by Tim Weaver
I stood there, unmoving, all the same. It was just after 3 a.m. and the street was absolutely silent except for the muted hum of traffic further out. Curtains were shut. Cars were dormant and empty. Next door, I thought I could see a hint of a silhouette, one of my neighbours passing behind a set of blinds that hadn’t been twisted all the way shut. I watched them disappear, and then returned my gaze to my own house. It was a rarity in this part of London because it was a bungalow. Usually, that was what I liked about it. But now, in the shadows, with everything that had happened to me, it seemed peculiar and unnatural; unwelcoming, cold.
Somewhere, I heard police sirens.
I grabbed everything I needed from the house and then left again, heading out the back, across the garden, and along an alley running adjacent to my home. Hailing a cab, I headed west and, thirty minutes later, was checking into a motel just off the M4. It was scruffy and faded, but it would be fine to lay low in. I paid in cash and kept my phone off – the battery out, the SIM too – and once I was in the room, spread everything out on the bed while the news played soundlessly on the TV.
Just after 4 a.m., a photograph of Glen Cramer in Royalty Park appeared above the left-hand shoulder of the newsreader for the first time. I felt my throat start to close. Reaching for the remote control, I turned the volume up.
‘… tropolitan Police have confirmed that the body of Hollywood actor Glen Cramer, best known in recent years for his role in the drama series Royalty Park, has been found tonight at a disused public baths in east London. While a spokesperson declined to offer any further details, a source close to the investigation has told us that Mr Cramer suffered “severe head injuries”. Clearly, this is a developing story, and details are coming in to us all the time, but we also understand that a man in his forties is being sought in connection with the death.’
Shit.
I suddenly felt nauseous, overwhelmed. Cramer had died at the scene and Zeller had just left him there – and now the police had zeroed in on me.
As I’d exited the baths through a broken wall at the rear of the building, I’d heard the approach of sirens, which meant neighbours must have reported hearing the gunshots. It meant there could have been a witness to my escape. It probably meant the police had got hold of Cramer’s mobile and discovered the call I’d made to him at 11.14 p.m. They’d see the note he’d written on it to remind himself of our meeting place. They’d ping my phone and see that I called from outside Limehouse station when I gave him directions to the public baths. I was the last person to speak to him.
They probably thought I was the last person to see him alive.
Briefly, I considered handing myself in, and then let the idea go again. I had nothing to play with. I couldn’t pin anything on Zeller. There were no direct lines to him. All I had was circumstantial evidence and a bunch of theories. The best thing I’d gathered in all this time was the testimony of a man now lying dead on a mortuary slab. Zeller wouldn’t have wanted it to end for Cramer in the way it had, I still believed that, not because he had any affection for Cramer any more, but because the death of Glen Cramer brought questions and media headlines. But it was a complication. Zeller and Egan were both still in the clear.
Even if it was on their radar at all, which it wasn’t, the Venice Angel case wouldn’t interest the Met. It was so old and so far out of their jurisdiction that they wouldn’t waste resources looking into it. There was no CCTV at Barneslow Scrapyard, so they couldn’t put Egan or Alex there at the weekend. There were no cameras in and around the baths either, which was one of the reasons I’d chosen it. As for Zeller, even if I went direct to the US, no agency there would go to the expense of reopening a case, let alone digging up a sixty-year-old corpse, without substantial proof that the original conviction was wrong. Martin went to San Quentin for his mother’s murder and he died there twenty-three years later. Hosterlitz was long dead, Cramer was gone now. There had been five people who could have shed light on what happened that night, and the only one of them left alive was Saul Zeller. I couldn’t get justice for Kerekes with what I had.
Not without Lynda Korin.
She hadn’t been found yet, not by me and not by Zeller and Egan either, but the fact they were still looking for her, still trying to silence her, seemed to prove something: she had information they didn’t want out in the open. She had some sort of proof. Maybe she had the evidence that could bring Zeller down.
