Broken Heart (43 page)

‘What did he say?’

Callson shrugs. ‘Not much he could say.’

‘Did he ever mention Cramer and Zeller again?’

‘Oh, sure. He never forgot those two.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, he started off telling me that Cramer and Zeller were involved in his mother’s death, whatever the hell reason they had for wanting to kill her, and then after he was done with me, he told anyone else who would listen to him at the station, and then, finally, he told his lawyer, and that was the point at which his lawyer probably said, “Whoa, whoa, shut your hole. You sound absolutely nuts. No one believes Cramer was involved with your mom’s murder. He’s a movie star and you’re a waste of space, and you were found in that room with all the evidence in the world pointing at you, like a neon fucking sign.” Words to that effect, I imagine. The best they were gonna get out of the jury was the kid being sent to the big house for the rest of his life. Him not going to the gas chamber once he turned eighteen – that would have been like a lottery win. But one thing was for sure: if Martin went into that trial shooting his mouth off about Cramer and Zeller and whoever else, the jury would turn against him like that.’ Callson clicks his fingers. ‘No one wanted to hear wild conspiracy theories from some delinquent kid. That would have been a disaster.’ Callson stops again, this time for longer, and in the silence he scratches away at some dry skin on the knuckles of his hand. ‘The irony, of course, was that Martin did exactly as his lawyer asked him to and never mentioned Cramer and Zeller at the trial – and it still got him a one-way ticket.’

‘He was sent to a juvenile facility?’

Callson shakes his head. ‘He was tried as an adult, remember.’

‘So he got sent straight to San Quentin?’

‘Correct.’

‘But he was never actually executed?’

‘No.’ Callson thumps the centre of his chest. ‘Heart problems. He blacked out in the prison yard about eighteen months after he got there. Congenital something or other. Anyway, even back in the fifties they weren’t about to send some sick kid to the gas chamber, so he made his home on death row instead. Twenty-some years later – 1977 – his heart finally popped while he was working in the prison library.’

But there’s a flicker of something in Callson’s face.

‘Mr Callson?’

‘Did you know that kid wrote me once a month, every month, for the entire time he was at San Quentin? Twelve letters a year for twenty-three years.’

‘No. I didn’t know that.’

An unmistakable sadness blows like a cloud across Callson’s face, and then lingers there. ‘Every month, always the same. “I’m innocent of this. Please help me.” I used to throw them in the trash to start with – just write them off as another asshole trying to clear his conscience. I’d had those letters before, these guys getting in touch with me, telling me I had it all wrong, giving me random names of the people who really did it – “The jury were paid off!” – all that bullshit. Those letters, they were an office joke. We all used to laugh about them, because we all used to get them. But, I don’t know, Martin’s letters …’ He fades out.

He starts to speak and then stops again, and the words hang there for a moment. ‘I guess it’s just that it got me thinking,’ he says eventually. ‘After a while, I stopped dumping the kid’s letters in the trash and I started to read them and I started to consider something: how much did you have to believe in something in order to write the same letter to the same person, claiming the same thing, over and over and over again? I mean, in those circumstances, you’ve got to be one of two things, right? You’re either a total fruitcake – or you’re not.’

‘And which one was Martin Nemeth?’

Callson looks into the camera. ‘I don’t think he was a fruitcake.’

61

It had been a month since there was any hint of rain, but there was rain tonight: a faint mist drifted across the still of the night, swirling beneath the street lights like a swarm of insects. It dotted against my skin, cool and fine, as I opened the gates to my driveway. The hinges moaned gently. A few loose stones crunched beneath my feet. I paused, looking at the space where my BMW should have been, and then across to the darkness of my house. The windows and entrances seemed to be untouched. Everything appeared exactly like I’d left it.

I stood there, unmoving, all the same. It was just after 3 a.m. and the street was absolutely silent except for the muted hum of traffic further out. Curtains were shut. Cars were dormant and empty. Next door, I thought I could see a hint of a silhouette, one of my neighbours passing behind a set of blinds that hadn’t been twisted all the way shut. I watched them disappear, and then returned my gaze to my own house. It was a rarity in this part of London because it was a bungalow. Usually, that was what I liked about it. But now, in the shadows, with everything that had happened to me, it seemed peculiar and unnatural; unwelcoming, cold.

