Broken Heart (17 page)

She was holding the door open with her right hand, her left on her hip. I couldn’t see a wedding ring on her finger, so I played it safe.

‘Ms Mae?’

She eyed me with suspicion. ‘Yes.’

‘My name’s David Raker.’ I already had a business card out and handed it to her. ‘I find missing people – and at the moment I’m looking for Lynda Korin.’

Her expression changed instantly: surprise, then concern.

‘Oh. Right.’

‘I don’t know whether you’re aware, but Lynda has been missing for ten months – since last October.’

‘Yes, I heard.’ She looked from me to the business card again. ‘I haven’t seen Lyn for … oh, I don’t know – eight, nine years. I used to live out near Chew Valley Lake for a long time, so we’d still bump into each other. But then I moved into Bristol for a job, and then back down here, and we just kind of lost contact.’

‘I totally understand,’ I said. ‘But if you’ve got a spare half hour or so, it would be useful to talk to you. I promise not to take up too much of your day.’

She looked like she might be trying to come up with an excuse, but then acquiesced, stepped back further into the hallway behind her and invited me in.

The cottage was tidy and smartly decorated, the hallway running through to a modern kitchen and a conservatory with two big leather sofas and bi-folding doors. She led me to the conservatory – cooled slightly by a breeze coming in off the farmland – and asked if I wanted something to drink. Once she’d returned with two mugs of tea, she sat on the other sofa and I talked a little more about my line of work and about my search for Lynda Korin. When I was done, she started filling me in on how she’d first met Hosterlitz and Korin.

‘After I did my A levels,’ she was saying to me, her accent elegant – Korin had joked that it was ‘plummy’ in the interview with Collinsky – ‘I took a year out and went travelling around Europe with a friend of mine. We started in the south of Spain and the idea was we were going to go in a loop: Spain, France, Belgium and Holland, then back down through Germany – West Germany as it was then – into Switzerland, and then finish up in Italy. But we ended up staying in Madrid.’

‘Because that’s where you met Robert Hosterlitz?’

‘Right. My friend and I were in a bar near Atocha station because we were due to head down to Valencia, and Bob, Lyn and some of the other cast and crew from the third
Ursula
film were in there. They’d just wrapped up the shooting.’

‘How did you get talking to them?’

‘Lyn came up to the bar to buy a round and my friend and
I were there. When she heard us speaking English, she started talking to us, and before we knew it she was buying us beer and we were sitting with her and the crew. It was a fun night. My friend and I were pretty drunk by the end of it and we didn’t have anywhere to stay because we’d planned to be in Valencia. So Lyn said we could crash at the place she and Bob were renting in Alcobendas. Next day we wake up and wander through to the living room and there’s a photograph of Bob – this old black and white shot – and he’s holding all these Oscars. He’d told us the night before that he was a director, but I didn’t recognize any of the cast, and I didn’t recognize him either, so I didn’t think much of it. But then I started to quiz him about the photograph and he told me this film he’d made had won seven Oscars, including Best Director. I couldn’t believe it. I mean,
seven
Oscars. You just never would have believed it. The place they were renting – it was a complete dump.’

‘So how did you end up working for him?’

‘He was due to start shooting on the first of – I don’t know – ten or eleven films he’d agreed to make for Mano Águila. Have you ever heard of Pedro Silva?’

‘I’ve seen his name mentioned.’

‘He was a producer. Mano Águila was his company. Anyway, the first film Bob made for him was … Goodness, it was so long ago.
Cemetery House
?’

‘That’s right, yeah.’

