Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  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.’

  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 intervi
ew 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.