Broken Heart (21 page)

I’d seen him carrying a set of identical keys when we’d been talking to each other, numbers etched into them in the
same way, each one presumably unlocking similar cabins at each of the locations that were on his route. He must have thought he’d lost this one somewhere, somehow, and he had. But it wasn’t down the back of the sofa. Korin had removed it from the ring, and then she’d gained access to the cabin – and that was when she’d gained access to the security system.

The DVR inside. The discs full of footage.

I drew the business card towards me. At the bottom, beneath the name of Tony Everett, his job title and the name of his business, Roman Film, was a URL. I entered it into the browser on my phone, and soon had exactly the answer I was expecting: they were a video production company. They produced high-end content for big-name international businesses. Cutting together elements from four different CCTV videos, editing it, making it impossible to see the joins, the borders between one piece of footage and the next, would be a walk in the park for them. If the police had been fully focused on Korin, if they’d put more than just a single man on to her disappearance, maybe someone, somewhere, would have noticed the footage was an amalgam. But they didn’t.

I looked at the message on the back of the card.

Great seeing you yesterday! I’m in Friday, TE
.

It was a message to Korin. Everett was like Fordyce: he thought he knew her – but he didn’t know her at all. I doubted if he’d had a clue what he’d signed up for, maybe still didn’t, but I could imagine how Korin had made it work. There was six months’ worth of security footage on disc inside the cabin. Once she had the keys, she got inside and took the DVDs she needed, handed them to Everett, and he cut together the footage for 28 October. She’d have told him the footage was for an advert, for a corporate video, for a
presentation; she’d have told him it was somewhere other than Stoke Point, some other part of the country. She might not have even given him her real name, so when she vanished, it was never a blip on his radar. When Korin had disappeared, it had barely been reported, even in the local press, so he wouldn’t have put it together. When I went to the ‘Who are we?’ tab on their website, I found pictures of the staff, and I saw Everett at the top: a man in his early sixties, smiling but awkward; plain, ordinary, unmemorable. Korin was the same age, but she was anything
but
ordinary. She was beautiful, confident.

Manipulative
.

I remembered what Wendy had said to me –
Lyn always had something of the actress in her
– and then filled in the rest. Once Everett had done what she’d asked, she must have returned the discs to the cabin, as well as the recut footage for 28 October. She must have put them back in the days after she disappeared, when Fordyce wasn’t around, when no one else was parked up at the peninsula who could place her there. The recut footage no longer included her leaving on foot, which is what she must have done the day she abandoned her car there. She
was
caught on camera leaving that place – but no one would ever see it. The original DVD recording from 28 October was gone for ever.

Her exit had been completely erased from history.

I looked around the spotless house. If she’d planned her disappearance, then it confirmed why the house was so neat, why even the fridge had been wiped down. She must have placed the car keys deliberately at the foot of the tree in Stoke Point too – but to what end? To draw attention to her message about Lake Calhoun? To help make the connection to the photograph, to the meter key? Why? The message in
the tree was so small it might never have been seen. White missed it altogether; I nearly had too. Certainly, without the engraving of the film projector, I definitely wouldn’t have looked twice.

So if she was going to lay a trail of clues, why make it so obscure? Why try to hide it so well? Why do it at all? I didn’t understand why she’d so meticulously planned a disappearance, and then led someone like me back to her front door, to a box showing the lies she’d built, to the men she’d influenced and taken advantage of. Why have Everett make digital copies from the physical DVDs and then leave the files on a USB stick to be found?

Nothing about that made sense.

I tried to clear my head, to put everything into some sort of order, but as I did, my phone beeped once. It was an email from Collinsky. He was replying to my message about the garden room, to the pictures I’d sent him of how it looked now – how it had been cleared out, repainted, fixed.

Subject: Re: Garden room

Date: Saturday 29 August 2015 – 16.13

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Looks completely different. Wonder why she cleaned everything out, even the tools etc? Back wall wasn’t like that when I saw it, at least as far as I can remember. That looks like the original wall panel that she’s repainted there (is that right?) – 90% sure there was no wall panel on view when I saw it, and that a piece of plain plasterboard had been covering it. Think she’d attached shelves to the plasterboard, and the shelves were full of junk.

