by Tim Weaver
‘You made me believe I killed her.’
‘You believed what you wanted to believe.’
‘If people knew what you’d done –’
‘But they don’t, do they?’
‘You killed her, Saul!’
Zeller didn’t reply.
Come on. Admit it.
‘We sent Martin to prison!’
Zeller looked out into the road, then grabbed hold of Hosterlitz’s arm, just above the elbow. Hosterlitz flinched. There was an almost mesmeric moment when the two men stared at each other.
And then Zeller’s expression changed and he suddenly started laughing. ‘Oh, I get it,’ he said, and then glanced back at Egan. ‘I get it. You think you were – what? Some sort of surrogate father to that kid? Is that what this is all about? Is that why you can’t forget him?’
‘He was just a boy. We sent his one-year-old sister to the orphanage!’
Hosterlitz sounded tearful now.
‘You thought you were some sort of father figure to them – is that it? You weren’t any father figure, Bobby. You’re a chickenshit. If you’d been any sort of man, you would have realized what I did for you. You would have sucked it down and gone back to work and made a hundred movies.’ He shoved Hosterlitz away. ‘You could have been the most successful director in history. You could have made millions if you’d had any balls. You could have had a house like this. Instead, look at the state of you. You’re an old drunk making films no one gives a shit about. You’re a fucking disgrace, Bobby. The world’s better off without you.’
Hosterlitz was looking down at the floor, motionless except for his hands. At his side, his fingers were rolling into balls, opening and closing, forming fists.
Zeller noticed. ‘What, you gonna hit me, Bobby?’
He’s trying not to react.
He knows he’s almost got it on tape.
‘You gonna hit me, big man?’
Zeller pushed Hosterlitz hard. He stumbled out of shot and then returned again – not to attack Zeller or defend himself, but to put himself back in frame.
‘You know something?’ Zeller said, dizzy with adrenalin now, swaggering in front of the boy he’d go on to mould and shape.
It was a vile, angry display of machismo, but it was exactly what Hosterlitz wanted. At first, he may have been thrown by Egan being there that night – but he’d realized, by this point, that Egan was going to be Zeller’s undoing.
‘You know something?’ Zeller said again. ‘You got nothing on me, and you never will. Someone else got sent down for that murder. That fucking boy of hers …’ Zeller shook his head and leaned right into Hosterlitz, his eyes checking the road again, checking Egan was watching. He dropped his bottom lip in a depiction of someone blubbing. ‘ “I didn’t do this. I didn’t kill my mommy.” ’
His words silenced the entire scene, as if every noise in the city had died at once. Hosterlitz closed his eyes.
Beyond them both, Egan moved for the first time, sliding off the bonnet of the Countach on to his feet, as if realizing Zeller might be about to go too far.
‘ “I didn’t kill my mommy, I didn’t kill my mommy.” ’
‘Dad,’ Egan said.
‘ “Why would I kill my mommy, Detective Callson? Why would I drink all this whisky and take all these pills? Don’t send me to the gas chamber, please.” ’
‘Dad, stop.’
‘ “I didn’t chop off her legs! I didn’t!” ’
‘Dad.’
The scene was quiet for a moment, Zeller and Hosterlitz opposite each other, like boxers in their corners. Hosterlitz was still looking at the floor, fists squeezed shut. Zeller was opposite him, his breathing slowing, his gaze fixed on the man whose career he’d ruined and whose life he’d changed for ever.
‘I did what I had to do,’ he said finally.
‘You set up Martin.’
‘Yeah.’
Hosterlitz looked up. ‘And you killed Elaine.’
‘Yeah, I did.’
A long, funereal silence.
‘It’s been thirty years,’ Zeller said, calmer, back in control of himself. ‘It’s time to forget her now. It’s time for you to go home and die, Bobby.’
Everything went black.
The film was over.
79
‘Mr Raker?’
Startled, I turned in my seat.
