Broadchurch (30 page)

‘How can you ever say that now?’ says Beth. She turns her face to the window as the van crowns Bredy Hill. The early evening sun casts a golden filter over the picture-postcard landscape. Beth barely sees it.

With little warning, Mark swerves into a run-down farmyard cluttered with old threshing machines and a rusting yellow tractor. Sorry-looking cows munch hay in a vast rusting barn. The only new thing is a shiny motorcycle with two crash helmets hanging on the back.

‘He’s got a bloody motorbike!’ says Beth, but Mark shushes her with his hand on her forearm. She follows his gaze to a small outbuilding in the corner of the farmyard; there’s movement inside. Mark stays calm on the short walk to the shack, then loses his composure at the last minute, shouting Chloe’s name and shouldering the door at the exact second that Beth remembers the kind of thing she and Mark got up to in the middle of the afternoon when they were young, and thinks it might be a good idea to knock.

Whatever Beth was expecting, it wasn’t this. The interior of the shack looks like a youth club. There are beanbags, a couple of battered chairs, fairy lights draped from the rafters and a flat-screen TV that’s showing a video game. In the centre of the room, Chloe stands wearing a pair of headphones. Her eyes are closed and she’s gently swaying. Dean – good-looking, Beth registers that even in her shock – is frozen with a games controller in his hand. After what seems an eternity, he pulls the plug on Chloe’s headphones. Her eyes saucer when she sees her parents.

‘Mum! Dad!’

Beth doesn’t know whether to slap Chloe or hug her. ‘What the
hell
are you doing?’

‘Dancing,’ says Chloe. ‘Dean made me a happy room.’

Dean gets up to take her hand. ‘Somewhere she can just shut herself away,’ he explains. ‘Enjoy herself without feeling guilty.’ Chloe smiles gratefully up at him. Beth looks at Mark and knows he’s thinking the same thing: it’s us, fifteen years ago. She is consumed with the most bittersweet feeling, like a longed-for kiss on broken skin.

‘What happened to your day out with the girls?’ asks Beth. Her anger has melted away.

‘They were too
nice
to me,’ says Chloe. ‘Kept asking me if I was OK. Watching what they said to each other. Like I was a freak. I rang Dean. He came and got me from the train station.’ Beth tries not to wince at the thought of Chloe on the back of Dean’s bike across miles of open countryside. ‘I just wanted a break from being sad. I loved Danny, you know I loved him, but I need a break from being the dead boy’s sister. It’s suffocating me. And I know you can’t understand that.’

Beth fights the tears: she doesn’t want to embarrass Chloe by crying in front of Dean. She’s grateful when Mark speaks for her.

‘No,’ says Mark. ‘We do understand. Don’t we?’

Beth nods, swallowing hard.

‘Are you keeping the baby?’ says Chloe. Beth looks to Mark – if he’s told Chloe, she’ll kill him – but he shakes his head. ‘I heard you fighting about it,’ says Chloe patiently, as if she’s the parent. ‘What you gonna do?’

Beth decides to repay Chloe’s honesty. ‘We don’t know.’ She looks around at the soft lights and the music and the sofas and feels ashamed as well as grateful that Dean has been the one to do this for her. ‘But first we need to make a happy room for you at home.’

The door of St Andrew’s church is always open, but Steve Connolly tiptoes through it with a trespasser’s unease. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands: they are too big for the pockets on his fleece, so he worries at his zip, then smooths down his hair. He looks around, studying each stained-glass window in turn, moving his lips as he reads the leaded inscriptions. There is a large stone statue of Christ in the transept: Steve touches the hem of its robe, then dips his head awkwardly. He lights a candle but doesn’t find any money in his pocket, so he blows it out and places it back on the shelf. He seems eager to please, even though the church is empty. After making two circuits of the nave, he settles in a pew halfway down and bends his head in prayer. It is in this position that Reverend Paul Coates finds him half an hour later. At the sound of footsteps, Steve Connolly’s eyes fly open as if a trance has been broken.

‘You don’t mind me being here, do you?’ he says. There is apology in his body language: he is almost bowing. ‘I’m not a regular.’

‘Of course not,’ says Paul. He squares off a pile of hymn books without taking his eyes away from Steve.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Steve leans forward in his earnestness. ‘I know it sounds daft, but… with God… do you hear a voice? Does God talk to you?’

‘No. Not directly. I just have faith that he’ll show me the way.’

