Broken Heart (30 page)

Instantly, something changed in their faces, but this time I’d missed the mark somehow. Egan started smiling. They both seemed to relax.

‘What do you know about “Ring of Roses”, David?’

I looked at Alex, her question hanging there between us, and then turned to Egan. The relief was so clear in his face.

‘You think all of this is about a film?’ she said, and glanced at Egan. ‘He doesn’t actually realize yet. I thought you said he’d figured it out.’

‘I thought he had,’ Egan replied.

I glanced between them. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘ “Ring of Roses”,’ Alex said.

‘What about it?’

‘Hosterlitz’s great, unfinished masterpiece – is that what you think this is about?’

‘Are you saying it’s not?’

‘I’m saying it’s bullshit.’

I felt my chest close. ‘What?’

‘He wasn’t working on a film, David. He wasn’t working on a script. There never
was
a script. “Ring of Roses” isn’t a movie – and it never was.’ She leaned into me, her perfume coming with her, its odour catching in my throat. ‘It’s something much more dangerous than that.’

41

‘You genuinely believed that Hosterlitz started writing again in retirement – is that it?’ Alex looked at me, sympathy in her face. ‘I mean, who knows? Maybe he did. But he didn’t finish any script. Way I heard it, after he got diagnosed with cancer, he went back to hitting the booze, and hitting it hard. Painkillers too. By all accounts, he was completely fucking loaded most of the time. The pretty picture of married life that Korin painted in
Cine
– it was rose-tinted bullshit. Most nights, he was down the local pub cleaning out their whisky supply. Ask my brother …’ She gestured to Egan. ‘He spoke to some of the people in the village when we started trying to find Korin back in November, and do you know how they remembered the great Robert Hosterlitz, Oscar winner and cinematic visionary?’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘As a sad old drunk.’

‘Why would I believe anything you say?’

She shrugged. ‘Believe what you want to believe, but – deep down – you know it’s true. I mean, let’s pretend for a moment that Hosterlitz
was
working on a film in the last, miserable, sickness-affected years of his life. Where the hell is it? It’s twenty-seven years since the old man died. Where’s the script? Where are the sketches, and the notes, and the ideas? Where are the actors he spoke to, or the producers he pitched it to? Where’s the evidence that it ever existed, in any form? Do you think Lynda has just been sitting on it for over a quarter of a century?’

I didn’t reply – didn’t know what to say.

‘There
is
no movie,’ Alex said. ‘There never
was
a movie. We should know. My father’s been watching Hosterlitz from before Korin ever came on the scene.’

I frowned at her. ‘What do you mean?’

She shrugged again.

‘Zeller had been watching Hosterlitz since the seventies?’

‘Since
way
before that.’

‘Why?’

But Egan stepped in. ‘That’s enough.’

Alex didn’t look at him, wisps of smoke curling past her face. ‘Point is, no script was written at that house. Nothing was made there. All Hosterlitz was doing in retirement was drinking and dying.’

‘But why was Zeller watching him?’

‘Dad likes to know his enemy.’

‘Hosterlitz was his enemy?’

‘Robert Hosterlitz isn’t the man you think he is.’

‘Meaning what?’

She didn’t reply this time. I looked at her, my mind spooling back to what Hosterlitz had written to Korin on the back of the photo of the angel (
I hope you can forgive me
), and then to what Veronica Mae had said about Hosterlitz, about the way he always behaved as if something was weighing on him.

‘Is “Ring of Roses” related to that case in the true-crime book?’

The two of them just looked at me.

I thought of the pages that had been torn out of it. Had Hosterlitz known what they related to? Had he told Korin before he died? Somehow I doubted it, because if he had been telling her everything, he wouldn’t have lied to her about his trip out to LA in 1984, and he wouldn’t have asked
for her forgiveness on the back of a photograph. But
why
keep something important from her? Because he hadn’t thought she needed to know? Or because he had been trying to keep her safe?

Alex tapped some more ash into the coffee cup. ‘The truth is, David, the best you can hope for – I mean, where any film is concerned – are some scrawled notes Korin may have kept, that Hosterlitz had
maybe
written on the back of a napkin while loaded up on bourbon and tramadol – and you really think my father’s losing sleep over that? Hosterlitz was finished. No one took him seriously. No one was interested in any script he was writing, even if he
had
completed it. This isn’t about a film, it’s about what Lynda found out about her husband.’

