Broadchurch (33 page)

‘I knew he’d be found,’ Susan shrugs, like they’re talking about a dumped mattress. ‘I didn’t want to get involved. You people destroyed my family.’

‘Tell me.’ It’s almost a whisper. ‘Help me understand.’ She needs to tease this out: it’s her hope that one honest confession about her family might propel Susan along to the truth about Danny. When she gets the truth, she won’t need her notes to check that the story tallies: this case history is branded on her memory for ever.

Susan starts to nod her head in a slow unconscious movement, more a self-soothing gesture than an assertion of truth. ‘We had two girls. My husband was an electrician. He used to have sex with the oldest, but I didn’t know.’ A note of defiance lifts her flat voice, like she’s reiterating the denial for the hundredth time. Maybe she is. ‘Then he tried it on with the younger one. Her sister wasn’t having that, wanted to protect her little baby sister. So she got herself killed. He told me she’d gone travelling. She’d never said nothing to me. After a while, people started asking questions. Then you lot came. Took the young one into care. Arrested him. He told them I knew, that I was part of it. I didn’t know. I never knew. Look at you – same expression they had.’

Her husband, her child, her home. How
could
she not know? Ellie works harder than ever to keep the judgement off her face. ‘I’m just listening,’ she says.

‘They found her body buried in the woods, three miles away, in the end. I was pregnant. Social Services took the baby, said I wasn’t a fit mother. Everything I told the police got twisted, thrown back at me. He was convicted. Got life. Hung himself ten months later in his cell.’ She clicks her teeth and looks to the ceiling. ‘Death. Once it’s got its claws into you, it never lets go.’ Finally Susan’s blank eyes swim and her lip begins to wobble. ‘When I was standing on that beach, looking at that boy’s body, I kept wondering if my girl looked that peaceful, after he killed her. I don’t think she did.’

Something still isn’t right. Susan has opened up about her family, but she is still misleading them about Tom – he is no lying little shit, no matter how convenient that might be for her – and Ellie has the sense that she is even now holding something back. Something huge. But she cannot imagine what it might be.

She’s lying about Tom. What else is she lying about?

Once again Tom Miller has left the house under the pretence of meeting friends. This time he is underneath a tree in the graveyard at St Andrew’s. Checking that no one is watching, he unhooks his camouflage backpack from his shoulders and takes out the laptop. With two hands, he lifts it over his head and brings it down hard on the corner of a tombstone. It buckles but does not break. Tom repeats the process three, four, five times. The screen shatters and letters are thrown from the keyboard to scatter an alphabet in the grass. Tom is red in the face and breathless by the time the casing finally smashes to reveal the circuitry inside. The hard disk catches the light: Tom can’t break it with his hands or his feet, so he scrapes it along the mossy stones. He is lost in a reverie of destruction, and it is some time before he notices Reverend Paul Coates watching him from behind a granite angel.

Tom freezes, then clutches the remains of his laptop to his chest. Paul takes a step towards him.

‘What’s on there, Tom?’ He is gentle and controlled. ‘Is it about Danny? If there’s anything on this computer, you have to tell your mum.’

‘Keep your nose out!’ Tom holds the disk at arm’s length like a shield. ‘Or I’ll tell them I saw you touching Danny after computer class, and it was wrong, and he told me he’d asked you not to do it but you did.’

Paul steps over the broken shell of the computer towards Tom. ‘I would think very carefully about what you just said.’

‘What’s the matter?’ shrills Tom. ‘Won’t God protect you?’

It’s not like him to cheek an authority figure, and he knows he’s gone too far. He turns to escape, but Paul knows the terrain better and besides, Tom is only eleven and could never outrun a grown man.

53

Hardy pushes the police station door, the back of his left hand still sticky from the dressing and weeping slightly where he pulled out the IV line. The medics’ voices, imploring him not to discharge himself, echo in his head. They will have called Jenkinson, which means he is no longer counting down the days until he is off this case but the hours, possibly even the minutes. The hospital tag is still on his right wrist. He bites through it and spits it into a litter bin in the corridor.

The hum of chatter in CID goes quiet when he enters, and the phones no longer ring off the hook. The effort of crossing the silent room nearly topples him. Everything he’s got left goes into breathing slowly in, slowly out. He will not be beaten by this.

