Broadchurch (32 page)

She passes the time chasing Susan Wright’s alibi. A few long-term residents at the caravan park reported seeing her that afternoon and again the next day, although none of them know her by name. ‘Her with the dog,’ they all say. It occurs to Ellie that Susan leaving home without Vince would be tantamount to a disguise. There was a party held on the site that night, and despite or because of that, no one was paying attention to caravan number 3. Ellie looks at the list of potential alibis: all but two names have been crossed off as negative.

When her desk phone rings, she takes a second to wonder what has come good first: the alibi, the police files or the dog. It is none of those things but the duty sergeant, putting in a call from the front desk that makes the whole investigation shift.

Someone has reported torchlight inside the roped-off crime scene of the clifftop hut. Ellie moves so quickly that the press cuttings on her desk lift in the backdraught. Hardy knows it’s something big as soon as he sees her face, and when she tells him what’s come through he is frozen for a second before grabbing his jacket and springing into action. ‘Don’t stand there wittering, Miller,’ he says. ‘Come on.’

Ellie slings her handbag diagonally across her body, calling backup on the way to the car. While she drives, Hardy phones through the order to trace the call. Ellie’s palms are damp on the steering wheel. She has had the feeling for a while now that the solution was going to come out of the blue, and maybe this is it. It doesn’t make sense, but then nothing about this investigation does.

They are the first on the scene. She makes the split-second decision to kill the lights and the engine at the last minute and they roll into the car park invisibly and in near-silence. From here, the hut appears to be in absolute darkness. The police tape flutters and has not been disturbed.
Please
don’t say this is a crank call.

The moon dips behind a cloud and they rely on torchlight to pick out their path. Hardy motions for her to take the front of the hut while he inspects the back. Ellie steps up close to the door. Its window panes form a grid of black mirrors. There is no sign of life inside and she resigns herself to the fact that at best this was kids taking the piss and, at worst, they’ve had the killer here and lost them.

She brings her torch up to the glass to make sure.

The door swings open and hits her in the face. The pain radiates from her nose and dazes her for a few seconds. She recovers her sight in time to see a figure in a hoody pelt past her. She registers only the basics – white, too tall to be a woman, neither thin nor fat – and he’s gone.

The noise has brought Hardy around. He takes only a second to check she’s all right and then they’re racing after the intruder. The beams of their torches are white balls bouncing over the uneven ground. Lumpy turf gives way to coarse sand, then to a dirt track that leads only to one place.

‘Suspect heading for boatyard!’ Ellie yells into her radio. A crackled reply tells her that a squad car is minutes away. Hardy is not as fast as his long legs would suggest, he’s not much faster than she is. The suspect vaults the wire fence into the boatyard with gymnastic ease. By the time Hardy and Ellie complete this move in awkward clambers, their man has disappeared into the maze of shiny hulls.

It’s confusing in here. Sound bounces off the boats, distorting Ellie’s sense of space.

‘I know you’re here,’ she yells. ‘We’ve got the place surrounded. You can’t get out.’ She strains for the approaching sirens that will give truth to her bluff, but hears nothing. The only sound is Hardy’s laboured breathing somewhere behind her. She puts her torch out and inhales deeply through her nose, as if to sniff the suspect out. He must be close. She treads lightly to minimise the crunch of pebbles under her feet.

Into this near-silence, her telephone rings, giving away her position. ‘Bollocks!’ says Ellie under her breath. There’s barely time to register the number before cutting the call. It’s the records on Susan Wright. Of all the timing…

She is barged to the floor before she knows what’s happening. She puts out a hand to break her fall but there is a loud crack from somewhere on impact. The base of her palm makes sharp contact with dozens of tiny stones and the flesh is lacerated. She lands awkwardly on her other shoulder, rolling over so that her cheek is grazed and she tastes gravel. This time, she doesn’t recover instantly; her internal gimbal has been temporarily disabled and the world rocks wildly around her. When she hauls herself back to sitting, a pain zips from her wrist to somewhere deep in her spine. The blue strobe finally arrives. It’s down to Hardy now to hold the man until backup comes. ‘Sir!’ she says, throwing her good arm in the right direction. ‘That way!’

Only one set of footsteps receding into the distance. She stumbles into the gangway between boats and is pulled up short to find Hardy flat on his back, torch rolling at his side, bony hands clutching desperately at his chest as he struggles for breath.