M

I left my laptop where it was, heading out across the garden to the shed. Once I was back inside, I returned to the repainted wall panel. In the very top and very bottom corners, I found slight indentations where screw holes had been plugged with Polyfilla and painted over. The work was good. Even in the right light, it was hard to see where the plasterboard had once been secured.

One possible explanation for the wall panel being repainted was obvious: Korin had prised the plasterboard from it when she’d cleared it out, and the wall panel underneath had discoloured more than the others. Its need for repair was greater.

But somehow, given what else I’d just found out – the deceit, the carefully constructed lies – I doubted that was the real reason.

29

Just as I’d suspected, Tony Everett – the MD of Roman Film – didn’t even know Lynda Korin by that name. To him, she’d been Ursula Keegan, a marketing manager for an advertising firm in London, who was looking to use the security footage in a pitch she’d be making to the Department of Transport.

It was hard listening to Everett talk about her, not least because – in not so many words – it sounded like he thought they’d had a connection, beyond just client and customer. I hadn’t told him the truth about who she was, because it invited fewer questions that way and because it felt cruel to twist the knife. He said he’d asked her out for a drink when the work was complete, and she’d told him the next time she was down in Bath, she would love to do that. But, like everyone else in the world, he’d heard nothing from Lynda Korin for the past ten months.

In truth, this whole thing left me cold: it wasn’t the direction I’d expected the case to take, it wasn’t the person I’d expected Lynda Korin to be, even as both her sister and former friend talked about her being hard to break down, about her and Hosterlitz being odd as a couple, having secrets, behaving strangely. Those things hadn’t rung alarm bells the first time I’d heard them, because a lot of missing people were like that. All of them had quirks, and they all had secrets. But this was more than that. This was deceit.

By the time I got off the phone to Everett, I was halfway
back to London, the motorway less affected today by the crush of bank holiday traffic. On the seat beside me was the box I’d taken from Lynda Korin’s, the photograph of the angel I’d removed from the album, and the DVDs of Korin’s four horror films.

As I ate up the miles, I thought about those films, about the ending that connected them all, about Hosterlitz’s strange, whispered repetition of ‘You don’t know who you are’ hidden on the soundtrack. I thought about the Post-it note that Korin had left in the teak box too, the timecode for
Kill!
on it, and the two lines of letters above that. XCADAAH. EOECGEY. Were the letters related to
Kill!
? How was I ever going to find out, even if they were? Without a clear line of sight on whoever Microscope was, I had no idea who else might know, especially as six of the eleven films Hosterlitz had made in Spain after 1979 were gone for ever.

I decided to phone the guy at Rough Print again.

After reintroducing myself, I cut to the chase: ‘Any idea where I might find copies of any of Hosterlitz’s so-called “lost” films?’

‘Hmm’ was all he said.

‘That doesn’t sound good.’

He chuckled. ‘Those films … well, the general consensus seems to be that they’re unrecoverable. The original negatives – basically, what Hosterlitz shot – got lost when the production company closed in 1986. It’s not necessarily the end of the matter if you’ve still got, say, distribution prints – they’ll be inferior in quality, but you can still make a dupe negative from a print – it’s just that this didn’t happen either. Those films were designed to be made quickly and on the cheap, and one of the results of that, I’m afraid, is that the places
that showed them at the time didn’t treat them with much in the way of reverence. That included returning them in a decent state, on time, or – in this case – at all. It happens more often than you might think. There’s a film called
Symptoms
…’

But I’d already tuned out and started thinking about my next move. In the copy of
Dias de los Muertos
, there had been the transcript of the panel Korin had done at Screenmageddon. Someone from a movie website in San Diego had asked her a question. Maybe I could get in touch with him next.