Jenkinson’s at his door before he’s had time to take his jacket off. She enters without knocking. Her face zooms in and out of focus.

‘I’ve referred you to the Chief Medical Officer, first thing tomorrow.’ It’s better than he thought: a one-day stay of execution.

‘I’m not leaving till this is solved.’

‘You don’t get a choice. As soon as he sees you, you’re done, Alec.’ She shakes her head. ‘Why take this job, if you knew you were this ill?’

‘I can still solve this, otherwise… why am I still here?’ He doesn’t just mean in the police station. He must solve this if it kills him. He notes privately that the phrase is no longer a mere figure of speech to him.

Jenkinson leaves him at his desk, where the wasted man-hours of Operation Cogden manifest themselves in towers of futile paperwork. Evidence and procedure have let him down. Desperation circles around him. Alone in his office, DI Hardy has a crisis of faith; he abandons himself to it.

They meet at the cob wall on the far side of Harbour Cliff Beach. It is low tide and the black rocks are exposed. They look like the rotten teeth of a huge sea beast, lying in wait. Clouds overhead threaten rain and a strong wind blows. It feels more like October than August. Now that the holiday season is too far gone to recover, it’s as though the sun has decided not to squander itself on Broadchurch. Hardy’s coat billows like a sail and he feels as though a strong gust will knock him to the ground.

Steve Connolly, feet planted firmly apart, hands in pockets, looks like not even a hurricane could shift him. Hardy has a sudden vision of how foolish he would look if anyone saw him. Anyone from the station. One of the Latimer family. Christ, imagine if Karen White turned up. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

‘You were the last person I expected to call,’ says Steve.

‘Surely nothing’s a surprise to you,’ says Hardy. Sarcasm is a reflex he can’t help.

‘That’s very funny,’ says Steve. ‘Never heard that before. What do you want?’

‘The Latimer case,’ he says, and somewhere deep inside he feels the heavy thud of a man hitting rock bottom. ‘I’m running out of time. If you have
anything
, give it to me now.’

Connolly doesn’t bother to hide his surprise. ‘Well, thank you. It’s about time.’ To his credit, he doesn’t gloat. He looks Hardy square in the eye. ‘Look, that message from Danny, about it being close to home. That felt the strongest.’

Hardy shouts to drown out the oncoming wind. ‘What does that mean? Close geographically? Family, friends, what?’

‘I don’t know,’ admits Connolly. ‘Just don’t ignore it.’

‘Prove to me you’re not a bullshitter.’

Now Connolly’s earnestness gives way to indignation. ‘I
gave
you something. I said, she forgives you for the pendant.’ Hardy fights to swish away the image the word
pendant
invokes: Pippa Gillespie’s face in the press photograph. ‘I told you, and you pretended to ignore it.’

Hardy is spooked for a second, but then his belief system overrides it. Shysters study body language, that’s how they work. It doesn’t mean anything that Connolly knew he’d hit a nerve.

‘And what does that mean?’ he challenges.

‘You already know,’ says Connolly. ‘I can see it. I haven’t got a clue what it means, all I get are fragments. And that’s what I got off you… that, and you’ve been here before.’ It’s a casually thrown dart that pierces the bullseye and Hardy can’t cover his shock in time. There’s no one else alive who knows about his first visit to Broadchurch. ‘You have!’ Connolly is delighted and angry at the same time. ‘You’ve been here before. I’m right, aren’t I?’

Hardy, no longer trusting himself to speak, looks out to sea. There is no warmth on anything today, only shades of blue and grey. Even the sun is ice-white. Suddenly Connolly’s eyes on his are too much and he turns to go while he can still walk, leaving Connolly triumphant on the harbour.

When Hardy spots Olly Stevens standing outside the police station, his stomach tightens. He can’t deal with the press right now. The feeling clearly isn’t mutual though, as when Olly clocks Hardy, he straightens up and clicks a pen out of his breast pocket.

‘No,’ says Hardy. He cannot think of a question Olly could come up with that would have another answer.

‘You must be feeling better, to discharge yourself from hospital.’

How the hell does he…? For a town so full of secrets, there’s fuck-all privacy in this place. Hardy yanks Olly’s arm and pulls him away from the station doors.

