Broken Heart (35 page)

It was Lynda Korin.

I glanced at my watch. The twist had happened at the start of the seventy-ninth minute – so was that what the timecode on the Post-it had been referring to? As I considered that, the two women briefly fought some more in a nearby office, and then Korin threw Mae against a wall, where she was impaled on a large shard of glass. After that, something more familiar took hold: the action cut to a wide shot, Korin the central focus, and the soundtrack dropped out.

It was the start of the ninety-second end sequence.

The slow dolly towards Korin began. I couldn’t hear Hosterlitz’s voice-over this time – not because it wasn’t there, but because the quality of the projected sound wasn’t good enough. After sixty seconds, just like all the movies I’d already seen, the camera inched past Korin and moved towards a walnut-cased television sitting in the corner. In this film the TV was off to start with, just a black screen, but then it popped into life and the same footage kicked in: the same video, shot from inside the same car, of the same street.

Ten seconds later, the credits rolled.

I looked back at Walker. ‘Did you see anything?’

His eyes were still on the wall. ‘What if the timecode you have for
Kill!
is a reference to the film’s reveal?’ he said. ‘What if it’s pointing to the fact that the killer is a woman, not a man?’

His thoughts were echoing my earlier ones.

‘Maybe,’ I said, and thought about the VO again. ‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you about. When the heartbeat and breathing come in, there’s –’

‘ “You don’t know who you are.” ’

I nodded. ‘You’ve definitely heard it, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what it means?’

He shook his head. ‘No. It’s so difficult to even hear him. I only really found it by accident, through repeated viewings of this sequence.’

I’d done the same with the DVD versions.

‘Can you play it over again?’ I asked.

Walker leaned over the projector and began reversing the reel. It kicked into life about a minute prior to the twist. I took a couple more steps towards the wall and then, as we got closer to Korin’s appearance, Walker began slowing the whole thing down, feeding the reel through the projector at half-speed. We moved past the point of the reveal and into the struggle between Korin and Mae, and nothing caught my eye – not about the construction of the scene, not about the women involved. Once Mae was dead, the repeated sequence began.

This time, I noticed something.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait a second. Can you take it back to the moment when Mae is killed by Korin?’

He did as I asked.

‘That’s it. Pause it there.’

Again, he followed my lead.

‘How long between Mae’s death and the start of the end sequence?’

Walker shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Five seconds maybe.’

‘Can you play the film frame by frame from here?’

He looked dubious, and I understood why: the film had been shot at the standard twenty-four frames per second, so even five seconds of the film equated to one hundred and twenty separate frames. But he did as I asked and I waited, quietly, while he set it up. Pretty soon, the film began again.

I was watching the scene so closely now, analysing every frame – even when one was almost identical to the next – that, after a while, I began to feel the pressure of it building behind my eyes. My head thumped and my vision blurred. It was a bizarre, unnatural way to view the movie, like watching the pages of a flick book shift at an infinitesimally low speed.

In these final few moments before the switch to the end sequence, the movie seemed darker than ever, as badly lit as anything Hosterlitz had ever put on to film.

Except maybe it wasn’t badly lit at all
.

It had taken three viewings – once at normal speed, once at half-speed and once frame by frame – for it even to click. At first, the poor lighting had just seemed like a by-product of the way the movies were made – quick and on the cheap. But now, slowing it right down, everything became clearer.

When Hosterlitz started the end sequence, when Korin became the sole focus for him, he got his act together and the scene was shot impeccably. But, before that, in the preceding seconds, the frames were so poorly lit and inadequately photographed that they were reduced to near black.

‘Because he’s doing it on purpose.’

Walker frowned, looked at me. ‘What?’

‘He’s poorly lighting these final moments before the repeated sequence on purpose. This last second is so dark it’s almost impossible to see what’s going on.’ I paused, thinking. ‘What if he’s hiding something?’

‘Hiding something? Where?’

‘Can you rewind it?’

