Broadchurch (26 page)

Hardy goggles at her. ‘The boat that was used to transport Danny Latimer’s body used to belong to your brother-in-law?’ There’s a world of judgement in his words: of her lax investigation skills, of her family, of her home. Ellie tries to let it roll off her.

‘It was left just off the beach with the motor chained up,’ she says. ‘Olly barely used it any more – bad associations, that’s why it took him so long to report it missing.’

‘Who knew it was there?’

‘Lots of people. It wasn’t a secret.’

‘See if Forensics can get any other DNA or prints off the shards, match them against all the elimination prints. Call Brian now, get him to prioritise this.’ The name triggers a reflex giggle in Ellie. ‘What’s funny?’

She’s got to tell someone, and she doesn’t think it would go down very well with Joe.

‘He just asked me out,’ she confides.

‘Brian?’ Hardy wears his does-not-compute expression. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Thanks very much!’

‘You’re
married
. Flattering, though.’

‘I suppose. But SOCO… They’ve had their hands everywhere.’ Ellie wrinkles her nose and waggles her fingers.

‘Dirty Brian,’ says Hardy, with a playful roll of the Rs and a rare smile. Ellie can’t remember a moment of genuine good humour between them before: naturally she seizes on it and ruins it.

‘Sir, what if we don’t get the killer?’

His face shuts down, the joke cancelled. ‘We will.’

She takes a deep breath to galvanise herself. ‘You didn’t on Sandbrook.’

Hardy freezes: no blinking, no breathing. Then he puts down the pen in his hand.

‘How long have you been waiting to bring that up?’

Since the day Jenkinson first uttered his name, she thinks, but lets a shrug answer for her. ‘That was different,’ says Hardy.

‘How? It all got hushed up.’

‘I didn’t want that,’ he says softly, although there is no one there to overhear them. ‘A mistake was made. A big mistake.’

‘By you?’

Hardy seems to shrink in front of her, like the authority has all been drained out of him. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

But Ellie knows she might not get another chance. ‘Sir, these are my friends, people I’ve known all my life. We can’t let them down.’

‘We won’t,’ says Hardy. He is looking straight at her but his glasses reflect the computer screen before him, white windows of words and numbers, and Ellie can’t see into his eyes.

It’s nearly one o’clock in the morning now. Before powering down her computer, Ellie emails Olly a copy of the Jack Marshall press release. It’s too late to make the papers, but he can have the online exclusive. It’s her way of saying thank you for coming forward about the boat, and for holding back when it might have made things awkward for her. He’s a good boy really.

41

Mark and Beth are in bed with the radio on for company.

‘Can we not listen to the news?’ asks Mark. Beth turns the station over to a music channel, then lies on her back, one arm hooked behind her head, staring at the ceiling. They lie side by side on their backs.

‘You know I love you,’ he says.

‘I know you
say
it. Since you’ve been caught out.’

Beth listens to the adverts like they’re lullabies. When he tries to hold her, she goes rigid. She is so drained by this anger, but she can’t let it go. She is frightened of what’s on the other side of it.

‘Beth,
please
.’ She can hear the effort of patience. ‘We’ve only got each other now. Why don’t we make an agreement. For tonight. No bickering. No silences. Just… find something else.’

‘Like what?’ she says. He’s got nothing.

A mindless jingle gives way to soft piano, the opening chords of a song that pierces both their hearts with a single arrow. It was everywhere the year Danny was born. It was playing the first time she felt him kick inside her: it was on the car radio when they drove home from the hospital with him tucked up in the car seat.

This time, when Mark goes to hold her, she lets him. They stay like that for the duration of the song, rocking slowly in time with it. When it’s over, Mark reaches for the keepsake box that’s been gathering dust on top of their wardrobe for years.

The radio and the lights are on low as Mark and Beth sit on the floor in their nightclothes, spreading the mementoes of their children’s earliest days around them.

Mark hands her a tarnished silver heart-shaped locket with two curls of soft baby hair, white-blonde for Chloe and brown for Danny. ‘Oh, look,’ says Beth. Gingerly she picks up Danny’s hospital tag: Male Infant of Elizabeth Latimer, 8lb 2oz. There’s a picture of him at two hours old. Here’s the first thing he ever wore, the blue-and-white-striped sleepsuit that he seemed to outgrow overnight. Knitted baby booties. Tiny red wellies that he wore on the beach in the winter. His first football boots. She used to hate cleaning mud off the studs with a knife. Now she knows she’ll never do it again, she misses it.

