Broken Heart (49 page)

Didn’t you ever wonder why I always used to film your eyes in close-up? Why I’d use them as windows to the rest of the scene? You would reflect silhouettes and shadows, as if they were the memories of the life you never knew, playing out inside your head. Didn’t you ever wonder why I repeated the same sequence of events, over and over? Maybe you did, but you never asked. I think a part of me was
waiting
for you to bring it up. Once, when I asked you for that paperback for my birthday, that true-crime book, I actually handed it to you and said, ‘I think this one case is particularly fascinating,’ and I pointed to the chapter on the Venice Angel. I did it blatantly, almost willing myself to be caught, for you to finally ask, ‘Why do you find that case so fascinating?’ But when you didn’t read it, I was so relieved. My whole existence with you was both utterly wonderful and quietly torturous.

I thought a lot about Zeller and Cramer too. I needed them to know that I hadn’t forgotten. I wanted them to see the footage of Pierre Street in my films. They never would have known you were Viktoria at the time – it took
me
so long to realize it myself – but they would have seen your likeness to Életke. They would have understood the message I was sending them both. But the sad truth was, no one watched those films. I was sending a message into the void.

The letter ended, unfinished, soon after that.

I don’t have the original negatives for any of the films we made together in Spain. Maybe they’re lost for ever. But everything I have is in the garage. Do you remember that old Super 8 I had? That’s there too. There’s something else as well. I bought it after I went to see Zeller and Cramer in LA. Once you get into the garage, you won’t be able to miss it. I’ve taped instructions to it. You’ll need your wooden angel as well. Look in my notes and you’ll see why. It’s the answer to everything. I’d hoped to have enough time to do everything myself, but, alas, I’m not sure I have.

That was the last thing he’d written. He didn’t sign off properly because he thought he was going to come back to it.

Instead, he’d died days later.

I looked at Korin. ‘ What’s this thing he talks about – this thing he bought and stuck instructions to?’

Korin studied me for a moment. ‘Did you ever wonder why I carved that illustration into the tree at Stoke Point before I disappeared? Why I left a key in the back of the photo, and that box next to the electric meter? What about the security footage? The Post-it? Did you ever wonder why I left those?’

‘Because you wanted me to find you.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But it’s not as simple as that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I spent
months
reading about you. I saw what kind of man you were. I saw the cases you’ve solved and the people you’ve helped. I knew you wouldn’t give up once you caught a glimpse of what was going on here, because that’s who you are. You care. You know what’s right. But I could only have you begin to look for me when I was
ready
for you to start
looking. It took me ten months to get to that stage, because Robert left instructions. But they were so hard. It’s so hard.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘That’s why the clues I left were so difficult,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want Zeller using them to find me before you did. I’d taken my work as far as it could go up here, and I needed you to help me figure out the rest. I needed you to help me with the final piece of the jigsaw – the angel.’

‘Stop talking in riddles, Lynda. What’s going on?’

‘I can’t find any reference to it in his notes. I don’t know why he calls it “the answer”.’

‘
Lynda
.’

But this time she didn’t reply.

Instead, she looked down towards the door of the caravan. In the silence, I became aware of the rain again, driving against the windows on which Korin had built the hidden history of her husband.

‘Lynda?’

‘Do you hear that?’ she said.

‘Hear what?’

‘That.’

‘The
rain
?’

But then there was something else: a dog barking.

I glanced at the door. ‘A dog – so what?’

‘It’s coming from the farm,’ she said, and there was a flicker of fear in her face now. ‘Joe, the owner, the guy who rents me this place, he’s away now. He’s not home again until tomorrow. That dog – she’s so soppy, so quiet. She never barks unless …’

‘Unless what?’

Her eyes flicked to me. ‘Unless she’s barking at someone.’

71

The valley was dark.

I told Korin to stay where she was and lock the door, and then I headed towards the farm. The rain was hammering down hard, only vague shapes visible beyond the cone of the torch Korin had given me. I could make out the farmhouse in front of me, its angles like the pale lines on a blueprint, and – behind that – the ominous blackness of mountain slopes that climbed, and dissolved, into the night. When I looked back down the field to the caravan, it had been reduced to squares of dull light. The glow from the interior, subdued by the cardboard at the windows, made it look like a boat drifting to oblivion.

I climbed the gate and crossed the road, then slowed my pace. There was a potholed concrete track at the side of the farmhouse. I swung the torch from side to side, as the smells of the place hit me: mud, wet grass, ferns, manure, silage, straw. A tractor sat under a corrugated-iron roof to my left, and then the track split in two: one half wound its way to the house, where an alarm box blinked above a blue door; the other half ploughed further onwards, in the direction of the two barns. The dog was inside the house, barking so hard she was almost hoarse. She was scratching at the door too, her paws sliding on lino, the sound so distinct and desperate I could hear it even above the rain.

Something had definitely set her off.

Up close, the barns seemed vast, like the hull of some
huge supertanker. In one I saw a quad bike and a furrow plough, and in the other I could see the vague, swollen shapes of the pigs. They were largely silent and most seemed to be still, but when I passed the torch across them, a few shifted and one made a deep snort. The dog started barking more vociferously.

I passed along the side of the barn with the pigs and found an annex built on the back, about the size of a garage. It looked like it might once have been a workshop, the only window – a panel of tall near-opaque glass – flecked with sawdust. The odour of old wood clung to it, even with the weather as it was, and there was the smell of oil, spirits and paint as well. The annex’s slanted roof had a tile loose, hanging at an angle like a puzzle piece that hadn’t clicked into place, and with no guttering, water fell from the roof in a sheet, machine-gunning against the ground and turning anything that wasn’t paved into an instant sloppy bog.

A noise.