There’s the slamming of car doors as uniform pour in to the boatyard. Ellie makes an arrow of her torch, pointing after the suspect.

‘Get after him!’ she screams.

She drops down next to Hardy. His eyes are bulging, a vein pulses on his forehead like a worm under the skin and his tongue hangs uselessly between greying lips.

Behind her, someone radios for an ambulance. ‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ she says, loosening Hardy’s collar. A couple of the PCs begin CPR, punching at his chest. Ellie holds Hardy’s hand while they wait for the paramedics to arrive. She feels his pulse with her thumb, the gap between beats growing longer as it slows, and slows, until there is barely anything left to feel.

52

Alec Hardy’s blood rhythms soundtrack his dreamscape. Images scroll relentlessly past, like a film he is condemned to watch for ever. Pippa Gillespie’s face turns into Danny Latimer’s. He’s wearing her pendant, she’s carrying his skateboard. He sees Daisy at a similar age, uniform on, running into his arms after school. This gives way to another little boy, one he’s never seen from the outside before, knees up to his chest as the tide rolls away from Harbour Cliff Beach. Then everything turns white.

The senses come back one by one. Touch is first in the form of pain, a sharp sting in the back of his right hand. Smell follows, the unmistakable sweat and disinfectant of a hospital ward. Something bleeps in his left ear. He tastes the stale interior of his own mouth.

The first thing he sees when the room comes into focus is the vertical blinds that hang like undone bandages at the window. A tube whistles oxygen up his nose and an IV drips something into the cannula in the back of his right hand. And there, slap bang in the middle of his vision is DS Miller, brandishing a bunch of grapes.

‘I hoped you might choke on the seeds,’ she says, dumping them just out of his reach.

‘I’m sensing you’re angry with me.’ The intended snark is undermined by his delivery: he sounds drugged and slow.

‘You nearly died on me! They told me you’ve been in here before and discharged yourself against their advice. Heart arrhythmia.’ Whatever happened to patient confidentiality? Hardy will have someone’s guts for garters over this breach. ‘They said you’ve known for eighteen months. You should’ve
told
me.’ Miller visibly relaxes once that’s all out of her system, and returns to her default setting. ‘Can’t they fix you?’

There is no point now in lying. ‘They want to put a pacemaker in, but they don’t know whether I’ll survive the operation. It won’t affect the case. I won’t let it.’

Miller’s not having any of it. ‘It already has! We were pursuing a suspect! We lost them because you collapsed! You’re a serving police officer, having blackouts. You came here, you took this case on, took that job knowing you weren’t up to it.’

She still doesn’t get it. This case is bigger than anything he’s going through. ‘Miller, we’re nearly there. That was the killer last night, I’m sure of it.’ He’s waking up, growing stronger by the second. ‘Male, young enough to be that fast, what’s that, between late teens and fifty? We’ve nearly got him. I was thinking who could it have been? It’s the right build for Mark, or his plumber’s mate, or the vicar even. And where’s Steve Connolly – that voices from the dead bloke – these days? Are SOCO up at the clifftop hut?’

Miller is listening despite herself, but she’s not convinced.

‘We can manage without you.’ This strikes at the core of Hardy’s worst fear.

‘I have to finish this. I can’t let the family down.’ At the mention of the Latimers, she visibly softens. He exploits her weak spot: his begging is only partly feigned. ‘Please, Miller.
Please
. Don’t tell the Chief Super. I’ll discharge myself. Give me half an hour.’

‘I’m going back to work.’ Miller slams the ward door on the way out. Hardy allows himself to hope. She is very far from happy with him. But she didn’t say no.

When Ellie stands up in front of CID, she remembers the last briefing she gave, winces a little at her unprofessionalism then, and moves on. She hasn’t got time for nerves now.

