Broken Heart: David Raker #7 Read online

  I thought of the engraving on the tree.

  ‘Did she ever meet anyone here?’

  ‘Not that I saw – but I suppose it might have been possible she did on the days I wasn’t working.’

  ‘So what did she do while you were here?’

  He shrugged, looking across the roof of the car to where the steps led down to the peninsula.

  ‘She’d go for walks out on the headland,’ he said, ‘or sometimes just sit in her car. She’d always say hello to me if we crossed paths, though, and a couple of times we had a nice chat. I liked her. Lynda, her name was.’

  ‘Do you remember what you chatted about?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. Just stuff.’ He paused, raising his left hand. There was a gold wedding band on his ring finger. ‘Unfortunately, my missus passed on a few years back. Liver problems. So I like talking to people and getting to know them ’cos … well, y’know.’

  I’m lonely.

  ‘And you got to know Lynda?’

  ‘I don’t know about got to know her, but we talked.’

  ‘Did she tell you much about herself?’

  ‘She said she’d been married once, that she lived somewhere out on the Mendips. I think she said she was an accountant. We shared some coffee out of my flask one time when she turned up early in the morning and it was cold – but don’t get me wrong, we weren’t best of friends or nothing. We just chatted.’

  ‘She ever mention anything about a Lake Calhoun to you?’

  He frowned. ‘A what?’

  ‘Lake Calhoun.’

  ‘Is that a lake round here?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘So, soon after that, she abandoned her car?’

  ‘Yeah. A few days after she disappeared, I came late in the day and it was parked up over there.’ He pointed to the corner, close to where I’d followed the trail into the trees. ‘It was a Thursday, I think. Anyway, I recognized her car, but couldn’t see her anywhere. I didn’t think much of it. I just figured she was out on the headland somewhere. I had a couple more calls to make on my rota, so I left pretty soon after. Week following that, I was on holiday, and then I came back on the Sunday; so – what? – nearly two weeks after she disappears. Again, I see her car, but there’s no sign of her. So when I returned on the Monday and found her car in the same place and no sign of her, I went looking for her, out of curiosity, I suppose. I mean, I didn’t think she’d just leave it here like that. But when I didn’t find her, I started to worry for her, y’know? So I called the coppers.’

  I glanced in my rear-view mirror again. I knew, from the police report, that Korin’s Ford Focus had been towed away and impounded. It had never been claimed, because Korin was never found and she had no family to take ownership of it in her absence. After six months sitting in a pen, the Focus was eventually sold for scrap.

  While I was still thinking of that, my eyes happened to move to the exterior of the cabin and I noticed a slim L-shaped tube made from black rubber poking out of the side of it. It was like a downpipe. Its end was embedded in a patch of concrete and secured there with rivets the size of ten-pence pieces. It took me a moment to realize what it was, but then I looked to the CCTV camera, mounted on a pole at the entrance, and saw wiring breaking out of the ground at its base from a similar rubber tube.

  It’s the wiring for the security system.

  I remembered then what Ewan Tasker had told me. The security system here was old, disc-based, which meant the recording equipment must be inside the cabin.

  I gestured to the downpipe. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me take a look at the CCTV footage from the day Lynda disappeared, would you?’

  ‘If it were possible, son, you’d be welcome to it,’ Fordyce said, producing a big bunch of keys from his pocket. Each one was marked with a number.

  ‘But it’s not?’

  ‘We keep six months of discs inside.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘After that, they get dumped. The police might have a copy, though.’

  I smiled, trying not to show my disappointment. I was going to have to find some magical way of building friendships with Avon and Somerset Police.

  ‘Did you ever see the footage yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Over someone’s shoulder, yeah.’

  ‘What did you make of it?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s like they said.’

  ‘She just vanishes?’

  ‘She comes into the car park here …’ He paused, looking towards the peninsula. ‘And she never comes back out again.’