Walker’s gaze lingered on me, as if he feared once again that I was losing it, but then his curiosity got the better of him and he changed the direction of the reel. He took it back two
seconds. Korin, having killed Mae, played out a series of minor actions in reverse, and then – with a snap of a switch – Walker began moving forwards again, frame by frame.

Two seconds of film comprised forty-eight individual frames. The closer to the forty-eighth we got, the harder it became to see anything, as if Hosterlitz had deliberately and rapidly faded out the lighting. In real time, the two seconds passed so quickly that the change in light would barely register as anything other than an amateurish moment in a movie littered with them – but slowed down to this pace, it felt completely deliberate. In the forty-sixth and forty-seventh frame, there was hardly any light at all. In the forty-eighth and final frame – before the switch to the wide shot that marked the start of the end sequence – Hosterlitz went even further than that: there was no hint of the scene at all.

The frame was just black.

‘Why has he done this?’ Walker said quietly.

‘You’ve never noticed this before?’

‘No,’ Walker said. ‘I’ve watched all these films countless times, but I’ve never watched them frame by frame like this. How have I never seen this?’

He sounded frustrated, understandably, but the answer seemed obvious. The finale of
Kill!
was so badly lit, in fact the entire
film
was so badly lit, that it would have been impossible to pick out a single frame of black. But, as I stepped away from the wall in an attempt to see things clearly, I started to realize something: the frame wasn’t
entirely
black.

There was some grey in it.

‘You see that?’ I asked, tracing a series of vague swirls with my fingers.

‘Yes. What are those?’

I squinted, willing myself to see better.

‘They’re words.’

Walker glanced at me. ‘Words?’

‘The same three words, repeated over and over.’

He just continued looking at me, like I might be joking. ‘I haven’t got my glasses,’ he said, turning his attention back to the wall. ‘What do they say?’

‘They say, “Ring of Roses”.’

52

The two of us were silent for a moment, our eyes on Walker’s bedroom wall, on the black frame filled with the same three words, repeated over and over again. I was caught halfway between elation and horror, buzzing from having followed the rabbit hole this deep, anxious and alarmed about what it might mean.

‘We need to do the same thing for the end sequence,’ I said.

Walker tore his eyes away from the wall. ‘What?’

‘We need to go frame by frame.’

‘You’re talking well over two thousand frames.’

‘I know.’

We stared at each other for a moment, Walker looking like he wanted to protest, but then his interest in Hosterlitz won out. The frustrated author in him, the man who had spent so many years trying to understand the director, trying to finish his book, was never going to be able to let this one go. He set it up and we began.

Forty minutes in, we found something.

It was a single frame, embedded in the moments after the camera had dollied past Korin and started focusing in on the television. At full speed, watching it with the naked eye, its screen time would have amounted to a twenty-fourth of a second. In real time, it would have come across as a pop, a jump, a rogue frame.

But it wasn’t any of those things.

It was a photograph.

Taken in black and white, the tones had been deliberately adjusted, the blacks blacker, the whites greyer, allowing it to be disguised within the shadows and half-light of the end sequence. But frozen here, on the wall of Walker’s house, we could see everything – the detail, the background, the woman in the centre of the shot.

‘Who’s that?’ Walker asked, pointing to her.

She was in her mid thirties, was slim and about medium height, although it was hard to be entirely sure as she was sitting on the top step of a clapboard house, its porch extending out either side of her, her legs tucked into her body.

‘This is old,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, even in 1981 – when
Kill!
was released – this was already an old photograph.’ I paused, studying the woman more closely. She was beautiful. ‘Look at her hairstyle. Look at the kind of clothes she’s wearing.’

Her jet-black hair was cut into an Italian style that recalled Elizabeth Taylor in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Her clothes were an even better barometer of when the picture was taken: she wore a full, gathered skirt, a petticoat visible underneath, and a pale blouse and dark neck scarf. She looked like she’d just come from a dance hall – or was about to leave for one.

