Broken Heart (46 page)

‘Are you saying you found all of this stuff in the garden room?’

‘No. But what I found in there led me to the boxes.’

I frowned. ‘Boxes?’

‘He left all of this in boxes,’ she replied, meaning the things on the walls. ‘But there were so
many
boxes, and they were all unsorted. Every single one was a mess. When I first came across them in July, after the interviews, they meant nothing to me. But, by August, I was starting to get an idea of what I might have on my hands.’

I looked around me.
The history of a cover-up.

‘The truth is, though, if I’d taken all of this to the police in August, I still wouldn’t have known enough. I was still playing catch-up, still trying to sort it into some kind of order,
understand
it. The police here would have said to me, “It’s a sixty-year-old murder that happened on the other side of the world – what are we supposed to do with this?”, and the cops in LA would have said, “What actual hard evidence do you have against Saul Zeller?” ’ She stopped and looked across at me. ‘And my answer would have been, “I don’t know. I just … don’t know.” ’

I watched her, rooted to the spot.

‘But that didn’t mean I couldn’t see where it was going,’
she went on. ‘I looked at what Robert had left behind for me and I thought, “This is going to take me somewhere dark. Sooner or later, this stuff is going to force me to run for cover.” I didn’t necessarily think about disappearing, not back then, but the more I read of what he’d left me, the more weeks that passed, the more the idea started to form. I’d go down to Stoke Point, keep turning up there and watching the same people, and I’d think about what I would do if I disappeared, how I would do it. Wendy called me one day and said she was having issues with her emails, and I offered to help her, and I knew, deep down, the reason why: so I could gain access to her inbox. She would report me missing, because she was all I had left – so if I could get into her email after I was gone, I could see what the police were telling her. It was all so calculated.’ She stopped and a worn smile cracked across her face. ‘In that sense, I suppose I wasn’t that different from Robert.’

As her last sentence echoed against the walls of paper, I said, ‘Why not just go to the police in September or October instead?’

‘Because I ran out of time. I was finally starting to get on top of it all by October. I still didn’t have enough on Zeller, not enough to fight him with, but I could feel that I was close. I thought, “It’s just a question of biding my time. I’ll keep on going through the boxes until I find exactly what I need.” But then it happened how I feared it might: I was forced to run for cover.’

‘Because of Marc Collinsky’s web article.’

‘Yes. I talked to Marc about Ring of Roses in the first interview without having a clue about what it was – it was just something I’d heard Robert mention before he died. I thought it was innocent – some script, some idea, that kept him going
through his last years of sickness. But by the time that article went out on the Internet on 27 October, I’d spent almost four months going through Robert’s boxes, and while I didn’t know everything, I knew enough. I knew that, when Marc put my name in that article, next to “Ring of Roses”, he was signing my death warrant, so I had no choice but to disappear. And I knew that the ornament you’re holding was the only way to protect myself, because the angel’s what Robert called “the answer”.’

I looked at the angel. ‘But the answer to what?’

‘To everything.’ She studied me. ‘I heard on the radio today that the police are looking for you. They think you killed Glen Cramer.
Did
you kill him, David?’

‘No. Zeller’s son did.’

She nodded. ‘I think the angel will clear your name. It’ll stop Saul Zeller. I think it’ll bring Zeller down and make him pay for what he’s done. I just don’t know how.
That’s
why I employed you to find me: because I’ve hit a dead end. In Robert’s notes, he calls the angel the answer, but I don’t know what the hell he means. I’ve spent ten months with these things he left’ – she gestured to the walls of paper – ‘and I’ve worked out most things, but I
still
don’t know what he means by that.’

‘Why do you even need the angel?’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve got walls full of evidence here.’

‘This isn’t evidence. This is a case history. This is one man’s point of view. Robert left all of this so I could understand what had gone on. But it’s not proof.’

I looked at the angel again.

‘But how can an ornament possibly help us?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but you can help me find out. I
know you can. I needed you to understand the case, to wade through the horror of it, to see the terrible things that had been done to that woman and that boy – not just by Zeller, but by Glen Cramer and …’ She paused for a long time. ‘And by Robert.’