I paused, listening. As if on cue, the rain eased off slightly. I directed the torch along the edge of the annex, down towards the back of the other barn. The only things there were old equipment, half submerged in mud, grass and old bricks. I turned my attention to the annex again. The door was a faded red that had peeled like burnt skin, and there were slide bolts top and bottom, both secured.

Then I heard the noise again.

I looked back the way I’d come, using my torch to illuminate the path. Rain drifted across the light like silver strands. In the barn, I could hear the pigs moving. In the house, the dog was barking even more frantically than before.

‘Hello?’

My voice disappeared into the night. I remained there, in
front of the annex, my eyes on the path. Everything was still.

‘Hello?’ I said again.

When I got no response a second time, I headed back, swinging the torch from side to side. The beam cut through the dark, shadows forming in the ridges of the barns, in the brickwork of the farmhouse – but anything further out, beyond the lines of the light, was invisible.

Except that wasn’t quite true.

As the rain stopped, I noticed a very slight colour change on one side of the farmhouse, as if the building was being backlit by a security light. I hadn’t taken note of it on the way in.

I moved more quickly, tracing the circumference of the barn. The pigs reacted to the fall of my footsteps, snorting, scattering, and as they did, the dog became even more desperate than before. I checked the farmhouse windows and then moved along a flagstone path to the front door. The dog was going crazy on the other side now, the door jerking against its frame.

I tried the door, but it was definitely locked.

Backing up, I continued in the direction of the caravan, along the path pitted with holes, between mountains I couldn’t see and trees I could only hear.

The caravan hadn’t even come back into view when something suddenly registered with me, giving me pause for a moment: the colour change I’d noticed on the house was an orange, not a white.

It wasn’t a security light, it was the caravan.

It was on fire.

72

Something ignited inside the caravan. A dull, guttural
whump
ripped across the darkness, and then smoke and fire erupted out of a window on the side, close to where the kitchen had been. For a split second, the entire valley lit up.

I broke into a run, crossing the silent road and springing over the gate. As I landed in the field – soil sodden beneath my feet – thick balls of smoke began to chug from a hole in the kitchen window. The faster I ran, the less control I had, my feet sliding on the grass. One hundred feet short of the caravan, the heat hit me, like running head first into a solid wall – and then I could smell the petrol. I pushed on, watching holes forming, a section of the roof seeming to drain away like liquid running into a plughole.

‘Lynda!’

Flames crawled and twisted, tendrils of fire wrapping themselves around the carcass of the vehicle – with no rain, there was nothing to stop it any more. One of the windows splintered and began to fall away, the grey of the cardboard that had been stuck to it long since gone. Minute pieces of paper – the remnants of the documents and photos that Korin had so meticulously mounted to the interior – were disappearing towards the sky in a trail of ash. Pretty soon, all that she’d found in the boxes would be gone for ever.

‘
Lynda!
’

I stopped twenty feet short of the caravan. The flames were so intense, I couldn’t get close enough to the windows
to put my face to them and look inside for Korin – but as I glanced around, trying to see if she’d made it clear, I noticed something smeared up the exterior of the caravan, right next to the open door.

Blood.

I felt a twinge of alarm.

The light from the fire cast a circle around the caravan, an ethereal glow, and then a breeze rolled up from the lake, the smoke whirling and changing course, and my eyes shifted from the door, back to the windows.

This time, I could see something.

It looked like a human shape, slumped over. I tried to get closer, the heat still holding me back, but I managed to inch near enough to make out a shoulder, visible at the bottom of the window. And then I realized what else I could see: a red anorak.

My heart sank.

It was Korin.

I moved to the door of the caravan, trying to see if there was any way I could gain access, any way I could get to her and pull her out. But it was impossible. The vehicle was an inferno, crackling and popping, all of it going up in smoke. Korin was inside, and so was the story of her and Hosterlitz’s life; the letter he’d written her; the photos of her mother.

Movement.

I swung around instantly, directing the torch down towards the drystone wall at the front of the caravan, the light skittering across its ridges. There was no one there. Uncertain of what I’d seen, I turned and faced back up the slope, re-establishing my grip on the light. My head was throbbing, the cool of the night and the heat from the fire prickling against my skin. I felt
goosebumps scatter along my spine, sweat at my lip, at my brow, on the palms of my hands.

Egan.

I spun on my heel and looked down the slope for a second time, to where the wall separated this field from the next. The mix of smoke and flames, the way the shadows tilted and altered, made it difficult to judge what was moving and what was a trick of the light. I lifted the torch to shoulder height, trying to use elevation as a way to spread its impact.

‘Egan,’ I shouted, ‘I know it’s you!’

I moved to the front of the caravan, shining the torch through the gap between its tow bracket and the wall. The field seemed to go on for ever on the other side, falling away into black. But the torch had a range of about sixty feet, plus there was the light from the fire, so if he was heading out that way, making a break for it across the field, I’d have been able to see him. But what if he hadn’t come to this end of the caravan in order to make a break for it?

What if he’s just done a loop of the van?

As I turned to face back up the field, he smashed into me so hard my feet left the floor. I had enough time to see the glint of what may have been a knife and then, a split second later, I’d careened against the top of the drystone wall, spiralled over it, and hit the wet bank of grass on the other side. I landed even harder than I’d left it.

Dazed, stunned, I rolled on to my back, old injuries reawakening – my arm, my chest, my face. I winced, my head swimming, and managed to haul myself up on to all fours. The torch was out of reach next to the wall. Somewhere, I thought I could hear the lake. Somewhere else, I heard a part of the caravan collapsing, the sound of metal and plastic folding like paper. Another
whump
and then fire
erupted like a fountain, painting my side of the wall a brief, brilliant yellow.

That was when I saw him.