Broken Heart (5 page)

The response from the police in Bath was slow. Wendy said she’d looked up police stations on the Internet, close to where Korin lived on the eastern edge of the Mendips, and Bath just happened to be the one she called first. Initially, she spoke to a uniformed constable called Stewart Wolstenholme.

From this point, however, there was a leap of nine days.

The next activity in the case was on Tuesday 11 November – the day
after
Korin’s car had been found at Stoke Point. That meant, even if Wolstenholme had told Wendy Fisher he was going to look into things for her on 2 November, he’d done nothing. It wasn’t until a National Trust employee – who checked on the car park at Stoke Point three times a week – reported Korin’s car as likely having been abandoned that the case found its way to DC Raymond White’s desk and something began to happen. White quickly began ticking boxes: he called Wendy to inform her that her sister’s car had been found; he conducted a more extensive interview with her over the telephone; he organized for a DNA sample to be taken from Korin’s toothbrush, and then cross-checked it with the Missing Persons Bureau to see if any of the unidentified bodies they had on file matched that of Lynda Korin. They didn’t.

White had conducted a background audit on Korin, though neither a credit check nor her medical history held
any real surprises: she had a steady income from the two days of accountancy work she was doing every week, she had a £15k-a-year pension, and at sixty-two she seemed well – a yearly check-up, just a few months before she went missing, had found her to be in excellent health.

I moved on and, again, picked up on the detail about how the vehicle had been left; how Korin’s Ford Focus had been locked, her purse and mobile secured in the glove compartment, while her keys – for the car, for the house – were found in some scrub nearby. That rubbed at me, and it had clearly bugged White too. He’d made a couple of notes: ‘Why throw the keys away? Why not leave them or take them with her?’ I thought again about the idea of someone else – and not Korin – throwing them away, and then looked at the photos of the keys in situ. They were at the foot of a tree, in a copse. All the trees had been vandalized with graffiti.

As I searched White’s paperwork, I got confirmation that he’d managed to secure the CCTV footage from 28 October, as well as footage from the day after Korin vanished, just to be sure she hadn’t, for whatever reason, stayed over and tried to exit the next day. He’d also used the registration plates of the cars that came and went on 28 October to track down potential witnesses, talking to the vehicles’ owners to see if they recalled seeing Korin at the peninsula the day she disappeared. All of them were frequent visitors to Stoke Point, which was good because it meant they knew the place and might have spotted something that didn’t fit. But the frequency of their visits also meant that they struggled to be exact about the day they were there. In fact, while all the people interviewed remembered being at Stoke Point around the time of the disappearance, few could offer much
else, and one man in his eighties argued he wasn’t there at all on the twenty-eighth, despite being recorded on tape.

For now, in lieu of the actual footage from the day, I had to make do with printouts from the six seconds Korin had been caught on film. They were all rinsed-out colour stills from Stoke Point’s solitary camera: caught at various stages of her approach was Lynda Korin, visible inside her Ford Focus. The last shot was the back end of the vehicle disappearing through the main gates.

I kept going and found the transcript of the interview that White had conducted with Wendy over the phone. It was long and detailed, but, while Wendy’s answers were clear and concise, its length didn’t disguise the lack of insight. Just one section leaped out at me, and more because of my personal interest in Robert Hosterlitz, the director.

WHITE
: Lynda was married – is that correct?

FISHER
: Yeah. To Robert. Bob. He died in 1988.

WHITE
: What did he do?

FISHER
: He was a film director. But not a famous one. Well, not by the end, anyway.

WHITE
: That’s, uh … Robert Hosterlitz, right?

FISHER
: That’s right.

WHITE
: Anything in his life that may have come back to bite Lynda? I realize he’s been dead a long time.

FISHER
: I can’t see what. They were very happy. Well, from what I saw of them.

WHITE
: What do you mean?

FISHER
: I just … Look, they were living in Europe. Lyn would fly out to see us once or twice a year, because she’d only have to pay for one ticket, whereas if you put me, my husband and my two kids on a plane it would have cost us four times as much. We didn’t have that sort of money back then.

WHITE
: So are you saying you hardly knew Robert?

FISHER
: She moved to Europe to model in 1971, she got married to him in 1978 after they’d only been dating six months, and then he died in 1988. We didn’t see him enough to know him. We went out to Europe in ’82, and they flew out to us once during the summer of ’79, and then again for Christmas 1984, although that final time he wasn’t around much.

WHITE
: You only met him three times?

FISHER
: Yeah. I
feel
like I knew him because – when she got married to him – I read up about him, about how he won all these Oscars in the early ’50s. But, the truth is, I didn’t know anything about him.

I returned my attention to Lynda Korin.

The search for her had been complicated by the fact that she seemed to live quite a solitary existence, which meant few really close friends, and so fewer people to notice she was gone. After searching her house and coming up short, White had decided to go door-to-door in the village and in others nearby.

As I turned the page, I saw that he’d included photographs from inside her house, but it was hard to get a sense of whether anything was awry – the rooms looked tidy and up together. Certainly, there was nothing in White’s report to suggest he’d found anything at the house to raise an alarm, and his decision to go door-to-door seemed to be a fairly obvious reflection of that. After asking around in the villages, he went on to speak to people Korin had done accounts for. He’d even interviewed the women at a book club she went to on a Thursday morning.

Again, he came away with nothing.

Buried deep in the file were her mobile phone records and printouts from her email inbox. Her relatively dormant social life meant there was little in either landline or mobile calls to get excited about. Across the three months that White had got hold of – from 28 July to 28 October – he’d gone to the effort of attributing each number to a name, listing who Korin had contacted, or been contacted by. The issue wasn’t really his level of care, more the lack of activity on the phone, something that was also true of her emails. My hope had to be that Spike’s more extensive background search – and the fact that he was going back six months instead of White’s three – might bring me something extra.

