Broadchurch (7 page)

The crying stops for a second. ‘I’ll come down in a bit,’ says Chloe. In the next instant, her phone rings out and she answers it, speaking so quietly that Beth can’t even pick up her tone, let alone her words. Who’s she talking to? What’s she saying? It guts Beth to know that Chloe’s friends, who are good girls, but only children themselves, are giving consolation when Beth is not allowed to. Still, she respects the closed door. She wants more than anything to hold her daughter, to receive comfort as well as to give it, but she mustn’t let Chloe see this. She’s only fifteen. Her brother has died. That’s enough to cope with, without knowing how much responsibility she now bears for her mother’s state of mind. So Beth backs away and goes downstairs, her arms heavy and useless at her sides; at the same time she carries an unbearable surplus of love.

Mark is in the hall, staring at his phone.

‘Every time it goes, I think it’s Danny.’ He has it set up so that every number in his phone book has a different alert. A klaxon for Nige, jingle bells for Beth. Danny’s number the cheer of a crowd. They’ll never hear it again. ‘I keep thinking he’s going to walk back in,’ says Mark.

They’ve been having this conversation, or a circular version of it, all day, batting denial back and forth between them.

‘Did you touch him? At the…’ She can’t finish. Mark shakes his head.

‘They wouldn’t let me.’

They wouldn’t have been able to stop
her
. Now that one terrible question is out there, the next follows almost without her permission. ‘Why didn’t you look in on him last night?’

‘
Beth
,’ says Mark, but she’s started now.

‘You always look in on him, when you come to bed.’ As the words spill, she realises that she didn’t actually hear Mark come to bed. Not that that’s unusual; she rushes past the thought on the way to the accusation. ‘Why didn’t you see he was gone?’

‘Why didn’t you?’ says Mark. It cuts her between the ribs.

Neither of them has an answer. Blame and counter-blame. Is this really what they are going to do to each other? Silently she vows not to let her marriage be destroyed by this. They owe it to Danny to stay strong and stay together. She needs Mark by her side and on her side if she is to survive this.

Karen White stands on the beach, shakes loose her ponytail and lets the salt wind blow London from her hair. The sun is a semi-circle on the horizon. A shrine has sprung up, as she knew it would. Cellophane rustles around supermarket flowers and tea lights gutter in jam jars. At the centre of it all sits a little toy chimp. A couple of kids tape a card to the lifebelt and leave, arm in arm, one crying into the other’s shoulder, then Karen is alone. She approaches the sad memorial and drops to her knees as though in prayer. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure that nobody is watching, she picks up the chimp and puts it in her handbag. She uses the map on her phone to find her way to the media briefing at the school hall.

The place looks tiny, as primaries always do. Hardy sits behind a microphone, his Chief Super beside him in dress uniform. Behind them is a board bearing the insignia of Hardy’s new force, the Wessex Police. Behind that, a jumble of PE apparatus.

Hardy stares past the assembled press to the far side of the room where paper fish swim across the wall. It’s not a full house. There’s a single camera crew and a handful of print journalists. It looks like the rest of Fleet Street concurs with Len Danvers. Good, thinks Karen. Less competition for the story. She’ll show him. She sticks to the back of the hall, taking care not to be seen.

She recognises Olly Stevens from his website and guesses that the tall blonde woman next to him, matching
Broadchurch Echo
lanyard hanging around her neck, must be a colleague. She’s on her feet with a question as soon as Hardy has been introduced.

‘Maggie Radcliffe, editor of the
Broadchurch Echo
,’ she says. The name rings a bell although Karen can’t place it. ‘What advice do you have for people in the town, particularly parents?’

Hardy addresses his reply to the camera. ‘The crime rate in this area is one of the lowest in the country. This is a terrible anomaly. We’re in the early moments of what may be a complex investigation.’ He breaks eye contact with the lens for a few seconds and scans the room. The little flinch he gives when he spots Karen is not picked up by the camera, but she notices it with satisfaction. He blinks and continues. ‘Danny’s life touched many people. We’ll be looking at all those connections. If you or someone you know has any information, has noticed anything unusual, please come forward now. I’d urge everyone: don’t hide anything.’ The cameraman goes in close so that Hardy’s face fills the monitor. ‘Because we will find out. We will catch whoever did this.’

