Broken Heart (23 page)

Something else occurred to me then. ‘Who called you to give you the go-ahead on the office move? I mean, who in the US specifically?’

‘Saul.’

‘Zeller himself? Not his staff?’

‘No. Him.’

‘But he must have a ton of people working under him?’

‘Yeah, he’s got a massive team out in LA.’

‘So you didn’t think it was slightly odd that he got so personally involved in this whole Comet cinema thing – even down to selecting the architect?’

‘It probably sounds weird, but when you’re on the ground it’s really not. He’s super hands-on; like,
over the top
hands-on. He’s nicknamed the Eye of Sauron because he always has to know what’s going on. But it works. You can’t argue with what he’s done – when he took over AKI, it was minor league. Now it’s one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. All big expenditure – and we’re talking almost ten million pounds to convert that cinema – ultimately gets signed off by Saul. More day-to-day stuff he’ll obviously leave to me.’

But even if that
was
the case, some measure of doubt still lingered in her voice. Something was going on here, something anomalous. We both knew it.

‘When did this whole process start?’

‘You mean, when did we invite people to pitch?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know. Last year – the beginning of November, maybe.’

‘Were you expecting it to start then?’

‘No. The whole thing had been dragging on for months, and Saul seemed reluctant to sign off on it. The “okay” just came out of the blue, really.’

Except she seemed to catch herself a moment later and we both filled in the gaps:
Zeller had spent months refusing to sign off on the expense – but then, all of a sudden, at the beginning of November, he did.

The beginning of November.

Only days after Lynda Korin went missing
.

‘How well do you know Glen Cramer?’ I asked.

‘Glen? Pretty well.’

‘I need you to set up a meeting – today, if possible.’

‘It’s Saturday evening, David. I can’t –’

‘This Egan guy has photographs of Cramer and you in his car. He’s been following me for at least twenty-four hours, maybe longer. I really need you to set up a meeting, Alex.’

I’d said it softly, but I could feel her bristle.

‘And what exactly do I tell him?’

‘Whatever you think is the best way to get him to say yes.’

‘You don’t just drop in for afternoon tea at Glen Cramer’s house. This is one of the world’s biggest movie stars.’

‘I know,’ I said again.

She didn’t reply for a moment.

‘Fine. I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?’

‘I think it would be a good idea if you
didn’t
mention this to Saul Zeller for the time being. Let’s just keep it between the two of us until we find out more.’

‘Okay,’ Alex said, and then paused.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Why would Saul lie to me?’

She sounded worried, a little spooked, which was understandable. I felt the same way.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Maybe he isn’t.’

But I wasn’t sure she believed that.

And I wasn’t sure I did either.

32

Egan tailed me for the next eight miles, all the way to my exit, always at least six cars back. But as I came down the ramp towards Chiswick roundabout, he broke off and headed towards central London. It made me wonder where he was going. It also added to the concern that was building in me: for now, the tail was passive – but at what point would that start to change? When he realized I was on to him? When he next talked to Alex and started to get the sense she might know something? I didn’t have a clue who Egan was, had no idea about his background, what sort of person he might be, what drove him, or how he’d react to being exposed, whereas he knew plenty about me. He knew what case I was working.

He probably knew where I lived.

When I got home, I pulled into the driveway, switched off the ignition and waited there for a moment. The alarm was still blinking and there was no indication it had gone off while I’d been away. But, just to be on the safe side, I did a quick circuit of the house before heading inside.

The first thing I did was grab my phone, go to a device location app and log in. A list of my three connected devices rolled out beneath a map that was busy generating a location for each of them. My main mobile and my laptop were with me, so two pins dropped at my home address. A third pin dropped at the western end of Wandsworth High Street. Egan was moving east.