She nodded. ‘He told me he needed victims – you know, people who could be killed off by the monster. My friend and I thought it’d be fun being slathered in fake blood, it was a chance to be in a film, and they paid us ten thousand pesetas, which was, I don’t know, forty, fifty pounds. He asked if we had any acting experience. I said I’d done a bit of drama
at school, so he gave me a couple of lines and then we bomb up to this old warehouse north of Madrid and the cameras start rolling – and that was that. The whole thing was laughable, really. Pure amateur hour. I was a terrible actress and my friend was even worse, but we were young and we had a great time, and by that stage of his career I’m not sure Bob’s quality control was particularly high. When he finished the film, he said I looked great on camera, and would I consider doing another movie. I told him I’d think about it, finished travelling around Europe with my friend, and then returned to Madrid a year later to work on … I think it was
The Drill Murders
. My friend had to get back to the UK for university, but I had no course to return for and no job waiting for me, so I figured, what the hell? I ended up staying in Spain until 1983, when Bob decided to retire. Pedro Silva wanted him to do more films, but Bob said no. That was how they ended up in Somerset. I told them it was beautiful, that they’d love this part of the world, and so they bought their house here.’

‘That’s the place a few miles up the road?’

‘Right. It’s gorgeous. They lucked out.’ She stopped, taking a sip of her tea. ‘We used to see a lot of each other for a while because I was in a teacher training programme here – that’s what I’d always wanted to do – so I just stayed with my parents while I was studying. But then my first placement was in London for a couple of years, and by the time I returned, Bob had been dead for six months.’

‘That must have been a shock.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was.’

‘You were close to them?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, but then stopped.

Something lingered in her face.

‘Ms Mae?’

She looked away for the first time, out through the doors into the garden, her gaze following the path of a butterfly as it settled on the conservatory doors.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said, ‘I liked them both a lot – I really did – but I was just thinking about some of the … I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘They were …’

‘What?’

‘Well, they were a little odd sometimes.’

‘In what way?’

Mae was silent for a moment, a look of anxiety on her face, as if she was uncomfortable talking about them in this way. ‘I guess we all have quirks,’ she said softly, pressing her lips together so hard they blanched.

‘What quirks did they have?’

Another long pause. ‘Bob was ultra-quiet, sometimes to the point of being completely mute, at least until you got to know him a little bit. Even then, it wasn’t going to be a conversation for the ages. It was hard to imagine him as this successful Hollywood director. He seemed to have lost all his confidence, his spark. In the time that I knew him, he’d sit there at the table, in the corner of the room, and he’d listen to everybody else talking – just watching them. He was always pleasant enough, but even by the time I’d done the third film with him, I honestly couldn’t say I knew all that much about him. Not really. Part of me wondered if he might have been that way …’ But she stopped.

‘Deliberately?’

She looked at me; nodded once.

‘You mean, he didn’t
want
you to get to know him?’

She didn’t answer immediately, and I thought of something Wendy Fisher had said:
Bob was quiet … I always thought there was more to him than met the eye.

‘Ms Mae?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think that’s exactly what it was. You’d just catch him looking at you sometimes.’

‘Looking at you how?’

‘When he was on his own, and even sometimes when they were together, this other look would come across his face. You’d catch him staring at you but there wouldn’t be anything
behind
the look. Does that even make sense?’

‘Like his mind was on something else?’

‘Exactly. For people who didn’t know him all that well, I think he probably came across as impolite and aloof.’ As she paused, I remembered Wendy – who’d never really got to know her brother-in-law – saying exactly that:
I’ll be honest, I thought he was damn rude
. ‘But I don’t think he was being impolite,’ Mae went on, ‘I really don’t. When he was quiet like that, I often thought that it was something much more complicated than that.’

‘Complicated in what way?’

‘It was like something was weighing on him,’ she said, and then stopped again. ‘Something was weighing on him – and, whatever it was, he found it impossible to let it go.’

‘You never found out what it was?’

‘No. But I always felt with Bob and Lyn … I don’t know … I think there were things going on in their private life.’

‘You think they were unhappy?’

‘Actually, the total opposite of that.’

I frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

Mae pursed her lips again, changing position in her chair. She had the uneasy air of someone who hated the idea of gossip, of discussing other people – their decisions, their choices. ‘Look, Lyn was a very attractive woman, clearly, so
on-set she tended to be right at the centre of everything. And, you know …’ She shrugged. ‘It wasn’t always unwanted, I guess.’