‘This thing happens to me, and I’m still trying to work it out. I hear a voice, in my head. And it gives me messages. I had a message from Danny, I had to give to Beth Latimer.’ He gives a short, bitter laugh. ‘See, say it out loud and it sounds bonkers. But the Bible’s full of talking angels and that, isn’t it?’

‘There’s a bit of that, yes.’ Steve doesn’t seem to register the effort it takes Paul to keep a straight face.

‘But what I keep wondering is, what if I was wrong? What if the message wasn’t from Danny Latimer. What if it was from God? Or… What if it’s not from either of them, Danny or God, and it’s just voices in my head?’

Paul sits down next to him. ‘Who have you talked to about this?’

‘The police. Beth. Now you.’

‘What about medical advice?’

Connolly rolls his eyes. ‘I reckon we both know where I’d end up, if I went in to a GP talking like this. I thought
you
’d understand.’ His obvious disappointment is shot through with accusation. ‘I thought we were both people who heard voices that weren’t from the living.’

‘I’m sorry to let you down,’ says Coates patiently. ‘Is that why you’re in here?’

‘No. I came to pray. The voice has stopped. So I’m praying to make it come again. ’Cause they need me: the family, the police. If I could just get another message, I could convince them. I could help them solve it.’ His eyes glaze. ‘But I’m getting nothing. And it scares me. What if I imagined it in the first place? What if I was wrong? What if I’m a liar? If I don’t hear it again, what am I?’

The reverend is uncharacteristically lost for words.

48

The hands on Hardy’s office clock stretch out for six and for once CID is emptying on time. Some lucky bastard – one of the quieter DCs whose name Hardy can never remember – is leaving today, and they’re off to toast his post-Broadchurch future.

With time running out, Hardy would have kept the lot of them behind but Miller insists that a night in the pub will give the team the morale boost they so desperately need for the final few days’ push of overtime. With collective spirits at an all-time low, he has little choice but to accept this. He draws the line at joining them, though. Instead, when Miller bounces up to his door, he gives her forty quid for a round and watches them file out to the pub with a mixture of relief and despair.

When he is sure they have all gone, he pulls out his mobile phone and rests it on the desk in front of him. In some ways he finds it easier to give a death knock or interview murderers than make this call. He is debased by his longing to hear Daisy, her real voice, not the chirpy voicemail greeting. He stares at his handset, willing it to ring out with her caller ID and spare him the rejection. He envisages her picture flashing up on his screen, feeling foolish at the indulgence. She hasn’t called him in six months: why would she do it now? If wishing worked, he would talk to her every day.

He speed-dials her before he can stop himself and, with fast-fading hopes, counts the twenty rings before it flips to the recording.

‘Hey, it’s me,’ he begins. Even to his own ears, the attempt at breeziness is unconvincing, but he perseveres. ‘Checking in with your voicemail, as usual. Listen, if you do get the chance, give me a ring, it’s been a really long time this time. I mean, I know you’re busy, home and school and… all that other stuff you do. But… I do think of you. Every day. Sorry, not getting soppy, had my warning on that.’ He gropes desperately for the right words. ‘We could video call, couldn’t we? I’d like that. You can be my first video call. Before you forget what I look like. This is Dad, signing off. I love you, darling.
Please
’
–
the word fractures halfway through – ‘give me a ring.’

He sets the phone down on the desk, feeling utterly wretched. Unable to sit still, he makes a tour of the office, switching off printers, replacing the caps on pens and setting files at right angles. When he’s completed his circuit he comes to the Operation Cogden whiteboard. Danny’s school photograph has begun to curl at one edge. The immutable facts of deposition – time, date, location – are boxed off underneath the picture, but the rest of the whiteboard is a messy, scrawled-upon palimpsest of discounted suspects and off-the-mark theories.

‘I can’t do this,’ Hardy hears himself say, and the words are followed by an agonising pain, a huge fist squeezing his heart to bursting point. He staggers back until he hits a wall and slides helplessly down it. Hardy assumes his childhood comfort position, knees pulled up to his chest, so close that he can rest his chin there. Experience tells him that he can hold this pose for hours and hours. He remains motionless amid the debris of his investigation until his heart rate returns to its version of normal. By the time he gets up with a low wheeze and a click of the joints, it is dark outside.