I had to find her before they did.
62
I didn’t have much left in the way of casework.
My notes from before the scrapyard, my files, the physical photos of the angel, the security footage from Stoke Point – it had all been burned. All I could rely on was whatever notes I’d gathered from talking to Rafael Walker, what I’d seen in Hosterlitz’s films, and what I could remember from talking to Cramer.
I flipped open the spare laptop I’d grabbed from my house, connected to the motel’s Wi-Fi, and searched the web for ‘Ring of Roses’. It felt like I’d done the same thing a million times over and, sure enough, I got the same mix of nursery rhymes and crèches as I had the first time around. Even when I entered the words ‘Pierre Street’ and ‘Van Nuys’ I hit a dead end. I searched business directories for Van Nuys, tried to locate maps for the area, and then spent half an hour trawling historical data.
Nothing.
I kept going, returning to accounts of the Venice Angel killing I’d already been through on the web. I went over everything Walker had told me, line by line, word by word – everything we’d discussed, all the tiny details I’d seen in the films. The hidden frame. The photograph of Kerekes. The footage of Pierre Street.
Still nothing.
What about Hosterlitz’s voice-over?
I’d never asked Cramer about that because he’d never even watched any of Hosterlitz’s horror films. But what could ‘You don’t know who you are’ mean? Was he talking to Korin in those moments? Someone else? Himself? The more I thought about it, the more it felt like an admission of guilt on Hosterlitz’s behalf, a way to tell her the truth, as if he was saying, ‘You don’t know who you are to me.’ I remembered what he’d written on the back of the photograph – I hope you can forgive me, Lynda – and it seemed even clearer: she’d been in a marriage with a man who loved her because she reminded him of someone else.
I felt a pang of sadness for Lynda Korin then. She’d never really known the man she’d lived with, loved, shared a bed with, shared a life with, until twenty-six years after he’d died; until, in 2014, she somehow figured it out – or, at least, figured something out. But what did she figure out? How did she figure it out?
How could she still be missing?
I thought of Wendy Fisher, of how she’d described Hosterlitz and Korin’s trip out to Minneapolis in 1984. I’d talked to her about it already, her recollection of Hosterlitz’s ‘scouting trip’, her opinion of him – but I hadn’t really pressed her on how Korin had been during that week without Hosterlitz. Could she have discussed anything with Wendy that seemed insignificant then, but might be huge now? Suspicions? Concerns? Cracks in their marriage? I doubted it, but I was running out of moves to make. I needed a breakthrough.
I didn’t have to switch on my phone to get her number – I’d made a note of it before I left the house – and I could just use the hotel landline to call her. It would cost me, but it would keep me off the radar for now. What complicated things was her job as a nurse, and the irregular hours she worked. If she was out on the ward, I might have to wait for a response, and I needed answers right now.
If she even had any.
I tried not to let the thought derail me, tried not to get bogged down in the idea that this was another dead end, and went to the hotel phone. Punching in her mobile number, I listened to six drawn-out rings. It hit voicemail.
‘This is Wendy Fisher,’ she said. ‘Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’
I hung up – and, as I did, someth
ing gave me pause, an idea I couldn’t get at, buried far back inside my head. I looked down at my notes, but had no idea what it was. Ignoring it for now, and already trying to think about my next move, I grabbed my laptop, went to an online directory and started searching for her home number. I’d try her landline, and if I got no joy there, I’d go back to her mobile and keep phoning. If I kept calling, I’d get hold of her eventually.
Her home was in Lakeville, south of Minneapolis, and when I went to the White Pages online, I got sixteen hits for Fisher. The White Pages listed all people under that name, and which other Fishers they were associated with, so I found Wendy and then I found the name of her husband too. He was called Carl. Even if I got hold of him and he got hold of her for me, that would be better than nothing.
But then I stopped.
