Broken Heart (20 page)

A teak box.

Inside were four items: a red USB stick; a business card, with a yellow Post-it note folded around it; and another key, but in brass.

As I removed them one by one, my eyes lingered on the key. It was a Yale, with a number 6 scratched into it on both sides. It was wholly unremarkable, and yet I felt as if I’d seen it somewhere before. Unable to place where, I shifted my
attention to the Post-it, and then to the business card. Unfolding the Post-it, I found four lines in black felt tip:

I zeroed in on the bottom half:
Kill! 1h 19m 7s
.

Was that a reference to
Kill!
, the film that Hosterlitz had made in 1981? It seemed like a logical leap to make, especially with the timecode attached to it – but I had no idea what the two lines of letters above it meant. The other problem was that, even if I was right about the
Kill!
timecode, six of the eleven films that Hosterlitz had made between 1979 and 1984 were history.
Kill!
was one of them.

As I pondered that, I thought again of the guy who’d posted on the forum under the handle Microscope. He claimed to have seen all eleven films, so short of Korin herself sitting down with me, he’d surely stand the best chance of being able to interpret this for me. But how the hell did I find him?

Frustrated, I took phone pictures of each of the items, in case I lost the physical versions, and then turned to the business card.

The name on it was Tony Everett. He was listed as the general manager at a firm called Roman Film. They were
based on an industrial estate in Bath. On the back of the card, Everett had written:
Great seeing you yesterday! I’m in Friday, TE
. He, his company, and the message he’d written meant nothing to me, so I grabbed my laptop from the car and moved on to the USB stick. Setting the laptop down on the living-room table, I slotted the USB into it.

The stick contained four video files.

They’d been labelled
August20.avi
,
September2.avi
,
September15.avi
and then, finally,
October28.avi
. My pulse started to quicken as I looked at the name of that last one: 28 October was the last day Korin was seen alive.

I opened the 28 October file.

It started playing automatically and, inside a second, I knew exactly what it was: CCTV film from the camera mounted outside Stoke Point.

Footage from the day Lynda Korin disappeared
.

I tried to think straight. What was the footage doing on this USB? Who did the USB belong to? Was it Korin’s? Someone else’s? Why had it been wrapped up and hidden inside the meter box?

Initially, the video was confusing, and when I looked at the readout of the time in the corner, I realized why: it began in the middle of the night, at 12.01 a.m. on 28 October. It was almost entirely dark. The only thing I could make out was a low-level lamp, halfway along the bridge, which cast a grey pool of light. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough to make out any cars or people; anyone approaching or coming back out.

Yet, as I moved the footage on, apart from the occasional flicker as a bird swooped past or a mouse scurried from one side to another, there was nothing. At about 6.30 a.m., the light slowly started to change, and by 7 a.m. it was clear the
sun was up, even if I couldn’t see it. It illuminated leaves on either side of the bridge and cast shadows across the tarmac. But still there was no one – not until just before 9 a.m., when I saw a black Ford Focus come into view, a flash of someone at the wheel. The Ford crossed the bridge and disappeared out of shot, into the car park.

Korin
.

Rewinding the video, I watched again, but this time inched it on frame by frame. A couple of seconds later I had the perfect shot of her, unmistakable and distinctive: both hands on the wheel, her face fully turned in the direction of the camera, her white-blonde hair tied in a ponytail. I recognized the image I was looking at immediately: it was exactly the same frame that had been included in the official police paperwork. If I’d had any qualms about it somehow not being her at Stoke Point that day, they were dispelled. It was definitely Lynda Korin.