‘Found out about him?’

‘Bobby was keeping secrets from her.’

Something curdled in my guts.

She paused, as if she thought she might have said too much. Then her eyes moved to the handcuffs, to my bound wrists, and she seemed to figure it made no difference now. But, as her eyes met mine again, an idea started to form. I thought of Korin. I thought of the surveillance tapes from Stoke Point – how she’d manipulated them, how she’d planned everything out.

‘Korin found out what “Ring of Roses” really means,’ I said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? She must have found out in the weeks after she did that interview for
Cine
. That’s why she chose to disappear – and that’s why you’re trying to find her.’

Neither of them reacted.

But I knew I was right.

Except something didn’t make sense. ‘If she’s got something on you, if that’s the reason she vanished, why the hell
has she been sitting on it for the past ten months? Why not tell the world what she knows?’

Finally, Alex moved, rubbing at an eye.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s the big question, isn’t it?’

She wasn’t toying with me now. She genuinely didn’t know why Korin had so flawlessly planned her departure, knowing that – eventually – she would be hunted,
then
proceeded to spend the last ten months doing absolutely nothing in response. Maybe Korin was ill. Maybe she was quietly wasting away somewhere.

Maybe she really
was
dead.

Alex took a last drag on her cigarette and dropped it into the empty mug. ‘You know, I
am
genuinely sorry, David,’ she said softly, almost tenderly. ‘I know it doesn’t mean much, but the couple of times we’ve met over the past few days, I’ve come away thinking, “I hope he gives up. I hope he fails to get anywhere,” because I didn’t want to see this.’ She opened and closed the lid of her cigarette packet. ‘My brother did warn us about you. He said you’d become a problem. Your stubbornness, your tenacity. I looked at your history, and I’m not saying you don’t have a very strong, very worthy moral centre – I can see that you do – but some of the stuff you’ve done down the years, some of the risks you’ve taken?’ She shrugged. ‘I guess my brother was right. It was always going to come to this.’

Egan took a step forward.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I wanted to come here and look you in the eye, because I felt you deserved that. I’m a pretty good judge of character these days. You tend to get good at picking liars when you do a lot of lying yourself.’ A smile – small, almost contrite. ‘I had to be sure you didn’t know more than you were letting on.’

She meant Korin. She meant she needed to be sure I hadn’t actually found out where she’d holed up, or what ‘Ring of Roses’ really was. The finality to her words sent nerves scattering along my back, and my heart started to pump hard in my chest. I looked around me, realizing I was out of time. I tried to seek a way out, a plan, a strategy. But there was nothing.

I was handcuffed to a radiator.

She stared at me, her eyes lingering on me for the last time, and then got up, walking to one of the windows. She parted two of the slats with her thumb and forefinger. ‘You know what the irony is? My brother will make you disappear like the people you find. You, any trace of the life you lived, your car, your belongings, this case. It’ll all be gone.
You’ll
be gone. There’ll be nothing. And you know what? That’s going to upset me. I like you, David.’ She let the slats snap back into place and then returned to the desk she’d been sitting on, not looking at me, but reaching for her jacket and shrugging it on. ‘In a different life, I’d have loved to have got to know you better.’

She returned to the door without once making eye contact with me. It was a weird, discordant moment: it felt like she genuinely meant what she was saying – and yet she was reading me my last rites.

‘You know what the old man told you,’ she said, talking to Egan this time. For a second she stood there, staring at the floor of the Portakabin. ‘Wherever you put him, make sure he never gets found.’

42

After Alex was gone, her heels clinking against the Portakabin steps, Egan just looked at me, almost sizing me up: a mortician at a slab; a butcher at a carcass. A moment later, he said, ‘I need to go and get my tools.’

His tools.

The words seemed to hover there, a noxious cloud of smoke, and then, with a smile, he added, ‘Don’t go anywhere, okay?’ He exited the room, blocking my view of what lay outside, and slammed the door behind him.

Do something. Do something now
.