‘… all sorts of other examples as well. The British Film Institute have got a list of seventy-five lost films on their website which they want to find, preserve and make available. Quite a few of them ended up going the same way as Hosterlitz’s horror movies.’

‘That’s really interesting,’ I said, trying to sound genuine. ‘So how likely do you think it is that someone could have copies of all eleven of those films?’

The man blew out a jet of air that crackled down the line. ‘I mean, I guess it’s
possible
. Even the six “missing” films existed at some point, and no one knows for sure what happened to them. Not one hundred per cent. If the negatives didn’t just get thrown in the bin when Mano Águila closed, maybe they got passed on to someone – a collector of some sort – but how you even
start
to look for that person, I don’t know. Plus, if someone
has
those films, why sit on them for thirty years? Why not share what you have with the world?’

We chatted a little longer and then I thanked him and hung up, frustration starting to eat at me. As it festered, I noticed something in my rear-view mirror.

A black Mercedes, about five cars back.

It had got on to the motorway behind me at Bath, but that
had been ninety minutes and eighty-five miles ago. I was skirting the northern edge of Windsor now, an hour from home, and it was still there.

It had been there the whole time.

I let a couple of miles pass, keeping an eye on the vehicle. Its windscreen was reflecting back the bright sun and the blue of the sky, so it was impossible to see who might be inside. But the further I went, the less concerned I became by it, the Mercedes slowly dropping back, cars changing lanes in front of it. Before long, it was eight cars behind me, a blob in the shimmering evening heat.

I glanced at the clock. Five forty-five.

I pulled into the middle lane and eased the accelerator down, wanting to get home now, to shower, to change, to get something to eat.

As I did, the Mercedes started pulling out too.

It was mirroring my movements.

30

A mile ahead of me was Heston services.

I kept my foot to the floor, flicking a look behind me at the Mercedes. It was subtly trying to close the gap between us. As the sun went behind a cloud, I caught a glimpse of a shape at the wheel – a man, broad, darkened by the shadows of the interior – and then the sun appeared again, and all I could see was a windscreen full of sky. As it did, my mind spooled back to what Veronica Mae had said about the cop who’d come to see her; and then to the forest I’d stopped at on my way out from her house, to the flash of movement I’d seen among the trees.

At the turn-off for the service station, I waited for as long as possible and then pulled a left, coasting up the slight rise and slowing down to see whether the Mercedes reacted. It did. As it pulled off the motorway, I rounded a corner – following a curved road into the car park – and the Mercedes disappeared from view. Accelerating, I whipped into a parking space as close to the service station building as possible, got out of the car and immediately popped the boot. I started going through my rucksack, pushed aside my clothes, washbag, a second notepad – and then finally found what I was looking for: a spare mobile phone. I always brought it with me as back-up, just in case my current one packed up.

Pocketing it, I slammed the boot shut, checked to make sure the Mercedes hadn’t arrived yet, and headed inside the service station.

It was busy. I made a beeline for the main shop and soon found what I was looking for: packing tape. Duct tape would have been better, but I’d make do. Paying for the tape, I headed out of the opposite side of the building, on to a small paved area with a few wooden benches and a dreary-looking Travelodge. As quickly as possible, I worked my way around the back of the motel, tracing a very rough circle until I was in the car park again, looking across at my BMW.

The Mercedes was about twenty-five feet away from me, slightly off to my left, parked under the shade of a tree.

There was no one inside.

Keeping my eyes on the service station entrance, I approached the vehicle at a half-run and cupped my hands to the glass as soon as I got to the driver’s side. In the passenger footwell I could see a red card folder, white paper edging out from it. I made my way around the front of the car, checking for the returning driver – even though I had no idea what he looked like – and then peered inside the Mercedes for a second time. Closer up, I could see the sheets of white paper had handwriting on them, and that there were two, maybe three photographs stapled to a sheet of pale yellow card. I tried the door in the vain hope that it had been left open, but it was locked, so I started to rock the Mercedes gently instead, hoping not to set the alarm off. I was aiming to shuffle some of the paperwork out from under the card covers.