Broken Heart (27 page)

Egan must have been renting this short-term.

Returning to the door, I took out my picks and went to
work on the lock. It was an old-fashioned tumbler, the pins full of rust, but – after a couple of failed attempts – I managed to get it open. I checked the tailor’s shop and the windows in the house next door, and then headed in.

Once I pushed the kitchen door shut again, the traffic on Streatham High Road became a dull buzz, like a dying insect, and the soft sounds of the house started to emerge: the hum of a refrigerator; the gurgle of a water pipe; an occasional, faint creak from somewhere as the house contracted in the cool of the dark. I hadn’t used the torch yet and there was enough light escaping in from the street for me to work with, so I left the kitchen and made my way into the hall.

It was short and sparse. There was paint on the walls but it had long since started to flake away, and the carpet must have been thirty years old: at the very edges it was still intact, but along the middle of the hallway, where thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of footsteps had passed back and forth, it had worn down to the weave, bits of stray thread exposed. Off the hallway, there were three doors: one into the living room, one into a bedroom, one into a small bathroom.

Pausing halfway along, I removed my phone and checked on Billy Egan’s whereabouts. The device location app put him two miles north of me, moving up Brixton Road. Pocketing the phone, I stepped into the living room, taking a closer look, but it was exactly as I’d seen it from outside: unloved, unfurnished.

The bedroom was equally small and just as sparse. There was a single bed, a fold-up wooden table being used as a place to stack toiletries, and a set of built-in wardrobes. The same carpet that was in the hallway and living room had made it in here too, thinned, dusty, frayed. I was more
certain than ever that the house was only a temporary stop-off for Egan, just a roof over his head.

I went to his wardrobes. Some clothes on hangers, separated into smarter wear – suits, shirts – and more casual stuff like T-shirts and jeans. A jumble of shoes, thrown into a heap. An empty suitcase. And then a pile of old books, their covers lined and spines creased, and some DVDs. I dropped to my haunches and went through both piles, but the books were mostly fiction – horror novels, sci-fi, thrillers from the 1970s and 1980s – and the DVDs were movies that had long since been confined to bargain bins. It suggested long hours of waiting, filling his down time with books and films.

I pushed the wardrobe doors shut and looked around the bedroom again, trying to imagine what Egan’s story was. If he was renting short-term, and he was working for Zeller, did that mean he’d come from the States?

Back in the hallway, I paused again to check Egan’s location, and saw that he was at the Elephant and Castle roundabout. That was thirty minutes from here on a clear run, even if he turned around right now. But he didn’t. Instead, he continued north-west on London Road, past the South Bank University campus.

I glanced at my watch and saw that it was after 11.15 p.m., and as I did, I became aware of something in the bathroom, adjacent to where I was standing.

The door was moving slightly.

There’s a breeze coming from somewhere.

I edged closer. The bathroom was tiny, a bath on the right, a toilet in the middle alongside a basin and a mirror, and a wall decorated with neither shelves nor tiles. I stepped fully inside the bathroom and pushed the door shut behind
me. The other sounds of the house – the refrigerator, the gurgle of pipes, the soft creaks – were silenced; all that remained was the faintest whistle of wind. It had been coming from directly behind the bathroom door.

Now I could see why.

There was an entrance to a cellar.

38

The padlock on the cellar door had been left unlatched.

I removed the torch from my rucksack and flicked it on. A set of polished concrete steps dropped down into darkness. Pulling the bathroom door open again, so I would be aware of any noise from the house, I double-checked Egan’s position. He was on Blackfriars Road, still heading north towards the bridge.

Squeezing behind the open bathroom door, I took a couple of steps down and stopped again. The walls of the cellar had been boarded with plywood, and a series of wires – pinned with tacks – snaked up from under the carpet and climbed towards the ceiling. The further I went, the more of the cellar I could see. It was big, maybe half the length of the house, and – like the rooms upstairs – furniture was sparse: a desk in the centre, with a brand-new iMac on it, a scanner and a printer; a big leather sofa, papers scattered across it, as if Egan had been in the middle of looking through them; a single shelf, full of ring binders. Below that was a filing cabinet.

I searched for a light switch on the walls next to me and couldn’t find one, but as I swung the beam of light around, I noticed that – beyond the desk – a felt pinboard had been screwed to the far wall. There was a map of London attached to it. A waterfall of photographs were at either side, pieces of string coming from individual pictures to points on the map, indicating where the photos had been taken. There
were six of Alex Cavarno: one a repeat of the picture I’d seen inside Egan’s car of her at the Comet; three outside the AKI office near the Docklands; and two outside what I assumed was her home. There were three more of Glen Cramer as well: the one I’d seen already of him locking up his house, one of him getting into a limo, and another of him having dinner, alone, at a restaurant in Mayfair.

All nine of the pictures had been taken with a long lens. More disturbingly, on the shot of Cramer getting into the limo, and in one of Alex outside the AKI offices, targets had been drawn on to their faces with a red pen.

There were a couple of photographs of me too. One was a fuzzy picture of Alex and me, quickly taken, talking to one another in the auditorium at the Comet. It was from our first meeting, when Egan had been there at the front of the cinema, posing as an architect. The second hadn’t been tagged to a location in London. It had been taken from behind a tree, through a forest of leaves, and I was talking on my phone. I felt a flutter of alarm as I realized where I was: a few miles from Veronica Mae’s house. At the time, I’d sensed someone was watching me, even though I hadn’t been able to see anyone. But Egan had been there. Until I’d spotted him on the motorway, he’d stalked me like a shadow.

I refocused, waking the Mac from its slumber, but it was password-protected, so I moved beyond the desk to the leather sofa, and to the paperwork scattered across it. As I pinched the torch between my teeth and gathered up the papers, I realized what I was looking at.

