Broken Heart Read Online Free PDF

of a Polaroid, had some sort of story to tell.
    A story the world might get to hear, if she was alive.
    Or get buried for ever, if she wasn’t.
    At just after seven, Ewan Tasker called me.
    ‘This is going to be short and sweet,’ he said once I’d picked up. ‘I emailed Lynda Korin’s missing persons report across to you, but footage of her – that’s harder. I’ve had a look and there’s some listed in evidence down in Bath, butit’s a DVD. Apparently, the tech they use at Stoke Point is old, so there’s no digital version – as in, the security system at that car park isn’t uploading it in real time to a server somewhere. So the only way you’re getting your hands on the footage – unless you’re into breaking and entering – is if you know someone who works for the police down in Bath. That way they can rip the footage from the disc and send it to you. Or they can just mail you the DVD itself. You got someone you know down there?’
    ‘Not at the moment.’
    ‘Could be time to unleash your winning personality.’
    I laughed. ‘All right, old man. I appreciate it.’
    I hung up, went to my email and found the message from Task. Attached to it was a digital version of Korin’s missing persons report.
    Right up front was a recent photograph of her. She looked remarkable, her sixty-two years like a number that didn’t compute. There were age lines at the corners of her eyes, and her blonde hair had become seeded with grey along her parting and across the arc of her forehead. Otherwise, her sharp, attractive features made her look ten years younger than she was. But, as good as she looked, it wasn’t her that caught my attention, it was the photograph itself. Although it was taken in a living room, presumably Korin’s – she was perched on the arm of a sofa – it looked professional. The lighting was too perfect, she’d had her hair and make-up done, her pose wasn’t natural. I made a note of it, wondering where the shot had come from, and moved on.
    The first section of the file just confirmed a lot of what I already knew, starting with Wendy reporting her sister missing on Sunday 2 November. Wendy was five years younger than Lynda and still lived with her husband in Lakeville, asuburb south of Minneapolis, where Lynda was born in 1952, and later grew up.
    Wendy had phoned Avon and Somerset Police in Bath after failing to hear from Korin, either via text or email, for five days. The timing fitted: five days earlier, on Tuesday 28 October, Korin had been caught on CCTV camera entering Stoke Point. In the report, Wendy called the lack of contact between them ‘worrying’ because ‘Lyn and I were in touch many times a day, every day.’
    The response from the police in Bath was slow. Wendy said she’d looked up police stations on the Internet, close to where Korin lived on the eastern edge of the Mendips, and Bath just happened to be the one she called first. Initially, she spoke to a uniformed constable called Stewart Wolstenholme.
    From this point, however, there was a leap of nine days.
    The next activity in the case was on Tuesday 11 November – the day after Korin’s car had been found at Stoke Point. That meant, even if Wolstenholme had told Wendy Fisher he was going to look into things for her on 2 November, he’d done nothing. It wasn’t until a National Trust employee – who checked on the car park at Stoke Point three times a week – reported Korin’s car as likely having been abandoned that the case found its way to DC Raymond White’s desk and something began to happen. White quickly began ticking boxes: he called Wendy to inform her that her sister’s car had been found; he conducted a more extensive interview with her over the telephone; he organized for a DNA sample to be taken from Korin’s toothbrush, and then cross-checked it with the Missing Persons Bureau to see if any of the unidentified bodies they had on file matched that of Lynda Korin. They didn’t.
    White had