Leaving the phone where it was, I grabbed my laptop, went to my inbox and found a message waiting from Alex. She’d emailed through the table plan for the
Royalty Park
launch party. It was a simplistic, top-down line drawing of the layout, with twenty tables and ten people per table. Each seat had been allocated a name. I didn’t recognize all of them, but I recognized a lot: actors and directors, producers, BBC management. Glen Cramer was on a middle table close to the stage. Alex and her European management team were among some more
Royalty Park
actors one table along. Then my focus switched to a table right at the front. It had more of the show’s cast members on it, as well as another name I’d come to know better in the past few hours.

Saul Zeller.

He’s flying over for the launch party
.

Why would the President of AKI fly halfway around the world for a party?
Royalty Park
was a huge success, but it was a fraction of what the company put out in terms of films, TV, music and videogames every year. They must have been laying on parties and launch events all the time.

Trying to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, I put in a web search for him and quickly found a profile piece.

Saul Zeller is the legendary industry heavyweight who, after taking over from his father, Abraham, as President of American Kingdom Inc. in 1970, transformed the company into a major competitor to the likes of Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. He is one of the longest-serving studio heads in Hollywood history.

Joining the company in 1951 as a fresh-faced 24-year-old, Saul was hugely influential at AKI from the get-go. His tenacity and hard-headedness, especially when it came to what worked commercially, won him enemies in the industry, but he enjoyed immense success from early on, persuading his father to make bold – and successful – moves into TV and music, and personally green-lighting box-office hits like
Department Crime
and
The Man with No Mouth.
But his judgement wasn’t just confirmed at the tills. He personally signed off on AKI’s first Academy Award winner,
Connor O’Hare
, in 1951 – legitimizing the company in many observers’ eyes – and then followed that with director Cornell Graham’s
The Last Days of the Empire
in 1952, and seven-time Oscar winner
The Eyes of the Night
the following year. As early as the mid 1950s, with Abraham Zeller suffering from ill health, most people believed that Saul was, in actual fact, running the company as the de facto President.

Having threatened to retire many times, Zeller has never
quite
been able to let go of the reins, saying it comes down to ‘being a total control freak and not wanting the fun to end’. He often jokes that his long life and good health are down to the ‘Prolong’ pills used in the company’s billion-dollar science-fiction franchise,
Planet of the Sun
. ‘I’ve been taking them every day since 1982,’ Zeller told the
LA Times
last year. ‘They’re like Viagra, but they don’t make me feel like I’ve got three legs.’

Leaving everything where it was, I showered and changed, and – after returning – checked my phone again and saw that Egan’s car was slowly inching south along Trinity Road, heading towards Tooting. I grabbed something to eat and, while I ate, I flicked back through the notes I’d made. Mostly they were details I’d garnered from Alex about Saul Zeller, but I also added what I remembered from my chat with the guy at
Rough Print, and began compiling a filmography for Glen Cramer. My hope was that Alex would be able to arrange a meeting with him in the next couple of hours and, if she did, I wanted to be prepared.

His career turned out to be a long and impressive history of success – four Oscars, record-breaking openings, iconic roles as everyone from Abraham Lincoln to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, and then even more awards and critical acclaim after he came out of a nine-year retirement in 2010 to star in
Royalty Park
.

It was only after I’d finished and was reading back what I’d written that I felt something gnawing at me: a detail on the page that I wasn’t seeing clearly yet. I went back and forth through my notes and eventually returned to the conversation I’d had with the guy at Rough Print, to something he’d said about how lots of films went missing in the way Hosterlitz’s horror movies had. He talked about the British Film Institute compiling a list of seventy-five ‘lost’ films they were keen to get their hands on. Was it something in that?

Unsure, I used my laptop to put in a search for ‘BFI lost films’. A couple of moments later, I was on a page headlined ‘BFI’s 10 Most Wanted’. A few seconds after that, my phone burst into life.

It was Alex.

‘Okay,’ she said, after I’d answered, ‘Glen’s agreed to meet up at 8 p.m.’

I looked at the clock. It was 7.15 p.m.