Somewhere, I heard police sirens.

I grabbed everything I needed from the house and then left again, heading out the back, across the garden, and along an alley running adjacent to my home. Hailing a cab, I
headed west and, thirty minutes later, was checking into a motel just off the M4. It was scruffy and faded, but it would be fine to lay low in. I paid in cash and kept my phone off – the battery out, the SIM too – and once I was in the room, spread everything out on the bed while the news played soundlessly on the TV.

Just after 4 a.m., a photograph of Glen Cramer in
Royalty Park
appeared above the left-hand shoulder of the newsreader for the first time. I felt my throat start to close. Reaching for the remote control, I turned the volume up.

‘… tropolitan Police have confirmed that the body of Hollywood actor Glen Cramer, best known in recent years for his role in the drama series
Royalty Park
, has been found tonight at a disused public baths in east London. While a spokesperson declined to offer any further details, a source close to the investigation has told us that Mr Cramer suffered “severe head injuries”. Clearly, this is a developing story, and details are coming in to us all the time, but we also understand that a man in his forties is being sought in connection with the death.’

Shit.

I suddenly felt nauseous, overwhelmed. Cramer had died at the scene and Zeller had just left him there – and now the police had zeroed in on me.

As I’d exited the baths through a broken wall at the rear of the building, I’d heard the approach of sirens, which meant neighbours must have reported hearing the gunshots. It meant there could have been a witness to my escape. It probably meant the police had got hold of Cramer’s mobile and discovered the call I’d made to him at 11.14 p.m. They’d see the note he’d written on it to remind himself of our meeting place. They’d ping my phone and see that I called
from outside Limehouse station when I gave him directions to the public baths. I was the last person to speak to him.

They probably thought I was the last person to see him alive.

Briefly, I considered handing myself in, and then let the idea go again. I had nothing to play with. I couldn’t pin anything on Zeller. There were no direct lines to him. All I had was circumstantial evidence and a bunch of theories. The best thing I’d gathered in all this time was the testimony of a man now lying dead on a mortuary slab. Zeller wouldn’t have wanted it to end for Cramer in the way it had, I still believed that, not because he had any affection for Cramer any more, but because the death of Glen Cramer brought questions and media headlines. But it was a complication. Zeller and Egan were both still in the clear.

Even if it was on their radar at all, which it wasn’t, the Venice Angel case wouldn’t interest the Met. It was so old and so far out of their jurisdiction that they wouldn’t waste resources looking into it. There was no CCTV at Barneslow Scrapyard, so they couldn’t put Egan or Alex there at the weekend. There were no cameras in and around the baths either, which was one of the reasons I’d chosen it. As for Zeller, even if I went direct to the US, no agency there would go to the expense of reopening a case, let alone digging up a sixty-year-old corpse, without substantial proof that the original conviction was wrong. Martin went to San Quentin for his mother’s murder and he died there twenty-three years later. Hosterlitz was long dead, Cramer was gone now. There had been five people who could have shed light on what happened that night, and the only one of them left alive was Saul Zeller. I couldn’t get justice for Kerekes with what I had.

Not without Lynda Korin.

She hadn’t been found yet, not by me and not by Zeller and Egan either, but the fact they were still looking for her, still trying to silence her, seemed to prove something: she had information they didn’t want out in the open. She had some sort of proof. Maybe she had the evidence that could bring Zeller down.

I had to find her before they did.

62

I didn’t have much left in the way of casework.

My notes from before the scrapyard, my files, the physical photos of the angel, the security footage from Stoke Point – it had all been burned. All I could rely on was whatever notes I’d gathered from talking to Rafael Walker, what I’d seen in Hosterlitz’s films, and what I could remember from talking to Cramer.