‘As you already know, the boss was taken ill last night, during the pursuit. I’m not sure when he’ll be back,’ she says. There is a domino run of whispers across the team: she talks louder. ‘But we just carry on, don’t get distracted. SOCO are back up at the hut after last night. Frank, go through our list of people of interest, compare those without alibis, or questionable alibis, on the night of Danny’s death, and knock on their doors, find out their movements from last night. The likelihood is the killer was there last night. We were very close. They’re rattled and they’re going to make more mistakes. OK. So. We have Susan Wright in custody.’ She grips the whiteboard marker and gives a gasp of pain. Her hands sting with little cuts and grazes from last night’s fall. When finally she got in last night, Joe picked gravel out of her skin with sterilised tweezers and dressed the cut on her elbow. Gingerly holding the marker with her fingertips, she writes SUSAN WRIGHT on the whiteboard and underlines it twice. ‘We’ve connected her to the site where Danny’s body was found; the cigarettes she smokes match the ones found at the scene.’ She double-checks the notes that were left on her desk. ‘But her alibi checks out. The caravan park owner saw her sitting in the window watching TV with her dog when he went off around 1 a.m. We’ve a match at the hut on Briar Cliff for her prints and DNA, but the owners have already confirmed she cleans there. No matches with any DNA found on Danny’s body. So she didn’t kill him. But she
knows
something. I’m sure. And most of you know about her husband by now. Those of you who don’t, the file’s on Nish’s desk. It doesn’t make pretty reading.’ She hears Alec Hardy’s rhythms in her own speech: she would hardly be surprised to hear a Scottish accent. ‘We’re…
I’m
continuing to question her, but time’s running out before we have to apply for an extension. I know it may sound daft, but we need to find her dog, Vince. He’s a chocolate Labrador. Nish has got a picture. The dog is a priority – she’s very attached to it, it might help her to talk. Uniform haven’t turned anything up so far.’ She tries to rally them the only way she has left: ‘We still have a duty to the Latimer family and that’s the most important thing. All right, that’s it for now, thank you.’

Ellie has to hitch her trousers up twice on the short walk to the interview room; her waistband is loose. She hasn’t been this slim since before having Fred. It gives her scant joy to realise that she’s finally lost her baby weight. The energy she’s burning now comes from somewhere beyond food and sleep. Is this how Hardy got ill?

Susan Wright sits morosely next to the duty solicitor. Ellie clears her throat and begins. Without Hardy at her side, she must switch between the roles of good and bad cop on her own.

‘Four cigarettes with your DNA all over them were excavated close to where Danny Latimer was found. And you had Danny’s skateboard. You gave it to a local boy.’

‘Is that what he said?’ says Susan, in her usual monotone. ‘
He
had it and showed it to me, asked me to keep it for him. He’s a lying little shit.’

The fury that erupts within Ellie at this has nowhere to go so she swallows it whole. ‘There are traces from the skateboard in your cupboard. Your fingerprints are on the board, as are Danny’s. You lied to us about Mark Latimer getting the keys to the hut. Now, what were you doing on that beach next to Danny’s body? Why did you have Danny’s skateboard? Why did we find your cigarettes near his body? Why didn’t you bring the skateboard to us?’

‘My dog,’ says Susan. ‘Vince, where’s Vince?’

Ellie seizes on this. ‘Susan, I’ve been on this case for a long time now,’ she says, no longer bothering to keep the edge out of her voice. ‘And I’ve lost
so much
patience. Now, tell me how you came by the skateboard. Because otherwise I will charge you, you will end up in custody. And if that happens, who knows what’ll become of Vince. He could be rounded up, he could be put down.’

Susan’s pupils flare in fear and Ellie knows it’s worked. ‘Tell me what happened.’

Susan’s shoulders lower an inch. Her guard has not been dropped, but it’s on the way down.

‘I was out walking in the middle of the night,’ she says. ‘Me and Vince, we like it during the night, no one else about. We walk for hours. We was just going out. We have a nap in the afternoons and we go out at three, maybe four in the morning. It’s lovely during the night, round here. Up from my caravan, up the hill on to the clifftop. When we got up, I saw it down on the beach. The boy. We went back down. He was all splayed out. The skateboard was next to him. I had a few cigarettes. Stood there for a while. Looking at him. He was beautiful.’ Ellie flinches at the thought of anyone seeing beauty in a dead child, and Susan picks up on this. ‘I mean, his limbs were all twisted out of place. But his face was at peace.’ She holds that word ‘peace’ for a second too long, like it’s too precious and rare to let go easily.

‘I don’t understand,’ says Ellie, ‘how you could stand over Danny’s body and smoke and then carry on walking your dog?’