Broadchurch (37 page)

‘Why did you lie to us?’ She’s too tired and sad even to get angry.

‘I was a bit panicky,’ says Kevin, warming to his confession. ‘Boy dies, you get seen having an argument. I thought, he wasn’t around to say otherwise. I haven’t slept in weeks. It’s been giving me merry hell. So I thought I should tell you. Am I in trouble?’

Ellie resists the urge to push Kevin backwards into the harbour. ‘What shoe size are you?’ she asks resignedly.

‘Eleven and a half.’ Kevin wears a rabbit-in-the-headlights expression. ‘Why?’

Hardy is in the family room with Tom and Joe Miller. A video camera nestles on a tripod and Tom blinks nervously into its lens. Joe is more restrained than in their last interview, although the effort of staying silent leaks into his body language, his left leg jiggling uncontrollably.

‘My computer got nicked,’ says Tom in answer to the first question. ‘At school. I left it in a bag and then it was gone.’

Hardy leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him. ‘You mustn’t lie to me, Tom.’

Tom looks in panic to Joe, who manages to button his lip. Hardy places the bag of smashed-up computer components in front of Tom, who flushes red.

‘Paul Coates said you threatened to accuse him of all sorts of shenanigans if he were to give this to us.’

Joe is incredulous. ‘You threatened the
vicar
?’ Tom darkens further.

‘I think you smashed it up because it had your emails with Danny on it,’ suggests Hardy. ‘Are these your emails?’ He pulls out a batch of printouts from his file. Tom recoils from the paper as Joe leans in close to read.

‘How did you get those?’ Fear thins Tom’s voice.

‘They’re stored on your server. We haven’t seen these before because Danny was using a different email address than his home computer. And you’re the only person he wrote to from this address. No, no – actually, you and one other person. We think he sent them from his smartphone.’ At the mention of the phone, Tom looks relieved. That’s one less secret for him to keep. ‘Where’d he get that from?’

‘He said he’d saved up from his paper round,’ says Tom.

‘In these emails, Danny’s asking you to stay away from him. He says that he doesn’t want to see you any more and you’re no longer friends. Why was that?’

‘He said he had a new friend,’ says Tom. ‘Someone who understood him better than me.’ Hardy registers the wording; it’s a strange insight for a pre-teen boy. It has the ring of something parroted from an adult.

‘You email back, “I could kill you if I wanted”.’

Joe can no longer override his protective instinct. ‘For God’s sake, it’s just kids!’ he jumps in. ‘It’s just boys falling out.’

‘I’m talking to your son, Joe. Not you.’

Joe reluctantly sits back in his chair but his outburst has unnerved Tom. Hardy pushes as hard as he can before the boy clams up completely. ‘Did you kill Danny, Tom?’

‘
No
.’ Tom shakes his head.

‘If you’re lying to me, there’ll be very serious consequences. If you want to tell me that you were involved in Danny’s death —’

Now Joe really loses it. ‘That’s enough! You want to question him like this, we need a solicitor.’

Hardy looks from son to father and makes a judgement.

‘Fine. We’re done for now. We need a DNA sample. Then you can go.’ They stand up to leave. ‘Oh, Tom? What’s your shoe size?’

Tom blinks at the apparent non sequitur. ‘Five.’

Hardy writes it down. ‘What about you, Joe?’

‘Uh…’ says Joe, as if he has to think about it. ‘Ten.’

61

DS Ellie Miller doesn’t walk any more. She trudges. She drags her exhausted feet from one place to another, hope dimming a little with every step. She takes her time on the walk to Harbour Cliff Beach. She has no idea why DI Hardy has called her down here. It hasn’t been a crime scene for weeks now.

She hears the sea like a rumour. The sandstone ripple of the cliffs reaches away from her to the vanishing point. She squints into the sun, on the lookout for Hardy’s matchstick-man figure. It’s only when she shifts her focus downwards that she finds him. He is sitting on the sand, folded in on himself with his knees drawn up to his chest, halfway to the shoreline. The sun plays upon him, breathing life into him; his skin is golden, his hair almost auburn. Maybe there is hope for him after the police.

‘They’ve caught Nige Carter,’ she says. Hardy scrabbles to his feet, brushing sand from his suit. He looks at Ellie as though she’s spoken to him in a foreign language. ‘Nige Carter?’ she repeats. ‘They found him hiding out in the hills in Mark Latimer’s van. He’s back in custody. He’s a shoe size ten,’ she reminds him.