Her hands clenched into balls.

‘Zeller needs to pay for what he’s done,’ she said, ‘otherwise all of these things on the walls, all the risks you took to get here, all the risks
I
took running and hiding and lying awake every night thinking Zeller would find me and kill me before I could finish – all of it has been for nothing.’

67

We were both sitting. I’d made us some tea, giving her time to recover her poise, and she’d lowered the hood on her coat, pulling her hair into a ponytail. More of her hair had greyed in the time she’d been missing, and some of the colour had drained from her cheeks. She’d lost weight too. Not much, but enough to start tugging at her. Even so, hers was a beauty that was difficult to subdue. As we started trying to work things out together, as she began talking again, I found myself looking into her eyes, unable to turn away.

‘I was twenty-four when I met Robert,’ she said. ‘He was fifty-one, so the age gap was huge. He’d only been left with a slight stiffness in his arm after the stroke in 1974, but he’d spent the five years before that ruining his liver with drink and painkillers. He was an alcoholic, basically. That was where you could see his age. So many people said to me, “He’s nearly thirty years older than you – what are you doing?” I understood why they would say that. He wasn’t unattractive, but he was tired and sad.’ She paused as she dug out those memories of him. ‘I never cared. I’d dated plenty of men my own age, and plenty of older men too, but none of them were like Robert. He had this subtlety to him. This mystery. You’d dig down to one layer, thinking it was as deep as you could go, then he’d reveal some other part of himself. He’d talk about film and literature and music, even stuff like politics and religion, things that academically
clever people bore you with at parties, and he would just bring them alive. It was like I was discovering the world with him.’

She took a sip from her tea, her knees pressed against her chest.

‘I know I told you lies to get you here, but I told you a lot of true things too. I don’t have that many friends. I’ve never given much of myself away. I love my sister dearly, but she’s a conformist – she’s fitted in everywhere – and I was always jealous of her. She made it through high school, college, got a good job, had a family, everything, and she never had a single problem at any point. I had nothing
but
problems – at least, until I met Robert. When I met him, it was like looking in a mirror: he’d been hurt like me, he’d done things he’d regretted like me, he was introspective and flawed and never wanted to talk about it. He had secrets.’

Immediately, I recalled her line about that in the
Cine
article.

‘About a year after we got married, his secrets came out. Well … I
thought
they came out. I
still
thought that, even by the time I was doing those
Cine
interviews in June and July.’ For the first time, there was a flash of anger in her face, but then it quickly became something else: upset, disappointment. ‘We were at home one night and I looked up and he was just watching me. We’d been shooting
Hell Trip
, so this would have been 1979. I looked up at him and … and he was in pieces.’

‘He was crying?’

‘Yeah. I’d never seen him cry before. I went to him and asked him what the matter was, and he just said, “You’re an angel.” He just kept saying that, over and over.’ She
paused, her eyes meeting mine, the rest left unspoken:
He was crying because, when he looked at her, he saw Életke Kerekes.
‘In some ways, I think he saw me as a literal angel, a reincarnation, a chance to put right what he’d done wrong. I know that now – but I didn’t back then.’ She cleared her throat. ‘In that moment, it felt like the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to me.’

She idled on the words he’d used, clearly still hurt by their subtext, by his refusal to tell her the truth. ‘It poured out of him after that. All these old secrets he’d bottled up. He admitted to using prostitutes before he met me. After he was chased out of the US by the HUAC, he said he was just so lonely. He didn’t want a partner at the time because he didn’t want to have to share his past with anyone. So he used call girls for years – right up until he had his stroke.’

Korin stopped again, eyeing me.

‘He liked to watch,’ she said a moment later.

I already knew exactly where this was going: to the conversation I’d had with Veronica Mae about how Hosterlitz had behaved on-set, how he’d watched his wife from the corners of the room.

