Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  However, it didn’t take much imagination to envision what it might once have been like; how an immaculate garden at the back of a beautiful cottage, with the still of the countryside and sweeping views of the valley, would transform it all. I began to understand why Korin hadn’t left this place, even after Hosterlitz had died.

  My gaze finally settled on the far corner of the garden. Sitting there in a sea of grass was the shed that Marc Collinsky had described to me. As he’d said himself, the word ‘shed’ didn’t really do it justice. It was a garden room, hexagonal in shape, with a slate-tiled roof and three windows at the front.

  I moved through the grass and stepped up to its windows. Collinsky had described it as a dumping ground when he came out here. But whatever Collinsky had seen inside, however messy it had been in October, it wasn’t now.

  It had been cleared out.

  I removed my picks and went to work on the lock and, twenty seconds later, the door sprang out from its frame. Inside, the building was about ten feet in diameter, but felt bigger because it was empty. I could see where shelves had once been screwed into the walls, and scratches on the floor where a table, or a workbench, had stood before being moved. On another wall panel there was the echo of a tool rack, the outlines of hammers and wrenches left behind. In specks of red, I saw where paint pots had once been stacked.

  The only one of the garden room’s six walls that didn’t appear to have any kind of history was one at the back and to the left. There was no indication of shelves having been screwed into it, no hint of what had once hung there. Instead, the wall panel had been given a fresh lick of paint, the same soft grey as the other walls in the shed, but clearly added more recently. Its surface was smooth and unblemished, and because the garden room had been closed up for so long, the vague whiff of paint still lingered. In Korin’s financials, there had been nothing to support the idea of a sale, no chunks of money coming into her account to indicate that she’d got rid of everything before she vanished. So where did the contents go? I looked back at the freshly painted wall panel. And why only paint this one? Did she start but not get the chance to finish it?

  Or had she been trying to cover something up?

  On my keyring was a penknife. I selected it, popped the blade out and gently tried to scrape away at the top layer of paint, trying to get at what might be underneath. I didn’t expect it to work and I wasn’t disappointed. Paint came off easily enough, but even when I barely applied any pressure to the knife, all I ended up doing was picking through to the wood below.

  Painting just the one panel didn’t necessarily mean she was trying to cover something up. I knew that.

  Yet something didn’t feel right.

  Grabbing my phone, I went to my inbox and drafted an email to Collinsky, asking him about his recollection of this room: what he saw, what had been kept here, whether he remembered if one of the panels had been painted recently. That last question was a long shot, but I took a series of pictures of the room anyway, and then messaged them all across to him, hoping one of them might jog his memory.

  After that, I headed to the house.

  25

  I made my way through the long grass, up on to the patio. To the left of the house were two windows, side by side, looking in at different ends of the kitchen. It was long but narrow, and finished in a farmhouse style. On the wall was a clock that had come to a halt at two forty-two.

  Moving across to the French doors, I could make out a second living room, bigger than the one at the front, and decorated more attractively. Sun poured in through a window at the side, revealing leather sofas and cane furniture laid out across white wood floors. Built around the window was a made-to-measure shelving system, a TV sitting inside it, a DVD player, countless books and films. There were ornaments too, trinkets, photos.

  I went to work on the French doors with the pick, eventually managing to pop the lock, and then pulled one of them open. I paused for a moment, just in case there was an alarm and I’d missed it, then stepped into the house. Like the garden room, weeks of sun had baked the interior, dust barely moving, the air stagnant.

  I tried the light switch closest to me, but nothing happened. There was no hum from the refrigerator in the kitchen, no buzz from the TV or a slim decoder tucked away in a space beneath it. The electrics had obviously been turned off.

  Moving through to the kitchen, I opened up the fridge, expecting to be hit by the stench of long-expired food. Instead, I found it had been cleaned out. When I checked the freezer, it was the same – defrosted and completely spotless.

  After that, I started going through the cupboards. They were mostly full of cutlery and kitchen equipment, but when I came across food it was tinned or in packets, and had been left tidy: lined up, or stacked two or three deep, or – if it was dry food – decanted into separate, sealed containers. I opened up the oven and could see it had been cleaned. The inside of the microwave smelled of disinfectant. It was like some sort of show home – pristine and flawless.

  As I went through the rest of the house, I found it in a similar state and could only really think of two reasons why. The first was that Korin had tidied the house before driving out to Stoke Point, knowing she wasn’t coming back. Maybe that was why DC White eventually let the case drift: because he thought that all of this, the neatness, pointed to Korin disappearing on purpose – coming up with a plan, executing it perfectly. People had the right to go missing. There was no crime in that.

  Or there was another, more disturbing reason it was so clean: someone else was trying to disguise their part in whatever had gone on. I thought again of the cop Veronica Mae had referred to, and then headed upstairs.