The annex was quickly filling with cops, each of them with a torch and a baton. I’d been so absorbed in the film, in the confession, I hadn’t realized they’d actually found me. One of them, a huge bear of a man in his forties, grabbed my arm and lifted me out of the chair. The Ring of Roses script slid off my lap, thumping against the floor of the room.
‘Are you deaf?’ the cop said.
He meant they’d called my name and I hadn’t responded. As he pulled me away, I glanced back at the picture viewer. There was nothing showing now. There were no credits, no music. It had just ceased.
Zeller’s confession – and then nothing.
I tried to imagine why Hosterlitz hadn’t taken the film of Zeller and Cramer to the police in the four years before he died; why he’d placed it inside the angel instead, sat on it, hidden it. But then I remembered his letter to Korin: A part of me needed to confess, because I knew it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t want what we had to be over … I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea … I tried to tell you and I tried not to tell you; I wanted to and I didn’t want to.
That was the battle that raged inside me for ten years.
It was what the letter was supposed to have been: a map to the boxes, to the truth about what lay inside the angel, a trail that Korin could follow in the weeks and months after she buried him. After he was dead, he wouldn’t have to face her as she realized who he was and what he’d done, but he would have confessed his sins.
Instead, he died before he got the chance to complete his work.
She eventually found her way to the boxes. She followed his map all the way to the truth about who she was. But he’d forgotten to direct her to the last piece of the jigsaw.
The roll of film inside the ornament.
Instinctively, I tried to reach down to the floor, to scoop up the script, to find out how Ring of Roses was supposed to end, but the cop yanked me towards him and proceeded to march me out.
‘Wait a second,’ I said.
But he wasn’t listening.
We moved out into the cool of the night, the whole place swarming with police, with firemen, with paramedics. I remembered Korin in the back of my car.
‘Lynda Korin,’ I said. ‘She’s in –’
‘We’ve found her.’
‘Is she alive?’
But he didn’t reply.
He kept his hand firmly gripped on my arm and then led me away, around the barn, back in the direction of the caravan. The fire was already out, hosed down, and all that was left were its smouldering remains; a charred, twisted skeleton.
The police interview room was small and plain. White walls, blue carpet, a table, black plastic chairs, a recording device. There was an air-conditioning unit as well, but it had been turned off: the room was hot and completely silent.
I rolled my neck and looked down at myself.
Blue cotton trousers. A plain T-shirt.
My clothes had been taken as evidence and my possessions bagged by the custody sergeant as soon as I’d arrived at the station. I gazed at my hands, along the ridges of my knuckles, and could still see the faint traces of blood, and then grazes from further back than that, when Billy Egan had hunted me through the canyons of the scrapyard. On the underside of my arms the scratch marks had scabbed over now. It made me think of Martin’s arms after Zeller had finished with him.
I’d made my call to a solicitor, a guy I’d never met from Whitehaven, and had told him everything I knew. Then he’d sat next to me, taking notes, as two Cumbrian cops called Taylor and Annechy spent an hour asking me questions.
; Taylor was in her early forties, attractive and quietly spoken, with short blonde hair. She had very bright, very grey eyes, like stones polished by the flow of a river, and she smiled a lot, which I imagined was effective in situations like this. A smile built trust and suggested understanding.
Annechy was olive-skinned and acne-scarred, a thick beard attempting to disguise the evidence. His hair was slicked back. He never said a thing.
‘What a mess,’ Taylor said.
There was silence for a moment. They both looked at me, plainly having a hard time processing everything I’d told them. I didn’t blame them. It was a long, complex journey, from one side of the world to the other, involving a case that was six decades old. They hadn’t expected this when they’d clocked in today.
‘We just spoke to a guy called Greg Plumstead,’ she went on.
Plumstead was the man that Korin had been talking to at CineLab UK in Manchester. His company had the technology to scan and transfer the footage on the 8mm and 35mm film stock – as well as the VHS-C tape – into a digital format.
