‘Maybe we don’t have to cover it. Excuse me.’ He called to a passing waiter, a young man in a white shirt and dark trousers. ‘We were thinking of doing some walking around the Brocken. If we wanted to bypass the Witches’ Trail what would be the best route to take?’
‘That would depend on how far you wanted to go and what you wanted to see, sir.’
Jamie was stumped for an answer, but Sarah cut in. ‘Somewhere scenic with lots of water. A lake or a river.’
The young man laughed. ‘Then that is simple. Here.’ He put his finger on the map at a point west of the mountain and conveniently just north of the town. A thin ribbon of bright blue amongst the green and the grey of the mountains. ‘It’s a popular walk for people who want to branch off the main trail and take in Braunlage. The Oderteich and the Oder gorge. Lake and river.’
Sarah turned to Jamie with a wry grin. ‘Did you pack your swimsuit?’
When they returned to the hotel more than one pair of eyes watched them cross the square.
At ten the next morning they were gazing across the glittering expanse of the Oderteich lake. The guidebook said the dam where they stood had been built three hundred years earlier to create a reservoir for the area’s mining industry. Now it powered a hydro-eletric scheme. The reservoir was close to one mile long and perhaps two hundred paces wide. For once, it was Jamie who chewed his lip. Sarah leaned against the wall, dejection written plain on her face.
‘OK, I’ll rephrase my question of yesterday. Did you pack your diving gear? Because it looks like you’re going to need it. We always knew this was a potential wild-goose chase, but at least there was a chance we’d find something. Now,’ she waved a despairing hand at the acres of grey water surrounded by pine trees, ‘now this. If they’ve sunk the painting in here we haven’t got a hope in hell of finding it. Not without a boat and a diving team.’
But Jamie only continued to gaze out across the rippling surface. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said distractedly.
‘You don’t think we should give up?’
‘No, I don’t think I’ll need my diving suit. Not even my swimming trunks.’
‘But you read Brohm’s words: Below the water you will find it. Well, there’s your water and if you want to find the Goddam thing you’ll have to find it yourself.’ She turned away and would have walked back towards the car, but Jamie put his hand gently on her arm.
‘You’re forgetting who we’re dealing with here. With Walter Brohm nothing is ever quite what it seems. This is a riddle within a riddle. No one in their right minds would hide a painting worth millions of pounds underwater. Gold, yes. Jewels, yes. But not something delicate, like an Old Master.
‘So we have to start with the premise that it’s not there, and ask ourselves what Walter actually was telling us. Think. He’s a scientist, a man very precise with his words. He would say Below the surface or Under the water, maybe even Below the water line, but never Below the water.’ He led her by the arm across to the opposite side of the road, where the Oder gorge cut through the trees as if it had been hacked out by a giant with a knife. ‘Unless he meant below the dam.’
‘Down there?’
‘Down there.’
* * *
‘What are we looking for?’
It was a question Jamie had been asking himself as he studied the map and tried to make it work with the shape formed by the four legs of the Black Sun symbol on the silk. They were sitting in the hired Toyota in a walkers’ car park, three miles downstream of the Oderteich, and it was only now that they’d begun to realize the true scale of the task facing them. He had never expected it to be easy, but, on paper, it had looked relatively straightforward, if strenuous and time-consuming. Find a track that would take them in to the general area pinpointed by the maps and then cover the ground until they discovered . . . what?
‘I don’t know. A sign, another symbol, a message painted on a rock. I don’t think we’re going to find the Raphael nailed to a tree. Walter Brohm says: ‘you must look beyond the veil’, which I suppose means whatever we’re looking for isn’t what it seems. But the diary says it exists and the map says it’s around here somewhere.’
‘That’s helpful,’ she said in a voice that reminded him of nails dragged across a school blackboard.
Somewhere. That was the problem. The forest around them would have been all but impenetrable except for the woodsmen’s tracks and walking trails carved into it. Low cloud the colour and consistency of guncotton added to the gloom, providing a thick mantle that brushed the treetops and wept a steady drizzle of misty rain that made it difficult to see more than fifty paces. Not that the visibility mattered. Even on a good day the view would have consisted of mile upon mile of grey-green spruce and the odd patch of bare granite. Somewhere behind them in the fog he could feel the great stubborn mass of the Brocken looming like a fox waiting to pounce. It wasn’t a nice feeling.