by Tim Weaver
Setting aside thoughts of Walker for the time being, I reached into the back seat, removed my pad and all the files I’d collected over the past few days, and started leafing through them again. It didn’t take long before I returned to Glen Cramer, to my short-hand version of the interview, rereading the same things in the same order, and turning them over in my head. Pretty soon after, I hit the section where he’d talked about Hosterlitz coming to his house, to the gates of his home, and my eyes came to rest on a line I’d added right at the end.
2nd time – December WHEN??
It referred to the second and last time Cramer had seen Hosterlitz. The first time had been on the Paramount lot in 1966, when Cramer had been filming Saints of Manhattan and Hosterlitz had returned to make The Ghost of the Plains. The second time, according to Cramer, had been December in some unspecified year.
I flipped back in my pad, all the way to notes I’d made while speaking to Wendy Fisher on video call, and then drew my laptop towards me, loading up a full interview transcription I’d typed up. I started going through it line by line. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for.
WENDY: I remember when Lyn and Bob came out to us one year … Jeez, this must have been Christmas 1984. Anyway, they stayed for a few nights, Christmas Day, and then Bob gets up on the twenty-sixth and just disappears for a week.
ME: Really? Where did he go?
WENDY: Northern Minnesota. Apparently, he went up to the state forests.
ME: Is that what Lynda said?
WENDY: She said he was scouting for work. I don’t know if that was true or not – I don’t even know if she really knew herself – but this was only the third time we’d ever laid eyes on him, and he couldn’t be bothered to spend more than a few days with us before driving off to wherever he thought he was going to scout for work in rural Minnesota.
Cramer had remembered how the tree outside his home had been decorated in lights the night that Hosterlitz had come to his house, and that it had been December.
So what if Hosterlitz’s scouting trip wasn’t to northern Minnesota at all?
What if he’d gone to Los Angeles instead?
I went through the interview a second time, a third time, but my attention kept returning to the same section: She said he was scouting for work. I don’t know if that was true or not – I don’t even know if she really knew herself. Was it possible that Korin genuinely didn’t know where her husband had been that week in December 1984? If that were true, why would he choose to keep it from her? Why would he make a trip to LA in the first place? Was it simply to confront Cramer?
It surely couldn’t have been to actually look for work. By that time, he’d been retired for nearly a year and was living with Korin on the Mendips. But even if he’d changed his mind about retiring, no studio would hire him, so hoping to find work of any kind was surely a wasted journey. Korin had talked about Hosterlitz starting to write again in retirement, to find happiness in it, but Cramer had never heard of ‘Ring of Roses’, and Korin had never seen as much as a partial script, so it seemed unlikely Hosterlitz had flown out to LA brandishing a finished screenplay.
Equally, it seemed an extreme course of action to fly fifteen hundred miles just to have a go at Cramer. Why bother? Was he looking for someone to blame for the demise of his career? Was it jealousy? Spite? All he’d ended up doing was embarrassing himself, and near destroying whatever affection Cramer still held for him. Perhaps, by that stage, Hosterlitz could see the end coming. He’d been given the devastating news that he had terminal cancer just weeks before he flew out to the US to see Wendy and her family, so he knew he was ill. Maybe that, combined with years of feeling victimized, the drink, the pills, the bitterness and resentment he must have felt, didn’t make it seem like an extreme reaction to him. Maybe it felt rational.
The last act in one long tragedy.
My gaze returned to the quote from Wendy Fisher – to the possibility that Korin had had no idea what Hosterlitz had been up to that week – and it made me wonder what other aspects of their marriage had been like that. What else had he kept back from her? Had she, in return, done the same to him? I thought of the conversation I’d had with Marc Collinsky, about how Korin had told him she’d never questioned Hosterlitz’s direction, even the repetition of those same, ninety-second scenes. But what if she had asked about it and he’d given her a reason, just not one that was the truth? Nothing in any piece of paper I’d read, or interview I’d done, suggested to me that they were unhappy. But if he’d lied to her about his so-called scouting trip in 1984, why not lie about other things?
Maybe he wasn’t the man Korin thought she knew.
Maybe he wasn’t a man anyone knew.
As I traced the lines of the interview for a fourth time, trying to find more of it that I could get into and prise open, I caught movement in the rear-view mirror and realized I’d become so consumed by the idea of Hosterlitz going to LA and lying to his wife that I’d shifted my attention away from the house.
Someone was coming out of the bungalow.
37
Snapping the laptop shut, I sank into my seat, eyes on the mirror. It was Egan. He came out of the front door and pulled it shut behind him, took a cursory glance out into the street, then unlocked the Mercedes. The indicators flashed twice. I caught a brief glimpse of his shaved head as he leaned forward, checking something on the dash, and saw that he was wearing the same clothes as earlier – a tan jacket, a black turtleneck. But then the shadows took him.
I’d parked close enough to the car behind me for him not to be able to see my registration plates when he passed, and far enough away from the nearest street light for the grey of my BMW to look black, silver or dark blue against the colour of night. But as he switched on his headlights and bumped off the drive, he headed towards me and then straight past without even giving me a sideways glance.
