Broadchurch (12 page)

‘OK, thanks.’

Beth turns her back on Pete and scrubs until the only dirt left in the bathroom is a ring of dried suds around the base of Danny’s shampoo bottle.

The promised extra officers are here at last. Ellie’s never seen this many detectives in one station before. Unfamiliar people make coffee in the staff canteen. They need more kettles and one of the new recruits is using Frank’s special big mug.

It is hard not to feel intimidated by the influx. Everything has been scaled up. Of course Ellie is gratified that Wessex Police have put their money where their mouths are for once: anything less and she’d be fighting for more. But the swell of voices drives home how much work still lies ahead of them. The case, that she had hoped would be simple and short, is getting bigger, the mountain growing even as they try to climb it. Despite their hard work, they remain stuck in the foothills, and Ellie is exhausted already. She hasn’t slept more than four hours since Danny’s body was found.

The air-con in CID struggles to cope with the heat generated by the extra bodies. Nish wipes the sweat from his brow, leaving a smear on his cuff. Everyone is tense, waiting for Hardy’s briefing.

Ellie pops her head into the boss’s office; he is bent over a letter. ‘Ready when you are, sir.’ Hardy folds the paper into an envelope that he tucks into his inside breast pocket.

‘You do it,’ he says, his beady eye unblinking. Fear rinses through her. Is he taking the piss? She’s never briefed a team on something this big before and he must know it. ‘On you go,’ he says.

She fights the urge to hide in the toilet and steps out in front of her assembled colleagues. She hates public speaking almost as much as she hates DI Alec Hardy.

‘Good morning, everyone.’ Her voice sounds reedy in her ears. ‘I – um, welcome, I’m Ellie, DS Miller. So we’ve. Lot to get through, we’re already behind because of the weekend and not having resources, which are here now, which are you. So.’ She’s shaking. Can they tell she’s shaking? She clasps her hands in front of her. ‘So you know we need to, you know, hit the ground running. Priorities today: house-to-house enquiries, ah, CCTV retrieval, technical data retrieval from phones, and um, alibi follow-ups. On, on top of that, there’s a lot of information that’s come in we need to sift through. Nish will be the office manager, so if you see him, he’ll have actions to give you.’

She finally gets Hardy on his own by the kettle.

‘Very inspiring,’ he says, reaching for the last mug on the shelf. She slams the cupboard door, sadly missing his fingertips.

‘
Don’t
do that to me again!’ she says. ‘What is it, just because I’m not running to arrest Mark Latimer, I get thrown to the lions?’

Hardy dunks what looks suspiciously like a herbal teabag. ‘You didn’t mention how they can discount Mark Latimer, or your own
exhaustive
list of suspects.’ She’s about to tell him what she thinks of his constant sarcasm when his next comment disarms her. ‘We’ll need to interview your son. He should have an appropriate adult with him. Not you, obviously. Latimer’s downstairs. We should start.’

The interview rooms in Broadchurch police station face dead south. The walls are studded with glass bricks that refract the sun as it crawls from east to west, turning the rooms into giant sundials. An officer who’s been there for a while can tell from the angle of the beam what time of day it is.

Right now, an unforgiving morning light is trained hard on Mark Latimer. Dark crescents cup his eyes. He’s been crying. Small wonder he’s got his movements wrong. Ellie checks that Hardy isn’t looking, then gives Mark an encouraging smile. She’s confident that they can uncross these wires and have him home again within the hour.

‘Sorry about yesterday afternoon,’ he says with a strange half-smile. Something twitches in Ellie’s subconscious; she’s seen that expression somewhere before but can’t place it. ‘What with everything, I was a bit hazy when you were asking me all those questions.’

‘It’s more that you tried to lie,’ says Hardy.

‘I was confused. All the days, blending into one. That boiler I said I’d done, that was Wednesday night. You know what it’s like.’

‘And on Thursday night, you were with a mate.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But yesterday you could not remember the name of that mate.’

‘It was Nige. Who I work with.’

‘OK. You couldn’t remember the name of the man you work with all day.’

‘It’s the shock, doing funny things.’ He gives that strange half-smile again and distress slithers through Ellie as she knows where she’s seen it before. Danny, at an Easter barbecue a few years ago, swearing blind he hadn’t eaten Chloe’s Easter egg with chocolate all over his lips. The knowledge that Mark is lying is like a lead weight falling through her.