Lynda Korin’s missing persons file.

I checked that it was exactly the same as the version I had – that he hadn’t had access to anything I hadn’t already
seen – and then put the file down again, returning the pages to an approximation of how they’d been before. When I was done, I got an update on Egan’s position and then went to the filing cabinet.

The top drawer wheezed on its runners.

Inside was a series of vertical card files, each one containing paperwork. I pulled some of the papers out. They were a mix of photographs and printouts. The photographs were of Lynda Korin’s house. Every corner had been documented, every room, external wall, the attic, the lawn, the view, the shed. I checked the shots of the living room to see whether the angel was in place. It wasn’t. There was no angel and the DVD cases of Hosterlitz’s films were placed horizontally. That meant, whenever Egan had arrived at the house, the angel and the films were already gone. So did that confirm that Korin had taken them herself?

I kept going through the drawer, and then the next one down, and found the same financial information and phone records for Korin that I’d already obtained myself. There were photocopies of paperwork Egan must have taken from Korin’s house too, as well as countless time sheets for Alex, for Cramer, for me, detailing exactly what all of us had been up to. In Alex and Cramer’s cases, the reconnaissance went back months. There were printouts of individual IMDb pages too – one for every film Korin had made with Robert Hosterlitz – even when all that page amounted to was a poster, a cast list and a limited synopsis.

I pulled the last drawer all the way out on its runners, and heard something roll away from me with a soft
thunk
. I reached in. The first thing I found was another photograph.

It was a shot of the wooden angel.

It was from the album in Lynda Korin’s home. I knew it straight away. I recognized the style of the photograph, the lighting – it echoed the one I’d taken and the others I’d found inside. But then I turned it over and realized this wasn’t the same. Not quite. On this one, something had been written on the back.

I hope you can forgive me, Lynda.

Robert x

Hosterlitz
.

But forgive him for what? I checked the front of the photograph again but didn’t see anything that I hadn’t already seen. It was the same angel in the picture, the same drawn-on black crucifix, the same discoloration on the ornament, the same minor chips and hairline cracks in it. I took a picture of this photograph, as a back-up, and then checked Egan’s position.

He’d finally started heading home.

Unzipping my rucksack, I put the new photo inside with the one I already had, then checked the filing cabinet again. Something had made a noise in there, something heavier than just a piece of paper.

Right at the back, I found out what.

It was a book.

The front cover had mostly been torn away, but the back was still intact, even if the colours had long since faded and some of the blurb was hard to read. At the top I could make out the tagline ‘Twenty of History’s Most Infamous Crimes!’ and when I lifted up what remained of the front cover, I found another dedication, faded a pale brown over time, this time from Korin to Hosterlitz.

My dear Robert,

Happy birthday! (I hope this is the one you asked for!)

L x

February 1983

Egan must have gone to the house in the days after Korin went missing and taken the photograph and the book. I stared at Korin’s dedication, at the coffee-stained, dog-eared book, the whiff of cigarettes and mildew coming off the pages. But why take them at all? Was it something to do with the messages on them?

I began leafing through the book and, on the copyright page, saw that it had been published in 1982. I turned to the title page, where the name of the book –
Criminal History
– was revealed, and then stopped at the contents page, rust-brown and creased, the bottom half of it missing. Not knowing what lay in store didn’t make much of a difference in terms of surprises: the book was filled with the stalwarts of true-crime literature – the Manson Family, Bonnie and Clyde, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, John Wayne Gacy, the assassination of JFK.

But then I got to the fifteenth chapter.

It took a couple of seconds to register with me before I realized what had happened. The book had made a twelve-page leap from the last page of one chapter on the killing of John Lennon, to the last page of the next one on some unspecified case. The entire chapter was missing, bar the last three lines.

where he died in San Quentin State Prison, aged thirty-nine. It remains one of the most brutal and controversial cases in a long history of notorious Los Angeles crimes.

I reread the remaining lines again. Had Egan taken the other pages out himself? If so, why? I looked around the room for any sign of them, couldn’t find anything, and turned my attention to the book again. The contents page was torn, so I flipped to the back, hoping to find an index or a bibliography, an author’s note – anything that might help me to pinpoint what case the missing pages related to. But there was nothing. I went to my phone and put in a search for the book title, hoping to find it on sale somewhere online, or – if I really lucked out – uploaded to Google Books in its entirety. But the book was thirty-three years old. It was out of print. It was gone, forgotten.

But not by Billy Egan.

I put in a second search, for ‘San Quentin prison 39 years of age’, but the term was too vague. There were too many results, tens of different names and dates, so I dumped the book into my rucksack along with the photograph and made sure everything else in the cellar was exactly as I’d left it.

Upstairs, the house was silent, street light seeping inside via the glass panels on the front door. Switching off the torch, I moved into the hallway and looked out through the living-room windows to the vacant driveway, to the road beyond. It was well after midnight now. Most of the houses were dark.

Returning to the location app, I saw Egan was about fifteen minutes away. I wasn’t about to take any more chances, either here in the house, or with the phone stuck to the underside of Egan’s Mercedes. If he discovered the mobile, the first thing he’d do was try to get into the handset. It was password-protected, but that wouldn’t keep him out for very long if he – or anyone he knew – had any sort of expertise with technology. It wouldn’t take much imagination for him to start looking in my direction when he found it either,
even if I remote-erased everything on it, which I planned to do. But minus any of my information, he couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure the phone was mine.

I set the remote-erase going.

Outside, the night was cool and, for the first time in days, it felt like rain might be in the air. Pulling the door shut, I made my way back along the edge of the property, close to the wall, staying out of the sightline of the house next door. Slipping the torch into the rucksack, I zipped it up and turned the corner.

Then it felt like I got hit by a train.