Broken Heart (44 page)

Even so, I kept going but, fifteen minutes later, I glanced at the clock and saw it was after five in the morning, and the energy seemed to leak out of me. I flopped back, bone-tired. Through the rear window of the motel room, beyond the rooftops opposite, I glimpsed a haze of orange, the accumulated light from the motorway. My eyes began to feel heavy as I watched it, shimmering like the margins of a marooned spacecraft, and then they closed completely.

Call Wendy
. I jolted awake again, my inner voice like an echo, pushing me back to the surface.
Call Wendy
.

I never asked her about the Post-it note. I never asked about the two lines of letters, or what they might mean.
Maybe she knows.
Going to the hotel phone, I found the number for her landline again and dialled it. It was 11 p.m. there, but Wendy would understand. I waited, briefly energized.

‘Hello?’

Someone had picked up. It was a man.

‘Mr Fisher?’

‘No, he’s not here.’

‘Is Wendy around?’

‘No, neither of them are here.’

I tried to imagine who this guy might be.

‘I can take a message,’ he said.

‘Can I ask who I’m speaking to?’

‘Greg Fisher.’

He must have been one of their kids.

‘Greg, my name’s David Raker. I’m an investigator in the UK. I’m doing some work for your mum over here, looking into her sister’s disappearance. I need to get hold of Wendy really urgently. Is she at work at the moment?’

‘No, she’s away.’

‘Do you know what time she’ll be back?’

‘No, I mean, she’s
away
. Mom and Dad are on vacation. They’re up in Alaska somewhere.’

His words stopped me dead.

‘Uh …’ I tried to think. ‘What do you mean, they’re on vacation?’

‘I mean, they’re on a cruise.’

‘For how long?’

‘A month.’

‘When did they leave?’

‘About ten days ago, I guess.’

Before I’d even started the case. Before Wendy had ever got in touch with me.
I thought back to the voicemail message I’d just heard from Wendy Fisher, and remembered how something about it had given me pause afterwards.

‘Does your mum have a Facebook page, Greg?’

‘What?’ He sounded confused. ‘Yeah, sure.’

I went to Facebook, searching for a Wendy Fisher in Lakeville, Minnesota. It didn’t take me long to find her. Her profile picture was a photograph of her and Lynda Korin, sitting next to one another in a garden somewhere.

I’d never seen Wendy before in my entire life.

She wasn’t the woman I’d spoken to on video call. This Wendy was much heavier, her hair was darker, she had a distinctive mole on the cleft of her chin and she wasn’t wearing glasses in any of the pictures I could find of her. The Wendy
I’d spoken to had looked like a weightier version of Lynda Korin – the same cheekbones, the same eyes, the same mouth.

As my heart thumped in my ears, I started to realize why the recorded message on Wendy’s mobile didn’t match the voice of the woman I’d spoken to over the phone. I realized why the woman who’d hired me looked nothing like the Wendy I’d just found on Facebook.

Because Wendy Fisher hadn’t hired me.

Lynda Korin had.

63

I sat there stunned for a moment, trying to deny it. But I couldn’t. It was why she didn’t want me to call her out of the blue, why she preferred to be emailed first. It was why her voice in our calls and the voice on Wendy Fisher’s answerphone were different. It was why Wendy didn’t look anything like Lynda Korin, and yet the woman I’d talked to over video had borne a striking resemblance to her. It had been Korin on the video call – except she’d dyed her hair and put on weight.

Or disguised herself – a costume, a wig.

I thought of something Marc Collinsky had told me about the garden room at Korin’s place:
There were still a few old movie props in there – a clapperboard, some bags of old junk with guff like vampire teeth, and blood, and make-up in them
. Make-up. Could there have been prosthetics too? Moulds? Silicone? Korin had looked big on the video call, but she’d looked big
under
her clothes. She’d covered herself up. All she’d had to do was tweak her physical appearance just enough, fill herself out and use whatever had been left behind by Hosterlitz, because she knew the quality of the Skype call would disguise the rest of it. The call was poor – pixelated, jumpy – because her connection was poor.

Did that mean she was somewhere remote?

I put a hand on my notes, trying to think straight, trying to imagine all the reasons Lynda Korin would set this into motion in the first place. So I could find out the truth about
what her husband had done? What Cramer and Zeller had done? If she already knew, why not just announce it to the world? Why go to the trouble of involving me? I drew the pad towards me, almost instinctively, and my eyes fell on to the lines of letters again, the ones on the Post-it note, and all the ideas I’d had as I’d attempted to figure them out. In my head, I spooled all the way back to that video call, trying to work out if there had been anything in the background to give away her location. There had been a mantelpiece, photo frames, but both had been bleached by sunlight from a nearby window. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with that.

I went back to her Internet connection, to it being slow, to the idea that she could be somewhere remote. That made sense – but where?

I looked at the two lines of letters again.

XCADAAH.

EOECGEY.

Somewhere remote.

Somewhere remote, somewhere remote, somewh–

I felt an internal shift. My eyes zeroed in on the beginning and end of each of the lines. The top one began with X, the other finished with Y.

Bloody hell, that’s it
.

It was so clever. I could see it so clearly now, I was unsure how I’d ever
not
seen it. These weren’t words. They weren’t even really letters.

They were grid references.

I tore off a fresh sheet of paper.

The X axis was C, A, D, A, A, H. If each letter corresponded to a number, C would be 3 because it was the third letter in the alphabet, A would be 1, and so on. I worked through it until I had the Easting, the X reference. It was 314118.

I now had half a location on a map.

