Broken Heart (10 page)

‘So what happened after that?’

‘Long story short, my editor told me to write a separate piece for our website, and I ended up including “Ring of Roses” in that. We put it online a couple of days after the magazine went on sale – you know, in an effort to promote the print edition and try to drive people towards the issue. We’re always doing that kind of thing. Airy-fairy, fact-free “Best of ” lists are what the Internet drinks up these days, so I pulled a “Top 10 Best Unmade Films” list out of my arse to try and get some’ – he made quotation marks with his fingers – ‘ “social media buzz”.’

‘So, wait – you
did
mention “Ring of Roses”?’

‘Yeah, but only in that “Best of ” list online, not in the magazine.’

‘That was the first time anyone had ever run anything on it?’

‘It was the first time “Ring of Roses” had been talked about,
ever.
’

‘And the online feature went out a few days after the mag?’

‘Uh, four, I think.’

Four days.

He didn’t seem to realize the significance of what he’d just told me, but I saw it so clearly it could have been written in neon: the five-day gap between the magazine going on sale and Korin disappearing may not have been the thing that was relevant at all.

It may have been the piece Collinsky posted online – telling the world about ‘Ring of Roses’ – twenty-four hours before she went missing.

13

As soon as I finished up with Marc Collinsky, I called Louis Grant, the archivist at American Kingdom’s European office, and asked if he could spare me an hour. I wanted to talk about Korin and Hosterlitz, and try to find out more about ‘Ring of Roses’. Collinsky said Grant didn’t know anything when the two of them had spoken, and had found nothing in the archives either – yet I still felt it was worth a shot. A polite South African, Grant said he was tied up until 5 p.m., but would happily meet me after that. He gave me an address in Southwark. Almost the moment I hung up, my phone rang again. It was a Minneapolis area code.

Wendy
.

I grabbed my pad from my bag and pushed Answer. The line squealed briefly, then settled into a hum.

‘Wendy?’

‘David, hi. Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply. I’m at work.’

‘Are you okay to talk?’

‘Sure. I just got on my break. Fire away.’

Very briefly, I gave her an overview of where I’d got to, without going into too much detail, and then asked her, ‘What do you know about Lake Calhoun?’

She seemed slightly thrown. ‘Lake Calhoun?’

‘It’s near you, right?’

‘Yeah. It’s forty minutes up the road from here.’

‘Any idea why Lynda might be interested in that place? I found a reference to it. There’s no evidence of her paying
for plane tickets, and her passport was found at her house, but maybe she visited the lake some time before she disappeared?’

‘No. No way. I mean, I guess we may have gone up on one of her trips out, but it’s been a couple of years since she visited, and we’ve got a lot of lakes in this part of the world. I don’t know why she’d only be interested in that one.’

‘You never went there as kids?’

‘Oh, sure. Mom and Dad would take us sometimes.’

‘Nothing happened there when you were growing up?’

‘One of us may have fallen over and grazed a knee or something – but
major
stuff?’ She paused. ‘Uh-uh. Nothing comes to mind, no.’

It wasn’t what I’d been hoping for. I flipped back in my notes to the conversation I’d had with Marc Collinsky.

‘What did you make of Robert Hosterlitz?’

‘Bob?’ She was surprised by the change of direction. ‘I hardly knew him. We only met three times in the ten years he and Lyn were together. Most of the time, when Lyn came to visit, she came alone.’

‘Did she ever say what attracted her to him?’

‘To Bob? I don’t know. I think she found him enigmatic.’

‘Is that what she said?’

‘No. Not exactly. But he was nearly thirty years older than her, a bit scruffy and unkempt, so it was hard to imagine it was physical. Lyn was gorgeous. She could have had any man she wanted. But she’d never had a long-term relationship with anyone until she met Bob. So he had something.’

‘Something the other men didn’t?’

‘Right. Before him, she had this succession of boyfriends. Actually, even calling them “boyfriends” would be stretching it. She’d mention a guy to me on the phone, and then the next
month it was someone else. She went through them quick and good.’ She paused, playing back what she’d just said. ‘That makes her sound slutty, I guess. But she really wasn’t like that. She didn’t go through them fast because she liked playing around, she went through them fast because she didn’t want to let them into her life. I think, basically, they just weren’t interesting to her.’

