Broken Heart (4 page)

I’d hoped to find a picture of her in the local newspaper stories, just to get a sense of what she looked like, but the web versions only carried generic, photo library shots of the peninsula, so I shifted my attention to social media instead. That proved to be another dead end. Her surname was unusual, at least in the UK, so it was pretty easy to see that she didn’t have a Facebook page, a Twitter account or anything beyond that. I’d held on to the hope, as she’d still been working a couple of days a week, that she’d maintained a LinkedIn profile – a photograph perhaps, or a CV – but that was another blank.

I decided to head back to Google and widen the search. Instead of tagging
Lynda Korin
with terms like
Stoke Point
and
disappearance
, I just typed in her name and hit Return. It would mean getting a ton of hits for women with the same name, but that didn’t matter.

The top hit was for a doctor in Tampa, the second was for a psychiatrist in Cleveland, and the third was the MD of a corporate training company in Munich.

It was the fourth that caught my eye.

Lynda Korin – IMDb

www.imdb.com/name/lk0091251

Lynda Korin
, Actress: Ursula of the SS.
Lynda Korin
was born on September 13, 1952, in Lakeville, Minnesota. She is best known …

It’s her
.

It was the town she was born in, it was her date of birth.

Confused, I clicked on the link and followed it to an IMDb profile page. On the left, there was no professional photograph of her, only a cropped poster for a film called
Cemetery House
. Her name was at the bottom in tiny black letters and she was running towards the camera, screaming, while a vague, monster-shaped shadow lurched in her direction from the background. It was the only picture of her anywhere on the page. I’d never heard of the movie before, I’d never heard of
any
of the movies listed in her filmography, but the way she looked on the poster stopped me dead. She was absolutely stunning – pale skin, blonde-haired, blue-eyed.

A moment later, the train wheezed into the station. I waited for the doors to slide open, stepped inside, then switched my attention to Korin’s biography.

Lynda Korin is an actress and former model, primarily known for her eponymous role in the cult Nazi exploitation movie
Ursula of the SS
(1977), as well as its sequels
Ursula: Queen Kommandant
(1978) and
Ursula: Butcher of El Grande
(1978). Famously, she married the director
Robert Hosterlitz
after meeting him on the set of the first
Ursula
in Madrid, which he was making under the alias Bob Hozer. She went on to appear in all eleven films Hosterlitz made in Spain between 1979 and 1984. After his retirement, the two of them moved to Somerset, UK, where Korin gave up acting to retrain in accountancy.

I felt completely thrown – and not just by Korin’s former career as an actress in low-budget horror movies. I’d grown up watching films in an old art deco cinema along the coast from my parents’ farm in south Devon; movies had become
an obsession, a way of escaping the boredom of life in a one-street village, the routines of the farm, the solitude of being an only child. The cinema had a film noir evening once every couple of months, and one of the movies I remembered most vividly was
The Eyes of the Night
. It was a brilliant noir, startling and beautiful, perhaps one of history’s best, and it won seven Oscars when it was released in 1953. Robert Hosterlitz, the man Lynda Korin had been married to, had written and directed it.

But then something had gone wrong for him. His career had gone south somehow. Before my wife, Derryn, had died, before they’d closed the Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank, we’d been there to an exhibition on film noir and listened to a talk on
The Eyes of the Night
and on Robert Hosterlitz himself, and heard how his life had been turned upside down. It had gone so bad for him, he’d ended up leaving America entirely.

As the train started to move, and before my phone signal died inside the bowels of the Tube, I quickly tapped the link for Hosterlitz in Korin’s biography in order to try and fill in the gaps in my memory.