What the hell could he be hiding? That innocent explanation slips a little further out of reach. ‘We’ll check with Nige,’ she says.

‘You go ahead, Ell,’ says Mark.

Hardy hands Mark the photograph of the hut on Briar Cliff.

‘Ever been there?’

She expects him to study the picture but a glance is all he gives it. ‘Did a job there, weekend or two back. Burst pipe. Nicky, who does all the paperwork for us, she’d have the exact date on the invoice.’

‘If it’s a rental property, who called you out?’ says Hardy.

‘This woman, can’t remember her name. I picked the keys up from her at the caravan park.’

Ellie gives up and lets Hardy take the lead. He’s right, she’s equal to this.

‘Just you, or Nige as well?’

‘Just me. Nige was away with his mum.’

Hardy takes a second too long to shuffle the papers in his file.

‘Mark, d’you own a boat?’ he asks.

‘Yeah.’

In the corridor outside, Hardy goes through the list of all the reasons why it’s got to be Mark.

‘A boat. Prints at the murder scene. And an alibi he made up overnight.’

‘You don’t know that, sir,’ she says, although with less conviction than before. ‘We’ll look at the boat, talk to Nige and confirm whether Mark did the work at the hut.’

‘Ask Pete what Mark told Beth about Thursday night, see if it marries up. And while we check, Mark stays here.’ Ellie’s stomach tightens around her meagre breakfast. She had hoped that they could get to the bottom of this without putting Beth on high alert.

‘D’you understand what it’d do to that family, to this town, if it was Mark?’

‘What’re you looking for, Miller? An easy answer? The least pain? It won’t work like that.’

‘I know,’ she says miserably. She is beginning to see herself as Hardy does, stubbornly keeping faith in something that might never have been true.

The harbourmaster ferries them past the jetty. A life jacket presses heavily on Hardy’s chest, rustling the letter in his breast pocket, as if he needed reminding of its contents.

Miller’s got good sea legs – probably bred into her – and the drizzle rolls off her orange coat as she stands on the prow, looking for Mark Latimer’s boat. Hardy hates being on the water. The to and fro of the waves is a cruel mockery of the symptoms that plague him. Masts sway dangerously before him. Miller reaches out to throw off the sea-green tarpaulin. The
Old Boiler
– someone’s idea of a joke, surely – is painted yellow and, as far as Hardy can tell, in good nick. Bigger than most of the glorified dinghies, this one’s got a sort of windscreen roof and a steering thingy. He takes pride in not knowing the right words for them.

Miller jumps on board and holds out her hand for him to follow. Hardy refuses. The realisation shoots from nowhere that he can’t remember the last time he held a woman’s hand. It is unexpectedly, inconveniently, painful.

‘Only needs one of us,’ he says briskly. ‘Minimise the risk of contaminating a crime scene. Know when it was last taken out?’

Miller doesn’t answer. She has dropped to her knees at the front of the boat.

‘
Shit
,’ she says.

Hardy pulls his own focus to where her gaze is fixed. Drops of red liquid have dried to brown. It’s blood.

18

‘I’ll get the coffees this morning,’ says Olly. ‘My treat, for once.’

Karen appreciates the gesture and, if she’s honest, the cash. Her contribution to Broadchurch’s economy is growing by the hour, and she still has no idea if Danvers will honour the expenses at the end of it. She needs a lead, and fast.

Olly crosses the road to a nearby cashpoint but returns empty-handed. Karen knows the mortified expression of someone whose card has been declined when she sees it.

‘Machine’s out of order,’ he says, evidently unaware that it’s currently delivering a stack of crisp tenners to the next customer. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

Karen pays cash for the drinks, pockets the receipt and together they walk to the harbour.

‘I looked at the
Herald
,’ says Olly. ‘You haven’t filed yet.’

She’s had time to prepare for this. ‘Don’t want to, till I’ve got the full background. I’m thinking about the family. I want to get it right.’

It’s important that Olly doesn’t realise that Karen needs him as much as he needs her. She might be the one with a shortcut to the nationals but she needs this local reporter onside to open doors for her. And they might yet be able to exploit his relationship with Detective Sergeant Auntie Ellie. ‘So can you help me with that?’ she presses. ‘Tell me who best to talk to.’

