Ask HN: SW product to assist investigations

Suppose you want to write a book involving a complex set of events, documents, characters and places. In any given moment you want to be able to reconstruct (as much as possible) where everyone was in order to see if a given hypothesis (e.g. "X was the masked man in the bank robbery on April 3rd, 1972...") can hold or not ("wait, on the day of the robbery Mr.Smith was in Rome, but he had just returned from a 2 months stay in France (i.e. his flight arrived in Rome at 22:30 on the night before), it looks improbable that he was able to take part in this even if he had remained in contact with Mr.Black (the only guy who was arrested) by phone and mail..." Question: is there any product that could be used for this kind of investigation/hypothesis validation? Mindmapping SW or stuff like The Brain I am not sure would help, because "closeness" in time and space is not very easy to represent there. As an example, let's imagine a UI where time is the X axis and space is the Y axis. You will see a widget where the X axis is April 3rd, 1972 (the Robbery) and a line (Mr. Black's life) that remains "in Rome" for 45 years... then shortly after the robbery moves to the prison where he will stay for 3 years. The line of Mr. Smith stays in Rome or close to it for 34 years, every documented meeting of him and Mr.Black is somehow represented along both lines, but the line moves far away (Paris) for two months and gets back close to Mr.Black's only a fraction of day before the crime. Events, people, documents etc. are all represented by specific widgets, can be zoomed up by clicking, but the main point would always be distance in time/space among these. Any suggestions? It does not need to be the same as my example, as long as it provides an equivalent functionality.