Broken Heart (26 page)

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t want to hurt her.’

‘No, of course,’ she said quickly, embarrassed now. ‘Of course you don’t. I didn’t mean to …’ It was her turn to stop this time. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t …’

I held up a hand.

‘I misread the situation,’ she said.

‘You didn’t misread it.’

The implication was obvious, but it did nothing to stifle her discomfort. She pulled at the door of the Range Rover.

‘I’d better be going.’

‘Okay.’

‘Give me a call if you need anything else.’

‘I will. Thank you again, Alex.’

It was only as her car disappeared from view and the burn of the guilt and regret began to ebb away that a thought popped into my head: What if all of this was about ‘Ring of Roses’?

What if that was the reason Saul Zeller brought Egan into the fold at the beginning of November? Completely out of the blue, he’d given Alex the go-ahead on the Comet refurbishment, after months of stalling on it, and told her to invite local businesses to pitch for the work. What if he did that because, a few days before, Zeller had come across Marc Collinsky’s web article?

The timings fitted.

Late October was the first time ‘Ring of Roses’ had been mentioned anywhere, in any form. Collinsky had left all
mention of it out of the print edition, which was why that wouldn’t have rung any alarm bells with Zeller. Plus, as a UK magazine, it wouldn’t even have been available in the States on export until January or February. But the Internet was different. It was instantly available. The article was there, for everyone to see, as soon as it went up on 27 October.

Maybe Zeller had found the article online himself. Maybe Egan had brought it to his attention. Maybe someone else did. However it had happened, it
had
to be why Zeller had signed off on the Comet plans so suddenly. He wanted Egan close to AKI Europe – in and around it. But to keep an eye on Alex? On Cramer? Or to follow a trail back to Korin and Hosterlitz, to whatever ‘Ring of Roses’ was? Egan was either following me because he hadn’t found Korin, or because he had. So did that mean he was trying to stop me – or use me?

Even without the answers I craved, I felt something grip in my stomach, an intuitive feeling that this was going somewhere bad. It was instinct kicking in from years of having followed missing people into the darkness. As I got out my phone and went to the location app, the same map of the same area in south London appeared, the pin dropped outside the same house as earlier on.

It belonged to Billy Egan.

I had to find out who he really was.

36

Bradbury Lane was an L-shaped cul-de-sac midway along Streatham High Road. The cul-de-sac consisted of an odd mix of 1930s houses, a couple of boxy, pebble-dashed bungalows, and a series of small businesses – a corner shop, a car workshop, a tailor, a chip shop. At the bend in the street, I spotted the Mercedes for the first time: it was half hidden by a tree at the gates to one of the bungalows, and sat parked on the drive, its black paint melding with the dark of the night. I pulled a U-turn and found a space away from the house, right at the mouth of the road.

The bungalow outside which the Mercedes was parked was probably the least attractive of all the houses. It had a single bay window at the front, a black door, an ugly brown colour to its pebble-dash, and a wooden fence that had gone a long time without being treated. Halfway along, the fence bowed slightly, as if either it had been battered by a strong wind, or someone had driven a car into it.

I checked the time. It was 10.30 p.m.

Angling the rear-view mirror so I had a clear view of the house, I used the time available to me to start searching for Rafael Walker, the man I hoped might be Microscope. The unusual, European spelling of his first name, combined with his very English surname, meant the hunt didn’t last long. Pretty soon, I had both Facebook and Twitter accounts for him, Instagram too, and the bones of a website he’d tried to get off the ground – and given up on – when
he’d started writing for
Sight & Sound
and the BFI Classics range.

On Facebook and Twitter, he was careful not to give too much of his personal information away; his posts were about films, TV, or work he was engaged in at the BFI. There were pictures from the American film noir exhibition he’d curated, but not a lot else. He loved his job, he loved movies. That was about the sum total of it.

On Instagram, however, he’d been marginally less cautious. I searched for his name in an online phone directory, found twenty-four R. Walkers in London, and then started going through his pictures individually, trying to look for any indication of where photos had been taken, and whether those photos might give me an idea of obvious life patterns, routines, where he liked going, and in what area he might live. After a couple of minutes, I found a shot of him with two other people in some kind of park. There was a series of small white boulders surrounding them; a sort of stone circle. Behind them, the sun had started to set, and – as I studied the photograph more closely – I realized I recognized the layout of the stones.

It was Hilly Fields in Lewisham.

I returned to the online phone directory. The twelfth R. Walker on the list had an address on Prendegast Avenue, half a mile from Lewisham High Street.

I thought briefly about calling him and double-checking he was definitely the person I was after, but it was ten-thirty on a Saturday night, and cold-calling him at home and firing questions at him about Hosterlitz and Korin seemed like the wrong way to play it. If he was smart, he’d probably figure out that I’d stalked him through social media, using it in the worst way possible, but that was just something I’d have to tackle once I got him on the phone – or saw him in person.
Monday was a bank holiday, which meant he wouldn’t be back in work until at least Tuesday – and there was no way I was waiting two days just so I could turn up at the BFI offices and make it all look official.

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.