Broken Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

DC White had emailed to her when he’d taken a trip there on 11 November. Even at a quick glance, it was clear that his messages to Wendy were carefully stage-managed, a mix of well-intentioned reassurances, minor updates and rudimentary delay tactics.
    For now, I ignored most of the stuff on Stoke Point because I planned to drive down there in the morning and take a look at it myself – but, in setting all that aside, it quickly became obvious how little else there was.
    In the end, only one email really caught my eye. In it, I found a picture of Lynda Korin and Robert Hosterlitz. ‘This was Lyn’s husband, Bob,’ Wendy wrote. ‘He died in 1988.’ It was a scan of a Polaroid, both sides of it, with a handwritten caption on the back: ‘Madrid 1983: Bob and Lyn, byRonnie M’. I did a quick search through the rest of the emails for anyone with the name ‘Ronnie M’, but came up short. However, the ‘Madrid 1983’ reference made sense: according to what I’d read about Korin and Hosterlitz earlier, in 1983 Korin would still have been working with her husband on the low-budget horror movies in Spain.
    I studied the picture.
    Against a sun-bleached, whitewashed wall, Hosterlitz and Korin were side by side. Hosterlitz, fifty-eight at the time, was small and thin, a striped T-shirt clinging to his narrow frame, his hair white and untidy. He had an arm around Korin and was smiling, his skin browned by the sun, his face creased up in the light of the day. A thick blanket of stubble covered his chin and jawline, making him look older than he was, and as I studied him, it became hard to see the person the world had known him as, or the one I remembered. This didn’t look like the man who had directed a film that had won seven Oscars, it looked like his ghost; an imitation. When I’d attended the exhibition at the MOMI all those years back, the film historian who had given the talk had shown us photos of Hosterlitz from the early 1950s – a younger, bigger, rounder version of the man, with a gold statuette, oiled hair, and expensive suits that bulged when buttoned. But that Robert Hosterlitz was long gone by the time the photo in Madrid had been taken. By this time, he’d been reduced to directing films with titles like Axe Maniac and Savages of the Amazon .
    Lynda Korin was different. She was nearly thirty years younger than Hosterlitz, and as pale as milk, her eyes like pools of pure blue water, her blonde hair – permed in a 1980s style – framing her face and placing the accent on her high cheekbones. Even with her sitting down, it was clear how tallshe was, her long legs crossed in front of her, and while the size of her breasts looked oddly out of place on her slender frame, straining against the dark vest she was wearing, it took nothing away from her. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d been expecting before I saw her in the movie poster on IMDb, but it wasn’t what I saw there and it wasn’t what I saw here, for a second time. She was so striking, such a stark contrast to the man she’d married – yet hers was a beauty that she was almost trying to disguise as she leaned into Hosterlitz and allowed herself to be protected by him. There seemed a shyness to her, a quietness and a reticence, her eyes darkened by the surrounding shadow, her smile just an upturned lip.
    Something about that didn’t make sense to me.
    She’d been an actress and a model, comfortable in front of the camera, comfortable – judging by the types of films she’d made – taking her clothes off too. So, as I continued to look at this picture of her, this portrait of a past life, it made me wonder about Lynda Korin. It made me wonder about her reasons for driving out to the edge of the sea on 28 October; about the reason she’d never been seen again; whether she’d gone there out of choice or out of fear; and it made me wonder about whether the woman in the photograph, frozen within the confines of a yellowing, thirty-year-old scan