Broken Heart by Tim Weaver Page A

disappearing again, and I followed the diagram to a spot where the even ground began sloping away, down to the peninsula.
    It was colder under the foliage, the light hazier and greyer, and as I bent down at the location where the keys had been found – in a knot of roots at the foot of one of the alders – I found a blanket of discarded junk: a few old, rusted drink cans; some plastic sandwich wrappers; a crisp packet rinsed white over time.
    I stayed where I was and reread the portion of the file dealing with the discovery of the keys, then looked at my surroundings again. The spot was maybe sixteen or seventeen feet back from the edge of the car park – the edge of the car park being the point at which its tarmac gave way to grass and trees. It was hard to appreciate it on the diagram in the file, but sixteen or seventeen feet made for a hell of a throw. I could see that now, standing where I was. It wasn’t beyond the capabilities of Lynda Korin – it wasn’t beyond the capabilities of any adult – but it was still a long way. If something about that bothered me, it didn’t bother me as much as the place the keys were discovered, in among the drink cans and sandwich wrappers at the roots of the alder.
    As I’d approached, I hadn’t even been able to see the baseof the tree, the point at which the roots were exposed and created a kind of natural pocket – and that was because, on a direct path from the car park, the roots were on the north-east side of it: the opposite side. They were all but hidden from view. The alder’s roots faced in the direction of the Bristol Channel, not the car park.
    Just to be sure, I returned along the path I’d come in on, and then walked it again, trying to keep the roots of the tree in view the whole time. It was impossible. A couple of times I caught sight of them as the path snaked right to left, but mostly the roots remained completely out of sight until I was right on the alder itself.
    I paused there, file in hand, trying to take it all in.
    DC White had proposed that Korin – or, if not her, someone else – had thrown the keys away. But if that was what had happened, I was being asked to believe that whoever had done so had not only thrown them that distance, but got incredibly lucky with where the keys had landed. It was certainly possible that it had played out like that. But it was equally possible that there was no luck involved at all. It was possible that a spot had been chosen and the keys had been placed there on purpose.
    Crouching down at the foot of the tree, I looked around again, turning that same theory over in my head – that the location of the keys was too far from the edge of the car park, and too well hidden in the roots, to have been a fluke.
    Question is, why would someone place them in this spot?
    I glanced at the alder, and then at the one next to it.
    The second tree was the thickest and biggest on this side of the car park, and its trunk was dotted with the scars of a hundred bored teenagers. All down the grey bark, kids had carved names into it, hearts, indecipherable graffiti thatmeant nothing. The same graffiti was in the background of the photograph of the keys in situ. As I thought of that, I opened up the file again and compared that shot to the view I had of the roots now. I looked from the photograph to the trees, to the file, and then back to the trees again.
    Everything looked exactly the same.
    I stood up and stepped across to the second alder, to its graffiti scars, twigs cracking beneath my feet, leaves vibrating as wind passed through them. Studying the hundreds of grooves and rifts made by knives and sharp-edged stones, my gaze eventually fell upon a small engraving, only a couple of inches high, about a third of the way up. It was easy to miss, almost hidden among everything else around it – but something immediately registered with me.

    It was a film projector.
    I double-checked the photograph in the file and saw that the