Broadchurch (3 page)

Hardy feels in his pocket for the pills – he learned to swallow them dry a long time ago – and remembers too late that they’re on the bedside table in his hotel room. He breathes evenly, the way he’s been taught to, and the panic attack begins to subside. ‘Don’t do this to me,’ he says under his breath. He wants to close his eyes, lie down and go to sleep, but his training kicks in and somehow he keeps putting one foot in front of the other. ‘Come on,’ he says, and forces himself to take in every detail of the scene that’s too much to bear. He looks up at the cliff, the grass fringe at the top, the sheer golden face and the rocks that surround the body. He tries to picture the trajectory.

‘Oh God,’ says a female voice behind him. ‘No, no, no —’

There’s a mumsy woman in a suit with mad curly hair staggering towards him. Automatically Hardy puts himself between her and the body as he tries to guess who she might be. Is she the kid’s mother? How the
hell
did she get past the tape? Bob’ll get it in the neck for this.

‘I know him, he lives here, he has tea at my house, he’s my boy’s best friend,’ she’s saying.

A
mother but not
the
mother. And she’s given them an ID. They need to calm her down, get the facts from her. Hardy orders her off the beach, but with shaking hands she pulls a police badge from her handbag. He gets her name and rank in a flash but it takes him a further moment to absorb that this tearful woman is job.

‘Oh God – Beth, does Beth know?’

‘Calm down, DS Miller,’ says Hardy, although he finds that her hysteria is fuelling his own calm. The more out of control she becomes, the more professional he feels.

‘No, you don’t understand – I
know
that boy – Oh God, Danny.’

‘Shut it off,’ snaps Hardy. ‘Be professional. You’re working a case now.’

‘Shut it off?’ Miller looks stricken and he knows how he’s coming across, but it’s either this or a slap to the face. It works. She stops crying.

‘Alec Hardy,’ he offers her his hand.

‘I know. You’ve got my job,’ she says.

‘Really?’ says Hardy. ‘You want to do that
now
?’ Behind his bluntness, he’s encouraged. At least now she’s talking like a copper. It doesn’t last long.

‘You don’t even know who he is,’ Miller accuses, like it’s Hardy’s fault for not growing up in this one-horse town, like it’s bad policing not to be on first-name terms with all the locals after one week.

‘Tell me!’ he shouts over the crashing surf.

‘Danny, Daniel Latimer.’ Hardy hears the full name for the first time and knows that within hours it will have a terrible celebrity attached to it. ‘Eleven years old. Goes to school with my son Tom. Family lives here, Dad’s a local plumber.’

‘Is this a suicide spot?’

‘He wouldn’t do that.’

Christ, he’s got his work cut out with this one. No wonder he got the job if this was his competition.

‘Answer the question.’

‘No. There are other spots, one about three miles west, another inland.’ She’s on the defensive again. ‘He’s not that sort of kid.’

Hardy’s heard enough from DS Miller and tells her to find out where the scene of crime officers are. Something about the neat way the boy has fallen doesn’t make sense and he needs Forensics to capture what he can see. There’s a cigarette butt by his feet that needs bagging up. No way he’s letting evidence get away this time, not if he has to pick through every grain of sand on this beach himself.

As Miller makes the call, he wonders whether her relationship to the dead boy will make her an asset to the investigation or a liability.

The tide inches closer.

Beth is a runner but she has never moved like this. Her flimsy pumps hit the ground without absorbing the shock but she doesn’t register the jarring in her joints. She clears the High Street in seconds flat and rounds the bend into the harbour. People huddle in groups of three and four, whispering and nodding towards the beach. Only Jack Marshall is on his own, standing sad sentry outside his shop.

Beth has no time to process this. She keeps moving, powered by a formidable internal force. She’s breathing heavily but there seems to be an endless supply of energy. Her world has shrunk to this: the need to get to the beach and confirm that whatever they have found there is not Danny so that she can get on with looking for him. All the while, the freezing cold water of fear rises around her, lapping at her chin.

Squad cars and vans crowd the seafront car park. Their primary yellow-and-blue livery looks garish and wrong against the soft blues and golds of the coast. Beth is forced to calm her pace as she slaloms through manoeuvring cars, elbows the bucket-and-spade brigade out of her way and then she’s on the beach. The sand threatens to slow her down so she kicks off her shoes, snatches them up and carries them. It’s coarse beneath her feet. At the foot of the cliff, police tape flutters white and blue in the breeze. The officers on duty are trying to persuade the gawkers that there’s nothing to see. It’s easy for Beth to dodge to one side and slip under the cordon.

