Broken Heart (18 page)

I could already see it was a lost cause. She was still frowning, trying to recall something, anything, but it was a part of her life long consigned to history.

‘Final few questions, I promise. Did either of them ever talk to you about a place called Lake Calhoun?’

‘Calhoun?’

I spelled it for her.

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘You don’t remember anything like that?’

‘No, definitely not. Where is it?’

‘It’s in the States.’

It clearly meant nothing to her.

‘What about the name “Ring of Roses”? Does that mean anything to you? Did either of them ever discuss a film idea that went by that name?’

‘No, but the police officer also asked about that.’

I looked up from my notes. ‘About “Ring of Roses”?’

‘Yes. When he came to speak to me about Lynda, he asked me quite a few times if I knew what it was.’

‘The police came to see you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was Detective Constable Raymond White?’

‘Uh … I think so.’

‘But you’re not sure?’

‘I can’t remember what he said his name was.’

An alarm started going off in my head.

‘Was it just one police officer?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he asked you about “Ring of Roses”?’

She nodded. ‘It was all he seemed interested in, really.’

I felt my fingers tighten around the pen. ‘Did he show you a warrant card?’ I asked. ‘You know, his police ID?’

‘Uh, I think so.’ But her eyes spoke of conflict, of confusion, of a difficulty in remembering. ‘Or maybe he didn’t, I don’t know.’

There was no record in White’s report of him ever visiting Veronica Mae at home, so I was betting on
didn’t
. And that really only meant one thing.

The man who had visited her wasn’t a cop at all.

00:07:53

Sirens drift across the afternoon.

In front of the camera, Ray Callson is seated cross-legged, his eyes on the windows. Sunlight shines on his skin. The finger and thumb of his right hand are gently rubbing together – a nervous tic maybe, or the sign of a smoker aching for a cigarette. He takes a long breath and then his eyes shift from the windows to a space just off camera.

‘Anyway,’ he says, a little wearily, ‘I was going to tell you about that one case I had. What do you want to know about it?’

‘You said, in your thirty-two years of being a police officer, it was one of the cases that stuck with you.’

Callson just nods.

‘Can you describe it?’

To start with, it’s unclear whether Callson has heard.

‘Mr Callson?’

‘We got a call to go to the Pingrove,’ he says quietly.

‘That’s how the case began?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s the Pingrove?’

‘It was a hotel, not far from here. On the corner of Wilshire and North Camden. It doesn’t exist any more, but back then it was a pretty famous spot. The place to be seen, I guess you could say.’

‘You said “we” got the call – who’s “we”?’

‘Me and my partner, Luis. Luis Velazquez. He’s gone now. Been gone a while, actually. Had a heart attack four or five years back. He was a good man.’

There’s a short, respectful silence.

‘So what happened when you two got to the Pingrove Hotel?’

Callson sniffs, adjusts himself in his seat. ‘It was weird. Everything in there was completely normal – except for the manager. The people behind the desk were carrying on with their jobs, the bellboy, concierge; there were guests milling around all over the place. They didn’t have the first idea what was going on. But the manager – he was out front, waiting for us. He hadn’t told any of his employees what he’d found yet. He was the only one who knew what had happened on the eighth floor – apart from the maid who’d reported it in the first place. I remember he was white as a sheet and he’d sweated through his shirt. He looked like my son used to look when he was a kid – you know, after he’d woken up terrified from some nightmare.’

‘He was emotional?’

‘Emotional. Yeah, that’s one word for it.’

‘How would you describe him then?’

‘No, emotional’s right. He was in shock.’

‘Because of what he’d found?’

Callson nods.

‘What happened after that?’

There’s a pregnant pause. Callson’s eyes are now fixed on a space low down, beyond the camera. ‘If I remember right,’ he says, ‘he told us what he found up there, and Luis started speaking Spanish.’

‘Spanish? Why?’

Callson looks up. ‘He was reciting the Lord’s Prayer.’