‘From about two years into our marriage, he started having …’ She halted, as if guilty at having to give voice to the words. ‘He started having problems. He couldn’t function in the bedroom. He said I should leave him, but it never crossed my mind.’ She stopped again, this time for longer. ‘I didn’t think about it at the time, but it seems so obvious now. The reasons he liked to watch, I mean.’

‘He looked at you and he saw Életke Kerekes.’

‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it was.’

She turned away from me slightly, the grey in her hair like silver thread.

‘Like I said, it just poured out of him,’ she went on. ‘He said he’d taken too many painkillers, too many other drugs. He said he knew he was an alcoholic too, although he never touched a drop during our entire marriage.’

‘So you figured those were his big secrets?’

She nodded. ‘And I still thought that. Until last year.’

But then my thoughts snagged on something she’d just said.
He never touched a drop during our entire marriage.

‘He definitely never drank again while you were married?’

‘Never,’ she replied, adamant. ‘Why?’

‘Zeller’s daughter told me he was drunk all the time in retirement.’

‘That’s a lie.’

‘Glen Cramer said that Robert flew out to LA in 1984, just after Christmas, and turned up on his doorstep, drunk.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The “scouting” trip.’

‘That’s right, yeah. Did Robert tell you he was going to LA?’

‘No.’ She looked at me, her expression neutral. It was hard to tell how she felt about it now. ‘He took his Super 8 camera with him and said he was going to drive to the state forests to do some location-scouting. That trip happened two weeks after he got told he had cancer. I’d spent the entire time crying my eyes out, but he’d barely reacted. He was numb. I figured he needed to be alone.’

‘So why’d he go to LA instead?’

‘To confront the ghosts from his past.’

‘Cramer and Zeller?’

‘When you get the sort of news Robert got a fortnight before we flew out to see Wendy, your priorities shift. The doctor said he might have two years, but he lived for almost four. He didn’t know he’d have an extra two years at the
time. He wanted to face down Zeller and Cramer, and do it before he died.’

‘So Cramer was lying?’

‘About Robert being drunk?’

‘Yes.’

‘They told all sorts of lies to him, and about him. That was just another one. Robert never took another drink after 1976.’

I looked at the walls of the caravan.

‘All this stuff you found in the boxes – where did Robert leave them?’

This time she moved. She got to her feet, her joints stiff from sitting for so long. She walked to the end of the caravan, opened a flip-up drawer, and began to riffle through some clothes. After a couple of seconds, she took something out, pushed the drawer shut again and returned to her seat. She held it out to me.

It was a wedding-ring box.

‘What’s this?’

‘He didn’t give me the box. Just what’s inside.’

I took it from her and snapped it open.

Inside was a silver key.

‘At some point, he’d bought a garage from the council on a housing estate outside Bath,’ she said. There was so much pain and bitterness in that sentence, it seemed to draw all the energy out of the room. ‘I never knew a thing about it. The key is for the garage. When I opened it up, I found twelve boxes full of this stuff, and each of the boxes was this high.’ She held a hand about four feet off the floor. ‘There was no order to it. Like I said, it was a mess. None of it made sense.’

‘He’d left the key to the garage in the garden room?’

‘Yes.’

That was when I finally understood. In the garden room, I’d found minor indentations in the corners of the freshly painted grey panel, where a piece of plasterboard had once been attached. The board had been used to hang tools.

‘The key was hidden under the plasterboard,’ I said.

I recalled what she’d told me earlier: how doing the interview with
Cine
had made her miss Hosterlitz. She’d started sorting out the garden room, sorting through the shelves and junk for things of his she may have forgotten about.

‘I dumped most of what I found in there, because it was useless,’ Korin said. She looked on the verge of tears for the first time, vulnerable and misled. ‘I never had a clue about the council garage. There was never anything on our bank statements. He was sick for most of those four years we were in Somerset. Some days were good, some were bad, but I don’t ever remember us being apart. We must have been, though. He must have disappeared for afternoons. He must have done things while I was out of the house.’ She paused, swallowed hard, looked at me and then away again. ‘Because, when I decided to rip that plasterboard down, the key had been taped to the panel with duct tape, and pinned up next to that was a letter.’