I inched it back again, watching her for a second time, and then let it run on at normal speed for a while, wanting to see how the day had unfolded. But it was so tedious and uneventful, I soon found myself fast-forwarding through it at 4x speed, then 8x when even that felt too arduous. No one else turned up at the peninsula for another two hours, until an old couple in a pale blue Golf entered Stoke Point. Another car – a Renault people carrier, with a mum and two kids inside – arrived half an hour after that; and then a red Vauxhall Insignia – with two older women in it – fifty minutes later. Just after 12.30 p.m., the mum in the Renault left, the Golf exited half an hour after that, and the Insignia was gone by 2 p.m. No one else arrived until after 3 p.m., when another old couple in a bottle-green Rover turned up. Fifteen minutes later, a man entered on a motorbike. By 4 p.m.,
both the couple in the Rover and the man on the bike had left.

Korin had never reappeared.

I watched the rest of the day through, until the sun set at just after five o’clock. As darkness descended, and the light at the gate fluttered into life, I knew this would be the most effective time to make an escape on foot, using cover of night as a disguise. But the gate snapped back on its automatic timer, and Korin didn’t come out. There was no sign of her. When I hit the end of the video at exactly midnight, I brought it all the way back to sunset and watched it again.

I knew for a fact there was no way out except across the bridge, because I’d seen it for myself – so where could Korin have gone?

As soon as the video was over for a second time, I closed it down and switched to my phone, using the web to find tide times for 28 October. But, deep down, I knew she couldn’t have left by boat, just as I knew it from the very start. Low tide was 10 a.m., high tide 4 p.m. Bringing a boat in risked being seen; wading out to one risked getting stuck.

I glanced at the Yale key again, troubled by it, troubled by all of this. As I mentally played back the image of her on the security camera, I started to wonder whether she’d slept over in her car and exited the next day, or in the early hours of the morning – after all, there was no footage on the USB from 29 October. But then I remembered there had been a reference to 29 October in the police report; of the video from that day being checked as well. The police had found nothing.

So could she have been smuggled out?

She wasn’t lying flat on the back seat of any of the vehicles, I knew that for sure, because the position of the
camera made it easy to see down into the rear of the cars that had passed in and out on 28 October. But what about in the boot? I couldn’t see into any of them, which made it impossible to know for sure.

I returned to the footage and noted down the registration of each of the cars that had come into Stoke Point on 28 October, thinking I could use Ewan Tasker to get me backgrounds on the owners if need be, then opened up the next file. This one was for 20 August.

That was two months before Korin vanished.

It began at the same time, 12.01 a.m., and I ran it on at the same speed – not so fast that I wouldn’t spot anything suspicious, but fast enough to whip through the lack of activity. As it was summer, the light began to break early and, by 6.30 a.m., everything was visible. At just before 9 a.m., the first visitors arrived – a family of four in a Volvo – and, as the day progressed, more and more people joined them. It was sunny, it was the school holidays, so it was much busier than 28 October. By midday, I’d counted fifteen cars; between midday and 3 p.m., there were another fourteen.

But, just after 3 p.m., something strange happened.

A bottle-green Rover, with the same registration plates that I’d seen on 28 October, turned up. It had the same old couple inside it. They passed over the bridge, into the crescent of trees, and were gone from view. I rewound it and played it again.

The same couple were at the peninsula
–
so what?

In White’s report, he’d mentioned that he’d talked to all of the drivers of the cars that had entered Stoke Point on 28 October, and they’d all been frequent visitors there. There was no crime in returning to a place you liked.

An hour later, just before 4 p.m., the old couple in the
Rover appeared again, exiting across the bridge and out of shot. This time, I paused it as they left. Even given the rinsed-out nature of the security feed, it was a clear picture of them. They looked like they were in their eighties, him hunched over the wheel slightly, her in the middle of saying something. Neither of them was familiar.

I ran the footage again, watching a succession of families leave through the gate, until I’d accounted for every vehicle I’d noted on the way in. Shortly after that, the gate swung closed and the sun started to set.

Once the video from 20 August was done, I moved on to 2 September. Just like the others, it started at one minute past midnight, and while I kept a close eye on the shadows, watching for anyone using them as a hiding place to get in and out of the car park, nothing of note happened until 11 a.m.