23

I was still thinking about what Veronica Mae had said – about someone coming to the house, pretending to be a cop, and asking about ‘Ring of Roses’ – when my phone started ringing on the seat beside me. It was Melanie Craw. The line popped and then buzzed as I answered, and I heard Craw saying, ‘Raker?’

‘Yeah. Can you hear me?’

‘Just about.’

Ahead of me, the road bisected a thick beech forest, like a canyon carving its way through a set of cliffs, and I managed to find somewhere to pull in, next to a gate and a stile. Above the stile, a Forestry Commission sign marked
Sherborne Woods
was pointing in the direction of a path winding beneath the dense canopy of trees.

The call cut out.

I slid out of the car and wandered up the road, hoping it might flicker back into life. Wind moved silently through the forest as I dialled Craw’s number.

Click.
‘Raker?’

‘Sorry about that. I’m out in the sticks.’

‘How did it go at the doctor’s yesterday?’ Craw said, cutting to the chase.

‘Everything was fine.’

‘Did he examine you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’

‘He said things were good.’

‘No chance of you keeling over again any time soon?’

‘No. Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Did he prescribe anything else?’

‘Just more of the same,’ I lied.

As I turned back towards the car, the faint breeze died away, the branches settling, the leaves doing the same – and, as everything hushed, I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye; off to my left, deep in the forest.

There was a drystone wall separating the road from the trees. I stepped up to it and watched the forest for a moment. Leaves and branches began moving again, thin shafts of sunlight appearing and vanishing, pale amber strands criss-crossing along the forest floor.

‘Raker?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, my eyes still on the trees. ‘I’m here.’

‘I’m finishing work at seven tonight and the kids are with my mum. I was thinking of getting a takeaway.’

‘Okay, well, I’ll wait for an invite.’

‘Ha ha,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you about something.’

‘That sounds ominous.’

She didn’t respond.

‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.

‘Like I said, I need to talk to you.’

I looked at my watch. It was almost midday.

‘I’m down in Somerset at the moment, and I’m not sure what time I’ll be back tonight. But I can give you a call when I’m an hour away.’

‘All right. Don’t get yourself killed in the meantime.’

‘I’ll try my best.’

I looked into the forest again, my eyes moving between trunks and branches, across grass and beds of fallen leaves.

There was no one around.

All I could see was a bird – a rook – on a branch about twenty-five feet from where I was standing, its black eyes and silver beak trained on me.

It squawked once and took off.

24

It took me a while to find the house that Lynda Korin had lived in for thirty-one years. West of the village of Hinton Blewett, it was tucked away on its own at the end of a short country lane, hidden from the road by plump hedgerows, its old, rust-speckled front gate pretty much invisible until I was almost upon it.

Getting out of the car, I fanned the gate open, its hinges moaning, and swung the BMW in through the gap in the hedge. At the end of a sand-coloured driveway pitted with small, uneven holes, a beautiful grey stone cottage laced with ivy came into view. It sat on an incline and looked out across the Mendips. The view was like a shot from a postcard: a carpet of green and yellow squares outlined by stone walls, Chew Valley Lake sitting like a thousand acres of blue ink about three miles away.

There was no alarm on Korin’s place, or at least not one that I could see, which made my life easier. Leaving the car door ajar, trying to keep it as cool as possible, I went to the front of the cottage. It had three windows on the ground floor: one on the left, which looked through to a small sitting room, and two on the right – one, a bedroom, the other a study.

I carried on around to the right, following a flagstone path between empty flowerbeds to a door on the side of the house that led to a utility room. Further around still was the back garden. A raised patio sat directly outside a pair of French doors, stone steps dropping down to a lawn that rolled at a
marginal slant because of the way the hill sloped. It was hard to get a sense of whether Korin loved gardening, because it had clearly been untouched in ten months: the grass was knee-length; weeds were crawling up the steps and out between patio slabs; flowerbeds were either empty, like the ones at the side of the house, or overrun, rampant and unchecked.

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.