The most obvious person missing from the phone records was her sister, and that was down to the fact that the two of them used WhatsApp. White had gained access to Wendy’s mobile and exported the history of WhatsApp conversations between them, but the news they shared was routine: what Wendy’s kids – both in their thirties, one single, one married with children – were up to, or what fruit she was growing in her garden; messages from Korin about what books she was reading, her job, yoga classes. It was only at the end that something stopped me. The last ever message Korin sent to her sister.

Love you so much, Wendy.

You have always been the

best sister anyone could

have x

Given the fact that she’d driven to Stoke Point the next day and vanished off the face of the earth, the words felt especially prescient. There were all sorts of reasons to believe
she
hadn’t
committed suicide – the lack of a body being the major one – but there were, equally, major reasons to believe she might be dead: no activity on her mobile for the ten months she’d been missing; her purse and credit cards left in the car, and – according to bank statements that White had included later on in the file – no attempt to withdraw any money or apply for any other cards. As well as that, she’d had no contact with her sister at all, a woman she’d never failed to keep in touch with for the entire time she’d been in Europe.

I sat back, looking out at the garden. Beyond the birdsong and the faint sound of traffic, I could hear the thump of distant music. But most of it hardly registered with me. I was too busy trying to make sense of what I’d read so far: that a woman, without any clear motivation for doing so, had driven herself to an isolated beauty spot, left her purse and her mobile phone in the car, tossed her keys into some nearby scrub – and proceeded to vanish into nothing.

No cameras. No witnesses.

No trace of her anywhere.

7

The video call with Wendy Fisher began just after eight o’clock.

It was the first time I’d seen her in person and, as I took her in, I instantly saw echoes of her sister. They had the same cheekbones, the same eyes, the same mouth. Elsewhere, though, the differences were obvious. It wasn’t just the fact that Wendy was brunette, her hair cut short, styled slightly boyishly around her ears and jaw, or that she was overweight, her upper arms thick beneath a cardigan, her belly gathered under an oversized T-shirt like the folds of a curtain. It wasn’t her slightly old-fashioned glasses either, although all of those things added to the general picture. It was the way she carried herself, the sadness in her face, the way age and worry and sorrow clung to her, all of it evident even through the pixelated, jumpy quality of the video feed. She may have been five years younger than Lynda, but it was hard to believe it.

She was sitting in a living room, photos on a mantelpiece behind her, one side of her face painted brighter by daylight coming through an unseen window. The first thing she did was to apologize in case the connection played up, telling me they’d been having problems with it for a couple of months, but I told her not to worry and gently steered the conversation around to the weeks leading up to her sister’s disappearance.

I asked, ‘You never noticed anything out of the ordinary in
her messages during the last few weeks before she vanished? I’ve managed to get hold of Lynda’s missing persons report, and have been through the messages myself – but maybe you got a sense from what she wrote that something was bothering her?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I really didn’t. Believe me, David, no one’s looked back through our conversations more times than me. I spent the first month after she went missing poring over every message, trying to find some hidden meaning in them.’

I flicked back to notes I’d made earlier. ‘The last message that Lynda sent you read, “Love you so much, Wendy. You have always been the best sister anyone could have.” She sent you that the day before she vanished.’

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘It sounds like a goodbye.’

‘Right.’ Wendy paused, a sigh crackling in the microphone of her laptop. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally, her voice flat, a little sombre now. ‘I suppose, in retrospect, it
was
a goodbye. And maybe I should have seen it for what it was at the time – but it just never really occurred to me then.’

‘What do you mean, “seen it for what it was”?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said again, ‘it’s just that Lyn has never been terrific at showing her emotions. She’s like Mom used to be. Mom was brought up on the plains of North Dakota, freezing her butt off all winter, hunting for food, peeing in a hole in the ground. She was loving in her own way, but she was tough. My dad, he was different. I was more like him. Lyn and I, we loved each other, we really did. But we just expressed it differently. I’d tell her I loved her and missed her all the time; she’d tell me how a book she was reading reminded her of the house we’d grown up in. That was how
she expressed what she felt – these slightly abstract, throwaway comments. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t cold – far from it, actually; most of the time she was the life and soul of the party – it was just she was so rarely willing to let her guard down, even with me. If she felt she was being led somewhere she didn’t want to go, she’d stop dead.’

The implication was that Korin was fun, she was good company, she was gregarious and open with her sister, and presumably others too – but only with regard to things she
wanted
to be open about. That wasn’t particularly abnormal: a lot of people were like that, especially missing people, because when they went missing, they did so having buried secrets no one ever knew they were keeping.

‘So what did you think when you received that message?’ I asked.

‘I was surprised, touched. You said you’ve got all the messages we sent to one another there, so you can see for yourself. She didn’t send many like that. That’s what I meant when I said I should have seen it for what it was. The second it came through, I should have thought, “This is weird. She never sends me messages like this.” But I didn’t. I read it and it made me feel happy, and that was enough.’

‘Would you say Lynda had many good friends?’

Her image pixelated slightly as she said, ‘She had friends, of course – lots of those. But
good
friends, people she’d open up to and share things with? I doubt she had many in England. In a weird way, I think she preferred it like that.’

‘Why?’

‘Lyn just wasn’t built like that. She was always fine in her own company. She didn’t need to be in a crowd to feel comfortable. Plus, it wasn’t like she was a recluse or something. She went out, had dinner with acquaintances; when we
WhatsApped or Skyped, she’d tell me about a book club she went to, yoga classes – all sorts of things. It sounded to me like she had an active social life and she had plenty of people she knew, but I’d be surprised if any of them actually
knew
her.’