‘In what sense?’

She shrugged again. ‘I mean, I think most days she enjoyed the attention. I’m not judging her, but she would play up to the crowd. You must have seen photos of her, so you know what I’m talking about: she had boobs all the way out here’ – she paused, holding both hands an arm’s length away from her chest, exaggerating for effect – ‘a face like a china doll, this hourglass figure most of us would need a corset to get
close
to …’ She stopped again, this time for longer. ‘But, despite all that, she was never interested in other people – only Bob. He would sit there watching her, never saying boo to a goose – and not because he was powerless to intervene, but because I think he liked it. Watching her, I mean.’

She didn’t continue for a while, as if gathering her thoughts, and I flipped back in my notes to where I’d quoted Korin’s interview with Marc Collinsky:
You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life. You’re a work of art
. As I stared at the quote from Hosterlitz, I recalled the way he’d treated Korin in the films I’d watched: his fixation on her, the obsession with the way she looked.

I prompted Mae. ‘Why do you think he liked watching her?’

‘I think he got off on people’s reactions to her. Sometimes I’d catch sight of him watching other men watching her. It’s not like he sat there with this leering grin on his face, like some dirty pervert. It was more that he was enjoying the fact that
they
were enjoying
her
. Never once did I see him tell her to stop.’

‘Do you think they were faithful to one another?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Definitely.’

She was vehement about it, and I remembered something she’d told me just now. I’d asked her if she thought they had been unhappy.

Actually, the total opposite of that
.

‘What you’ve got to understand about Bob and Lyn is that, if they chose to do those things, it was because they
both
chose to do them. As a unit, they were incredibly tight. In fact, they were so well suited to one another that they could sometimes come across as rude. They could appear to be almost paranoid about letting other people in. I mean, Lyn always did such a good job of disguising it – she never made you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. She was lovely. But I got closer to them than anyone, and I’d watch them sometimes, and they’d look at each other, and it was like they communicated without speaking; and if you got too close, you’d be able to … to kind of …’ She stopped. ‘I don’t know how to explain it, really. You’d just be able to feel them back away from you.’

‘What sort of things would make them back away?’

‘Anything, nothing – I don’t know. It was a long time ago. There were just certain things, certain discussions, that made me think, “That was weird.” ’

I wrote some notes and we talked a little more, but the subject seemed to plateau, so I changed gear. ‘Do you remember anything odd about the end of the films you shot with Robert and Lynda back then? Specifically, a ninety-second scene with Lynda that seems to have been repeated a few times.’

She looked at me blankly. ‘No, not really. I mean, I haven’t
seen those films since the eighties. To be honest, a few of them I never even bothered watching when they came out.’ She broke into a smile. ‘I told a lot of my family I was working in Spain as an English teacher for those years, because I didn’t want them watching films like
Die Slowly
and seeing me running around stark naked and screaming.’

I returned the smile she gave me, but kept pressing: ‘You never felt like Lynda’s scenes got treated differently?’

A frown. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Maybe Robert spent more time on them?’

She eyed me, as if she guessed I was trying to lead her somewhere, but it was obvious she had no idea what I was talking about – not least because those films were made over thirty years ago. I decided not to risk losing her courtesy and backed away from the subject.

‘In the report into Lynda’s disappearance, there’s a photograph of Robert and Lynda that I think you took of them – a Polaroid.’ I grabbed my phone, went to Photos and showed her the picture. ‘Do you recognize this?’

Her face brightened. ‘Wow.’

‘Do you remember taking that picture?’

‘I do, yes.’

‘The police found it in Lynda’s house. Anyway, I’m interested in that part of their lives – the eleven or so years between the time they met to the time Robert died. I don’t suppose you’ve retained anything from that period yourself – you know, photographs, letters, things you brought back from Spain?’

She frowned. ‘Not that I can think of.’

‘Maybe something they gave you, or another photograph you took of them? Anything that might help me, really.’