Which brought her to the papers themselves. What did they have to say on the subject?
Auger took the bundle of documents from her handbag and began to arrange them on the maroon bedspread, eventually covering it completely. She laid each item out neatly, but imposed no sorting methodology on the papers other than the order in which they emerged from the bundle.
She stepped back from the bed and looked at the dead woman’s legacy.
“Talk to me, Susan,” she said. “Give me a hint as to what all this is about.”
Auger poured herself another cup of coffee, added cream and sugar and set about rearranging the material on the bed, hunting for some meaningful combination. But no permutation of the papers looked any more or less significant than the last. Unless she was missing something subtle, the message must be in the content of the documents rather than any pattern they formed. None of these papers would have had any particular significance to a local. They might have struck someone as rather an eccentric collection of documents, especially if they had been traced to a young American tourist, but there was no smoking gun, no one document that shrieked of an otherworldly origin. There was, in fact, nothing in the collection that could not have been acquired by an ordinary person with access to the usual libraries and bookshops. There were no top-secret blueprints or duplicated documents from E1; nothing even remotely hinting that Susan White was an explorer who had arrived in Paris through a quasi-wormhole link from some unguessably distant part of the Milky Way.
Auger scrutinised the papers once more to make sure she was not missing something, but barring the use of invisible inks, microdots or some other such subterfuge, there was nothing intrinsically destabilising about any of the items Susan White had acquired. There was, in short, nothing that would have caused any obvious difficulties had it fallen into local hands. In all likelihood, the documents would have been thrown out and the biscuit tin kept instead.
But Caliskan and his organisation had staged a high-risk operation to recover these documents. And the emphasis had indeed been on “recovering” them: there had been no talk of simply discarding or destroying them. No: Caliskan wanted them back, and that meant that the documents were themselves suspected of being important.
They knew that Susan White had been on to something. They just hadn’t wanted to tell Auger, knowing that it might have scared her off. She had been foolish not to ask more questions about the significance of the lost property before she agreed to recover it. But Caliskan and his people had counted on her clutching at any straw to avoid the disciplinary tribunal, and they must have known that she would not think too deeply beyond the immediate objective. The fact that they had been right, that she had played so willingly into their scheme, only made her feel more foolish.
“Verity,” she chided herself. “You silly, silly girl.”
Shaking her head, Auger returned her attention to the papers.
“You knew what this was about,” she said, addressing Susan White’s imagined presence, which she pictured brooding like herself over the tableau of harmless documents. “You knew what this was about and you knew that it was worth someone murdering you for.”
Auger reached out and examined the largest of the maps. It was the first time she had paid proper attention to it. Why had it ended up in the woman’s collection of papers, when others like it could be bought cheaply at almost any stationery shop? A similar map was almost certainly amongst the items White had already passed through the portal.
Auger opened the map fully, laying it gently over the other documents without disturbing them. Covering half the bedspread was a political and geographical map of Europe, with lines marked on it in a dark-blue ink. Auger scratched gently at the lines with her fingernail, as Floyd had done, satisfying herself that they were not part of the original design. They formed a tilted “L” shape, with one arm reaching from Paris to Berlin and the other from Paris to Milan. Inked circles surrounded the three cities, and neat digits above the lines indicated—Auger was certain—the distances between them in kilometres. But beyond this observation, the meaning of the markings eluded her. What was so critical about the distances between these cities that this map had to be smuggled out of E2 at all costs, when that information was readily available in the archives back home?
Auger folded the map, taking pains not to damage the thin paper upon which it was printed. As she returned it to its place amongst the other documents, her attention was drawn to a railway ticket. It was for an overnight sleeper train to Berlin, purchased not long before Susan White died, but dated for travel just after her death.
Auger scanned the other documents looking for a German or Italian connection. It did not take her long to find an official-looking letter from a heavy-engineering concern located in a suburb of Berlin. The letter was printed on very good paper, with an impressive letterhead in scarlet ink. Her newly installed German crunched through the text with machinelike efficiency.
The letter was in response to an earlier query—evidently part of some longer chain of correspondence—concerning the manufacture of a number of specialised items. From what Auger could gather, this contract involved the forging and machining of three large metal spheres at the Berlin works of Kaspar Metals. The letter also referred to the transportation and installation of these aluminium spheres in Berlin, Paris and Milan, together with a number of associated parts. The fact that the spheres were large and heavy was obvious from the attention that the letter placed on their delivery. They would require specialised arrangements and were much too heavy to be flown, even given the distances involved. The letter went on to stress the difficulty of delivering the objects without damage, according to the instructions of the “artist,” and that this would incur additional costs.
Metal spheres. What, she wondered, was that all about?
Auger searched through the other documents and pieces of paper, looking now for anything related to the German contract. Almost immediately she found a carefully executed sketch of a sphere hanging from a heavy-duty gantry or support cradle, attached to it by many delicate springs or wires. The sphere was marked as being more than three metres in diameter.
Auger wished that she had access to the historical archives back in E1. Although they were not exhaustive, they would have given her some guidance as to whether the spherical objects were also part of the E1 historical timeline. Perhaps some ambitious artist had indeed commissioned the forging of such aluminium spheres, and Susan White had simply got the wrong end of an innocent stick. Auger couldn’t count on it, but a detail like that might just have survived the Forgetting.
But even if that was the case, Auger reminded herself, this was E2, where the timeline had already swerved twenty years away from E1 chronology. The chances of an artist pursuing the same project in two very different histories were small indeed. The same thinking applied even if the spheres were part of some clandestine military or scientific project being conducted by the E2 locals. Even if it had a traceable analogue in E1, it was very unlikely that a similar initiative would have been undertaken in the altered Europe of E2. But not, she had to admit, unthinkable: if there was a good enough strategic reason for something, then it might crop up in both the E1 and E2 chronologies, despite the altered political landscape. What seemed less likely was that something would be developed in E2 and not E1, especially if that something depended on a scientific underpinning. The scientific worldview of E2 had barely advanced since 1939.