Broadchurch (11 page)

Chloe’s free hand scrolls through her phone. She’s reading, not texting. With luck, she’s checking coverage of Danny’s death on the web and wondering why there isn’t more. That will make Karen’s job a lot easier. She reaches into her oversized handbag for the ten-pack of Silk Cut that she always carries for times like this. A shared cigarette, the flint flare of the lighter, is worth an hour on the doorstep.

‘Got a light?’ she asks.

Chloe turns around and Karen senses the flattery – that she’s being treated as an equal by this adult. She offers her a yellow Bic and Karen sparks it.

‘Are you Chloe?’ The girl’s instantly on her guard. ‘I’m sorry for what happened to your brother.’

Karen pulls out her second prop from her handbag. It’s Danny’s toy chimp, rescued from the beach. ‘I’m guessing this meant a lot to him,’ she says.

Chloe snatches it from her, furious, as Karen knew she would be. ‘What’re
you
doing with that?’

Karen keeps her voice soft. ‘You can’t leave it down there. It’ll get stolen, end up in the papers, you’ll never see it again. Too many vultures.’

Chloe’s eyes narrow. ‘How d’you know so much?’

‘I’m one of them.’ Karen grins and is gratified when her smile is returned. ‘I work for the
Daily Herald
.’

‘We’re not talking to the papers.’

‘I know. You’re right not to.’

They all say that at first. It’s a gut reaction and Karen knows better than to take it personally. Look at Sandbrook: both sets of families rejected her at first, but as the case dragged on, Pippa’s parents used press attention as a way to process their grief as well as keep the pressure on Hardy, while the other parents pulled up the drawbridge. If that’s what the Latimers need, Karen will respect it, but she has to give them the choice. It’s too soon to know which way the Latimers are going to fall. They won’t even know themselves yet.

Chloe is watching her intently. Suddenly aware that the cigarette is burning to a stub, Karen pretends to inhale. ‘I only came to give you that’ – she gestures to the toy – ‘to stop others from nicking it. If it was my brother, I wouldn’t want strangers having it.’

‘Thanks.’ Chloe clutches it to her chest. More years fall away from her.

‘Can I borrow your phone?’ Chloe only hesitates for a second before handing it over: Karen can see that she finds her intriguing.

‘I won’t call you,’ she says, tapping in her own number. ‘I won’t come to the door. I won’t stop you on the way to the shops, like the others are going to. But if you or your family need to speak, or you just need a friend when it’s getting a bit much, you call me.’ She saves it as
A
FRIEND
before handing the phone back. ‘Thanks for the light.’

Karen takes her leave. She knows to quit while she’s ahead. Around the corner, she flicks the cigarette away with a grimace of distaste.

It’s dusk and the gnats are out in Mark Latimer’s garden. DI Hardy, fatally attractive to midges, is tempted to take the interview inside, but Beth is hovering at the window and he needs Mark on his own. The stats are a signpost pointing this way. Most murdered people know their killer: over two-thirds of murdered children are killed by a parent, with fathers more likely to kill than mothers. And Mark Latimer is squirming like a man with plenty to hide.

‘Thursday night, the night Danny went missing, where were you?’

‘On a call-out? Came through early evening, dunno, half six – this family’s whole system had packed in.’

‘How long did that take?’

‘Most of the night. It was a nightmare boiler. I was there pretty late.’ Mark’s eyes drop to Hardy’s notebook, watching the words go down.

All the while Hardy is assessing Mark. He’s tall, with the well-defined muscles of a man who spends all day crouching, pulling and lifting. He could pick
me
up, thinks Hardy. He looks down at the hands and tries to marry these large palms and long fingers to the ligature prints on Danny’s neck.

‘No. There wasn’t a call-out.’

Mark does his best to look mystified. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘We have CCTV footage of the car park at the top of Briar Cliff. You were there at 1.23 a.m.’ Mark looks over his shoulder. Beth’s still at the window. He throws her a little-boy smile that’s vanished by the time he turns back to Hardy.

‘So you’re snooping on me now?’ he hisses.

‘We were checking CCTV in the area. Now, what did you do that night?’

‘What, am I a
suspect
?’

‘The first thing we do is eliminate people from the investigation. You tell me where you were, who you were with, how long for. I eliminate you from suspicion. It’s entirely methodical. You don’t tell me those facts, I can’t eliminate you. And if I can’t eliminate you, you’re a person of interest.’

