Yet another perplexing thing was the statement in the Security Directorate report that, “Exactly who and when the items [snowboard and boots] were returned cannot be determined.” This implied that the police had reason to believe that someone other than Duncan had returned the items. Why?
Duncan had been with another man when he’d purchased the cassette from the Innsbruck music shop. Who was the other man? This reminded Lynda that he’d been approached by a CIA recruiter, but had turned down the proposal because it required changing his identity and separating from his family. Had he in fact taken the offer? If so, it meant that he’d lied to his parents and left them to worry themselves to death. She didn’t think he would have done such a thing, but she still tried to figure out the likelihood that the man who’d approached him had indeed been a CIA recruiter, and not an imposter.
European hockey coaches and players (like Duncan’s friend George Pesut) frequently travelled back and forth across the Iron Curtain, which made them potentially attractive recruits as intelligence couriers or even collectors. Likewise, many agents travelled to Austria—a neutral country situated between Eastern and Western Europe—to transfer information, and over the years, several had been kidnapped or murdered. On July 13, 1989, three representatives of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan were assassinated in Vienna, apparently by Iranian agents.
Yet even if the CIA had persuaded Duncan to take a deep cover position, surely it would have allowed him to tell his family. The risk of his parents spilling the beans was far preferable to their publishing his name and photograph in newspapers across Europe in a desperate attempt to find him.
Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, a Canadian tourist in Moscow spotted a young man who she thought to be Duncan based on photos she’d seen in the papers. He was sitting in a popular bar with a Russian-looking woman. Though the tourist was too shy to approach him, she snapped a photo and sent it to Lynda and Bob. The man in the image resembled Duncan, but wasn’t him.
Lynda contemplated the possibility that he’d been recruited as a courier while retaining his identity as a coach in Scotland, and that his first assignment had been to go to Austria to receive information and then to deliver it to someone in the UK. Had the information been especially valuable, it was conceivable that he was murdered for it. Or was it? The scenario seemed to belong more to the movies than reality, but Lynda couldn’t help wondering.
A strange-acting foreigner vanishing in the fog, an unknown individual returning the rental gear, the car reappearing in the parking lot after September 1—it was all so mysterious.
Chapter 10: The Note under the Door
“With no solid lead, and with all of the ambiguity, you felt you had to pursue every lead, no matter how improbable it seemed,” I suggested to Lynda one morning at breakfast on about the fourth day of my visit to Saskatoon. Derrick MacPherson had just arrived from Vancouver for a weekend visit. Like his father, he tended to listen and observe more than he spoke, and I could tell he was watching me closely to see how I interacted with his parents.
“That’s right,” Lynda said. “You have to understand how weird everything was. I mean, how did Duncan’s disappearance after a little excursion to a ski resort become such a ridiculously complicated and confusing fiasco? It was like some crazy B-movie that’s not intended to be even remotely plausible.”
“Like an episode of The Twilight Zone,” I said.
“Exactly!” she replied. “The following summer was almost as weird. I guess the ski resort and the police were pretty unhappy about our return,” she chuckled. “They probably thought they’d seen the last of us when we left in October of eighty nine.”
As we discussed their adventures in the summer of 1990, I started thinking about how hard it must have been for them to understand what was going on around them in the tightly-knit community of the Stubai Valley, so vastly different from their home on the Saskatchewan prairie.
“We figured that at least someone in the valley knew something about Duncan, and that we’d eventually find him if we just kept looking. In the end, we met some really nice people, but no one was able to tell us much. Given what we know now, I wonder if people did know something but were afraid to tell us.”
“I’m surprised that no one tried to help you indirectly, like sliding an anonymous note under your hotel room door,” I remarked.
Not long after I said this, we began studying Lynda’s journal from the summer of 1990, which she’d dug out of her basement in preparation for my arrival. Her second entry noted a meeting with Inspector Brecher, during which she asked him about the assertion in the Security Directorate report that the snowboard and boots had been returned.
June 28, Thursday
He explained the snowboard again—Duncan paid 500 schilling (50 dollars) for snowboard lesson & use of snowboard. Brecher made it sound as if Duncan returned this snowboard & that possibly he had another one in the afternoon. Must get clarification on this—need to have someone speak in German to Brecher & to be certain of what Brecher is saying.
A few entries later, on Monday, July 2, Lynda wrote:
Angelika, Gaby, & I also went to see Brecher to get clarification on the snowboarding procedures. He says he believes the snowboard was returned, but he does not know by whom. No records are kept. He does not know if there were 2 snowboards involved or if Walter just let Duncan keep the snowboard he took the lesson on. He says one must ask Walter.
“He’s telling you here he believes that Walter knows whether the snowboard was returned, and he’s insinuating that Duncan used a second board in the afternoon—perhaps one that belonged to Walter.”
“But why is he telling me to ask Walter?” Lynda asked. “Wasn’t that his job?”
“Officially, yes, but he feels he needs to keep his distance from this case, so he’s trying to nudge you in the right direction without explicitly telling you.”
“That was your note under the door, mom,” Derrick remarked.
As Lynda wrote in her journal, she met Walter a few days after her second meeting with Brecher. Walter reiterated that Duncan had rented a board and boots from the Sport Shop 3000 for the entire day. After their morning lesson and lunch together, Walter last saw him walking with the board towards the lift to practice. Walter still reckoned that Duncan might have had an accident while hiking on August 10. Perhaps he’d visited the waterfalls below the glacier and fallen into the pool at their base, where his body could have been buried in sediment.
Though Lynda didn’t find Walter’s waterfall theory compelling, she trusted that he was frank and sincere, so she didn’t ask him expressly about Brecher’s statement that Duncan may have used a different board in the afternoon.
On July 1, an Italian couple named Gino and Anna Falchero arrived in Stubai to resume their search for their son. Thirty-three year old Fabrizio Falchero had been a competitive downhill skier in his youth, and in his twenties he became an instructor. Like Duncan, he also loved cycling. At twenty-eight he’d suffered a head injury in a motorcycle accident from which it had taken him a long time to recover. His mother had worried when he drove up to the Stubai Valley in early October of 1989, as it was the first time since his accident that he’d travelled on his own.
“Please call every day to let me know you are okay,” she asked him, and he promised he would. On October 10 he parked his camper close to where Duncan had parked on August 9, and was never seen again. The two young athletes had led similar lives, and both of them had gone missing after arriving at the Stubai Glacier. Had they met the same fate?