Robert Hosterlitz was born in Dresden on February 15, 1925, but emigrated with his family (his father was German actor
Hans Hosterlitz
) to Los Angeles in 1933. His debut as a writer-director, aged just 24, came in the surprise commercial hit
My Evil Heart
(1949), but it was his fourth movie that should have propelled him to superstardom: his film noir
The Eyes of the Night
(1953) won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (making Hosterlitz, at 28, the youngest ever recipient of the award) and Best Screenplay. Yet, in 1954, after being subpoenaed to appear before the House of Un-American Activities, accused of being a member of the US Communist Party, Hosterlitz chose to flee America. It was hoped that a much-publicized return to Hollywood to make the western
The Ghost of the Plains
(1967) would kick-start his career, but instead the film proved a commercial and critical disaster for Paramount. Hosterlitz never recovered. After reportedly suffering problems with both alcohol and drugs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, financial hardship forced him to spend the last decade of his life making cheap horror movies for the grindhouse producer
Pedro Silva
in Madrid. He died in 1988.

Wendy Fisher hadn’t mentioned any of this – but then why would she? It had been twenty-seven years since Hosterlitz had died, which meant Korin had been a widow for over a quarter of a century, which in turn made her marriage an irrelevance. Or, at least,
probably
an irrelevance. Certainly, it was hard to see how it might connect. She was sixty-two, an accountant, living in a house on the edge of the Mendips, decades on from the life, and the husband, she’d once had.

I planned to catch up with Wendy on a video call later, so I’d ask her more about Korin’s marriage then. I was also hoping that, by the time I got home, she would have emailed the material that DC White had sent through to her. She’d talked about pictures, some documents, any of which might be a useful starting point before Tasker and Spike got back to me.

As I thought about that, about Robert Hosterlitz, about echoes from the past, my eyes returned to the picture of Lynda Korin, a woman forgotten as an actress and forgotten by the police.

But not forgotten by her sister.

6

Once I got back to Ealing, I opened up the windows of my house, trying to get some air circulating, and then messaged Wendy to arrange a time for me to video-call her. While I waited for a response, I showered and changed, then took my laptop through to the back deck to continue building a picture of Lynda Korin. Wendy responded a few minutes later to tell me that she’d emailed over everything she could lay her hands on, and confirmed our Skype call for 8 p.m.

I headed straight to my inbox.

It turned out that everything she could lay her hands on mostly seemed to amount to photographs of Stoke Point. They were a mix of ones she’d sourced from the Internet herself, and shots that DC White had emailed to her when he’d taken a trip there on 11 November. Even at a quick glance, it was clear that his messages to Wendy were carefully stage-managed, a mix of well-intentioned reassurances, minor updates and rudimentary delay tactics.

For now, I ignored most of the stuff on Stoke Point because I planned to drive down there in the morning and take a look at it myself – but, in setting all that aside, it quickly became obvious how little else there was.

In the end, only one email really caught my eye. In it, I found a picture of Lynda Korin and Robert Hosterlitz. ‘This was Lyn’s husband, Bob,’ Wendy wrote. ‘He died in 1988.’ It was a scan of a Polaroid, both sides of it, with a handwritten caption on the back: ‘Madrid 1983: Bob and Lyn, by
Ronnie M’. I did a quick search through the rest of the emails for anyone with the name ‘Ronnie M’, but came up short. However, the ‘Madrid 1983’ reference made sense: according to what I’d read about Korin and Hosterlitz earlier, in 1983 Korin would still have been working with her husband on the low-budget horror movies in Spain.

I studied the picture.

Against a sun-bleached, whitewashed wall, Hosterlitz and Korin were side by side. Hosterlitz, fifty-eight at the time, was small and thin, a striped T-shirt clinging to his narrow frame, his hair white and untidy. He had an arm around Korin and was smiling, his skin browned by the sun, his face creased up in the light of the day. A thick blanket of stubble covered his chin and jawline, making him look older than he was, and as I studied him, it became hard to see the person the world had known him as, or the one I remembered. This didn’t look like the man who had directed a film that had won seven Oscars, it looked like his ghost; an imitation. When I’d attended the exhibition at the MOMI all those years back, the film historian who had given the talk had shown us photos of Hosterlitz from the early 1950s – a younger, bigger, rounder version of the man, with a gold statuette, oiled hair, and expensive suits that bulged when buttoned. But that Robert Hosterlitz was long gone by the time the photo in Madrid had been taken. By this time, he’d been reduced to directing films with titles like
Axe Maniac
and
Savages of the Amazon
.