Night finally falls on Harbour Cliff bay. The colours of day have faded but the evidence tents are lit from within, turning the white canvas a pale pink. They glow like jellyfish as SOCO work into the night.

Danny’s death is the lead item on the ten o’clock news. The Latimers watch from the sofa, all three faces wearing the same stupid, stunned expression.

Up at the farm, cows graze in peaceful bovine ignorance as Dean watches on his phone.

Becca Fisher has the news on the computer at hotel reception. She takes a large tug on a neat whisky and checks her phone for text messages for the third time in five minutes.

Olly Stevens and Maggie Radcliffe, finalising the front page layout in the
Echo
office, down tools and watch in silence.

Nige Carter, working through the night to cover Mark’s absence, sees the news in someone else’s house, some woman who didn’t even know Danny. She is crying but Nige is dry-eyed.

Jack Marshall, alone on the empty shop floor, listens to the radio, hands in his cardigan pockets, mouth set.

Paul Coates watches on his iPad in the vestry where the stone walls hang with photographs of his frocked predecessors.

Susan Wright watches on the portable television in her static caravan, the dog’s head on her lap and a cigarette in her hand. She shakes her head, then exhales a long slow thread of smoke.

Joe Miller, clearing up the sitting room, is frozen to the screen, a stuffed toy in each hand.

Upstairs in his bedroom, Tom Miller stares at his phone for a long, long time. He chews his lip in deliberation, then his expression hardens. He checks behind him to make sure that Joe isn’t lurking on the landing. All clear. Now he has made his decision he acts quickly. First he deletes all Danny’s text messages, a record of friendship that goes back years. Then he’s on his laptop, hitting the keys in a series of actions reserved only for emergencies. The warning message fills the screen: ‘Are you sure you want to reformat the hard disk? You will lose all your data.’ Tom clicks yes.

He looks over his shoulder again. That’s not grief on his face. That’s fear.

11

At first light, DI Hardy walks the route of Danny’s paper round, a pencilled map as his guide. The kid covered a lot of ground: coastal footpaths as well as residential streets. He climbs a shallow hill that brings him out on a huge greensward high above the beach, a timeless green landscape. Cow parsley blooms in white foam at waist height. In the grassy dunes and hummocks Hardy sees only hiding places for those inclined to hide. The ground is booby-trapped with rabbit holes and their droppings squish like raisins under his soles.

On the clifftop trail that looks like a road to nowhere Hardy spots a CCTV camera attached to a telegraph pole. It points to a lone hut, something between a trailer and a chalet. It is out of place here: it could have been dropped there by a typhoon, like the house in
The
Wizard of Oz
. He gets the impression a bad storm could send it tumbling down the cliff. He follows the sandy track that cuts through the gorse.

Up close, he cups his hands around his eyes to see in. It’s a holiday let, by the look of it: uninhabited but well-kept, tastefully kitted out in seashell art and a nice cloth on the table. It’s Hardy’s idea of hell – fresh air, isolation, grass, never-ending sky – but he knows that the world’s full of idiots who love this sort of thing.

He needs to get in.

There’s a shadow on the grass and then that woman and her brown dog come into view. She doesn’t have the aimless walk of the tourist rambler; she knows this place. Hardy takes one step towards her but on seeing him she turns on her heel and breaks into a trot to get away from him. He’s too tired and too far from his medication to attempt pursuit. But she is on his radar now.

Ellie’s the first one downstairs, tiptoeing in her slippers around the silver slug trails that appear on their carpet every night. Joe insists that one day he’ll catch the culprit and return it to the garden. He’s big on the humane treatment and rescue of creepy-crawlies, a hangover from his former life as a paramedic. Ellie scrapes off the worst of the trails with a tissue. If she ever catches the slimy little bastard she’ll salt it, but it’s clever; it knows when they’re asleep.

She suddenly sees herself as though from the outside. How pathetic is that, how
offensive
, getting wound up about slug trails when a little boy has been murdered? She feels sadness like a great pressure from above: she has to rest her head on the floor for a while. Ellie stays like that for a long time, crying softly for Danny, until footsteps overhead tell her that the boys are waking up.

