Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  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.

  The pillbox was just a shell: a circular concrete shelter half consumed by the long grass of the headland, with a window that looked out over the water. Its flat roof – slabs of moss-dotted concrete – sat unevenly on top, its walls yellowed by age, pockmarked and coarse. If I’d had any thoughts about it being part of Korin’s escape plan – or someone else’s escape plan for Korin – I soon let it go. Once, this had been the last line of defence between Hitler and the shores of Britain; now it was just a decaying ring of stone that kids used for hide-and-seek.

  I continued my way along the path. The further I went, the harder it got to hear anything above the wind. The squawk of seagulls faded out, the soft wash of the sea too. Either side of me, the grass slanted away to the gravel and rocks that I’d seen on my approach, a grey stone beach that traced the circumference of the entire peninsula. Every time a gust jagged in, it almost knocked me off balance and I could feel the hardness of the ground beneath my feet. With the wind so brisk, with it still being so early, it was easy to forget that everywhere had been baked by the sun for months.

  Within moments, the end of Stoke Point came into view, the tip of the headland marked by a signpost with writing on it. There was nothing else between me and it, just an ocean of undulating grass, jagged pockets of gorse, and knotted, ragged brambles. It was wild and bleak, but empty and featureless. There was no case-breaking piece of evidence on this finger of land. No smoking gun. The only thing this journey had reinforced was how untamed and isolated it all was out here; how, once you got on to the headland, the only way you got back off again was the way you’d come in. That made it the perfect place to disappear from if you were able to disguise your exit.

  I headed back, windburn in my cheeks, sweat at the arc of my hairline, and climbed the steps up to the car park. Behind me, out in the Channel, the sun continued its ascent, changing the light on the peninsula again. There was an almost sepia quality to it, the headland bathed in its glow, the grass burnt orange like every blade had caught fire. In the car park, though – as I made my way back into the ring of trees – it was different. Shadows had formed and grown.

  On the far side, the man who’d greeted me forty-five minutes ago was wearing a pair of gardening gloves and sweeping dead leaves into a pile next to the cabin. As he did, the wind picked up again, funnelling into the car park from the entrances at either end. Branches swayed around me. Foliage snapped. Shadows seemed to shift and twist as sunlight flickered through gaps in the canopy.

  I got back to the car and grabbed some printouts I’d made of Lynda Korin’s file. I flicked through to the official police investigation, to descriptions of how her purse and mobile phone had been found in the glove compartment, and her keys in the scrub beyond the vehicle. Looking out again at the lonely spaces around me, I watched trees lurch and roll in the breeze, and the shadows adjust again.

  Gradually, everything settled.

  Refocusing my attention on the paperwork, I zeroed in on a photograph of Korin’s keys in situ, discarded in the grass. A computer illustration showed their exact position in relation to the car park.

  It was
off to my left, beyond a bank of long grass.

  It was time to take a closer look.

  9

  With the file still in my hands, I passed through grass and into a tight nest of windswept alders, their branches crooked and gnarled. Sunlight dappled the dried mud at my feet, flickering into life and then disappearing again, and I followed the diagram to a spot where the even ground began sloping away, down to the peninsula.

  It was colder under the foliage, the light hazier and greyer, and as I bent down at the location where the keys had been found – in a knot of roots at the foot of one of the alders – I found a blanket of discarded junk: a few old, rusted drink cans; some plastic sandwich wrappers; a crisp packet rinsed white over time.

  I stayed where I was and reread the portion of the file dealing with the discovery of the keys, then looked at my surroundings again. The spot was maybe sixteen or seventeen feet back from the edge of the car park – the edge of the car park being the point at which its tarmac gave way to grass and trees. It was hard to appreciate it on the diagram in the file, but sixteen or seventeen feet made for a hell of a throw. I could see that now, standing where I was. It wasn’t beyond the capabilities of Lynda Korin – it wasn’t beyond the capabilities of any adult – but it was still a long way. If something about that bothered me, it didn’t bother me as much as the place the keys were discovered, in among the drink cans and sandwich wrappers at the roots of the alder.

  As I’d approached, I hadn’t even been able to see the base of the tree, the point at which the roots were exposed and created a kind of natural pocket – and that was because, on a direct path from the car park, the roots were on the north-east side of it: the opposite side. They were all but hidden from view. The alder’s roots faced in the direction of the Bristol Channel, not the car park.

  Just to be sure, I returned along the path I’d come in on, and then walked it again, trying to keep the roots of the tree in view the whole time. It was impossible. A couple of times I caught sight of them as the path snaked right to left, but mostly the roots remained completely out of sight until I was right on the alder itself.

  I paused there, file in hand, trying to take it all in.

  DC White had proposed that Korin – or, if not her, someone else – had thrown the keys away. But if that was what had happened, I was being asked to believe that whoever had done so had not only thrown them that distance, but got incredibly lucky with where the keys had landed. It was certainly possible that it had played out like that. But it was equally possible that there was no luck involved at all. It was possible that a spot had been chosen and the keys had been placed there on purpose.

  Crouching down at the foot of the tree, I looked around again, turning that same theory over in my head – that the location of the keys was too far from the edge of the car park, and too well hidden in the roots, to have been a fluke.

  Question is, why would someone place them in this spot?

  I glanced at the alder, and then at the one next to it.