She picks up an empty toilet roll tube and wonders why they kept it. Mark holds up a little paper cone and fixes it to one end. ‘He was mad about rockets, wasn’t he?’ Beth sees it for what it is now; it’s a model spaceship Danny made at pre-school. She cradles it in her hands. Now she wonders why they didn’t keep it on display.

They move on. A shoebox is stuffed with photographs of their first holiday abroad: Spain, 2005. Danny loved every second of the plane journey, even the turbulence.

‘Oh my God, Mark!’ laughs Beth when she finds a picture of the four of them sitting solemnly at an outdoor table at a tapas restaurant. ‘D’you remember that evening?’ He joins in her laughter. How could he forget it? They’d ordered paella to get in the local spirit only to find that the prawns not only still had their shells on but eyes and bloody
tentacles
: all four of them had been in hysterics at the sight of it. They left it untouched then went to a neighbouring restaurant to get pizza.

They unearth swimming certificates, stick-man drawings, birthday cards, school reports. She even takes a bittersweet pleasure in a piece of faded card with a shrivelled violet tacked to it, from the time a seven-year-old Danny picked half the flowers from an elderly neighbour’s garden as a present for Beth. She made him go round and apologise but she pressed the flowers and kept them. She brushes against a petal and it crumbles to dust under her touch. Her shoulders buckle.

‘I lie awake at night thinking, what do we do about his room? We’ll have to clear it, with the baby coming and…’ He’s talking through tears now. ‘I don’t want to. Every time I think the pain’s getting less, there’s something to deal with.’

It is the first insight Beth has had into what goes on all night on the next pillow. She has been too consumed by her own guilt to register the detail and depth of Mark’s. She looks into his brimming eyes and the thaw is instant as she sees her own grief reflected. She understands for the first time that they have been mourning Danny at different paces, two wavy lines on a graph that come in and out of range but rarely touch, taking it in turns to be the strong one, the angry one, the sad one, the quiet one, as though a double dose of the same emotion is more than the family could take. But now, on the floor of Danny’s bedroom, amid the rubble of his little life, their discrete lines of grief connect and spark like two currents. Beth is plunged into true intimacy for the first time since it happened and the comfort of knowing her husband understands warms her skin like sunlight.

‘I’m drowning here,’ he says, giving in to tears.

‘This isn’t on you,’ she says. With one hand resting in Mark’s, she turns her attention back to the pressed violet and stares through it until she can see a little boy’s soil-covered hands delivering the stolen flowers into her lap and a sad smile tugs at her cheeks. Beth is still light years from being able to give thanks for Danny’s life. His death is still too big for that and too close. But for a few minutes there is respite from the present in the past.

Jack Marshall flails awake to the sound of breaking glass. His feet find their slippers in the dark and he reaches into his dressing gown. He pads downstairs to find that a brick has been thrown through his window. Shattered glass is everywhere. He throws open the front door; the vandals have fled but not before spray-painting the word PAEDO on the side of his boat. They’ve had a go at his car, too, cracks spreading around a hole in the dead centre of the windscreen.

By the time he has finished picking up the worst of the glass from his furniture and carpets, it is two o’clock in the morning. The van carrying the next day’s newspapers will be here any minute. There is no point in going back to bed. He sits in his armchair and he waits for the familiar thud of the stack of papers landing outside the newsagent’s.

FIRST PICTURES: CHILD-SEX BRIDE OF BROADCHURCH JACK screams the
Mirror
, while the
Mail
has gone with FAMILY PHOTOS THAT HIDE A DARK SECRET.

In the accompanying picture, Jack’s hair is still dark: Rowena’s is long and blonde and her face still flawless. Between them, Simon puffs out his cheeks, preparing to blow out the candles on the birthday cake before him. There are six flames, one for each year of his life.

There is a strange, dry groan, like the creak of a door that has not been opened for decades, as the old man begins to cry.