‘I suppose,’ Olly looks uneasy. ‘I know these people. You can’t stitch them up.’

‘You’ve read my stuff. You know I show people as they are. I’ve got no agendas.’

He’s still not convinced. ‘But… Danny
died
.’

Patience doesn’t come naturally to Karen, but she tries. ‘Listen, Olly. What you do this week will decide your whole career. I know you think I’m being really hard-nosed but opportunities like this don’t come along often. It doesn’t matter how it happened, or whether you feel comfortable. No one is better placed to do the right thing by the Latimers than you are.’ She’s almost got him, she can tell. ‘I’ll pay you. Finder’s fees. Proper rates.’

That decides him. ‘OK – well, I’ve got to go into the
Echo
now but shall we compare notes at lunchtime?’

The day stretches out in front of Karen. There’s a story hiding somewhere here. It is a point of pride that she puts the clues together faster than Alec Hardy.

Her first port of call is the newsagent. She picks a magazine at random and a Mars bar from the shelf. The man behind the counter has a blank expression that doesn’t change even when she turns her fullest smile on him.

‘You’re Mr Marshall, right? You run the Sea Brigade. Karen White,
Daily Herald
.’ She pockets her change and takes her business card from her purse. ‘I’m here covering Danny Latimer’s death.’

‘I don’t talk to the press,’ says Jack Marshall.

Karen turns her smile up a notch. ‘You’re a newsagent and you don’t talk to the people who make the stuff you sell?’

‘I sell ’em. I don’t want to be in ’em.’

‘Why?’ Her cheeks are starting to ache.

‘Don’t get smart.’

‘I’m only trying to find out about Danny. He did a paper round for you, didn’t he?’

‘Are you going to leave nicely, or do I have to ring the police? I’ve been courteous.’

She leaves her card anyway. ‘If you change your mind?’ She correctly predicts its trajectory into the bin. On the way out, she overhears Jack Marshall call her a parasite. She’s heard worse.

Outside, her phone buzzes. Work: the seventh call since yesterday. She lets this one go too, and deletes the subsequent voicemail. What can they do? They can’t technically pull her from the story, given that she’s here without their permission. One more day and she’ll have Len Danvers on the phone begging her for a double-page spread on deadline.

She’ll turn something up. She always does.

The British summer is living up to its reputation: soft light drizzle has turned to pouring rain. DS Miller wears a ridiculous bright orange coat and carries an umbrella. Hardy gets wet, although his feet, in the new boots Miller gave him, remain bone-dry. She keeps glancing down at the puddles and pulling a smug little face.

Here in the caravan park at the foot of the cliff, a handful of families are determinedly enjoying themselves despite the rain, but the parents keep their children close.

They approach Susan Wright’s wretched mobile home. Miller’s smile stays plastered on even when Susan greets them with an admonishment for waking the dog up.

‘You caught ’em yet?’ she says to Hardy. ‘There’s kids not safe out there.’

At least she won’t slow them down with pleasantries. ‘Did Mark Latimer fix a burst pipe at the hut on Briar Cliff a few weekends back? He says he got the keys from you.’

‘No. We never had a burst pipe up there.’

Beside him, Miller stiffens and he feels another wave of frustration at her refusal to take Latimer seriously as a suspect. The sooner the results on the blood from the boat come back the better.

‘When did you last clean up there?’

‘Ten days ago. Ain’t been nobody in since then.’

‘Who else has keys? We’re treating it as a possible crime scene.’ She has this way of looking at them, like they’re the ones under suspicion.

‘Me and the owners. That’s it.’

‘Right.’ Hardy snaps his notebook shut. ‘We’ll send someone along to take elimination prints.’

She doesn’t bat an eyelid. ‘We finished?’

The door is slammed in their faces before they can reply.

There is one more call to make before they get back to Mark. Miller gives him the lowdown in the car.

‘Nige moved back in with his mum, Faye, when his dad died a few years back. They’re ever so close. He’s worked for Mark for about three years. Mark trained him up. Nige drives the van. Keeps it parked on his drive.’

Mead View is a couple of blocks away from Spring Close but on a different scale: the bungalows crouch low and the cul-de-sac can’t accommodate the car-to-home ratio. Mark’s van is parked on a driveway that’s not quite big enough for it.