‘Fantastic.’

‘Thing is, though, he’s old but he’s not stupid. If you go in there pretending this is about the launch party or something like that, and then start asking him questions about Saul
Zeller, he’s going to know this isn’t about where he is on the table plan. So I told him a version of the truth – you’re doing some work for AKI, and looking into the possibility of undiscovered material from Hosterlitz.’

That was closer to the truth than she realized given Korin’s admission that Hosterlitz may have been working on a project called ‘Ring of Roses’.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘that’s smart.’

‘You’ve only got an hour, though. That’s all I could organize. After that, a limo’s picking him up and we’ve got to run him out to a photo shoot that
Vanity Fair
have organized with the show’s cast at Osterley Park.’

‘The sun goes down in an hour.’

‘It’s a night shoot. Please don’t be late.’

I thanked her again, ended the call and phoned Melanie Craw. When I’d talked to her earlier, she’d invited me over to her place for something to eat. I felt a pang of guilt as she answered, even though any opinion I had of Alex Cavarno, any connection we shared, had so far gone unspoken.

‘I’m not going to be able to make it tonight,’ I said to her once she’d picked up. ‘I’m really sorry. Something’s come up and it won’t wait.’

‘Okay.’

That was it. I listened to the silence on the line, then remembered what else she’d said to me on the phone before:
I need to talk to you about something
.

‘We can chat now,’ I said.

‘No, not over the phone.’

‘Are you sure everything’s all right?’

‘Just give me a shout when you’re free,’ she said.

I waited for a moment, trying to imagine what she might want to talk about – but then I let it go.

Using the mobile again, I double-checked Egan’s position. The pin had finally come to a halt in a street called Bradbury Lane, just off Streatham High Road. That was eleven miles south-east of where I was. I watched for a while, ensuring Egan had definitely come to a stop, my eyes flicking between the phone’s display and the notes I’d made on the laptop, still feeling like something was staring me in the face. The harder I looked, the fuzzier the words became.

It doesn’t matter. All that matters is Egan
.

But as I went to close my laptop, my eyes strayed across the BFI’s ‘10 Most Wanted’ page again – and, at the bottom, I fixed on their address.

21 Stephen Street. London. W1T 1LN.

The postcode.
I felt an internal shift.

It’s their postcode
.

Feeling a charge of electricity, I put in a search for a list of curators – the people at the BFI who maintained and catalogued the organization’s collection – and found a list of nearly thirty people, divided into Fiction, Non-Fiction, TV, and Special Collections. There were seven names in the Fiction section, four men and three women. I started going through the men, reading each of their biographies.

At the third one down, I stopped.

His name was Rafael Walker. He looked to be in his mid forties. His work for the BFI had involved curating exhibitions on American film noir and European horror movies from the 1970s. He’d contributed articles on those subjects to
Sight & Sound
magazine and had written the BFI Classics book on
The Eyes of the Night
. He knew Hosterlitz’s work intimately, both his noirs and his horror films.

Male. Forty-five. W1, London
.

I was starting to wonder if I’d just found Microscope.

33

Glen Cramer lived in a detached, four-storey townhouse in Bayswater. It was a beautiful building, a mix of London stock brick and white render, with ivy covering an entire flank of the building. Immediately outside its set of six-foot steel gates, a group of four girls in their mid-to-late teens were chattering to one another. On the opposite side of the street, eight other people were gathered, some taking pictures of the house. Two of them, smoking and leaning against the bonnet of a grey van, were press photographers, cameras hanging from their necks. It made me realize how easy it would have been for Egan to blend in here.

As I arrived, Alex Cavarno was already waiting for me in her Range Rover. I parked behind her and she started to get out, dressed for the weekend in a pair of red leggings, a white vest and flip-flops, her dark hair braided to one side, her face free of make-up except for a hint of mascara. Casual or formal, it didn’t seem to make much difference – she looked just as good as the first time I’d met her.