Lynda Korin was different. She was nearly thirty years younger than Hosterlitz, and as pale as milk, her eyes like pools of pure blue water, her blonde hair – permed in a 1980s style – framing her face and placing the accent on her high cheekbones. Even with her sitting down, it was clear how tall
she was, her long legs crossed in front of her, and while the size of her breasts looked oddly out of place on her slender frame, straining against the dark vest she was wearing, it took nothing away from her. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d been expecting before I saw her in the movie poster on IMDb, but it wasn’t what I saw there and it wasn’t what I saw here, for a second time. She was so striking, such a stark contrast to the man she’d married – yet hers was a beauty that she was almost trying to disguise as she leaned into Hosterlitz and allowed herself to be protected by him. There seemed a shyness to her, a quietness and a reticence, her eyes darkened by the surrounding shadow, her smile just an upturned lip.

Something about that didn’t make sense to me.

She’d been an actress and a model, comfortable in front of the camera, comfortable – judging by the types of films she’d made – taking her clothes off too. So, as I continued to look at this picture of her, this portrait of a past life, it made me wonder about Lynda Korin. It made me wonder about her reasons for driving out to the edge of the sea on 28 October; about the reason she’d never been seen again; whether she’d gone there out of choice or out of fear; and it made me wonder about whether the woman in the photograph, frozen within the confines of a yellowing, thirty-year-old scan of a Polaroid, had some sort of story to tell.

A story the world might get to hear, if she was alive.

Or get buried for ever, if she wasn’t.

At just after seven, Ewan Tasker called me.

‘This is going to be short and sweet,’ he said once I’d picked up. ‘I emailed Lynda Korin’s missing persons report across to you, but footage of her – that’s harder. I’ve had a look and there’s some listed in evidence down in Bath, but
it’s a DVD. Apparently, the tech they use at Stoke Point is old, so there’s no digital version – as in, the security system at that car park isn’t uploading it in real time to a server somewhere. So the only way you’re getting your hands on the footage – unless you’re into breaking and entering – is if you know someone who works for the police down in Bath. That way they can rip the footage from the disc and send it to you. Or they can just mail you the DVD itself. You got someone you know down there?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘Could be time to unleash your winning personality.’

I laughed. ‘All right, old man. I appreciate it.’

I hung up, went to my email and found the message from Task. Attached to it was a digital version of Korin’s missing persons report.

Right up front was a recent photograph of her. She looked remarkable, her sixty-two years like a number that didn’t compute. There were age lines at the corners of her eyes, and her blonde hair had become seeded with grey along her parting and across the arc of her forehead. Otherwise, her sharp, attractive features made her look ten years younger than she was. But, as good as she looked, it wasn’t her that caught my attention, it was the photograph itself. Although it was taken in a living room, presumably Korin’s – she was perched on the arm of a sofa – it looked professional. The lighting was too perfect, she’d had her hair and make-up done, her pose wasn’t natural. I made a note of it, wondering where the shot had come from, and moved on.

The first section of the file just confirmed a lot of what I already knew, starting with Wendy reporting her sister missing on Sunday 2 November. Wendy was five years younger than Lynda and still lived with her husband in Lakeville, a
suburb south of Minneapolis, where Lynda was born in 1952, and later grew up.

Wendy had phoned Avon and Somerset Police in Bath after failing to hear from Korin, either via text or email, for five days. The timing fitted: five days earlier, on Tuesday 28 October, Korin had been caught on CCTV camera entering Stoke Point. In the report, Wendy called the lack of contact between them ‘worrying’ because ‘Lyn and I were in touch many times a day, every day.’