Halfway to the horizon a dark dash breaks the sand. If she hadn’t been told that it was a body, would she know what it was? A few steps closer and she sees that it’s too small to be a man, but it could be a woman. The nightmare reels her in and she keeps going.

A familiar silhouette steps between Beth and…
it
, and Ellie turns slowly towards her. Beth recoils for a second because something is horribly wrong with Ellie’s face. She looks like she’s had a stroke. When she sees Beth it gets worse.

‘Beth!’ she says, running towards her. ‘Get off the beach!’

‘What is it?’ says Beth. ‘What’ve you found?’ She’s giving Ellie one last chance to tell her that everything’s OK.

Ellie blocks her. ‘You can’t be here.’ Beth almost wants to laugh. This is her beach as much as anyone’s. How
dare
they tell her where she can and can’t be? She keeps putting one foot in front of the other. She’s fitter than Ellie and it’s easy to give her the slip. The police behind her are close enough now that she can see their long shadows chasing hers across the rippled sand but still she keeps going, running towards the heart of her nightmare and then she sees the same too-bright colours flash before her again. Blue suede with a yellow flash. Danny’s shoes, shoes that she bought herself, are not quite covered by the makeshift shroud. What is left of Beth’s controlled facade crumbles to powder.

‘Those are Danny’s trainers!’ Her voices bounces off the cliffs. ‘
Those are Danny’s trainers!
’

She repeats this phrase over and over even as the police catch up with her and grip her upper arms. The black-and-white police uniforms flash in and out of focus. Sounds and voices come and go. Beth bucks and flexes but she can’t escape them. She can’t leave him there with his feet sticking out like that. He gets cold feet when he’s asleep. She needs to tuck him in properly. She twists her body one last time in a futile effort to break free. As they drag her away, her heels carve gullies in the sand.

The rising tide of panic closes over Beth’s head. The horror rushes like dirty water into her lungs. It floods her heart. She doesn’t care if she drowns. She would welcome it.

4

The
Broadchurch Echo
newsroom is in its customary state of chaos. The paperless office is but a dream here, desks buried under reams of loose pages. The sleek new monitors on the desks are attached to a creaking computer system that hasn’t been properly upgraded for years. Here comes Maggie Radcliffe, the editor: she’s never been upgraded either. She’s been in local news since cut-and-paste meant scissors and glue, and smoking at your desk was de rigueur. Now, an electronic cigarette twirls between her fingers as she squints at an Excel spreadsheet of falling revenues.

Olly Stevens, Maggie’s latest protégé, comes in, dark hair tousled in a way that only the very young can get away with. He’s looking pleased with himself. ‘Reg didn’t make it,’ says Olly, referring to the veteran photographer who spends more time in the Red Lion these days than behind his lens. But Maggie still uses him; she sees him in the supermarket every weekend, and they look after their own in Broadchurch. ‘So I did it myself with my camera phone.’ Olly transfers the pictures of Tom Miller wearing his ‘gold’ medal with pride from his phone to the screen on his computer. There’s enough here for a double-page spread.

‘Aw, look at their little faces!’ says Maggie. ‘You’ve almost got an eye.’

She’s still looking over Olly’s shoulder when an email beeps its way into his inbox. ‘Oh my God,’ he says, fingers hovering over the mouse. ‘
Daily Mail
. My application.’

‘Open it!’ says Maggie.

He processes what’s on screen in half a second and his face falls. ‘
Bastards
.’

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she soothes. ‘There’s plenty of other newspapers.’

‘I’ve tried them all now,’ he replies glumly.

‘You’re good, petal. Your time will come.’

Further encouragement is interrupted by a text alert on Maggie’s phone. She glances down. ‘Yvonne says the beach is closed for some reason. Go down and check it out, will you?’

Hardy is back at the clifftop for the second time that morning, this time with DS Miller at his side. They climbed the steep coastal path to get here. Now police tape keeps the ramblers and rubberneckers out of the way. It’s the closest thing there is to a fence. Hardy can’t believe that people are allowed to walk up here without a safety barrier. Everything about the countryside is a deathtrap. He gets as close to the edge as he dares. A couple of feet below the grass verge is a shallow ledge, a place for people to think twice before jumping.