I flipped open the spare laptop I’d grabbed from my house, connected to the motel’s Wi-Fi, and searched the web for ‘Ring of Roses’. It felt like I’d done the same thing a million times over and, sure enough, I got the same mix of nursery rhymes and crèches as I had the first time around. Even when I entered the words ‘Pierre Street’ and ‘Van Nuys’ I hit a dead end. I searched business directories for Van Nuys, tried to locate maps for the area, and then spent half an hour trawling historical data.

Nothing.

I kept going, returning to accounts of the Venice Angel killing I’d already been through on the web. I went over everything Walker had told me, line by line, word by word – everything we’d discussed, all the tiny details I’d seen in the films. The hidden frame. The photograph of Kerekes. The footage of Pierre Street.

Still nothing.

What about Hosterlitz’s voice-over?

I’d never asked Cramer about that because he’d never
even watched any of Hosterlitz’s horror films. But what could ‘You don’t know who you are’ mean? Was he talking to Korin in those moments? Someone else? Himself? The more I thought about it, the more it felt like an admission of guilt on Hosterlitz’s behalf, a way to tell her the truth, as if he was saying, ‘You don’t know who you are
to me
.’ I remembered what he’d written on the back of the photograph –
I hope you can forgive me, Lynda
– and it seemed even clearer: she’d been in a marriage with a man who loved her because she reminded him of someone else.

I felt a pang of sadness for Lynda Korin then. She’d never really known the man she’d lived with, loved, shared a bed with, shared a life with, until twenty-six years after he’d died; until, in 2014, she somehow figured it out – or, at least, figured
something
out. But
what
did she figure out?
How
did she figure it out?

How could she still be missing?

I thought of Wendy Fisher, of how she’d described Hosterlitz and Korin’s trip out to Minneapolis in 1984. I’d talked to her about it already, her recollection of Hosterlitz’s ‘scouting trip’, her opinion of him – but I hadn’t really pressed her on how Korin had been during that week without Hosterlitz. Could she have discussed anything with Wendy that seemed insignificant then, but might be huge now? Suspicions? Concerns? Cracks in their marriage? I doubted it, but I was running out of moves to make. I needed a breakthrough.

I didn’t have to switch on my phone to get her number – I’d made a note of it before I left the house – and I could just use the hotel landline to call her. It would cost me, but it would keep me off the radar for now. What complicated things was her job as a nurse, and the irregular hours she
worked. If she was out on the ward, I might have to wait for a response, and I needed answers right now.

If she even had any
.

I tried not to let the thought derail me, tried not to get bogged down in the idea that this was another dead end, and went to the hotel phone. Punching in her mobile number, I listened to six drawn-out rings. It hit voicemail.

‘This is Wendy Fisher,’ she said. ‘Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

I hung up – and, as I did, something gave me pause, an idea I couldn’t get at, buried far back inside my head. I looked down at my notes, but had no idea what it was. Ignoring it for now, and already trying to think about my next move, I grabbed my laptop, went to an online directory and started searching for her home number. I’d try her landline, and if I got no joy there, I’d go back to her mobile and keep phoning. If I kept calling, I’d get hold of her eventually.

Her home was in Lakeville, south of Minneapolis, and when I went to the White Pages online, I got sixteen hits for Fisher. The White Pages listed all people under that name, and which other Fishers they were associated with, so I found Wendy and then I found the name of her husband too. He was called Carl. Even if I got hold of him and he got hold of her for me, that would be better than nothing.

But then I stopped.

The Post-it note
. I’d forgotten all about it. With Walker’s help, I’d followed the trail to the
Kill!
timecode, but there were still the two lines of random letters above that. I flipped back in my notes. I’d written them down during my interview with Walker, trying to make something out of them,
see
something.

XCADAAH. EOECGEY.

I tried to find patterns in them, relationships the letters might have to the films that Hosterlitz had made, or to Korin’s life before she disappeared. I broke them down and rearranged them to see whether they might be anagrams, added full stops to see if I recognized them as acronyms, did a web search for the letters as a group, in pairs, in threes. Every road I went down ended in the same result.