959. I worked on my catalytic process off and on over much of the next decade, and got nowhere. No system that I could devise using ordinary platinum, or platinum in its finely divided form of platinum black, had any success at all. Almost by accident I began experimenting with a rare isotopic form of platinum known as Platinum N. For the first time the results seemed encouraging and I think – mind you, I can say only I think – that I have devised a workable process for the catalytic reformation of oil to produce protein. My notes concern this process.’

  I could think of little to say. From almost any other man this would have seemed science fiction stuff. From Paul Villeneuve it could be taken as a statement of precise, scientific fact. The value of such a process was incalculable. But he had not finished his story. He went on.

  ‘The whole process depends on the use of this particular isotope of platinum. It has not yet been synthesised, but it occurs in nature in a rare mineral called Agdalite. That mineral has been found in certain rocks in south-west Greenland. So far as I know it has been found only in Greenland. Agdalite has no other commercial use – indeed it has no present commercial use at all. The platinum content is too minute to be of value. And there is no present application for platinum N. It is a scientific curiosity.’

  That explained the Greenland cutting. It was an ugly picture. If the Villeneuve process worked – and his processes could be expected to work – whoever controlled the source of Agdalite would control cheap protein from oil.

  ‘You suspected interference with your notes nearly a year ago,’ I said. ‘Why are you telling me about it now?’

  ‘I think,’ said Mr Villeneuve, ‘that we could both do with a glass of that admirable Glen Morangie. I certainly could.’ He fetched a bottle and glasses from a corner cupboard and poured us both a drink.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s better!’ He relished the whisky slowly. Then he said, ‘I have not been entirely inactive. But such action as I have been able to take almost convinced me that I must be mistaken. My exceptionally heavy sleep that night suggested that I may have been drugged. We drank whisky in here both before and after dinner, and it would have been easy to slip something into my glass. If you don’t suspect your guests of wanting to drug you, you don’t really keep a sharp eye on your drink. I am entirely capable of carrying out the necessary analysis for traces of a drug, but there was nothing to analyse: the glasses had been cleared away and washed up. Without much hope I did analyse the whisky left in the bottle. I found nothing.

  ‘I considered the safe. No one goes to it except me and – very occasionally – Paula, who acts as my secretary. There are two keys, one which I always carry with me, and one which is kept by my bank. I checked with the bank – that key, which I deposited when it was brought by the safe makers, can be obtained only on my personal request. I have certainly not been impersonated – it has never left the bank. My own key, so far as I know, has never been out of my possession. Of course, it is out of my control when I sleep, but I sleep with it under my pillow, and I have always found it there when I wake up. I have tried to think who might know of this habit, and I fear that it may be known to most of my staff, indeed to most of my close colleagues. I have never made any great secret of it. The matter came up once, some years ago, at a board meeting – the deputy chairman, who, as you know, is a lawyer, asked quite reasonably how the company could get access to my papers in the event of my death, say in an air crash. I explained that my executors could obtain the spare key from the bank, and I recall also explaining the care I took of my own key. Perhaps this was misguided – but one does not mistrust fellow members of one’s own board.

  ‘There was no trace of damage to the safe, so if it was opened it must have been opened with a key – and the only possible key would seem to be my own. I looked for fingerprints, dusted the door, the shelves, the files with powder, and photographed everything. It was easy, from glasses, spoons and the like, to get fingerprints of all the other people in the household. The only prints I found were my own, and on the outside of the door, some prints of the maid who dusts the room. All was as it should be.

  ‘I thought of going to the police. But what could I tell them? The evidenc
e of interference with my notes is very slight. I have no doubt about it, but without fingerprints, with no sign of forcible entry anywhere, to the house or to the safe, what could the police do?

  ‘The only abnormal happening that I can relate in any way to the affair is my exceptionally deep sleep on the night of Reggio’s and Morgan-Jones’s visit. And that does not amount to much – I had no particular hangover, and apart from the fact that I was asleep Paula noticed nothing odd about my appearance when she came in. Moreover, if I relate that sleep to the interference with my notes, I must assume that either Homer Reggio or Gil Morgan-Jones, or both of them acting in concert, came here to rob me. And that seems utterly absurd.

  ‘I worried about things all through the summer and autumn, but nothing else happened and I felt that I must persuade myself that I am old and getting fanciful, and try to put it from my mind. Then came that paragraph in the newspaper about Greenland. Now I know that I am not wrong. Have I convinced you? Can I convince anybody else?’ He spoke almost pleadingly.

  I thought for a moment or two, and replied rather guardedly. ‘You have made out a case, I think, for investigation. But just what you investigate I don’t know. Have you thought again about the police?’

  ‘Yes, of course I have,’ he said, ‘but again I have to ask myself, “What can I tell them?” And there are other difficulties now. To invoke the police would be to invite questions in every department of International Metals, and equally distasteful inquiries in the United States. It would mean disclosing the importance of Agdalite. If I am right in my suspicions it would alert some very clever men. We are not dealing with fools.’ He brightened a little, as if the prospect of not dealing with fools almost pleased him.