  It was in exactly the same condition. Two bedrooms, as well as Korin’s, and then a separate bathroom, all orderly and uncluttered. Sinks had been cleaned, bath, toilets, shower. There was an attic as well, accessed via a ten-step staircase on the landing. It was light and airy, the ceilings high, its four windows facing out in four different directions. Some old boxes filled with junk had been stacked against one of the walls: musty clothes, blankets, books, a broken record player, a cracked wristwatch. As I looked through them, I remembered pictures of the boxes, of the attic, of all the rooms in the house, in White’s official report. But then my attention switched again: right at the bottom of the last box, just as I was about to close it, I found a scrapbook, water-wrinkled and laced with cobwebs.

  Inside were photographs of Robert Hosterlitz.

  There were no dates anywhere, but as I started to flick through the first few pages, it was relatively easy to get an idea of when the pictures were taken.

  One was a faded black and white shot of him outside a cinema in Los Angeles, the RKO Pantages, the marquee overhead announcing it as the location of the 26th Annual Academy Awards. Dressed in a tuxedo, smiling, clean-cut but a little overweight, he was holding an Oscar in each hand. I figured this must be his Best Director and Best Picture wins for The Eyes of the Night, which meant the photograph was taken in March 1954. There were others dotted around it: a picture of him and Barbara Stanwyck, smiling for the camera, on the set of Only When You’re Dead in 1952; one of him arched over a typewriter in a small office at what I assumed was the American Kingdom studio lot in LA; and him perched on a wall at Victoria Embankment, cigarette in hand, looking towards Big Ben. At the bottom it was stamped Wick Films, 1957, making this a publicity still, taken by Wick, the UK production company he’d signed with after fleeing America. He looked good: handsome, slimmer. At the time, he probably saw this as a new dawn for himself. In reality, it was the beginning of the end.

  Then, five pages in, something unexpected happened: Hosterlitz suddenly vanished from the scrapbook entirely, and was replaced by hundreds of shots of Lynda Korin. There were photographs of her everywhere, crammed into every available space – haphazardly, untidily. Despite that, there seemed to be a vague chronology, starting when she was in her mid twenties – which put it at about the time she’d first g
ot together with Hosterlitz – and carrying on into her mid thirties, which would have been around 1988, when he’d died. It made me wonder whether he might have taken these, and not just because the decade-long time frame of the shots fitted the ten-year period the two of them were married. It was also because they seemed to echo the films I’d seen the night before. He was fascinated with her in the same way.

  Every single picture was perfectly framed, the lighting exemplary, her skin flawless, her eyes such a deep, resonant blue they seemed to come alive in front of me. Every time I turned a page, there was another shot of her; occasionally, there were so many of them on a single sheet of the scrapbook that they overlapped each other or had begun to come loose. Then, halfway in, three of them cascaded out from a page towards the back, the glue long since dried out, and scattered across the floor of the attic.

  I picked them up.

  Except these weren’t of Korin at all.

  Instead, they were pictures of an intricately carved angel, perhaps eight inches high and made from wood, hands together in prayer, its head bowed. As I flicked forward in the scrapbook, I found more at the very back: two pages of the same angel, shot from different angles and distances. It was hard to tell where they’d been taken, although the angel was sitting on the same table throughout.

  I checked back, making sure I hadn’t missed anything similar, but it was just the countless pictures of Korin. Returning to the rear of the scrapbook, I counted up the shots of the angel. There were twenty-one of them.

  Confused, I returned to the three photos that had come loose, zeroing in on the one that provided the clearest, front-on close-up of the angel. The wood had been carved to make it look like the figure was wearing a long, flowing gown, and its face was minutely detailed, its eyes closed, nose and lips visible. On its neck, I noticed a mark had been made in black felt tip. It was a crucifix.

  Someone had drawn it on.

  Wondering if it was Hosterlitz or Korin who had taken the photographs of the angel, and whether one of them had added the cross – or someone else entirely – I suddenly recalled what Hosterlitz had said to Korin: You are an angel. I think you are the most beautiful woman I’ve met in my life. You’re a work of art. Was his choice of words just a coincidence? Or was there a connection between what he’d said and the photographs I had here?

  Unable to decide for certain, I set aside one picture of the angel, slid the rest of them into the scrapbook and returned everything to the box again.

  By the time I got back downstairs, though, a vague air of familiarity had started to eat at me. I began wondering if I’d seen the angel somewhere before. I searched the house for a second time, ending up in the living room I’d started out in, where the shelves were dotted with ornaments and keepsakes.

  But there was no angel.

  I headed back to the car and fished out White’s file, going back over his account of when he’d taken a look at this place himself. It was short and sweet, which was why I’d failed to recall much about it:

  Nothing of note at house. Three-bedroom cottage, attic, two living rooms – one large, one small. House clean.

  The first time I’d been through it, I thought he meant the house was clean, as in clean of any evidence. But now I was starting to think he probably meant it was literally clean. Spotless. Wiped down. That meant the house had been this way when White had come to take a look at it two weeks after Korin vanished. Knowing that for certain didn’t make much difference: there was still no telling whether Korin herself had cleaned the house down in the days before she disappeared, or if someone else had come back and done it before White arrived on 11 November. Both made me uneasy.

  I lingered on the file for a moment, going through the pictures White had taken of the house himself, and a few others he must have found here in frames and in drawers and then added to the report. I’d looked at them all before, many times over, but I went over them again.