As he paused at the top of the road, indicating left, the car lit by the glow from Streatham High Road, I looked at my phone and saw the pin mirroring the movements of his vehicle. The phone was still in place, taped to the underside. He hadn’t realized it was there yet – which meant he still didn’t know I was on to him. I needed to make use of that advantage while I could. Once he was gone, I threw everything into my rucksack, swung it over my shoulders and headed down to the house.
As I approached, I saw that a gate at the side had been padlocked shut. I looked up and down the street, checking for twitching curtains, and then eyed the bay window at the front of Egan’s bungalow. The blinds were drawn and, through the mottled glass panels in the front door, there was no sign of any internal light. Checking again that there were no eyes on me, I slipped along the pathway running parallel to the house, climbed up and over the gate, and dropped down on to the other side. I paused, listening.
Everywhere was quiet.
At the back of the house was a small garden, basic, perfunctory: a two-foot brick wall hemmed in a patio full of uneven, moss-covered slabs, and a square of lawn that looked like it had recently been treated with weedkiller. There was nothing in the beds, no pots, no trellising. On one side the garden was overlooked by a bigger, two-storey house, and on the other side I could see the back of the tailor’s shop. There was no activity in the shop, which wasn’t a surprise, but the lights were on upstairs in the house next door, so I kept to the rear wall of the bungalow and tried to stay out of sight.
There were two windows and a door. The door led into the kitchen, one of the windows also giving a view of it, while a second belonged to the living room. The room was small and had one two-seater sofa in it, an open fireplace, and a television on a three-legged stool in the corner. There was no wallpaper, no pictures, no shelving. As I leaned in against the glass, I could see a DVD player as well, the wires from that and the TV snaking across the old carpet to a plug point next to the hearth. Beside the sofa were remnants from a takeaway. Otherwise, it was empty.
Egan must have been renting this sho
rt-term.
Returning to the door, I took out my picks and went to work on the lock. It was an old-fashioned tumbler, the pins full of rust, but – after a couple of failed attempts – I managed to get it open. I checked the tailor’s shop and the windows in the house next door, and then headed in.
Once I pushed the kitchen door shut again, the traffic on Streatham High Road became a dull buzz, like a dying insect, and the soft sounds of the house started to emerge: the hum of a refrigerator; the gurgle of a water pipe; an occasional, faint creak from somewhere as the house contracted in the cool of the dark. I hadn’t used the torch yet and there was enough light escaping in from the street for me to work with, so I left the kitchen and made my way into the hall.
It was short and sparse. There was paint on the walls but it had long since started to flake away, and the carpet must have been thirty years old: at the very edges it was still intact, but along the middle of the hallway, where thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of footsteps had passed back and forth, it had worn down to the weave, bits of stray thread exposed. Off the hallway, there were three doors: one into the living room, one into a bedroom, one into a small bathroom.
Pausing halfway along, I removed my phone and checked on Billy Egan’s whereabouts. The device location app put him two miles north of me, moving up Brixton Road. Pocketing the phone, I stepped into the living room, taking a closer look, but it was exactly as I’d seen it from outside: unloved, unfurnished.
The bedroom was equally small and just as sparse. There was a single bed, a fold-up wooden table being used as a place to stack toiletries, and a set of built-in wardrobes. The same carpet that was in the hallway and living room had made it in here too, thinned, dusty, frayed. I was more certain than ever that the house was only a temporary stop-off for Egan, just a roof over his head.
I went to his wardrobes. Some clothes on hangers, separated into smarter wear – suits, shirts – and more casual stuff like T-shirts and jeans. A jumble of shoes, thrown into a heap. An empty suitcase. And then a pile of old books, their covers lined and spines creased, and some DVDs. I dropped to my haunches and went through both piles, but the books were mostly fiction – horror novels, sci-fi, thrillers from the 1970s and 1980s – and the DVDs were movies that had long since been confined to bargain bins. It suggested long hours of waiting, filling his down time with books and films.
I pushed the wardrobe doors shut and looked around the bedroom again, trying to imagine what Egan’s story was. If he was renting short-term, and he was working for Zeller, did that mean he’d come from the States?
Back in the hallway, I paused again to check Egan’s location, and saw that he was at the Elephant and Castle roundabout. That was thirty minutes from here on a clear run, even if he turned around right now. But he didn’t. Instead, he continued north-west on London Road, past the South Bank University campus.
I glanced at my watch and saw that it was after 11.15 p.m., and as I did, I became aware of something in the bathroom, adjacent to where I was standing.
The door was moving slightly.
There’s a breeze coming from somewhere.
I edged closer. The bathroom was tiny, a bath on the right, a toilet in the middle alongside a basin and a mirror, and a wall decorated with neither shelves nor tiles. I stepped fully inside the bathroom and pushed the door shut behind me. The other sounds of the house – the refrigerator, the gurgle of pipes, the soft creaks – were silenced; all that remained was the faintest whistle of wind. It had been coming from directly behind the bathroom door.
Now I could see why.
There was an entrance to a cellar.
38
The padlock on the cellar door had been left unlatched.