It was how most of Ring of Roses had ended up on DVD.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He said he’d been working with Korin for six months, although he didn’t know her by that name. He knew her as Ursula Keegan. They only communicated by typewritten letter – which he found a bit weird – landline, or in person on the rare occasions when she’d go down and see him. She never did anything over the Internet or by mobile phone. He said he thought she was some kind of eccentric film hobbyist, or a collector. He asked her a couple of times what the film was about, and she told him it was a docudrama she was making for her own enjoyment, principally to teach herself how to edit and direct, and that she was reusing old movie footage she’d picked up at a car-boot sale years before.’
‘And he believed her?’
‘He said he could never make much sense of the film because she always delivered it in small chunks that she’d already cut herself, and that it was always delivered out of sync – as in, one week she’d give him ten minutes from the end, and a fortnight later, she’d give him five minutes from the start. After a while, he just scanned everything in without asking questions, and once the footage was scanned, she kept it all on an external hard drive. We found a laptop too, in a lock box at the back of the annex. The laptop was loaded with film-editing software and a DVD burner. That was how she got the different cuts of the film on to DVD. Any research she did online, she did via the farmer’s Internet connection, and she wiped her history after every session, presumably so the farmer wouldn’t see it.’
‘How did she afford to pay CineLab?’ I asked, thinking of the financials I’d been through. There had been no activity after her disappearance, and no sign of her siphoning off funds in the months before she went on the run.
‘She worked on the farm, cash in hand.’
I nodded and then thought of something else. ‘Have you been through all of the footage in that fridge? Do you have any idea what’s on it?’
‘We don’t,’ Taylor said.
I eyed her, slightly confused by the response, and then looked at Annechy, who had a frown on his face, his arms crossed.
‘Wait a second, are you saying Lynda’s still alive?’
The two of them looked at each other for a moment, then at my solicitor, and then – finally – back to me.
‘Yes,’ Taylor said. ‘She’s in a bad way, but she’s still alive.’
80
Two detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department spent a month working with the Cumbrian and Metropolitan Police forces in Carlisle and London trying to piece together what had happened. I was released on conditional bail, pending further enquiries, and had to relinquish my passport in case I planned to skip the country. It seemed unnecessary but I didn’t fight it, and after a while a part of me started to wonder if the idea hadn’t come from the Met. As Craw had always told me, officers there were waiting for the chance to catch me in a lie. They’d see it as revenge for having crossed their paths, for refusing to back down, for solving cases they’d long committed to the vaults. It saddened me that I’d made so many enemies there. I’d never set out to do that and I’d never wanted it.
In my quieter moments, I began wondering if Craw might become one of those enemies herself. The full gravity of her decision to take up the secondment in Glasgow, and to move away, didn’t really sink in until I was alone in the interview room, waiting for Taylor and Annechy. In the days after, I tried to speak to her on the phone, but she refused to pick up. A week after that, she finally sent me an email where she suggested in a few terse sentences that we should use the time away from one another to reassess what we had. I wasn’t sure any amount of distance would help bridge the gap between her need to protect her career, and the life I’d chosen in finding missing people.
So, in the end, Craw drifted away from me, and then so did the suggestion of any charges being brought against me. Either Taylor, Cumbria Police, officers at the Met, or the CPS decided it would be a waste of time and money to take it any further.
I moved on, alone.
The murder of Glen Cramer gave the media a star around which they could orbit everything else. His crimes – his involvement in the killing of Életke Kerekes and his complicity in the framing of Martin Nemeth – weren’t revealed in full until months later, so in the days after he died, any connection he had to anything that Zeller and he had done seemed to get forgotten relatively quickly.
The crimes were old, which didn’t help – it made them less resonant to news crews looking for a modern Hollywood angle to sell – but his appearance in the fourth series of Royalty Park – which started two days after the events at the farm – was the most effective bleach of all, whitewashing his history as the public reconnected with his gentle portrayal of Stan Isserman, the elegant ambassador that he played on the show. It was a dismal illustration of the power of celebrity.