‘But Robert was?’

‘Well, she married him after six months.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘All I know is that she never talked about other men like she talked about him. Other men, she’d dismiss with a wave of the hand, but she was never like that with Bob. We only met him three times, but even then I could see a difference between the way she was around Bob and the way she was with other men she’d seen. Bob was
very
important to her. I mean, he must have been for them to get married so quickly. I’m just not sure if she saw him as a husband or some sort of father figure – or whether it was something more … unusual.’

‘Unusual how?’

‘I don’t know.’

I waited her out.

‘I think maybe she saw him as a challenge,’ she said.

‘In what way?’

‘He was like her – he didn’t give much of himself away – but whereas Lyn could disguise it well, Bob never could. Lyn always had something of the actress in her, but Bob was the opposite. He was quiet. He definitely
wasn’t
the life and soul of the party. In fact, the first time I met him, I remember thinking he was boring as all hell. But Lyn wouldn’t have dated him – and she
definitely
wouldn’t have married him so quickly – if he was boring. She wouldn’t have made that kind
of commitment. She’d never made that kind of commitment to anyone else,
ever
. That’s why I always thought there was more to Bob than met the eye – and I think Lyn found out what it was, and it really appealed to her.’

I thought back to the
Cine
article, to the section in it where Korin hinted at Hosterlitz harbouring a secret she wanted to get at.

‘You couldn’t tell what it was that appealed to her so much?’

Wendy laughed a little. ‘No. I was blind to his charms, I’m afraid. But he made her happy, which was the main thing. He was clearly a smart guy, he loved her, so maybe it was that.’ She paused. ‘But he could be weird too, discourteous.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, I remember when Lyn and Bob came out to us one year … Jeez, this must have been Christmas 1984. Anyway, they stayed for a few nights, Christmas Day, and then Bob gets up on the twenty-sixth and just disappears for a week.’

‘Really? Where did he go?’

‘Northern Minnesota. Apparently, he went up to the state forests.’

‘Is that what Lynda said?’

‘She said he was scouting for work. I don’t know if that was true or not – I don’t even know if she really knew herself – but this was only the third time we’d ever laid eyes on him, and he couldn’t be bothered to spend more than a few days with us before driving off to wherever he thought he was going to scout for work in rural Minnesota. I’ll be honest, I thought he was damn rude.’

I started to remember her mentioning the same thing to White, in the interview transcript I’d read.

‘That’s what Lynda said – he was “scouting for work”?’

‘I think so. I don’t know. It was a long time ago. That’s why I said we didn’t ever really get to know him. We saw him three times before he died, and one of those times he spent most of his vacation on some sort of road trip.’

‘Okay,’ I said, trying to put things together.

Something’s definitely going on here
.

‘Do you think this is about her marriage to Bob?’ Wendy asked.

‘No, I’m just trying to get some background.’

At best it was a deliberate fob-off, at worst a bare-faced lie, but I needed to know more before I made a commitment one way or the other.

‘Can I ask you something else?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

‘Have you ever heard of “Ring of Roses”?’

‘The nursery rhyme?’

‘I think it’s more likely to have been a project that Robert was working on before he died.’ I stopped, thinking. ‘Maybe
project
is too grand for what it was. It’s just … Lynda mentioned to the journalist who did that piece on Robert that he’d started writing again before his death, once they moved back to the UK. A name that came up is “Ring of Roses”. It could have been a full-blown script or it could have been a name on the back of a napkin. I think a full-blown script is unlikely, but the name – “Ring of Roses” – is something I’d like to try and tie up.’

‘ “Ring of Roses”?’

‘Right. This would have been in the years between 1984 and 1988.’

She paused. ‘I’m trying to think …’

‘If you’re not sure, that’s fine.’

I didn’t want her misremembering something because I’d
pushed her too hard – or, worse,
pretending
to remember because she wanted to help.