‘Look, I don’t want to stitch you up. Genuinely,’ says Olly. In his free hand he waves his reporter’s notebook like a white flag. Hardy doesn’t release his grip but it’s weakening by the second, and it must be surprise or some latent respect for the law that stops Olly breaking free.

‘So what
do
you want?’ asks Hardy.

‘An exclusive.’

54

There are still holes in Susan Wright’s story and Ellie can only hold her for another few hours before charging her. That’s not the end of the world: she can pick and choose from a list of charges, but she would rather get the facts out of her with as little duress as possible. The sun fires a single glass square: it is just after lunchtime.

‘So this is what I’m struggling with.’ Her words cover the growling of her stomach. ‘I know those cliffs. If you’re walking your dog, you can’t see straight down unless you’re right on the edge, you can’t have seen Danny’s body. The angle’s wrong. What you’re telling us, it doesn’t ring true. Now have another think, otherwise I’m going to charge you with obstructing a murder inquiry.’

Susan is blank. ‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘Like you didn’t see what your husband was up to?’ The low blow hits home. Susan turns her head slowly away. Ellie cranes across the desk to catch her eye. She’s not letting her get away with it this time. ‘You were out walking at the time Danny’s body was left on the beach. What did you see?’

Susan raises her eyes to the ceiling as if in prayer, although her lips don’t move. She seems to find an answer, though, because when she brings her face back down, the defiance has drained from it.

‘I wasn’t on the cliff, I was on the beach.’ The downward inflection gives away Susan’s relief. Finally, there’s the sense of confession that has been missing so far. ‘I saw a boat come in. Little. Like a rowing boat but with a motor on the back.’

Ellie’s heart thuds painfully against her ribcage. ‘How many people on board?’

‘One. One man. Black woolly hat.’

‘What did he do?’ Ellie’s mind is whirring: why, why, what’s going on? She’s so busy trying to read the subtext of Susan’s words that she’s in danger of losing the thread.

‘He took the boy’s body out the boat. Laid it on the beach. Then he got back in the boat and went off west.’

‘Did you recognise the person who left Danny’s body on the beach?’

Susan starts to nod again. For a long time, it is the only movement in the room. ‘Yes, I did,’ she says at last. ‘He calls himself Nigel. Works with the boy’s dad.’

He calls himself Nigel.
It’s a strange turn of phrase, but Ellie doesn’t have time to analyse it. She rewinds the summer, trying to remember ever seeing Susan and Nigel in the same place, let alone in conversation.

‘You know Nigel well, then, to recognise him at night, from that distance. When did you last see him?’

‘Few weeks ago.’ Her voice is thick. ‘He came to my caravan. He had a crossbow. He threatened to kill me.’

Ellie wonders what her face looks like because she wasn’t expecting
that
. She would know if Nige had a crossbow. She wonders now if Susan has picked on Nige to distract them from something else. It’s no secret that he was close to Danny, and that he’s been questioned in the nick before. ‘OK. Why did he do that?’

‘He didn’t like what I was saying.’

‘And what
were
you saying?’

‘Don’t remember.’

She’s lost her again. It takes everything Ellie’s got not to scream. If Susan realises the extent of her desperation, they might as well give up. ‘You don’t remember what you said to make a man threaten you with a crossbow?’

‘Not really.’

‘So Nigel threatens you, for some unknown reason, and you frame him as the killer.’

Susan looks Ellie hard in the eye and speaks with rock-solid conviction. ‘It was him carrying that body.’

Ellie checks the clock again. If they can bring Nige in straight away, they’ll have just over two hours with both of them under interrogation. Maybe he can shed some light on all this. When you think about what she is, what she is alleged to have done, what is Susan Wright’s word worth? Ellie leaves her suspect in the indifferent care of the duty solicitor and slams the interview room door behind her. The hairline crack in Nige’s alibi – the quick trip to the pub – now seems to her a potential chasm. He wasn’t out of the house long enough to kill Danny, clean his body, steal a boat and dump it on the beach, but he was away for long enough to commit the murder, then go out again once Faye was asleep and cover his tracks. They should have gone after him harder. Ellie rubs the space between her eyebrows where the tension collects. Her skin feels loose around her skull.

She is wondering who to tell first now the boss has gone when she rounds the corner into CID and collides with a wraithlike DI Hardy. He is thinner than ever, and appears to be wearing pale green make-up.