‘In the murder of my own son?’

Hardy is damned if he will let Mark play that card.

‘I’m sure this is all very straightforward.’

He can see Mark weighing up his options. If that’s not panic in his eyes now it soon will be.

‘I met a mate. We went off together. They dropped me back at the car park later, then I came home. Three, maybe four in the morning.’

‘What’s your mate’s name?’

Mark’s eyes slide to the side. ‘Can’t remember.’

Sometimes, killing makes people clever. Self-preservation kicks in and the murderer discovers hitherto untapped reserves of resourcefulness and ingenuity. It’s almost as though points are added to their IQ. Hardy wonders if Mark was always this thick, or it’s grief making him thick, or the whole thing is an elaborate double bluff.

‘You can’t remember the name of your friend? Where’d you go?’

‘I think we had a drink, bite to eat, drive round…’ Something that’s almost a smile pulls at his mouth.

‘You
think
?’ says Hardy. ‘It was three days ago.’

‘Yeah. And a lot’s happened since then.’

Beth’s still staring at them attentively, as though trying to lip-read. Hardy steps to one side, so that he’s hidden behind Mark.

‘And is there any reason you wouldn’t want me to know the name of your mate? This is only about who killed Danny. Nothing else.’

Mark rolls his neck. ‘It’ll come back to me. I’m knackered, I haven’t slept, all the stuff on the news, my head’s not straight.’

Hardy changes tack. ‘When you came in, you went straight to bed. Can your wife confirm when you came back?’

‘No, she was asleep,’ says Mark.

It’s an admission and they both know it. They’re getting somewhere. Hardy draws breath for his next question but his phone rings. He paces to the edge of the garden, leaving Mark to wonder.

‘Sir, it’s El – Miller,’ she says. ‘I’m at the clifftop hut. We’ve got a match for Danny’s fingerprint up here in blood. We think this is where he was killed, then moved two miles along the coast.’ Hardy registers silent approval: Miller is bullet-pointing, the way he likes it. ‘SOCO say the place has been meticulously cleaned, but they’ve also found a set of fingerprints by the sink. I messaged them through to run a match against elimination prints. They belong to Mark Latimer.’

17

Ellie Miller has long perfected the art of getting up without disturbing her family, but this is an early start even by her standards. The sun is up but it’s still cold and she pulls on her big orange coat, the one that lets the kids spot her from a hundred paces. Joe has a similar one in royal blue. Mum Coat and Dad Coat, the final surrender of style to parenthood. In the kitchen, she melts inside to see – she was so tired that she missed it last night – that Joe has made her a BLT sandwich for breakfast and two Thermos flasks of tea to kick-start her day.

The clifftop hut is a crime scene now, a cordon flapping between pegs, the entrance tented. Hardy is at the cliff edge, his back to the hut, the wind combing his fringe into a spiky quiff. He’s staring at the sea like it’s hypnotising him: when he does look at Ellie it is with annoyance, as though she has broken a sacred trance. When she hands him the Thermos he looks utterly baffled.

‘It’s freezing,’ she says. ‘Long weekend working, big day ahead. Thought this would help.’ Hardy takes it and looks at it without thanks. ‘Have you got children?’ she asks.

‘Why?’

‘They must have shit manners.’ He doesn’t react. She hates this way he has of making her wonder if she has actually spoken at all. Instead, he makes a sudden flailing movement, as though he’s tripped over something. It’s not the first time she’s seen him do this. He’s ill at ease on the lumpy turf up here and those shoes, a knackered pair of brogues with the sole peeling away from the leather, aren’t doing him any favours.

‘You need a good pair of boots.’ She studies his feet. ‘What size shoes d’you take? Eleven?’

‘No thanks,’ says Hardy. He cranes forward to look at the beach. ‘Makes no sense. Why move him to Harbour Cliff? Why not just throw him off here? Perfectly good cliff for chucking a body over.’

Ellie is appalled. ‘Can you not talk about it like that,
please
.’ Mentally she retracts her offer.

She chooses to take his silence as apology. In the distant harbour, a handful of fishing boats head out.

‘Any boats gone missing recently?’ Hardy asks. ‘A boat’d leave no tracks.’

It’s a good point, and Ellie’s pissed off that she didn’t think of it herself. ‘Moor it on the shore to leave a body, any evidence washed away.’