The Scene of Crime Officers crouch and crawl in their white suits, fingertips searching for clues, overseen by Brian Young. His hood is down and his mask off to denote his authority; the breeze runs its fingers through his puff of black hair.

‘How’s it going?’ Hardy asks him.

‘It’s looking like the fall was faked,’ says Brian. There’s a question in his voice; he’s not doubting the evidence, more asking why. ‘Angle of the body was wrong, too arranged. And up here there’s no flattened grass or slippage, no loose rocks. No fibres, no handmarks, no sense of a downward trajectory.’

‘You mean he didn’t fall?’ asks Hardy. ‘Could he have jumped?’

‘Unlikely, given where he was found, and the trajectory of the cliffs.’ Brian motions the fall with two hands. ‘Ask me, someone tried to make it look like an accident. I don’t think he was up here at all.’

‘See?’ says Miller. ‘Not Danny. He wouldn’t
do
that.’

‘Get on to the pathologist, tell him to hurry up, even if it’s just preliminary,’ he replies.

They go on foot back down to the beach. Miller talks Hardy through the different ways to access the cliffs from the town and he listens attentively. He still can’t quite get his bearings, although he is starting to slot the different parts of the town together and to internalise his sense of direction, so that the place is slowly replacing the one frozen image from his past.

The mobile homes in the caravan park have a toytown look about them from above that is not lessened by proximity. Outside number 3, an unsmiling woman leans with a large brown dog at her feet, mug in her hands. Hardy takes a mental snapshot of her.

A battered red Nissan crunches to a halt behind them. A brown-eyed manchild jumps from the driver’s seat and walks towards them, smiling. Miller quickens her pace towards her own car.

‘He seems to know you,’ says Hardy, seconds before the kid calls out, ‘Auntie Ellie!’ Miller glows bright red, to Hardy’s amusement. She needn’t be embarrassed; she’s quite capable of looking foolish all on her own.

‘Olly Stevens,
Broadchurch Echo
,’ he says, and it’s not funny any more.

‘No statements now,’ says Hardy automatically. He slams the car door on Olly but his voice comes through the window. ‘I heard there was a body. Has it been ID’d? Please?’ he says in the wheedling tone of a kid asking for an ice cream.

‘There’ll be a statement, Oliver,’ says Miller. She drives away, leaving Olly in a cloud of sand.

Ellie can’t remember the last time she drove to Spring Close: it’s quicker to walk across the playing field that connects both their homes. She tries to focus on the mirror, signal, manoeuvre of the journey rather than what’s at the end of it.

Then they pull up outside the Latimer house and reality bites down hard. She knows this place almost as well as her own. She can see it across the field from her kitchen window: they’ve spent more boozy Sunday afternoons here than she can count. And yet it looks strange, unfamiliar, as though she’s never been here before. She feels the double responsibility of a friend and a police officer, in that order, and suggests to Hardy, as they get out of the car, that she leads because she knows them.

‘How many deaths like this have you worked?’ asks Hardy.

She feels about an inch tall. ‘This is my first.’

‘You can’t make it better. Don’t try.’

‘You don’t know how I work!’ He’s treating her strength – finding the calm in the chaos – like it’s some kind of Achilles’ heel.

Hardy speaks in bullet points, his rolling Scottish Rs giving his words punch. ‘Most likely premise is abduction. Was he taken, if so who by? Watch them. Every movement. Anything that doesn’t make sense, tell me. The closer the relationship, the greater the likelihood of guilt. Don’t look at me like that.’

Ellie didn’t realise she was.

Inside, the Latimers line up on the sofa, Beth and Mark, Chloe – still in her school uniform – and Liz. Beth is shaking, hands fluttering from her belly to her mouth and back again. Mark is so still he barely seems to be breathing.

Hardy pulls up a chair from the dining table and faces them. Ellie feels a fierce protective urge that takes her by surprise: she doesn’t want him anywhere near them.

‘The body of a young boy was found on the beach this morning.’ Ellie hears the stock phrase from the outside for the first time. The euphemism, designed with such care, serves now only to insult and delay.