Her words don’t have the impact she was expecting. He’s given up, she thinks. He’s had enough. Even though he is clearly broken, she envies him. At least freedom is imminent for Hardy. She can’t imagine a time when this will no longer be her life. She can barely remember a time when it wasn’t.

‘I was here before, on this beach,’ he says. ‘I came here as a kid. We had a tent on some campsite near the cliffs. I tried looking for it when I first came.’

Ellie doesn’t know what surprises her most; that he’s been here before or that he used to be a little boy. She pictures him in a suit, surly and unshaven, aged eight. ‘
You
came on holiday to
Broadchurch
?’

He nods. ‘Didn’t remember it was here till the day I came back. Freaked me out. Those bloody cliffs still the same. I used to sit under them, get away from my parents arguing.’ His attention shifts to the horizon. ‘They spent days sniping and shouting. The third day in, I sat here, all day, on this beach, right into the night. Thinking, I’m not going to have a family soon. When I got back they were livid. They’d been out looking for me. They didn’t think to look on the bloody beach, mind.’

‘Did your mum and dad split in the end?’

‘No.’ Hardy kicks at the rough sand. ‘Kept bickering till the day my mum died. Last thing she ever said to me: God will put you in the right place. Even if you don’t know it at the time.’

The two detectives face the horizon together, listening to the drag and deposit of shingle in the waves. It’s a repetitive, hypnotic sound that brings about an eerie peace deep within Ellie. Broadchurch has always felt like the middle of the world to her. Right now, Harbour Cliff Beach feels like the edge of it.

The lull is shattered by the ring of her telephone. It’s Nish. Ellie listens, then cuts the call. She is as adrenalised now as she was peaceful ten seconds ago.

‘It’s Danny’s phone,’ she tells Hardy. ‘It’s back on. They’re tracing the signal now.’

Hardy doesn’t share her excitement, but nods decisively. ‘I want the tracking signal coordinates sent to my phone. You get back and question Nige Carter, get the truth out of him.’ The shutters have come down again and it’s hard to believe that this is the same man who has just confided in her. ‘Go on, go. Go!’ he barks. Her trudge has a new impetus behind it as she heads back towards the station. If Nige is in custody, then who’s got the phone? Are they looking for two people after all? For the first time in weeks, she feels that the answers to her questions might be within reach.

‘Miller!’ What now? She turns back, shielding her eyes to see him. They are separated by a tract of sand and the breeze is picking up again. Hardy has to raise his voice. ‘You’ve done good work on this, Miller. Well done.’

It is the first praise he has ever given her. Ellie shivers, as though someone has walked over her grave.

The sun is an old bronze coin, low in the sky.

Hardy walks the length of Broadchurch High Street without looking up from his screen. His progress is tracked by a red pin: Danny’s phone by a blue. It is too soon to be precise about the location. That will come as he closes in. For now, the blue pin is merely a triangulation point between three possible locations. He speeds up, noticing as he does that his vision is pin-sharp and his legs strong and obedient. It is as though his illness, recognising the gravity of the moment, has decided to suspend play for a while.

The dull end of the High Street abruptly gives way to nondescript suburbia. Hardy zooms in. He looks up, makes a mental calculation, then turns left into an alleyway. It’s the first time he’s entered this hidden network of pathways and with none of the landmarks he has come to rely on, he loses his bearings and is temporarily a stranger in Broadchurch once more. A glance down at his phone roots him again. With technology as his guide, he covers the footpath in fifty paces and comes to the playing field. The red pin is almost overlapping the blue. Hardy stands equidistant between St Andrew’s church dead ahead, the Latimer house to the right, and there to the left…

He puts his handset in his pocket and bears left across the field. With one final alleyway to negotiate, Hardy checks his phone again. Here, in Lime Avenue, the two pins on his screen converge.

The Millers’ garden path feels a mile long. The front door is open. Tom and Fred are in the sitting room, laughing at a cartoon. Hardy is pulled up short by the black device in Tom’s hand, but it’s a TV remote, not a phone. He clears his throat and the boys look up, but he only takes their attention away from the screen for a moment. They are used to seeing policemen in their house. Hardy backs into the hall and continues through the kitchen. The knot in his stomach pulls taut as he walks through the unkempt back garden. The shed door is ajar. Hardy pauses. His bile rises for reasons that have nothing to do with his illness.

