Broken Heart (6 page)

I thought of the file I’d been through, the evidence of a lack of good friendships, of people she’d shared her life with. Maybe it
was
a consequence of never quite being able to let herself go – or maybe it was more deliberate than that; something more premeditated. Maybe she didn’t give anything away, not because she was incapable of doing so, but because she had a reason not to.

I changed tack. ‘You said your sister’s an accountant?’

‘Correct.’

‘But that’s her second – actually, third – career, right? I found out this afternoon that she did some modelling – and some acting too.’

‘Oh, sure. But that was way back.’

‘In the seventies and eighties?’

‘Well, the seventies and early eighties. She went to Europe in 1971 because she got offered some modelling jobs out there – and then she ended up staying. After that, she got into the movies – but not real well-known ones. They were, like …’ She paused, grimaced slightly, clearly searching for a way to describe her sister’s films in the most respectful way possible. ‘They were kind of low budget. Horror movies, really. That was where she met Bob, her husband. He directed them all.’

‘That’s Robert Hosterlitz?’

‘Right. Have you heard of him?’

‘I have, yeah. She didn’t take his name when they got married?’

‘No. Korin is our family name. She’d built a modelling career with that surname, so it was just easier to keep it. Anyway, like I said, Bob was a director. Back in the fifties, he won a bunch of Oscars. In his day, he was a pretty big deal, but by the time we met him …’ She stopped again; a sad smile. ‘Well, he wasn’t … Not any more.’

‘Did you ever see any of Lynda’s films?’

‘One or two, but not many. They weren’t really my thing. I supported her in what she did, because she was my sister, but I didn’t necessarily like what she was doing – you know, taking her clothes off, pretending to have sex on camera, that sort of thing.’

I paused to check my notes. ‘After Robert died, did Lynda ever have any other relationships?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘None?’

‘Not that I knew about.’

‘Would she have told you if she had?’

‘Yeah, I think so. I mean, why conceal it?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe she thought you wouldn’t approve.’

Wendy smiled. ‘Lynda’s a big girl. I’d love to think that I hold that level of influence over her, but the reality is she’s older than me, more independent than me, and wouldn’t
not
do something just because I said that I didn’t like it.’

‘So, as far as you know, she’s been single since 1988?’

‘As far as I know. She may have been out on a few dates or whatever, but she’s never had another relationship.’

I nodded. ‘Okay. Why do you think she decided to stay in the UK?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you’re her only family, she’s originally from the US, you said yourself she didn’t really have any close friends,
and that’s certainly borne out in what I’ve seen and heard so far. So why not move back to the States with you?’

‘She liked England.’

‘You think that’s all it came down to?’

‘Have you seen the place she owns?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘It’s right on the top of a hill with stunning views across this big lake, and it’s where she made a home with Bob. She was devastated after he died – totally and utterly broken. I’d never seen her like that in my life, even after Mom and Dad went on. Maybe she just didn’t want to sever her final connection with him.’

I chewed on that for a moment. It was clear her decade with Hosterlitz had cast a long shadow, even almost thirty years on. Korin loved him, missed him, perhaps never got over him. It was becoming easier to understand why she may have chosen to remain single.

‘I’m going to let you go now, Wendy.’

‘Oh, okay. Have you got all you need?’

‘For now, yeah.’

‘If you need anything else, absolutely anything else at all, please get in touch. My hours are all over the place this week, and at the hospital I tend to keep my cell on silent because the bosses don’t like our phones going off on the wards – but I can sneak a look at texts or emails easily enough.’

‘Okay, I’ll do that. I do have one last question, though.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ve just sent you a screenshot of a picture I found in the missing persons report. It’s of Lynda.’ I glanced to the left of the video window, where I had the picture open. ‘It looks vaguely professional to me. Could you take a look at it?’

‘Now?’

‘If you can.’

She leaned closer to the laptop and started using her computer to access her email. While she did, I wrote up a couple of notes, trying to condense my thinking. I heard Wendy muttering to herself, her mouse clicking, and then – a few moments later – she said, ‘Right, here we are,’ and leaned back again.

‘Have you got the picture there?’