The Post-it note. I’d forgotten all about it. With Walker’s help, I’d followed the trail to the Kill! timecode, but there were still the two lines of random letters above that. I flipped back in my notes. I’d written them down during my interview with Walker, trying to make something out of them, see something.
XCADAAH. EOECGEY.
I tried to find patterns in them, relationships the letters might have to the films that Hosterlitz had made, or to Korin’s life before she disappeared. I broke them down and rearranged them to see whether they might be anagrams, added full stops to see if I recognized them as acronyms, did a web search for the letters as a group, in pairs, in threes. Every road I went down ended in the same result.
Even so, I kept going but, fifteen minutes later, I glanced at the clock and saw it was after five in the morning, and the energy seemed to leak out of me. I flopped back, bone-tired. Through the rear window of the motel room, beyond the rooftops opposite, I glimpsed a haze of orange, the accumulated light from the motorway. My eyes began to feel heavy as I watched it, shimmering like the margins of a marooned spacecraft, and then they closed completely.
Call Wendy. I jolted awake again, my inner voice like an echo, pushing me back to the surface. Call Wendy.
I never asked her about the Post-it note. I never asked about the two lines of letters, or what they might mean. Maybe she knows. Going to the hotel phone, I found the number for her landline again and dialled it. It was 11 p.m. there, but Wendy would understand. I waited, briefly energized.
‘Hello?’
Someone had picked up. It was a man.
‘Mr Fisher?’
‘No, he’s not here.’
‘Is Wendy around?’
‘No, neither of them are here.’
I tried to imagine who this guy might be.
‘I can take a message,’ he said.
‘Can I ask who I’m speaking to?’
‘Greg Fisher.’
He must have been one of their kids.
‘Greg, my name’s David Raker. I’m an investigator in the UK. I’m doing some work for your mum over here, looking into her sister’s disappearance. I need to get hold of Wendy really urgently. Is she at work at the moment?’
‘No, she’s away.’
‘Do you know what time she’ll be back?’
‘No, I mean, she’s away. Mom and Dad are on vacation. They’re up in Alaska somewhere.’
His words stopped me dead.
‘Uh …’ I tried to think. ‘What do you mean, they’re on vacation?’
‘I mean, they’re on a cruise.’
‘For how long?’
‘A month.’
‘When did they leave?’
‘About ten days ago, I guess.’
Before I’d even started the case. Before Wendy had ever got in touch with me. I thought back to the voicemail message I’d just heard from Wendy Fisher, and remembered how something about it had given me pause afterwards.
‘Does your mum have a Facebook page, Greg?’
‘What?’ He sounded confused. ‘Yeah, sure.’
I went to Facebook, searching for a Wendy Fisher in Lakeville, Minnesota. It didn’t take me long to find her. Her profile picture was a photograph of her and Lynda Korin, sitting next to one another in a garden somewhere.
I’d never seen Wendy before in my entire life.
She wasn’t the woman I’d spoken to on video call. This Wendy was much heavier, her hair was darker, she had a distinctive mole on the cleft of her chin and she wasn’t wearing glasses in any of the pictures I could find of her. The Wendy I’d spoken to had looked like a weightier version of Lynda Korin – the same cheekbones, the same eyes, the same mouth.
As my heart thumped in my ears, I started to realize why the recorded message on Wendy’s mobile didn’t match the voice of the woman I’d spoken to over the phone. I realized why the woman who’d hired me looked nothing like the Wendy I’d just found on Facebook.
Because Wendy Fisher hadn’t hired me.
Lynda Korin had.
63
I sat there stunned for a moment, trying to deny it. But I couldn’t. It was why she didn’t want me to call her out of the blue, why she preferred to be emailed first. It was why her voice in our calls and the voice on Wendy Fisher’s answerphone were different. It was why Wendy didn’t look anything like Lynda Korin, and yet the woman I’d talked to over video had borne a striking resemblance to her. It had been Korin on the video call – except she’d dyed her hair and put on weight.