  11

  The traffic was much heavier on the way back to London, but I still made it home by 11 a.m. My phone had pinged a couple of times on the way up, so I knew I had emails waiting, and when I sat down at the back of the house with my laptop, the sun beating down, I saw they were both from Spike.

  I’d really been hoping for a response from Wendy, but it was still 5 a.m. in Minnesota, so I decided to give it another couple of hours before chasing her up.

  In the end, there wasn’t much to get excited about in what Spike had sent over, even though he’d collated information from a much bigger time period. He’d got me statements, financial history, phone records, emails, but – as I meticulously went through it all – it became clear that, if the search for Lynda Korin had stalled, it hadn’t been because White had missed an email, or a phone call, or a clear and damning piece of evidence. That was a disappointment and a relief: it meant there were no new leads in what Spike had sent me, and he’d spent all night wasting his time on my behalf; equally, it meant the focus of the search had narrowed, and I could concentrate my efforts elsewhere. For now, that meant the inscription I’d found in the tree at Stoke Point, and the article in Cine magazine.

  I spent some time doing the same searches for Lake Calhoun as I’d done earlier, making sure I hadn’t overlooked anything. When it was clear I hadn’t, I set that strand of the investigation aside until I could speak to Wendy, and switched tack. It wasn’t just the name of the lake that had been carved into the tree, it was also the image of an old-style movie projector. I didn’t know who had put it there or why, but the name of the lake was an obvious link to Lynda Korin – so it was logical to assume the projector was too. That made me think that I needed to know more about her film career, such as it was.

  In the end, it took about five minutes to bring myself up to speed. I didn’t need to read user reviews to know that Korin’s films were bad – it was easy enough to come to that conclusion based solely on their titles. She-Zombie and Dracula’s Flesh weren’t going to be making a ‘Best of’ list any time soon, but – on the back of her fairly successful career as a catalogue model – I started to wonder if she’d just seen acting as a fun distraction. Whatever her reason for doing it, her sidestep into movies came courtesy of a working relationship she’d struck up with a producer called Isaac L. Murray, the brains – if that was the right word – behind a bunch of films with names like Lust of the She-Wolf and B is for Blood. More relevantly, he got Ursula of the SS off the ground in 1976, and offered Korin her first ever lead role. It was on the set of that movie that she met her husband, Robert Hosterlitz, although by then he was a shadow of his former self, penniless and desperate for work, borne out by the fact that he’d agreed to direct Ursula in the first place.

  One site described the three Ursula films as ‘cult seventies Nazi exploitation flicks about a sadistic, nymphomaniac female Kommandant who conducts experiments on her male prisoners’. The first made the infamous Video Nasties list during the 1980s, but – according to the same website – in reality, ‘Ursula was banned more for the subjects it tackled (Nazis, sex, human experimentation) than its actual content. The truth is, the movie’s actually trashy nonsense, made memorable by the busty, beautiful Lynda Korin.’ Robert Hosterlitz had directed all three of the Ursula films his wife starred in, and then Korin had gone on to appear in another eleven movies Hosterlitz had made in Spain after that. S
he’d taken a mix of lead and supporting roles, but the movies were all of the same ilk, with names like Kill! and Die Slowly.

  On paper, it was hard to see how any of this mattered, whichever way you approached it. Korin was having a bit of fun as a part-time actress; Robert Hosterlitz was in the dying embers of his career, just trying to make ends meet.

  Even so, I spent twenty minutes seeing whether I could get hold of a few of Korin’s films, just to get a sense of her, even from nearly forty years on. I also wanted to see if there might be something connecting back to what I’d found out about her already, or what I’d discovered carved into the tree. Instead, I found that only a couple of her movies were available any more – and the ones that were either had very long order times or were in the hands of specialist collectors.

  Finally, I turned to Marc Collinsky’s Cine article.

  As Wendy had already told me over Skype, it wasn’t really about Korin at all, but about her husband, and in particular his early career in 1950s America. Korin had simply been used as a way to understand him away from the camera.