She squinted slightly, her eyes magnified behind the lenses of the glasses, and then her face became a mishmash of tiny squares, the connection unable to follow her movements exactly. ‘Yeah.’ Her accent made it sound more like
yah
. She leaned in again. ‘Oh,
this
. Yeah, I gave the police this one. She looks so beautiful.’

‘Did you take it yourself?’

‘Oh, no. No way. It was from that magazine she talked to.’

‘Magazine?’

‘Yeah, they took it for the article.’

‘Which magazine is this?’

‘Uh …
Cine
.
Cine
magazine.’

‘The film magazine?’

‘Right. That’s right.’

‘What did she do with them?’

‘Um … it was an article about Bob, I think, like a celebration kind of thing, because it had been sixty-something years since he made that film that won all the Oscars. This journalist went to the house to talk to her. Uh … Colsky, I think.’

‘That was the name of the journalist?’

‘I think so, yeah.’

I wrote that down.

‘When did the article come out?’

‘I think it came out in, like, November last year. We don’t get
Cine
in the US, so I’m not sure exactly. Lyn said she would send me a copy when it went on sale in England, though.’ A brief pause, a flicker of pain, visible even over the poor connection. The magazine had never arrived, just like her sister had never arrived home from Stoke Point. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, her voice a little softer, ‘I’m not sure when it came out, but I remember she did two interviews with this guy, Colsky. She did the first at the end of June last year, and the second … I don’t know, maybe a week later.’

‘Did she say it went all right?’

‘Yeah. She said it was great fun.’

A couple of minutes later, after finishing the video call with Wendy and telling her I’d be back in touch soon, I found out that the journalist Korin had talked to was a guy called Marc Collinsky, rather than Colsky. He worked as a senior staff writer for
Cine
, the UK’s biggest movie magazine. I found a profile picture of him on their website, an email address and a landline. I tried calling the landline, even though it was after 9.30 p.m., hoping he might be working publishing hours, and got lucky.

‘
Cine.
’

‘Is that Marc?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Marc, my name’s David Raker. I’m a missing persons investigator. At the moment, I’m looking into the disappearance of Lynda Korin.’

A pause on the line. ‘Disappearance?’

‘You didn’t know about that?’

‘No. What happened to her?’

‘She’s been missing since last October. I know you did an
interview with her the summer before that. I’d like to discuss it with you if I can.’ I thought about my schedule, and where best to fit him in. I needed to get down to Stoke Point as soon as possible because, without seeing it, walking it and getting a feel for it, I had no clear idea about the last place Lynda Korin had been seen. It also made sense, while I was down in Somerset, to take a look at her home on the Mendips too. That meant the whole of tomorrow was out.

‘How about Friday?’ I said.

‘I won’t be around then. I’m flying out to Berlin tomorrow evening.’

I was silent again, thinking about whether the
Cine
article mattered for now. It was hard to gauge without seeing it for myself, but from what Wendy had told me, the article was on Robert Hosterlitz and not Korin – Collinsky was just using Korin as a bridge back to her husband. That instantly made it less compelling.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘When are you back?’

‘Next Tuesday.’

‘Can we arrange something for …’ But then I paused. I’d been absent-mindedly scrolling through the back issue section of the
Cine
website, and something had caught my eye.

‘Actually, are you free tomorrow lunchtime, Marc?’

‘Uh, I can be. I fly out at six.’

‘How about I meet you outside your office at 1 p.m.?’

‘Okay. Yeah, okay, then.’

I hung up, my eyes still fixed on the same part of the website. Beneath the cover of the issue that had featured the Lynda Korin interview, there was a link to the digital edition and confirmation of the date the physical copy had gone on sale.

23 October.

That was five days before Lynda Korin disappeared.

I stared at it, mulling it over. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was just coincidence that she’d vanished so soon after her photograph had run in the magazine. Except the more I tried to support that argument, the less certain I became. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the Korin interview would have been out there on news-stands, in homes, lying around in waiting rooms and discarded on public transport. Korin, elegant and beautiful in her photograph, would have been seen by all sorts of people who’d never heard of her until then – and that worried me. It worried me because I had no way of knowing who those people might be. It worried me because five days after the world found out who she was, she was gone.