It’s dark inside the shed and his eyes take a while to adjust. He turns slowly around and takes in the logs drying out, the skateboards in two different sizes, the bikes and the camping equipment. In the middle of this, Joe Miller stands, wearing jeans and a checked shirt, his left arm curled protectively around his body, his right hand holding Danny’s phone to his lips in a loose kiss.

‘I’m sick of hiding,’ he says.

62

It is the dark side of midnight on Thursday, 18 July.

The Miller family are back in Broadchurch after three blissful weeks in Florida. They arrived home four hours ago to a pile-up of post and carpets glistening with slug trails.

Three members of the family are asleep. It was a tough flight and the effort it took to keep the kids awake all the way home from the airport now seems worth it; they have crashed out in their beds, unbathed, teeth unbrushed. Ellie is out cold, the seal broken on the bottle of melatonin pills she bought at Orlando Airport.

Joe Miller is wide awake despite the jet lag. That sick twisted feeling in his guts, absent for three blissful weeks, is back. He told himself, while he was away, that he was… he hates the word
cured
, as it suggests he’s done something wrong, and he hasn’t. Well,
they
haven’t. It takes, two, after all. But it’s the only word that really seems to describe the way he felt on holiday. For the first time since it started, he felt utterly in the moment. His boys were enough. Ellie was enough. They had sex almost every night for the first time since trying for Fred. In Florida, Joe told himself that he was
cured,
but it came back, that longing swirled with shame. It came back on the road into Broadchurch. It came back stronger than ever. The last food he ate was an airline meal six hours ago but his appetite has vanished. He is literally sickening for Danny.

Joe Miller stands for a while on the landing, watching his wife and children sleep, and then at the ping of a text message he’s downstairs, feeling in the dark hall for the car keys. His is the only car on the one-track road. Now and then as he skirts close to the cliff edge, there’s a wink of moonlight on sea in the distance. Joe drives slowly, trying to order his thoughts. After the initial swoop of relief that Danny will see him again comes doubt. Danny wants this to be the last time. He’s been very clear about that. Joe thinks hard. There’s no way he can get his hands on any more money – Lucy hasn’t been to the house for months, he can’t make her his scapegoat again – so if he’s going to convince Danny to keep meeting, Joe’s going to have to persuade him with words. And if not… well, the thought of this being the last time makes Joe want to weep, but if this is how it’s got to end, then they must make this last time count.

He parks the car up at the usual meeting point, the half-made road flanked by high hedgerows, lush and lusty with summer foliage. There is a purity to this place, far from the traffic and CCTV of the town. Joe’s stomach clenches at the sight of Danny balanced on his skateboard, in the middle of the lane. The moon shines a spotlight on him. His hair’s got a little bit longer in the last few weeks. That top is new. Joe is too overwhelmed to speak, then Danny does a trick on his skateboard, a flip-over that Joe taught him. They both laugh: the tension is shattered, and Joe knows that it’s going to be fine.

‘Hiya,’ says Danny. The harmless word hits Joe like a bullet: Danny’s voice has broken while he was away. It’s a hook in Joe’s heart, but he doesn’t know which way it’s pulling him.

They do the final fifty yards to the clifftop hut on foot. Danny moves a rock to get the key out, and they’re into the place Joe thinks of as their haven. He takes a moment to appreciate the clean smell of it, the neutral seashell art and the colour scheme, so tasteful you don’t even notice it. How could anything that happens here ever be tawdry?

Joe sits on a chair and lets Danny sit on his lap. He is the perfect weight: the perfect size. When he’s on his knee, Joe catches their reflection in the window and is pulled up short. The difference between how it looks on the outside and how it feels on the inside is huge, too big to explain even to himself. He closes his eyes against the image and just breathes him in. But something’s wrong. Danny’s arms are open, loose. He’s in Joe’s arms but he’s slipping away.

‘We don’t have to stop this,’ murmurs Joe. The intended reassurance backfires: Danny moves out of the hug.

‘We do.’

‘I know I said tonight was the last night but… we’re not doing anything wrong.’

‘So why does it have to be a secret?’