  There was one of Korin in her early fifties at some kind of fete, smiling for the camera next to a bunch of older people, presumably from the local village. Another of her with the ladies of the book club she attended, and a third of her in the living room – she was standing at the doors, the garden visible behind her, shelves to the left of her, smiling for the camera. Wendy had also sent me the same picture.

  I moved on. White had taken shots of all the rooms, and also a few top-down pictures of the storage boxes in the attic. Did that mean he’d looked inside the scrapbook? What had he made of it? I could phone him and try to find out, but it was safe to assume that he’d made little of it, because there was no mention in his investigation of how Hosterlitz had photographed Korin over and over, or of the weird, repeated shots of the angel in the –

  I stopped.

  Wait a second.

  I flipped back to the photograph of Korin in her living room. It must have been taken recently, because she looked in her early sixties. But it wasn’t that.

  It was something on the shelves beside her.

  Getting out of the car again, I returned to the house and made a beeline for a shelf full of DVDs, perched above the television. They were all Hosterlitz’s films. His noirs. His western. The horror films that were still available to buy in English. They were stacked horizontally now, one on top of the other – but in the photograph of Korin with the shelves, they’d been stacked vertically.

  They’ve all been moved.

  I slid out one of the cases and opened it up. It was empty. When I tried the next one along, it was exactly the same. I tried some more and found the discs missing from all the cases. Every single Hosterlitz film had been removed.

  But that wasn’t the only thing.

  In the photograph of Korin, an ornament had been sitting at the end of the shelf to the left of her shoulder, almost acting as a bookend for the DVD cases.

  It had been the wooden angel.

  Now that was gone too.

  26

  I took a step back from the shelf.

  Had Korin taken the wooden angel and Hosterlitz’s films with her? They were there in the shot that Wendy had sent me, the one White also had in the file, and the picture couldn’t have been more than twelve months old. But why take the angel? Why take the films?

  Unless she didn’t take them at all.

  Someone else did.

  I thought again of the police officer that Veronica Mae had described, a man who hadn’t identified himself but had come asking questions about Lynda Korin. Was it him? Why did the films and the wooden angel matter?

  I headed outside into the long grass, trying to think, the sun immediately beating against my back. As I looked across the valley, the lake winking under the heat of the day, I closed my eyes, listening to the far-off drone of a plane passing high above me. When I couldn’t come up with anything, I returned to the doors of the living room and looked inside, back to the shelf that had been next to Korin in the photograph. Instantly, something else registered with me there.

  A six-inch-by-four-inch photograph in a silver picture frame.

  My gaze had passed it countless times as I’d searched the room earlier, but it was only now, looking at the frame from outside rather than inside, that I could see something on it: a series of marks, like fingerprints, dotted across the rear of the frame, where someone had been holding it. The marks were grey.

  I looked across at the garden room.

  Grey – like paint.

  I reached in and picked up the frame. It was paint. Someone had come in here and handled the photo frame while they’d still had paint on their hands.

  But then my attention switched again.

  Inside the frame was a photograph of Korin and Hosterlitz. They looked younger than in the Polaroid that Veronica Mae had taken, Hosterlitz especially, and were on the fringes of a shore. It was a bright summer’s day, both of them in shorts, Korin with sunglasses perched on top of her head. As I took that in, I thought back to something Wendy Fisher had told me, about how Hosterlitz had
only been out to Minneapolis with Korin twice – once in the summer of 1979, once for Christmas 1984 – and then my eyes settled on the corner of the shot. There was a wooden sign next to them.

  It said: 32nd Street Beach – Lake Calhoun.

  A charge of adrenalin almost knocked me off balance. Quickly, I turned the photo frame over, pushed the catches open and removed the back section. Inside, a piece of brown cardboard had been used to keep the photo in place and to fill the quarter-inch gap between the back of the frame and the glass. I took out the cardboard, set it aside and grabbed the picture. There was nothing inside the frame except the photograph. I ran my fingers beneath the edges of the interior, just to make sure, but all I found was dust.

  Pausing there, I looked at the frame again, at the same grey paint that was on the garden-room wall, and then finally at the photograph of Lynda Korin and her husband at Lake Calhoun. What had I been hoping to find? A suicide note? A confession? Some damning piece of evidence? Frustrated, feeling a little foolish, I started to put the thing back together again, my eyes straying from the picture to the frame – and then finally to the piece of cardboard I’d set aside.

  I turned the cardboard over.

  Taped to the back of it was a key.

  27

  I ripped the key away from the cardboard.

  It was for a meter box.

  Heading outside, into the garden, I hurried across the lawn to the side of the house and found it next to the utility-room door: a white box, at ankle level, with a slanted lid. Kneeling, I used the key on the lock, twisted it and hoisted the lid up. Inside was a gas meter, encased in reinforced plastic. Cobwebs formed a fine grey blanket across everything, but when I pushed them aside, I saw something underneath. Roughly the size of a brick, it had been wedged into the space between the bottom of the meter and the edge of the box, and was wrapped in black plastic.