I quickly applied the same rules to the Northing, the Y axis, but I came out with seven numbers instead of six, because the second letter – O – corresponded to the fifteenth letter of the alphabet. Unless the O wasn’t an O at all.

Unless it’s a zero
.

I pulled my laptop towards me and put the X axis in, then put the Y in as 505375 and hit Return.

The page loaded instantly.

It was an empty field.

I moved the map with the trackpad and a farm came into view, about three hundred feet north. Otherwise, there was nothing.

I zoomed out.

The farm was on a road, a thin country lane. It sat on its northern side, but the place where the pin had dropped, the grid reference, was in a field to the immediate south. The field must have belonged to the farm, but there was nothing on satellite that indicated anything in the field itself. Just grass, trees and drystone walls. Maybe a few animals. Was the grid reference an allusion to the farm, and not to the field?

Or had I just called this whole thing wrong?

I zoomed out again.

A lake came into view, about half a mile south-east of the grid reference and the farm. There was a hint of elevation to the north of the farm too. There looked to be a slope and the slope appeared to be blanketed in scree. I zoomed out again.

A name popped in over the lake.

Wast Water.

It was the Lake District.

I managed to get a few hours’ sleep – and, at 8 a.m., I found the number for the farmhouse and called it.

‘Hello?’

It was an older-sounding man, halfway through eating something.

‘Oh, hi,’ I said.

Now what?

‘I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got the right number – or if you can help me – but I’m looking for Lynda.’

‘Lynda?’

That was all he said.

‘Yeah, Lynda.’

‘There’s no one called Lynda here, son.’

It was hard to tell, but there seemed no hint of collusion, no sense he was holding something back from me. I looked down at my notes, and my eyes came to settle on a line right in the middle. It said: Életke Kerekes = Elaine Kinflower.

A pseudonym
.

‘Sorry, my mistake,’ I said, and then wheeled back to when I’d first found the box at Korin’s house, and the business card inside for Tony Everett at Roman Film. Korin had told him her name was Ursula Keegan. ‘Sorry, I meant Ursula.’

‘Ursula?’

I heard movement, the line crackled a little, and then there was the ping of metallic blinds being parted.

‘Nah,’ he said.

‘Ursula’s not there?’

‘Nah, it’s not that she ain’t here,’ the man said. ‘It’s just it looks like the blinds are down on the caravan. I don’t think she’s even up yet.’

PART FIVE

64

Sun briefly peeked through the clouds, rinsing the slopes of Wasdale gold. The valley was a breathtaking sweep of summits and hollows, its vast peaks forming a rugged amphitheatre around Wast Water, a three-mile stretch of lake that sat like a sheet of grey glass at the bottom of scree-covered slopes. When the wind roused itself, ripples scattered across the surface of the water like a delicate and deliberate work of art; and yet there remained something bleak about the lake, a strange, indefinable darkness. In the winter, when the tourists had gone home and the routes into here had become impassable, I imagined the valley might feel like the loneliest place on earth.

The farm sat on the slopes of Buckbarrow, part of the southern ridge of Seatallan, a mountain to the north of the lake. It was a large cream building, enclosed within moss-covered drystone walls, and had two huge corrugated-iron barns at the back of it. I’d driven past and seen tractors and the rusting bones of old machinery in one, and on the way back, I saw pigs in the other, feeding at a trough. There were cows too, but they were out in the fields to the left of the farm, wandering the grassland with their heads down. Immediately behind the barns, the contours of the valley began to change, sloping gradually into a wall of scattered scree and burnt orange fern.

The grid reference was for a location in a field on the opposite side of the road to the farm itself. On the web, the
satellite photography hadn’t shown anything but more grass and more walls, but that imagery was four years old – and things had changed since.

There was a caravan there now.

It sat alone in the field, like a ship drifting out on an emerald sea, blinds dropped at its windows.

It had been that way since my arrival.

I’d hired a car in Ealing and had left London at just after 9 a.m. It had been a six-and-a-half-hour drive, slow around the cities and slower once I’d left the A road and started the climb into the National Park. On the radio, I’d been listening to my name repeated all the way up. It had escaped into the wild, my photograph too. It wouldn’t be long before the Met discovered that I’d hired a car. Shortly after that, they’d find me on surveillance cameras, and be able to track me all the way north. I might have five or six hours. The fact that they’d have to coordinate with Cumbria might give me until the morning.

But, one way or another, they were coming.

That was why I was playing it cautiously for the moment – because maybe Lynda Korin knew they were coming too. Maybe the farmer had told her about my call. Maybe she’d heard about me on the radio or seen me on TV, and knew I was on my way. Or maybe this was all a trap. I didn’t know what Korin’s motivation might be for trying to trap me – and I wasn’t sure I really believed that was the case – but she’d been gone ten months, hiding out here while Zeller and Egan had tried to track her down and kill her.

I wasn’t about to underestimate her.

Sixty minutes later, I reassembled my phone and powered it on for the first time in eighteen hours. Messages and missed calls poured in. I swiped through them.

There were only two I was looking for.

Annabel had texted from her holiday in Spain, clearly up to date with the news back home. I told her everything was okay, and that it would get sorted out in a few days. I wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but that was what she needed to hear. The other was a text from Melanie Craw, sent yesterday evening.

We keep missing each other.

CALL ME.

Part of me wanted to speak to Craw, to find comfort in a voice I knew, to tell her the same things I’d told Annabel: everything was all right, I’d get out of this because I’d done nothing wrong. But another part of me saw the reality – that calling her would only lead to an argument. She wouldn’t understand. She was built like a cop, thought like one, acted like one, even as our relationship had become more serious.