49

Tom Miller, alone in his bedroom, can’t settle on anything. He has abandoned his book for a magazine, the magazine for his Nintendo DS, but even that can’t hold his focus. It is mid-afternoon, that annoying time of day when it’s too late to join in anyone’s daytime plans and too early to see if they want to meet up after tea, and in any case, no one’s really allowed out late any more.

Downstairs, the sounds of the CBeebies channel and the dishwasher being loaded tell him that Fred and Joe are in. With an expression of resignation, he checks the parking space in front of the house for his mother’s car. It’s empty, but he sees something else that has him spring into life. He clears the stairs quicker than a skateboarder on a ramp, and is out of the front door in seconds. Joe, wiping down the high chair in the kitchen, doesn’t register Tom’s exit. Only Fred sees him go.

‘Paul!’ he shouts to the man walking towards the church. ‘I need to ask you something!’

Paul Coates’ face, set in a grimace, is wearing a smile by the time he turns to face Tom.

‘Sure. Go ahead. Unless it’s difficult, in which case I’m just going to run away from you.’

Tom grins. ‘If someone deletes something from a hard drive, is it gone for ever?’ He scratches his nose. ‘My dad accidentally deleted something.’

Coates considers Tom for a second. ‘No,’ he says. ‘There are recovery programs. If those don’t work, the right tech expert could probably get it back. So no, not totally gone.’

‘OK. Thanks,’ says Tom, but he looks far from pleased with the answer.

Back in his room, he spends five minutes trawling through the recycle bin of his laptop, shaking his head at the screen and occasionally looking over his shoulder. The noise of the dishwasher can provide cover for a creeping parent. Eventually he slams the lid closed and slides the computer into his camouflage backpack, although he doesn’t bother to pack the lead or the mouse.

This time he lets Joe know that he’s going out. ‘Jayden’s going to the arcade,’ he says. ‘He’s waiting at the top of the alley.’

It’s the first time Tom’s been anywhere on his own since Danny went missing. ‘Tell you what, me and Fred’ll walk you to the alley,’ frowns Joe. Overprotectiveness is the default setting of all the parents in Broadchurch now, even the ones who used to pride themselves on giving their children old-fashioned freedom.

While Joe is getting his coat, Tom quickly and deliberately upends Fred’s orange juice all over him, hair, clothes, the lot. Fred wails, more in bewilderment than discomfort. ‘I couldn’t stop him,’ says Tom, when Joe charges in. Fred needs a dunk in the bath and a complete change of clothes.

‘I can’t leave Jayden on his own,’ says Tom.

Joe looks from son to son. Fred screams louder. ‘OK, fine,’ he says, but he doesn’t look happy about it.

At the end of the field, Tom bears left, away from the direction of the amusement arcade and towards Harbour Cliff Beach. Occasionally he adjusts his backpack to test for the reassuring heft of the laptop inside it. Frequently he looks over his shoulder, but whenever he sees someone else – a dog walker, another boy on a bike, a couple out rambling – he puts his head down and walks on. It is clear that he wants to be alone.

He is on the other side of the caravan park, en route to Briar Cliff, by the time he finds seclusion in a grassy dune. He wriggles out of his rucksack and sets it down. He turns slowly in a circle to check he is definitely alone. Then, from his pocket, he retrieves a small claw hammer. He taps it gently on his palm and stoops to unzip his rucksack.

A loud panting noise shocks Tom into dropping the hammer; it misses his foot by an inch and is immediately half-buried in the sand. His fear turns to delight when a large brown dog bounds over the edge of the dune and licks his hand. Tom laughs out loud, and wraps his arm around the dog’s neck.

Susan Wright looms into view, a lead in her hand.

‘He likes you.’ Tom’s face is nine-tenths smile as he wraps his arms around Vince’s neck.

‘He’s so nice,’ says Tom. ‘I’m not allowed a dog. My little brother’s allergic.’

‘You wanna be careful,’ says Susan. ‘This is near where that boy died.’

Tom buries his face a little deeper into the dog’s fur. ‘He was my friend.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ says Susan Wright. She checks for onlookers. The coast is literally clear, the woman, the boy and the dog the only living things in sight. She appears to weigh up a decision. ‘Wanna come and feed Vince with me?’ She nods to the third caravan back from the beach. ‘He’ll love you for ever.’ Tom hesitates, looking Susan up and down, but is persuaded by Vince, who nuzzles his cheek and paws at his clothes. Tom nods. He appears to have forgotten the hammer sticking out of the sand, and if Susan notices it she does nothing about it. The smile she gives Tom does not reach her eyes.