  The article began with how the Hosterlitz family, seeing the Nazi threat on the horizon, had emigrated from Germany to the US in 1933. Robert was eight at the time. His father, a minor actor himself, was friends with legendary director Fritz Lang and, eventually, that was what allowed Robert to grab a foothold in Hollywood.

  ‘Robert had a difficult early life,’ Lynda Korin says. ‘His father died when he was thirteen, and Robert was diagnosed with a minor heart condition in 1943, when he tried to enlist. A lot of people didn’t understand the reasons why he couldn’t join up. They just saw this German kid, still with a little bit of an accent, who stayed at home when every other eighteen-year-old went off to war. I think that bred some suspicion, and the Robert I knew … that would have got to him. He would have hated the idea of being disliked. But, eventually, Fritz Lang managed to pull some strings and Robert got work editing scripts for propaganda films at the War Activities Committee. It was some time during that period that he wrote the script for My Evil Heart.’

  In 1949, with Lang prominent in the background once again, Monogram was persuaded to give Hosterlitz a very small budget to make My Evil Heart. Against all odds, it was a critical and commercial smash and, off the back of it, Hosterlitz – just twenty-four at the time – signed a four-film deal with American Kingdom Inc. There, he made Connor O’Hare and Only When You’re Dead, gaining two Oscar nominations, and then The Eyes of the Night. That was the game-changer. And not just for Hosterlitz either. His leading man in that movie, Glen Cramer, who’d already won an Oscar for his portrayal of the title character in Hosterlitz’s Connor O’Hare, also went on to win his second Oscar for The Eyes of the Night.

  In an interview with the LA Times in 1989, during the press for Half-Light, for which he won his fourth and final acting Oscar, Glen Cramer was quick to give Hosterlitz his dues: ‘If it hadn’t been for Bobby, I’d be serving hamburgers in McDonald’s. I’ll never forget, before he cast me in Connor, he came to see this show I was doing in New York. He waited outside the stage door, and I thought he wanted an autograph. I said to him, “This is the first autograph I’ve ever signed,” and he said, “Well, it won’t be the last.” I’ll never forget that. When he died last year, he left such a hole to fill. That HUAC bullshit back in the fifties has a lot to answer for. It was an absolute scandal.’

  Accused of being a communist by the House of Un-American Activities, Hosterlitz fled LA for London, but he was soon in an irreversible slide. His career failed to ignite in Britain, he made three films in Germany, and then – eight years after he left, and no longer of interest to the HUAC – he returned to the US when his mother became ill. He got some TV work, directing episodes of Bonanza and Petticoat Junction, and then seemed to have manoeuvred himself back into the big time when he signed with Paramount to direct a western he’d also written the script for called The Ghost of the Plains. It was destroyed by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at the box office. Hosterlitz’s career was finished.

  ‘He fell into more TV work to pay the bills,’ Korin says, ‘but then his mom died in 1969, and everything disintegrated. He got depression. He got addicted to painkillers, sleeping pills, speed … call girls.’ Korin pauses at those last two words, then shrugs. ‘He was lonely and grieving. He said the drugs made him paranoid, and he lost a lot of friends.’ Disgruntled, unloved and alone, Hosterlitz moved back to the UK, where Hammer rival, Amicus, offered him the haunted house film House of Darkness (1971).

  The production turned out to be a disaster.

  ‘He was strung out on drugs most of the time,’ remembers the producer Gordon Lem, ‘and – even when he wasn’t – everyone thought he was weird, all the way down to the woman who made the tea. To be honest, I felt sorry for him by the end. He was like the walking dead: gone behind the eyes.’

  Three years later, Hosterlitz suffered a stroke. After a long recovery, and unable to get any work anywhere in either the UK or the US, Robert – now penniless – moved to Spain to direct the first Ursula film.

  The grindhouse producer Isaac L. Murray offered to double his money if he directed back-to-back sequels to Ursula, so Hosterlitz made Ursula: Queen Kommandant (1978) and Ursula: Butcher of El Grande (1978), which switched the action to a South American prison. By that time, he and Korin were married. ‘Those films were bad,’ she says. ‘If I tried to convince you otherwise, you’d laugh me out of the room. I mean, I spent most of the time in the buff. But if I hadn’t done them, I never would have met Robert.’