  The second tree was the thickest and biggest on this side of the car park, and its trunk was dotted with the scars of a hundred bored teenagers. All down the grey bark, kids had carved names into it, hearts, indecipherable graffiti that meant nothing. The same graffiti was in the background of the photograph of the keys in situ. As I thought of that, I opened up the file again and compared that shot to the view I had of the roots now. I looked from the photograph to the trees, to the file, and then back to the trees again.

  Everything looked exactly the same.

  I stood up and stepped across to the second alder, to its graffiti scars, twigs cracking beneath my feet, leaves vibrating as wind passed through them. Studying the hundreds of grooves and rifts made by knives and sharp-edged stones, my gaze eventually fell upon a small engraving, only a couple of inches high, about a third of the way up. It was easy to miss, almost hidden among everything else around it – but something immediately registered with me.

  It was a film projector.

  I double-checked the photograph in the file and saw that the engraving had already been there when the keys were found in November. So was it just a fluke? Could it really be a coincidence that a film projector had been carved into a tree, feet from where a former actress had last been seen, inches from where her keys were discovered?

  I looked at the words to its right: Lake Calhoun.

  Unsure where that was, I immediately headed back to the car, grabbed my phone and put in a search for it.

  As soon as I looked at the first hit – a Wikipedia article – a charge of adrenalin grabbed me. I scrolled down, looking for more in the way of corroboration, and saw the same thing confirmed over and over.

  Lake Calhoun was a four-hundred-acre body of water, south-west of Lakeville.

  The city in which Wendy Fisher lived.

  And the place in which Lynda Korin had grown up.

  10

  It was 7.50 a.m. in the UK, making it 1.50 a.m. in Minnesota, so Wendy was either asleep or at work. I fired off an email to her, remembering how her job as a nurse made it hard for her to take calls on the run, and told her I needed to speak to her as soon as possible. I wanted to know why the name of a lake – a lake local to her and her sister as children – might be carved into a tree, just feet from where Lynda Korin’s keys had been found; and I wanted to know why a film projector had been scratched into the bark next to it.

  As I thought of the projector, I thought again of the interview with Korin in Cine magazine, and grabbed my laptop off the back seat. I’d downloaded the digital edition of the issue the previous night but hadn’t had a chance to read it yet. I’d been up too early, the article was too long and dense to do on a quick run-through, and I didn’t want to miss anything. I’d planned to go through it once I got back to London. For now I just did a keyword search, hunting the PDF for any mention of Lake Calhoun. There were no matches.

  Returning to Google on my phone, I tried to use the lake as a jumping-off point for stories that might be related to it – crimes, disappearances, things connected to Korin in some way – but there was nothing. Moments later, I noticed that the man at the gate was finishing up, his trousers hitched with a bicycle clip, the cabin beside him padlocked.

  I started up the BMW and headed over.

  As I got to him, I wound down my window. In my rear-view mirror, I glanced back at the place where I’d found the inscription, and then to the top of the steps that led back down to the peninsula. The wind had calmed a little, and I could see the sun above the trees, a white disc against a flawless blue sky.

  ‘You leaving already?’ the guy said to me.

  ‘I’m afraid so. This is the only way in and out of here, right?’

  He frowned, looking towards the bridge binding the car park to the mainland, as if it might be a trick question. ‘Yeah,’ he said, frown still lingering, ‘it’s the only way in and out.’

  I glanced again at my rear-view mirror.

  ‘Do people ever moor boats off the peninsula?’

  ‘Moor them where, exactly?’

  ‘I didn’t see a jetty.’

  The frown stayed. ‘That’s ’cos there ain’t one.’

  Clearly, he’d marked me out as some sort of crackpot, so I tried to move the conversation on.

  ‘I heard a woman disappeared from here last October.’

  He seemed puzzled by the change of direction, but then his expression softened. ‘Tragic,’ he said. ‘I was the one that called the police about it.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yeah. I told them she must have abandoned her car here.’

  ‘That makes you Len Fordyce, right?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘My name’s David Raker,’ I said to him, offering him my hand, attempting to put him at ease. ‘I’ve been asked to try and find out how the lady disappeared.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and we shook hands. ‘You a copper or something?’

 
; ‘More like an Or Something. I work for myself.’

  ‘Like a private investigator?’

  I gave him a business card and manoeuvred us back to Lynda Korin. ‘So, you check on this place – what? – three times a week, is that right?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m not always here to open up at the start of the day like this, though. Sometimes I get here last thing at night, or at lunchtime. That’s why the gate’s on a timer – if I’m not here at this hour, it opens automatically five minutes after sunrise, and then closes again thirty minutes after dark. If your car gets stuck, tough luck. We warn people about it.’ He gestured to the board on the cabin. ‘It don’t really matter when I come, as long as I make sure everything’s in order when I get here. To be honest with you, I never even realized she’d left her car here permanently – abandoned it, I mean – until quite a while after.’

  I nodded, looking back at the car park.

  ‘Nice lady, that one.’

  Instantly, I tuned back in again. ‘What was that?’

  ‘She came here a few times, is all.’

  ‘You mean, before she disappeared?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘I saw her maybe five, six times.’

  ‘Did you tell the police that?’

  ‘Yeah, course I did.’

  But that piece of information hadn’t been in DC White’s missing persons report. Why? Perhaps because he didn’t think it was important. Perhaps because it wasn’t important. She’d been here before – so what? Because it meant she knew this place – or had got to know it. Or it meant she’d returned for some other reason.