Broadchurch (41 page)

Slowly, Ellie turns her head towards Spring Close. There is no movement there: only Beth, framed in her bedroom window, hands on the sill. Ellie puts her head in her hands and when she looks up again, Beth has gone. A chink of light expands and contracts to show Beth’s back door opening. It is the least Ellie can do to meet her halfway. The two old friends walk slowly towards each other. There is so much Ellie wants to say to her, but she will give Beth the first word. She is braced for tears, rage, violence.

She gets silence. They stand opposite each other for a long time. Finally Beth moves her head from side to side, slowly, deliberately, almost sarcastically.

‘How could you not know?’

As she walks back towards her house, Ellie howls inside. Beth’s reaction is a barometer for the rest of the community. It is nearly a relief to know that she has to go. Miraculously, her voice holds steady during a quick call to a whispering Lucy. Tom is finally asleep, an arm curled protectively around Fred. She retraces her steps back through the alleyways, cutting into the High Street at the Traders, and makes it up the stairs to Hardy’s room without anyone seeing her.

He sits on the bed while she slumps opposite him in a tub chair, still in her orange coat.

‘I want to kill him.’ She’s not ashamed of it; it’s almost a point of pride. ‘Help me understand,’ she says, deferring to Hardy’s experience. ‘Because I can’t. Do you believe him? Do you think it’s possible? He says he was in love. How could he, how could any adult be in love with an eleven-year-old boy? Is he a paedophile? The pathologist found no evidence of abuse on Danny, and I asked Tom and he said Joe never touched him. So what does that make him?’

Hardy takes his glasses off. ‘Just because he didn’t abuse either boy, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have gone on to,’ he says in his new, soft, good-cop way.

‘Doesn’t mean he would’ve, either.’ She hears her own desperation.

‘We’ll never be sure.’ His voice is heavy with sorrow. ‘Maybe he was romanticising, in order to justify what he felt. Or maybe that’s as it was. I don’t have those answers. People are unknowable. And… you can never really know what’s in someone else’s heart.’

‘I should’ve seen it.’

‘How?’

‘I’m a bloody detective! Miller, such a brilliant copper, the murderer was lying next to her.’ For the first time it hits her that Hardy knew before she did. How long has she been making a fool of herself? ‘When did you suspect?’

‘Last day or so,’ he says. ‘It always had to be someone close. There was the description. Who could it be if it wasn’t Nige? The way Joe behaved when Tom was interviewed. And then Danny’s email account on the missing phone. It only had two contacts. Tom… and Joe.’

Ellie’s humiliation is complete. ‘All along, you said don’t trust.’

Hardy lets all the air out of his lungs. ‘I
really
wanted to be wrong.’

67

They let Beth have her boy back in the first week in September. Danny should be starting Year 7, scuffling off to South Wessex Secondary in an oversized blazer. Instead, Beth is bringing his Manchester City football kit to the undertaker near St Andrew’s church.

They return the next day: Beth, Mark, Chloe and Danny, this family of four for the very last time. Outside the Chapel of Rest, Beth holds Mark’s hand so tight that he winces in pain. She has seen a dead body before – she was at her dad’s bedside when he passed away – but that was fresh death and a long time coming. This is different.

But once through the door, the nerves melt away, replaced by a weird sense of elation. Danny! They’ve done something clever to him, to make him look – if not sleeping, then not the horror-film corpse of her imagination. The light-blue football top used to bring out his eyes, but they are closed now, his lashes thick and dark on his cheek. As if by prior agreement, they each spend a minute with Danny alone, whispering in his cold ear. Mark goes first, then Chloe; Beth does not eavesdrop on the others’ private goodbyes. Chloe has brought Big Chimp along in her bag. She keeps it together as she tucks the worn toy into Danny’s arms. ‘Night-night, Dan-Dan,’ she says, with grown-up tenderness that tears Beth apart. Then Chloe turns around and half-collapses into Mark’s arms. ‘I can’t leave him alone, Dad. I can’t do it.’ Mark is crying as he leads her outside into the fresh air, and Beth and Danny are together alone.

She lifts the blanket and counts his fingers, the way she did when he was a newborn, and keeps hold of his right hand as she lowers her face to his. ‘I love you, baby,’ she says. His skin is marble against her lips. ‘I am so sorry. I love you, and I miss you so much.’