That was when a pale blue Golf entered.

Recognition hit me immediately:
it’s the same blue Golf I saw enter the car park on 28 October
. When I paused the security feed to check, the car had the same number of people in it as it did on the day that Korin disappeared. It was another older couple, but not the same couple that was in the Rover. What tethered the two couples and the two vehicles together was obvious, though: they were both in footage from separate days, saved to this USB – and they’d both returned on 28 October, the day Lynda Korin had disappeared.

As the security feed continued to roll on, other cars arrived, but I wasn’t interested in them any more. I was interested in the couple in the Golf. I kept my eyes fixed on the screen, only breaking off to glance at my pad, to look for where I’d written down their registration number, to remind myself of it – but then, the third or fourth time I looked at
my notes, something leaped out at me. The entry and exit times I’d written down for the Golf on 28 October:
11.12 to 13.02
.

As I turned back to the screen, I saw the timecode in the corner tick over to 13.02 and the Golf emerged from the car park again.

I froze.

It’s the same footage.

The Rover and the Golf both entered and exited Stoke Point at
exactly
the same time on 20 August and 2 September as they did on 28 October – because the footage from those days had been edited into the video for 28 October.

The video from 28 October wasn’t an original.

It was a composite.

The whole thing was a lie.

28

I looked down at the Yale key, at the business card, at the Post-it, and then back to my laptop. My stomach turned as I started putting it together. The whole thing was a lie – and Lynda Korin had constructed it. When I played the last file, just to be sure, I found exactly what I expected: on 15 September, as well as the other vehicles that came and went, I spotted the red Insignia with the two women in it, the mum and her kids in the Renault people carrier, and the guy on the bike. The arrival and departure of all three had been taken from this footage and spliced into the video for 28 October, along with the pale blue Golf and the bottle-green Rover from the other dates. But the truth was, none of the vehicles had ever been there on the twenty-eighth – it was just made to look like it.

I remembered again how, in White’s original report, no one he’d talked to – not the owners of the Golf, the Rover, the Insignia, the people carrier or the motorbike – could remember much more than being at Stoke Point at
around
the time Korin went missing. It was two weeks between the disappearance and the case finally landing on White’s desk, which wouldn’t have helped – but, as well as that, all the people interviewed were frequent visitors to Stoke Point.

That was why none of them could be one hundred per cent certain if they were there on the twenty-eighth or not. Even if they told White they were pretty sure they
weren’t
, he would have told them they’d been caught on CCTV camera
on the day, and they’d have just put their recollection down as an error. They were at Stoke Point all the time – they would just assume they’d got their days mixed up. Out of all of them, there had only been one person adamant he wasn’t there, and he’d told White as much. In my notes, I’d written, ‘Man, 80+, says he wasn’t there on 28/10, even though he’s on tape. Mistake? Forgetful?’ But it wasn’t either of those things. The man was the one who’d been driving the Rover. He’d told White he wasn’t there that day, but White put it down to the same reasons as I had in my notes. A mistake. An error. A forgetful old man.

We’d both done him a disservice.

The five vehicles had been cut into the footage because they were the five vehicles most frequently seen by Lynda Korin at the peninsula in the months leading up to her disappearance. The guy I’d talked to at Stoke Point, Len Fordyce, had told me about how he’d got to know Korin a little, how they’d chat, how she’d returned a number of times to the car park before she vanished on 28 October. She’d been doing reconnaissance. She’d been watching the cars coming in and out, seeing who arrived most often. Eventually, she’d narrowed it down to five vehicles in the footage, and the whole time Fordyce thought she was talking to him because she was just that type of person. Maybe she was. But it wasn’t
just
that. She’d talked to him, got to know him, using his loneliness as a way to lower his guard. And as I looked at the brass key again, with the number 6 etched into it, I knew why I recognized it, why the number had disturbed a memory that I couldn’t quite place. It belonged to Fordyce. It was for the cabin at Stoke Point.