  It was at this point that Collinsky began to talk about Korin’s own career, in particular the years after she married Hosterlitz. She seemed open and honest in her responses, always giving a straight answer to a straight question – but then Collinsky asked her about what had attracted her to Hosterlitz in the first place.

  She thinks about it. ‘He was clean by 1976 – he’d even given up smoking – and it was hard to tell he’d ever had a stroke. But there remained a sadness about him, and I guess that drew me to him. He wasn’t attractive in the way I’d always thought of people as being attractive; not chiselled, or even that confident. I think his confidence had been beaten out of him by then. But he was mysterious. I used to think, “I bet he’s got a secret to tell.” And the more time I spent with him, the more I wanted to know what that secret was.’

  ‘Did you ever find out?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘Is that a no?’ I ask her.

  Korin just looks at me. ‘Next question,’ she says.

  I read the rest of the article but didn’t find anything as interesting as what she’d said about her husband; about her belief that he was harbouring some sort of secret. When Collinsky had pressed her on what it was, she’d sidestepped it.

  Why?

  I read and reread the same section again, trying to figure out if it was directly relevant to this case, relevant to finding out what had happened to Lynda Korin after she’d driven down to Stoke Point ten months ago. It seemed unlikely, given that Hosterlitz had been dead twenty-six years by then.

  But that didn’t mean it was impossible.

  12

  At a couple of minutes before 1 p.m., Marc Collinsky emerged from an elevator on the ground floor of his office building. He may have been writing about film, but he looked like every music journalist I’d ever known: boots, skinny black jeans, a mop of messy hair and a leather jacket, despite the heat. He was about thirty-five, his blue eyes bright and youthful, his face covered in a fine scattering of stubble.

  We shook hands.

  ‘Thanks for sparing me the time,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I don’t know if I can help.’

  He was Scottish and quietly spoken.

  ‘Well, I appreciate it all the same,’ I told him, and then asked where was good for lunch. He suggested a deli on Earlham Street, five minutes’ walk away.

  We headed there and he managed to find a table at the win
dow, and once I’d paid for our food, I returned to him with two overpriced sandwiches and a couple of bottles of still water. Shrugging off his leather jacket, Collinsky uncapped one of the bottles and chugged most of it down in one gulp. ‘Thanks for this,’ he said, then pushed it aside, unwrapping a ham and pickle sandwich.

  ‘I just finished your article on Hosterlitz.’

  He looked up. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I thought it was brilliant.’

  His gaze lingered on me for a second, as if he thought he might be the butt of some elaborate joke. ‘Thanks,’ he said, clearly still uncertain.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Well, I appreciate it.’ He shrugged. ‘For me, it was about scratching an itch. Hosterlitz was a genius, a bona fide genius, and we’re supposed to be a magazine about film, not just the last year of film. Sixty years on, those film noirs he made are works of art. Sixty years from now, they’ll still be works of art.’

  I got out a pen and a pad, and started to steer the conversation around to Lynda Korin. I gave him some background on who I was, why I wanted to speak to him and who I was working for. He listened, asking the occasional question, but mostly remained silent.

  When I was done, I said to him, ‘I don’t think this is about some falling-out with her family, because her sister is back in the US. It’s not about friends either, because – to be frank – Lynda didn’t have that many. She seemed happy at work, didn’t have any enemies, was in good health, physically and financially. So far, the thing that’s most interesting to me is that, five days after your article was published, Lynda disappeared. That might be important or it might not. But if it was a catalyst for her going missing, I need to find out why.’

  ‘Why would it be a catalyst for her going missing?’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s what I was hoping to find out from you. Can you start by telling me how the article came about?’

  He didn’t reply straight away, clearly concerned that his article might be directly linked to Lynda Korin’s disappearance.