I removed the torch from my rucksack and flicked it on. A set of polished concrete steps dropped down into darkness. Pulling the bathroom door open again, so I would be aware of any noise from the house, I double-checked Egan’s position. He was on Blackfriars Road, still heading north towards the bridge.
Squeezing behind the open bathroom door, I took a couple of steps down and stopped again. The walls of the cellar had been boarded with plywood, and a series of wires – pinned with tacks – snaked up from under the carpet and climbed towards the ceiling. The further I went, the more of the cellar I could see. It was big, maybe half the length of the house, and – like the rooms upstairs – furniture was sparse: a desk in the centre, with a brand-new iMac on it, a scanner and a printer; a big leather sofa, papers scattered across it, as if Egan had been in the middle of looking through them; a single shelf, full of ring binders. Below that was a filing cabinet.
I searched for a light switch on the walls next to me and couldn’t find one, but as I swung the beam of light around, I noticed that – beyond the desk – a felt pinboard had been screwed to the far wall. There was a map of London attached to it. A waterfall of photographs were at either side, pieces of string coming from individual pictures to points on the map, indicating where the photos had been taken. There were six of Alex Cavarno: one a repeat of the picture I’d seen inside Egan’s car of her at the Comet; three outside the AKI office near the Docklands; and two outside what I assumed was her home. There were three more of Glen Cramer as well: the one I’d seen already of him locking up his house, one of him getting into a limo, and another of him having dinner, alone, at a restaurant in Mayfair.
All nine of the pictures had been taken with a long lens. More disturbingly, on the shot of Cramer getting into the limo, and in one of Alex outside the AKI offices, targets had been drawn on to their faces with a red pen.
There were a couple of photographs of me too. One was a fuzzy picture of Alex and me, quickly taken, talking to one another in the auditorium at the Comet. It was from our first meeting, when Egan had been there at the front of the cinema, posing as an architect. The second hadn’t been tagged to a location in London. It had been taken from behind a tree, through a forest of leaves, and I was talking on my phone. I felt a flutter of alarm as I realized where I was: a few miles from Veronica Mae’s house. At the time, I’d sensed someone was watching me, even though I hadn’t been able to see anyone. But Egan had been there. Until I’d spotted him on the motorway, he’d stalked me like a shadow.
I refocused, waking the Mac from its slumber, but it was password-protected, so I moved beyond the desk to the leather sofa, and to the paperwork scattered across it. As I pinched the torch between my teeth and gathered up the papers, I realized what I was looking at.
Lynda Korin’s missing persons file.
I checked that it was exactly the same as the version I had – that he hadn’t had access to anything I hadn’t already seen – and then put the file down again, returning the pages to an approximation of how they’d been before. When I was done, I got an update on Egan’s position and then went to the filing cabinet.
The top drawer wheezed on its runners.
Inside was a series of vertical card files, each one containing paperwork. I pulled some of the papers out. They were a mix of photographs and printouts. The photographs were of Lynda Korin’s house. Every corner had been documented, every room, external wall, the attic, the lawn, the view, the shed. I checked the shots of the living room to see whether the angel was in place. It wasn’t. There was no angel and the DVD cases of Hosterlitz’s films were placed horizontally. That meant, whenever Egan had arrived at the house, the angel and the films were already gone. So did that confirm that Korin had taken them herself?
I kept going through the drawer, and then the next one down, and found the same financial information and phone records for Korin that I’d already obtained myself. There were photocopies of paperwork Egan must have taken from Korin’s house too, as well as countless time sheets for Alex, for Cramer, for me, detailing exactly what all of us had been up to. In Alex and Cramer’s cases, the reconnaissance went back months. There were printouts of individual IMDb pages too – one for every film Korin had made with Robert Hosterlitz – even when
all that page amounted to was a poster, a cast list and a limited synopsis.
I pulled the last drawer all the way out on its runners, and heard something roll away from me with a soft thunk. I reached in. The first thing I found was another photograph.
It was a shot of the wooden angel.
It was from the album in Lynda Korin’s home. I knew it straight away. I recognized the style of the photograph, the lighting – it echoed the one I’d taken and the others I’d found inside. But then I turned it over and realized this wasn’t the same. Not quite. On this one, something had been written on the back.
I hope you can forgive me, Lynda.
Robert x
Hosterlitz.
But forgive him for what? I checked the front of the photograph again but didn’t see anything that I hadn’t already seen. It was the same angel in the picture, the same drawn-on black crucifix, the same discoloration on the ornament, the same minor chips and hairline cracks in it. I took a picture of this photograph, as a back-up, and then checked Egan’s position.
He’d finally started heading home.
Unzipping my rucksack, I put the new photo inside with the one I already had, then checked the filing cabinet again. Something had made a noise in there, something heavier than just a piece of paper.
Right at the back, I found out what.
It was a book.
The front cover had mostly been torn away, but the back was still intact, even if the colours had long since faded and some of the blurb was hard to read. At the top I could make out the tagline ‘Twenty of History’s Most Infamous Crimes!’ and when I lifted up what remained of the front cover, I found another dedication, faded a pale brown over time, this time from Korin to Hosterlitz.