She stays like that, sobbing apologies over the coffin, for an hour. Mark takes Chloe home to Liz and Dean and comes back again, sensitively prising her away, telling her that it’s time for the parlour to close for the day. Before she leaves, Beth runs her fingers through Danny’s hair and dishevels it, so that he looks like himself. It is the last thing she will ever do for him and it is pathetically small.

On the morning of the funeral, she puts on a new dress and does her hair and make-up with care. She has muted hopes for the service. Everyone keeps telling her that today will be painful but good for her. They use words like therapeutic and cathartic. This day, fantasised about for so long, doesn’t feel real now it’s here. Mark in his black suit looks like an actor playing a part. That man in the top hat, standing solemnly at the door is like something out of a history book.

Beth is dragged mercilessly back into the present when she sees the hearse. There is too much space around the undersized coffin. Danny’s name is spelled out in white chrysanthemums and there’s a tiny floral tribute in the shape of a football, sky blue and white. Her make-up is gone by the time she takes her place next to Mark in the mourners’ car.

The cortège rolls slowly down the High Street: a child could outpace it on a skateboard. They pass the Traders, the tourist office and the
Echo
. Pete had warned them that there might be a few dozen well-wishers on the route – press interest is such that they have had to make the church service invitation-only – but nothing prepares the Latimers for what they see. Hundreds of people have lined the pavements to wave Danny off on his final journey. There are people Beth has known by sight all her life and faces she has never seen before. Pensioners, teens and mums with buggies have interrupted their day to stand in silent respect. For the first time since it happened, Beth is able to take solace in the support of strangers.

At the corner of St Andrew’s Lane, Steve Connolly stands in his technician’s overalls, his hands clasped in front of him. He is unafraid to meet Beth’s eye. The way he looks at her – sad, sorry, sincere – makes something twitch in Beth’s chest. Her faith is restored, if not in Steve Connolly’s psychic powers, then in his integrity. Is he mad? She envies him, if so. She envies him his world of spirits and voices and signs. All this time they’ve spent in church and she hasn’t had so much as a sunbeam through a window to suggest that Danny’s spirit lives on. She turns her head, the better to read Steve, but his head is dipped in deference and then the car turns the bend and he is out of sight.

It seems that everyone has sent flowers. Lilies trumpet their arrival at the church gate and the sickly sweet smell turns September back into high summer. In a dark corner of the churchyard, Beth’s father’s grave is open and waiting for Danny. Far from giving her comfort, it only layers one loss over another.

Inside, the congregation is a sea of shaking shoulders.

The coffin is borne to the altar by Nige Carter, Bob Daniels, Pete Lawson and Dean. Miss Sherez, Danny’s old teacher, lights a single candle and places it next to Danny’s school photograph.

Tom Miller is a few rows back, tucked between Olly and Lucy Stevens. With a conscious effort of will, Beth forces herself not to look at him. She doesn’t want Tom there, but unlike Ellie he can’t, and mustn’t, be held responsible for what Joe did. She finds room in a corner of her heart for this boy, Danny’s friend, and what he must be going through.

Paul Coates wears a purple stole over white vestments. His is the only dry eye in the house. ‘The Bible says: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.”’ Doubt ripples his brow. ‘Is that possible for us, here, after what we’ve been through? I don’t know. But we have a responsibility to ourselves, and to our God, to try.’

In the front pew, Beth cries loud and hard. Her skin stings with the tears that spill and spill from a bottomless well. There is no therapy here. No catharsis. Only the horrific dawning knowledge that she is no more ready to say goodbye to Danny than she was the morning she saw him on the beach. She will never be ready to say goodbye.

Karen White sips white wine from a plastic glass and looks around the wake. Mark and Beth have done Danny proud. There’s a gazebo in the back garden, and they’ve opened up the gate so that the party spills into the playing field. Kids run in and out unsupervised, giving Karen a glimpse of what it was like in Broadchurch before the murder. It is as though the Pied Piper has given the town back its children.

All the children but one. Karen blots her leaking tear ducts with a paper napkin. Today, people are talking in terms of Danny’s life rather than his death. She feels that she is getting to know him properly at last.