Or disguised herself – a costume, a wig.
I thought of something Marc Collinsky had told me about the garden room at Korin’s place: There were still a few old movie props in there – a clapperboard, some bags of old junk with guff like vampire teeth, and blood, and make-up in them. Make-up. Could there have been prosthetics too? Moulds? Silicone? Korin had looked big on the video call, but she’d looked big under her clothes. She’d covered herself up. All she’d had to do was tweak her physical appearance just enough, fill herself out and use whatever had been left behind by Hosterlitz, because she knew the quality of the Skype call would disguise the rest of it. The call was poor – pixelated, jumpy – because her connection was poor.
Did that mean she was somewhere remote?
I put a hand on my notes, trying to think straight, trying to imagine all the reasons Lynda Korin would set this into motion in the first place. So I could find out the truth about what her husband had done? What Cramer and Zeller had done? If she already knew, why not just announce it to the world? Why go to the trouble of involving me? I drew the pad towards me, almost instinctively, and my eyes fell on to the lines of letters again, the ones on the Post-it note, and all the ideas I’d had as I’d attempted to figure them out. In my head, I spooled all the way back to that video call, trying to work out if there had been anything in the background to give away her location. There had been a mantelpiece, photo frames, but both had been bleached by sunlight from a nearby window. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with that.
I went back to her Internet connection, to it being slow, to the idea that she could be somewhere remote. That made sense – but where?
I looked at the two lines of letters again.
XCADAAH.
EOECGEY.
Somewhere remote.
Somewhere remote, somewhere remote, somewh–
I felt an internal shift. My eyes zeroed in on the beginning and end of each of the lines. The top one began with X, the other finished with Y.
Bloody hell, that’s it.
It was so clever. I could see it so clearly now, I was unsure how I’d ever not seen it. These weren’t words. They weren’t even really letters.
They were grid references.
I tore off a fresh sheet of paper.
The X axis was C, A, D, A, A, H. If each letter corresponded to a number, C would be 3 because it was the third letter in the alphabet, A would be 1, and so on. I worked through it until I had the Easting, the X reference. It was 314118.
I now had half a location on a map.
I quickly applied the same rules to the Northing, the Y axis, but I came out with seven numbers instea
d of six, because the second letter – O – corresponded to the fifteenth letter of the alphabet. Unless the O wasn’t an O at all.
Unless it’s a zero.
I pulled my laptop towards me and put the X axis in, then put the Y in as 505375 and hit Return.
The page loaded instantly.
It was an empty field.
I moved the map with the trackpad and a farm came into view, about three hundred feet north. Otherwise, there was nothing.
I zoomed out.
The farm was on a road, a thin country lane. It sat on its northern side, but the place where the pin had dropped, the grid reference, was in a field to the immediate south. The field must have belonged to the farm, but there was nothing on satellite that indicated anything in the field itself. Just grass, trees and drystone walls. Maybe a few animals. Was the grid reference an allusion to the farm, and not to the field?
Or had I just called this whole thing wrong?
I zoomed out again.
A lake came into view, about half a mile south-east of the grid reference and the farm. There was a hint of elevation to the north of the farm too. There looked to be a slope and the slope appeared to be blanketed in scree. I zoomed out again.
A name popped in over the lake.
Wast Water.
It was the Lake District.
I managed to get a few hours’ sleep – and, at 8 a.m., I found the number for the farmhouse and called it.
‘Hello?’
It was an older-sounding man, halfway through eating something.
‘Oh, hi,’ I said.
Now what?
‘I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got the right number – or if you can help me – but I’m looking for Lynda.’
‘Lynda?’
That was all he said.
‘Yeah, Lynda.’
‘There’s no one called Lynda here, son.’
It was hard to tell, but there seemed no hint of collusion, no sense he was holding something back from me. I looked down at my notes, and my eyes came to settle on a line right in the middle. It said: Életke Kerekes = Elaine Kinflower.