He walks slowly through the darkness to Harbour Cliff Beach. The waxing moon is his only witness as he steps out of his slippers close to Danny’s shrine then continues barefoot across the sand. He comes to a standstill at the foot of the cliffs.

Water laps at his bare feet; waves throw tiny stones at his toes then drag the sand from under him. From his pocket he takes the one photograph that the press did not get their hands on and that he could not commit to the fire. Bringing it to his lips, he kisses his wife and child goodbye and recites the Lord’s Prayer for the last time.

Dawn breaks two hours later to reveal Jack Marshall lying on his back, his arms spread wide as wings. Seaweed writhes around his dressing-gown cord and laces his hair. Waves wash over him, then retreat. White foam traces the outline of his corpse.

PART TWO

42

Ten days have passed since Harbour Cliff Beach gave up its second body of the summer. Already the newsagent’s has been boarded up, an estate agent’s hoarding nailed across the door offering the premises for rent. Despite its prime location between the harbour and the beach, there has been no interest. Sand gets everywhere but mud sticks.

Jack Marshall’s only public exoneration is a sheet of newsprint taped to the window. In the photograph, which was taken on the last night of his life, he is wearing his Sea Brigade uniform. The accompanying report, written by Oliver Stevens, has a one-word headline: INNOCENT.

It is half past ten in the morning and Karen White has already been up for five hours. Her journey began in London at dawn with a black cab, took in a long train ride and now she’s in a minicab, windows wide as they speed along the only road into Broadchurch. They keep loose pace with another minicab, a grey Vauxhall, that left Taunton station at the same time. The passenger is a skinny middle-aged woman in a black hat with an old-fashioned lacy veil. She’s too formally dressed to be press. It looks like Karen’s the only hack who’s bothered to make the journey.

She checks her BlackBerry and thinks about calling Olly. Their last conversation was his panicked small-hours visit to her hotel bedroom. He was almost in tears as he told her that they’d fucked up, that Jack Marshall’s alibi had suddenly come good, and even though he should have known better he begged her to stop the story that had already gone to press. She hadn’t slept, but skipped town the following morning and steeled herself to ignore Olly’s barrage of texts and calls and then, a few days later, his email of the over-emotive piece he’d written for the
Echo
about how Jack Marshall had been hounded to death. Karen tried to get the
Herald
to print a more restrained version of the same story. Danvers, furious at her fuck-up, allowed her a single paragraph on page thirteen. She knew she was lucky even to get that. The story is dead.

In the intervening week and a half, Hardy has come up with no new leads. This means no reporter will touch the story again until there’s an arrest at least, probably until someone’s been charged.

Her last contact with anyone in Broadchurch was a curt email from Maggie Radcliffe saying that she hoped Karen was pleased with what she’d done. Karen didn’t bother to dignify it with a reply. Of all the sanctimonious shit… she didn’t notice Maggie taking Jack in when it all kicked off. Her precious Broadchurch turned on him happily,
eagerly,
like a bunch of Elizabethans cheering at a public hanging. The bottom line is that there’s still a killer walking free and, a month into the investigation, Alec Hardy is no closer to catching him than he was the day after Danny died.

Naturally she has regrets: a man is dead, after all. She is sorry that in putting Broadchurch on the map, she opened the floodgates for the tabloids and the inevitable muck-raking. She’s not happy about the way the red-tops went after him. But she did what she had to to bring Danny Latimer’s case into the public eye, and she won’t be made to feel guilty for that. Maggie should know that already; when Olly grows up a bit, he’ll realise it too. But she won’t let the blood be on her hands. She –
they
– wrote the best piece they could from the sources they had. At the time, Karen would have bet her mortgage on Marshall’s guilt. All the evidence pointed in his direction and the police found nothing to contradict it until it was too late. If Hardy and his team were even halfway competent they would have checked Marshall’s house out properly the first time they cautioned him and he would have been dismissed before they had even had a chance to consider him. Checking for CCTV, for fuck’s sake: how basic does it get? And when they had exonerated him, they should have put a wire out then and there. They knew that the vigilantes were after him. Karen is sickened that Hardy actually seems to be doing a worse job in Broadchurch than he did in Sandbrook. He needs to be taken off this investigation and replaced with someone competent.