In the front room, a looping video of him playing football has Mark and Nige hypnotised.

‘You never thought it was me, did you, mate?’ says Nige. ‘Not really.’

‘How could I have ever thought that?’ Mark replies too quickly. Karen sees what Nige cannot. Of course Mark suspected Nige, just as Beth suspected Mark, just as everyone suspected everyone except Joe Miller.

Ellie is prominent by her absence. Every journalist in town is after her, but so far no one has got to her. Olly is so protective he won’t even discuss her: the police have hidden her well. Karen is aware that Danvers would sack her if he knew that she had the fish on a hook but tossed it back. But she’s not interested in that story. It’s Beth she’s here for: not for what she can get, but to show support. Karen intends to leave after she has said a few words of condolence, but Beth is trailing a watery smile behind a plate of sausage rolls. People queue to talk to her.

Karen refills her glass – the wine is from a box, and it’s starting to go warm – and stands under the gazebo where Olly and Maggie are chatting quietly, composure regained after the messy tears they both cried in church.

‘It’ll be weird for you, going back to covering the parish council meetings after this,’ Karen says to Olly. He shuffles awkwardly.

‘Actually, I’ve been offered a job with the
Herald
,’ he says.

Maggie just about covers her disappointment with congratulations. Karen is less inclined to mince her words.

‘Are you mad?’ she says. ‘You’ll be earning, what, ten grand to rewrite agency stories? If you want to learn the craft, you’d be better off staying here. You’ll learn more from Maggie in a week than you will in a year on the
Herald
.’

‘That’s what I told Len Danvers,’ grins Olly. ‘It didn’t feel right. Thought I’d stay here a bit longer.’

Maggie throws her arms around Olly in delight. Karen reckons she’s dodged a bullet there. Life is long, and who knows whether their paths will cross in the future, but right now she’s not sure that their working relationship, let alone their physical one, would relocate too well to London.

She takes another sip of her drink. Over the rim of her tumbler, she spies the one she’s been waiting for.

Alec Hardy is on indefinite leave while he waits for Wessex Police to decide his professional fate. A life of leisure does not suit him. He looks a little healthier, as though he is at death’s garden gate rather than its door, but socially he is floundering. Standing in a corner of the garden on his own, he has no small talk. He is still dressed like a detective, in his blue suit and grey tie, and he’s still watching the room like one too, staring intently at everyone. He can’t help himself: not just because that’s what he’s trained to do, but because there is no other way he knows how to be. Karen finds herself in the unimaginable position of feeling sorry for him. Not so sorry that she’s going to let him off the hook, though.

‘Why didn’t you give me Sandbrook?’

‘You made my life hell,’ he says.

‘
You
didn’t tell the truth,’ she shoots back.

‘I couldn’t. You want easy answers, scapegoats and bogeymen. The world’s more grey.’

Karen is insulted, then bewildered. ‘Then why tip me off about the announcement?’

‘Because you fought for the families at Sandbrook,’ says Hardy. ‘It was the right thing to do.’

He puts down his empty cup and walks over to talk to Pete. Karen is fuming. He always has to have the last word. She hasn’t finished with him yet.

‘Karen.’ Beth is at her shoulder. Her face is beginning to plump and glow with the pregnancy but the skin around her eyes is tidemarked with salt that settles in the fine lines and emphasises them. She looks very young and very old at once.

‘Keep in touch, won’t you?’

Karen wants to howl; as if she would ever leave any of her families alone. She wants to hug Beth, but she looks fragile, as if one more embrace might snap her, and settles for a brief hand on her arm.

‘Of course I will,’ she says. ‘And I hope you know you can call if you ever need anything… Advice, or even someone to talk to.’

Beth nods. She doesn’t have to say thank you. ‘Will you come tonight? We’re lighting the beacon for Danny.’

Karen’s eyes fill again. ‘I’ll be there.’

The temperature drops as the sun dips over the roof. She looks around for Alec Hardy, but he has gone.

EPILOGUE

It is the night of Danny Latimer’s funeral. The tide is out and the beach and cliffs are washed pale by moonlight. Hardy and Miller, the jetsam of the investigation, have washed up at the cob wall on the far side of the harbour. They sit at opposite ends of a bench, arms folded, their backs to the sand.