‘This must have been taken in the fifties,’ I said.

Walker studied the image. ‘So who is she?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and my eyes drifted to the edges of the photograph, where the number 117 was fixed to the house, in a space next to the front door – and then to what lay beyond the house, further in the background.

‘What are those things?’ Walker asked.

He was pointing to the far right-hand side of the
photograph, where my own gaze had already settled. There was the hint of a dirty-looking canal, overgrown and dark. But that wasn’t what Walker had been referring to, and it wasn’t what I had my gaze fixed on either. We were both looking at the same thing: silhouettes on the horizon, one next to the other, like a forest of electricity pylons.

‘I think they might be oil derricks,’ I said.

‘Oil derricks?’

I looked at the woman again, at the way she was dressed, at the clapboard house, at the canal, at the derricks, trying to put it together.

‘Venice,’ Walker said.

I turned to him. ‘What?’

‘It’s Venice in Los Angeles. It’s got to be. I’ve done so much research on the city for the book, I know it inside out. They struck oil in Venice in the twenties. It was like a fifty-year boom or something, and then the wells ran dry in the seventies. At one stage, they would have had these derricks all along the coast.’ He stopped, eyes still fixed on the photograph. ‘The clapboard house, the canal, the oil derricks, it’s
got
to be Venice. It’s got to be LA in the fifties.’

As I processed that, I thought of those lines in the true-crime book.
A notorious Los Angeles crime
. Was that where this woman fitted in? Was she where this all ended up? I continued to stare at her, the altered monochrome of the photograph taking nothing away from her. In fact, in an odd way, it made her even more striking – more ethereal somehow, her pale skin reduced to a grey mask, her lipstick a dark, perfect oval.

‘So who is she?’ Walker asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, taking a camera-phone shot of her. ‘But we need to check some of the other films you’ve
got. We need to see if Hosterlitz included this photograph, and the black “Ring of Roses” frame, in those too.’

Walker did as I asked, grabbing another film at random from cold storage and loading it into the projector. This time it was
Beware of the Woods
, made the year before
Kill!
. The negative wasn’t in as good condition, magenta bias evident in a pinkish tinge to some of the actors’ faces – but it was easy to ignore now.

‘How will we know where to pause it?’ Walker asked.

He meant, watching it at normal speed, how would we know if there was a single black frame like the one in
Kill!
.

‘I think he’ll put it in exactly the same place,’ I said.

Walker stopped it before the end sequence, inching it back to the moments just before the wide shot. We found the black frame quickly after that. It was in exactly the same place as
Kill!
: embedded before the first frame of the wide shot, like a title card announcing a new scene. After a while, we found the photograph of the woman too, slotted in before the walnut-cased television became the sole focus of Hosterlitz’s camera.

‘It must be in every film,’ I said.

‘This is insane,’ Walker replied.

‘Can we check some of the others?’

‘Which ones?’

‘Any. Just select a couple at random.’

Walker headed back to the kitchen.

As he did, I felt my phone go off in my pocket. When I got it out, I saw that it was Melanie Craw. She’d tried calling me while I’d been chained up at the scrapyard. I’d called her back after I got out, hit her voicemail and promised to try again later. But I never had.

Next to me, the woman in the photograph remained
frozen on the wall. The ashen tint of her skin, the darkness of her lipstick, the lightness of her clothes. But, this time, as I stared at the snapshot of her, the phone still going off in my hand, I began to see something new. Something I hadn’t spotted until now.

A tiny shadow, cast across her neck.

I felt the phone stop buzzing, and then Walker returned with two more film cans and made a beeline straight for the projector.

‘Wait a second,’ I told him, holding up a hand. ‘Wait a second.’

He looked at me. ‘What?’

I found the pictures of the wooden angel on my phone, and then held one of them up beside the woman on the wall. I looked at the woman again, and then back to the angel. The woman. The angel. The photograph. The phone.