Eventually, she muttered, ‘I’m sorry.’

She sounded desperate to help, her voice emotional as frustration began to claw at it. I tried to come at it from a different angle. ‘You talked just now about the trips Robert and Lynda took to see you out in Minnesota …’

‘Sure.’

‘You said that, during the Christmas 1984 visit, you found Robert a little discourteous because he just upped and left for the week.’

‘Yeah. The scouting trip.’

‘The name “Ring of Roses” never came up then?’

She took a long breath. ‘I mean, it was such a long time ago, but I honestly don’t remember that name – “Ring of Roses”. I don’t even remember if he took a camera with him, or a typewriter. He could just have been getting away from us all for a week. Like I told you, I’m not sure that even Lynda knew what he was up to while he was away.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I just remember asking her, “Where’s Bob gone?” and she …’ There was a crackle of air as Wendy made a noise. ‘She just kind of shrugged.’

‘Why wouldn’t he have told her what he was up to?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The way you describe them, they sounded close.’

‘They were,’ she said. ‘Honestly, they were.’

‘Do you think it had something to do with his sickness?’

She considered it for a while. ‘Well, Bob got told he had cancer a fortnight before he flew out to us in ’84, so I guess it’s possible, but … I don’t know.’

I tried to match up the timings. As I understood it from
what I’d read in Marc Collinsky’s feature, Hosterlitz shot his last film with Korin in Spain during the autumn months of 1983. After that, they moved to Somerset in early 1984, where he retired. Sometime in mid December 1984, he was diagnosed with cancer, and then – at Christmas – he and Korin visited Wendy in the US.

So did Hosterlitz disappear for a week because of the diagnosis he’d received before he left the UK? Was he simply trying to seek out some time by himself, away from the noise and commotion of a family Christmas? It would be understandable if that had been the case, but why keep it back from Korin? Why not just tell her the truth? If they were close, surely Hosterlitz would tell his wife that he needed some space, some time, to reflect upon news that would change everything – them, their marriage, their time together. It was literally life and death.

Ultimately, I couldn’t plough a clear enough path through my thoughts to see the answer, and, after a while, wondered if that unaccounted-for week even mattered at all. Maybe, in a similar vein, ‘Ring of Roses’ didn’t either. Maybe
none
of this mattered.

I just wasn’t sure if I really believed that.

The ‘scouting trip’ to northern Minnesota, ‘Ring of Roses’, the carving of the words ‘Lake Calhoun’ and the film projector into the tree at Stoke Point – I didn’t know what any of them meant or where they led yet, but I was pretty certain about one thing.

They were threads.

And threads always came loose from something bigger.

14

The address Louis Grant, the American Kingdom archivist, gave me turned out to be a crumbling art deco cinema in Southwark called the Comet that had been closed since 1998. It felt like a weird place to meet, but – as he’d agreed to see me so quickly – I went along with it. The cinema was next to the high belly of a rusting railway bridge, and though the building was old and decayed, the paint flaking, the bricks starting to crumble, I felt a powerful sense of nostalgia as I approached it, memories firing in my head as I remembered the one just like it that I’d gone to as a kid.

A door had been left open for me at the back, and inside the air was musty and stagnant, a corridor rolling ahead of me with two other doors off to the left, and a staircase at the end that wound up and to the right. The oppressive summer heat followed me in: sunlight glinted off the chipped floor tiles and the peeling vinyl wallpaper, and illuminated the dust in the air as I approached the stairs.

I headed up, following a vague hint of light, the smell closing in around me – old wood and furniture, and the whiff of stale cigarette smoke. At the top was an elegant foyer: marble floors with geometric squares, limestone stairs, balustrades made from chromed steel, and a ticket booth, standing alone like a lighthouse in the middle of the room. Beyond that was the auditorium itself. I stepped closer and looked in. The screen, taped in a couple of places and half hidden behind thick curtains, looked out over a sea of worn, red velvet seats.

There were three people in conversation halfway down, all with different accents: two men – one local, one South African – and an American female.

‘Mr Grant?’

All three looked up.