Even more sad to me, at least at the beginning, was that Robert Hosterlitz barely warranted a mention, his unfinished film still a piece of evidence in a police lock-up that the media hadn’t seen yet. Without him, there would never have been enough to convict Zeller. His guilt, his pain – his decision to eventually face up to what he’d been a part of – was the glue that bound the case together.
And so the trajectory of the media coverage traced a predictable line for a couple of months. Stories came out from AKI insiders about how staff had always known Saul Zeller was ‘cruel’, about the dark arts AKI had practised under his watch. Alex Cavarno was painted as a control freak and a fanatical egotist drunk on the power that Zeller had given her. In the first few weeks, AKI suffered badly, its share price nosediving, an assortment of Hollywood stars taking the chance to go public and put some distance between themselves, Saul Zeller and Alex.
Eventually, though, after Életke Kerekes was exhumed from a grave in a Venice cemetery and DNA trace evidence linked Zeller to the body, Zeller was charged, sacked, and a new president – Dan Chu of AKI Asia – began to steady the ship. Alex Cavarno was extradited back to LA, along with her father, and a few days later I watched them both, live over the Internet, take the stand during their arraignments. Zeller seemed unaffected by it all, by the court proceedings, by the death of Billy Egan, and I realized any hopes I’d had that he might actually show some contrition had just been a fantasy. Alex followed after he was done, and couldn’t have been more different. She sobbed throughout, her face blanched, her beauty finally subdued. At the same time as that, a campaign had begun to clear Martin Nemeth’s name.
About a week after the events at the farm, I got a call from Chu. He was softly spoken, surprisingly so, and had a heavily Americanized East Asian accent.
‘I’m sorry you got caught up in our dirty laundry,’ he said.
‘No one saw this coming – least of all me.’
‘We’re going to try and push through the Comet reconstruction, despite everything. I think we
need some good publicity.’ He stopped. ‘All we need to do now is find an architect who isn’t a cold-blooded killer.’
It was a joke, and we both knew it, but there was a kind of sadness to the statement too.
We talked for a little while longer, and then – just as he was about to call off – he said, ‘Have you been to see Lynda yet?’
‘No. They said she wasn’t ready for visitors.’
‘Okay. When you do, give me a call. I’ve got something I’d like you to help me with.’
81
On a sub-zero morning in early December, just over three months after I first agreed to begin the search for Lynda Korin, I met her at an office near Spitalfields market.
Her hand was still wrapped in bandages, one side of her face too. She’d had a second skin graft a few weeks before, and – because of the knife wound she’d sustained in her chest – she was confined to a wheelchair as well. She looked uncomfortable and in pain, but she had a nurse with her – funded by AKI – who seemed to be well attuned to her needs. Every time Korin started to struggle, the nurse would try to put her at ease again by tenderly adjusting her position.
The truth was, though, the really hard work was probably yet to come for her. Rehabilitation would involve not just healing, not just gaining control over her physical injuries, but accepting the way she looked now. One side of her face remained as striking and timeless as it had ever been; the other was a memorial to the man who’d tried to kill her, and to the fire that had almost consumed her.
A couple of weeks after the events at the farm, I started visiting Korin in hospital. I’d sit at her bedside and we’d talk, as best she was able, and then, when she was well enough to leave the ward, I’d buy her lunch at the hospital café and we’d sit under its glass roof, discussing the idea Chu had come up with, while watching the autumn sun pour through the panels. After she was discharged, we met more frequently, throughout the rest of October and November, and every time we did, it was in the same conference room with the same people: Chu on satellite link, three technicians, and a documentary maker that Chu had flown over from New York, who’d begun on the project full-time. On a couple of occasions, Rafael Walker was invited along as well, generously loaning the production company the original negatives that he’d so lovingly kept at his flat.