Hardy nods. ‘What time’s Mark Latimer coming in?’

‘Nine.’ Ellie needs him to know he’s wrong. Just because she can’t
think
of an innocent explanation doesn’t mean there
isn’t
one. Her head’s all over the place and she’s tired. There’s probably something really obvious that she’s missing. She’ll kick herself when the penny drops. ‘Sir, he’s not in the frame.’

‘Look at the evidence in front of you. Stop behaving like you’re his bloody solicitor.’

He leaves her there at the edge of the cliff, the wind twisting her hair to dreadlocks.

The sedative they give Beth gets her to sleep but doesn’t keep her there. On every waking there are a few beautiful seconds of normality before it all hits her again. If she wakes, and goes back to sleep, four times in one night, that’s up to ten seconds’ reprieve from the nightmare.

She drags herself groggily to the toilet. Danny is everywhere. In the bathroom, his shampoo is a genie in a bottle. No one else will use it, but the thought of throwing it away is abhorrent. She steps on the scales: she’s lost five pounds in as many days. Her ribs and hip bones jut to frame a gently convex belly. When Mark tries the door, she jumps guiltily off the scales.

He’s next in, locking the door behind him. They never used to do this. From the landing Beth hears the tap of keys on his phone, the swish of a message being sent and then in reply comes a text alert in Nige’s ringtone. What good will he be, hopeless bloody Nige? What can Mark say to him that he can’t say to his wife?

She doesn’t want to go downstairs. There’s always someone
there
now. But she doesn’t want to stay up here, either, with Danny’s bedroom sucking at her like a dark star. She tiptoes down the stairs, a stranger in her own house.

In the sitting room, Pete empties a postbag on to the table. Some of the envelopes simply say Latimer Family, Broadchurch, but still they have made their way from Newcastle, London, Birmingham, Cardiff and beyond to this little house in Dorset. The kitchen sink is full of flowers and the worktops are piled high with food. Casseroles, pies, cakes and biscuits. They didn’t have this much on the buffet at their wedding.

‘What do we do with it all?’ she says, picking up a jar of home-made jam. It’s almost laughable the way people’s minds work: Those poor people with the murdered son, I’m sure a bit of home-made bramble jelly will make it better.

‘I’ll take some,’ Pete licks his lips. ‘Some amazing pies there.’ Someone needs to fit this bloke with a ten-second delay between his brain and his mouth. At least this time he realises and has the grace to look embarrassed.

‘What happens now?’ says Beth, giving him the opportunity to make himself useful. ‘We gave them a list of suspects. How far have they got?’

‘They’ll tell us when they’re ready,’ says Pete.
Us.
Like this is happening to him, too. Like he’s on the inside of it. He turns to Mark. ‘You should get going, they’re expecting you.’

Chloe says what they’re all thinking. ‘Why’d they want to talk to you, Dad?’

‘Routine, I expect,’ says Mark. ‘To them, at least.’ It’s because he had a go at the vicar, that’s what it is. Pete got there before Mark could do anything really stupid like throw a punch, but he heard the threats and now they’ve got him down as a nutter.

Beth watches him go, envious on some level that he’s got an excuse to leave the house. She hates being shut up. Mark says she’s like a dog, she needs walking twice daily. Back in the bathroom she snaps on rubber gloves and cleans the grouting with a toothbrush, scrubbing until the damp comes away.

Pete gives her half an hour before he’s there with a cup of tea. She will wait until he’s gone then tip it down the sink. He doesn’t go, only hangs around clearing his throat.

‘They did ask,’ he says eventually. ‘The night before Danny was found, you and Chloe were in, watching TV…’

‘We watched a film on Sky, comedy. Ashton Kutcher.’ It wasn’t even funny but she wishes she had laughed harder now.

‘Where was Mark?’ She knows what he’s trying to do and she’s on the defensive. She’s not going to make it easy for them to waste time on Mark when they should be looking for the real killer.

‘He was out.’

‘And he got back…’

‘Dunno. I was asleep.’

‘He was working.’

‘That’s what he said.’

Pete frowns. ‘You don’t know who for?’

What is the point of this? It’s never been part of their routine for Mark to inform Beth where he’s working. She’s not that interested. It’s not that interesting. She resents the way they’re turning every little blip in domestic administration into something sinister. She folds her arms. ‘No.’