I clicked on the link for the issue and left the digital edition to download. After that, I headed straight to bed. I needed to grab some sleep while I could.

It was going to be an early start.

8

I left London at 4 a.m. and was skirting the northern fringes of Bristol at just gone 5.50. Ideally, I would have left later and stayed for the day, especially as I’d wanted to take a look at Lynda Korin’s house too – but that wasn’t going to be possible now. I needed to be back in Ealing for midday in order to meet up with Marc Collinsky at 1 p.m., so I’d just have to go to Korin’s house tomorrow. It was annoying, but there was no way around it. I definitely needed to see Stoke Point before the case got any further, but I also needed to speak to Collinsky about the interview going out in
Cine
and Korin disappearing just five days later. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t get a chance to sit down with him until Tuesday.

As I came off the motorway east of Weston-super-Mare, the sky was still dark, and it stayed that way for a while. The crawl into the wetlands of north Somerset – big, flat, open country that eventually became the ragged edges of the coastline – seemed to take for ever in the blackness, but then ten minutes from Stoke Point the light finally broke at the horizon. As the peninsula emerged from the gloom, I could see it stretching into the Bristol Channel as if it were the arm of some huge, fallen giant; minutes later, I spotted paths on the headland weaving in and out of one another like braided hair, and the waterfall of rocks bordering it, all the way around. It made me realize the impossibility of Lynda Korin coming here to commit suicide. The peninsula was too flat,
too low. She might have broken some bones making a jump, but she wouldn’t have killed herself.

She didn’t drown either. The tide was in now, but it hadn’t been the day Korin had disappeared. If she’d been depressed enough, scared enough or brave enough to make her way on to the mudflats to try to end her life, she wouldn’t have succeeded: the mud was certainly dangerous, but it would have consumed her to her knees, at worst to her waist. She’d have needed rescuing by the coastguard, but it was unlikely to have killed her – plus, she would have been seen by the lifeboat crew, by people watching from the headland. Instead, no one saw anything. There wasn’t a single witness.

The entrance to the car park was small and unremarkable. It was carved out of a thick crescent of trees on the other side of the stone bridge that Wendy had described to me. In front of the entrance was a cabin with a National Trust logo and a board screwed to it, and a half-open gate. To my surprise, there was a man inside the cabin, partly obscured behind milky glass, and a bike leaning up against it.

I pulled up at the gate and looked around. Off to my left was the one and only security camera. It was attached to a metal pole – like a street light – and focused on the entrance. I thought of the CCTV stills of Lynda Korin, of her car entering through the gate. Where had she gone from here?

‘Good morning.’

The man from the cabin was standing by my car now, a National Trust T-shirt on. He was in his early sixties, balding and bearded, with a maze of broken capillaries in his cheeks and a slight paunch. He had a smile on his face, but he made an obvious show of checking his watch and then looking at the car park beyond the trees, which was totally empty. I remembered from the police report that someone
from the Trust came to check on the car park three days a week, and that a guy called Len Fordyce had reported Korin’s car as having probably been abandoned. I looked for a name badge, but if he had one, it wasn’t on his shirt.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘You’re keen.’

I smiled. ‘I hear it’s going to be a nice day.’

‘Thirty degrees,’ the guy told me in a broad West Country accent. ‘Anyway, make yourself at home. We close at sunset.’

He opened the gate the rest of the way, and I headed in and parked up.

A set of concrete steps – buried among oak trees thick with leaves – led from the far end of the car park, thirty feet down the slope of a bank, to the peninsula.

The tide was in, the mudflats obscured. As I got to the bottom of the steps, the light improving the whole time, I looked out at the Bristol Channel flanking me on both sides. The grey water was streaked with coils of brown silt, like snakes twisting beneath the surface, and the sea was being hacked at by the wind, churned up, rolled. The air was noticeably cooler here compared to the car park, even though, above the crest of Steep Holm – an island five miles offshore – the arc of the sun was now above the horizon, the sky an incredible prism of pink and orange and claret. As I started along the headland, in the direction of a Second World War pillbox on the left, a series of gusts ripped in, making it hard to maintain a straight line along the path. It made me wonder what this place had been like the morning Korin had come here.
Colder, the wind probably even worse.
It had been the end of October then.