Broken Heart Read Online Free Page B

only child. The cinema had a film noir evening once every couple of months, and one of the movies I remembered most vividly was The Eyes of the Night . It was a brilliant noir, startling and beautiful, perhaps one of history’s best, and it won seven Oscars when it was released in 1953. Robert Hosterlitz, the man Lynda Korin had been married to, had written and directed it.
    But then something had gone wrong for him. His career had gone south somehow. Before my wife, Derryn, had died, before they’d closed the Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank, we’d been there to an exhibition on film noir and listened to a talk on The Eyes of the Night and on Robert Hosterlitz himself, and heard how his life had been turned upside down. It had gone so bad for him, he’d ended up leaving America entirely.
    As the train started to move, and before my phone signal died inside the bowels of the Tube, I quickly tapped the link for Hosterlitz in Korin’s biography in order to try and fill in the gaps in my memory.
Robert Hosterlitz was born in Dresden on February 15, 1925, but emigrated with his family (his father was German actor Hans Hosterlitz ) to Los Angeles in 1933. His debut as a writer-director, aged just 24, came in the surprise commercial hit My Evil Heart (1949), but it was his fourth movie that should have propelled him to superstardom: his film noir The Eyes of the Night (1953) won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (making Hosterlitz, at 28, the youngest ever recipient of the award) and Best Screenplay. Yet, in 1954, after being subpoenaed to appear before the House of Un-American Activities, accused of being a member of the US Communist Party, Hosterlitz chose to flee America. It was hoped that a much-publicized return to Hollywood to make the western The Ghost of the Plains (1967) would kick-start his career, but instead the film proved a commercial and critical disaster for Paramount. Hosterlitz never recovered. After reportedly suffering problems with both alcohol and drugs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, financial hardship forced him to spend the last decade of his life making cheap horror movies for the grindhouse producer Pedro Silva in Madrid. He died in 1988.
    Wendy Fisher hadn’t mentioned any of this – but then why would she? It had been twenty-seven years since Hosterlitz had died, which meant Korin had been a widow for over a quarter of a century, which in turn made her marriage an irrelevance. Or, at least, probably an irrelevance. Certainly, it was hard to see how it might connect. She was sixty-two, an accountant, living in a house on the edge of the Mendips, decades on from the life, and the husband, she’d once had.
    I planned to catch up with Wendy on a video call later, so I’d ask her more about Korin’s marriage then. I was also hoping that, by the time I got home, she would have emailed the material that DC White had sent through to her. She’d talked about pictures, some documents, any of which might be a useful starting point before Tasker and Spike got back to me.
    As I thought about that, about Robert Hosterlitz, about echoes from the past, my eyes returned to the picture of Lynda Korin, a woman forgotten as an actress and forgotten by the police.
    But not forgotten by her sister.

6
    Once I got back to Ealing, I opened up the windows of my house, trying to get some air circulating, and then messaged Wendy to arrange a time for me to video-call her. While I waited for a response, I showered and changed, then took my laptop through to the back deck to continue building a picture of Lynda Korin. Wendy responded a few minutes later to tell me that she’d emailed over everything she could lay her hands on, and confirmed our Skype call for 8 p.m.
    I headed straight to my inbox.
    It turned out that everything she could lay her hands on mostly seemed to amount to photographs of Stoke Point. They were a mix of ones she’d sourced from the Internet herself, and shots that