My wrists were bound at my back – my hands level with the base of my spine. Keeping my eyes fixed on the door, I tried prising my hands apart, pulling them in opposite directions, but Egan had bound them so tightly I wasn’t only failing to shift the tape, I could feel it cutting off my blood supply. I pulled again, teeth clenched, muscles taut, every ounce of energy focused in my fingers, my wrists, my arms, but my skin needled with pain and I started to feel light-headed. I shifted on the seat, trying to clear the haze behind my eyes – and, as I did, I felt something cool tug at my ankles. Dread filled my guts like a sludge. I’d forgotten about the handcuffs.

I stood up, keeping an eye on the door – turning as best as I could with a handcuff clasped around my ankle – and looked at the chair I’d been sitting on. Was there anything I could use? Any sharp edges I could try to snag the duct tape
on? There was a tiny screw halfway up one of the legs, rusty and frilled at its circumference, and not sitting quite flush to the frame. But it was difficult to get at, and when I sat again I struggled to even find it with my fingers.

Eventually I did, and with the handcuff tugging at my ankle, I tried to get a clumsy sawing motion going. If Egan walked in now he’d know instantly what I was up to. I was at a forty-five-degree angle, with my wrists three-quarters of the way down a chair leg. He’d see what I was trying to do. But I was out of options.

It was this or nothing.

I sawed as fast as I could, repeatedly catching my skin on the edges of the screw. Before long, I’d opened up cuts on both arms, and there was blood in the creases of my palms. Undeterred, I kept going. The faster I went, the less accurate my movements got, and the more damage I was doing to my skin. When I slowed, I gained back accuracy but ate into whatever time I had left. I tried to mix it up – fast and then slow, repeat, repeat – and a minute later, I could feel the first tentative signs of give in the binds. I fumbled around with my thumbs, running them both along the edges of the duct tape. I’d torn it slightly – but, when I tried to prise my arms apart, the tape still didn’t budge.

I started again, slowly getting into a rhythm, the chair wheezing under my movements. I’d been going about a minute when there was a subtle shift in the shadows around me. I glanced through the mottled glass of the door and heard Egan coming back up the steps, his silhouette distorting as he reappeared there.

Come on
.

I kept going, even faster now, feeling the screw shredding my skin, the leg of the chair slick with my blood.
Come on, come on
. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to fixate on the movement of my wrists, on catching the screw against the edges of the duct tape – and then, suddenly, pain seared up my arm. I stopped, sucking in a breath. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Egan right outside the door, his silhouette perfectly formed, the handle starting to turn. Yet it was hard to fully focus on that because my left arm felt like it was on fire. I could feel blood all over it, carving a series of trails down the inside of my forearm – over the duct tape, into the lines of my hands, along my fingers to the floor. I’d ripped something, lacerated skin. I didn’t need to see it to know that it was bad.

The door opened.

Egan appeared in the doorway, the knife in one hand, some sort of rolled leather pouch in the other. Inside, I could hear tools clinking against each other.

‘It’s time,’ he said.

43

I sat up straight and tried to erase all emotion from my face. I wasn’t sure if Egan could see any blood from where he was standing – I wasn’t even sure how much blood there was – but, as he entered and clicked the door shut behind him, he eyed me without paying particular attention to the carpet or the chair.

Instead, he ran his tongue along the top of his gums, like he was trying to rid himself of the lingering taste of something sour, and waved the knife in front of him, disturbing the still air, testing it out. He held it up to the sun coming through the blinds, the blade winking in the dusty light, then placed it on the desk nearest to him along with the leather pouch. The pouch rattled, clanged.

‘My sister is more emotional than me,’ he said, looking down at it. He undid a tie and it unfurled like a blanket. I could see scalpels and pliers, a hammer, clamps, strap wrenches. I swallowed, trying not to show him any fear, but he didn’t look at me. ‘Thing is, emotion can cloud judgement. She was quite taken with you, so when she said she had to look you in the eye to make sure you weren’t lying to her, I’m sure she believed that you really
weren’t
lying about what you’d found out.’ He stopped, wriggling a scalpel free of its binding. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not as trusting. So you’re going to tell me what you know about Lynda Korin’s location.’