She pours orange juice into a glass and takes it up to Tom. Joe’s waiting for her at his bedside. He looks exhausted, like his jet lag’s finally kicked in.

‘How’re you doing, lovely?’ She hands Tom the juice. ‘You had nightmares. You were shouting in your sleep.’

‘What was I saying?’ His fingers trace the rim of the glass but he doesn’t drink.

‘We couldn’t make it out,’ says Joe. ‘Heard you say Danny at one point.’

Tom drops his eyes to his lap. Ellie tries to remember what it’s like to be eleven, how innocent secrets assume giant proportions.

‘Are you going in to work?’ he asks.

‘Yes. Dad’s got a quiet day planned for you.’

‘We’ll go down the DVD shop, rent whatever you like, get some popcorn,’ says Joe, much too brightly. ‘Duvets on the sofa. What do you think?’

Tom isn’t fooled for a second. ‘Will I have to talk to the police?’

‘At some point,’ says Ellie. ‘Not today, I don’t think. Unless there’s anything you can think of that might help us?’

‘When I have to talk to them, can it be you?’

Ellie shakes her head. She wonders who they’ll get to question Tom. It’ll have to be someone he doesn’t already know, but he’s been coming in to the station since he was a toddler. Her heart sinks to realise that there’s only one officer in Broadchurch who fits the bill.

Karen White’s joy at learning that she is staying in the same hotel as Alec Hardy has only been marginally reduced by missing him at breakfast. She’s been waiting outside the police station since half-past seven, regretting the double refill of coffee at breakfast time. She needs a toilet break, soon, but can’t risk leaving her post. It might be her only chance of the day.

He shows up at a quarter past eight, city shoes caked in mud and sand, like he’s been for a long, ill-judged walk. When she calls him by rank and name he ignores her, so she puts her hand on his arm. He removes it like it’s contaminated.

‘Karen White,
Daily Herald
,’ she says, as though he could possibly have forgotten who she is. Long after the rest of the press pack had moved on, she was still demanding answers. She’s proud of that. But Hardy just looks right at her, hazel eyes unblinking.

‘I wondered if I could buy you a cup of tea?’ She smiles even as he turns his back on her: it’s a trick that keeps her voice friendly when she’s angry on the inside. ‘You know there’s going to be attention on you. You need someone to put your side of this across. Don’t rule it out. If you need me, I’ll be at the Traders. You know what, you can give me a knock —’

He rounds on her then. ‘You are
astonishing
,’ he spits, before swinging through the station door. It slams in her face.

Too right, thinks Karen. I
am
astonishing. You don’t know the half of it.

Minutes later, she’s at the
Echo
office. She pauses with her hand on the door, stopped in her tracks by a picture of Danny Latimer, grinning in a yellow T-shirt. It’s different to the formal school photograph that the police have released. He looks like the kind of kid she likes. Cheeky. Funny. For the first time it hits Karen, really hits her, that Broadchurch is not a spin-off of Sandbrook but a story – a tragedy – in its own right. She swallows the lump in her throat.

Inside, people are lining up to sign a condolence book that Maggie Radcliffe has set up.

Karen has remembered, with a little help from Google, how she knows Maggie’s name. They studied her work on the Yorkshire Ripper at journalism college. She was one of the first to question the police operation. She was at Greenham Common too, taking part in the women-only peace camp as well as covering it for the tabloids. She’s old-school, part of Len Danvers’ generation. Karen has a lot of respect for her and knows that she won’t be as easy to manipulate as Olly Stevens.

Luckily, Maggie’s deep in conversation with a guy who looks much too young for the dog collar he’s wearing. Karen’s never seen such a young priest. She looks him up and down; his clothes are new, on-trend, not bought round here, and his fair hair, combed and slicked down in a side parting, is so old-fashioned it’s cool again.

‘The church should’ve done this,’ he says, pen poised over the book.

‘It’s not a competition,’ replies Maggie coolly. ‘It’s new to all of us.’

‘I’d like to write a column,’ suggests the vicar. ‘Something like
Thought for the Day
on Radio 4. To remind people why the Church is important at a time like this, what it can offer them.’

Maggie snorts. ‘Me and your boss had a parting of the ways long before you popped up here. I was made to feel very unwelcome in your church.’