Broadchurch (34 page)

‘Sir, what are you —’

He bats away her concern with the back of a scabbed hand. ‘I’m seeing the doctor in the morning, Miller.’ She doesn’t have to ask him what that means. It’s over. What does that mean for her? Keep him involved, or get on with it without him? The words are out before she’s aware of making the decision. ‘There’s been a development. Got an eyewitness account. Nige Carter carrying Danny’s body out of the boat and laying it on the beach. I don’t know how reliable she is, but…’ The news has brought a pink glow to Hardy’s complexion. He puts in the call for the uniforms to bring Nige Carter in and there’s a corresponding heat in his voice.

‘Remind me what we know about Nige Carter,’ he asks Ellie as they wait.

‘He moved back in with his mum when his dad died, five, six years ago,’ she says. ‘He’s part of the furniture at the Latimers’, always in and out the house… But I don’t believe he’s capable of Danny’s murder.’

‘Everyone we’ve interviewed is capable,’ says Hardy. ‘Just takes the right circumstances.’

‘And there’s your view of the world. I don’t know how you sleep.’

‘Who says I sleep?’

The gates outside squeal open as a police van and a squad car roll into the car park. Ellie and Hardy watch the yard from the window. Nige leaves the van in cuffs. Even from this distance Ellie can see that he’s been crying. The first DC who gets out of the car holds an evidence bag up for them to see: Ellie gasps to see a crossbow inside, but is silenced completely when the second car door opens and a female PC is followed by Vince on a rope lead.

‘You take Susan, I’ll take Nigel,’ says Hardy. ‘I’ll see where he says he was that night. And why the hell he had her dog.’

She wonders if Hardy’s aware how much he’s sweating. His whole face is glazed with it.

‘You sure you’re up to questioning, sir? How are you feeling?’

‘Spec
tac
ular,’ he says. Ellie silently calls him all the names she can think of.

The detectives wait at the end of the corridor while Nige makes his allotted telephone call. He dials the number without having to look it up.

‘Mark, mate.’ The echo in the station further distorts his breaking voice. ‘I want you to hear it from me. Police have taken me in. They think I had something to do with Danny. It’s all wrong, this.
You
know that.’ It’s impossible to tell from Nige’s face whether Mark is raging at him or comforting him.

Hardy studies Nige Carter across the table. For the first time he really registers how young Nige is. The shaved head puts years on him but there’s something childish about him, with his eagerness to please and his gangly limbs. Hardy remembers the little armoury that uniform retrieved from Nige’s garage and wonders if the happy idiot thing is an act. He’s kicking himself for not excavating the fault lines in Nige’s original statement properly. Susan Wright’s testimony, together with the crossbow, has changed everything.

With the clock hard against him, there’s no time for preliminaries.

‘Run us through where you were the night Danny Latimer was killed.’

Nige gives a dopey, nervous smile. ‘We been through this, weeks back. When you had Mark in. I was at home, with Mum, watching telly.’

‘What were you watching?’

‘Something about baking. Mum loves all that.’

Hardy slides a photograph of Susan Wright across the desk. ‘D’you know this woman, Nigel?’

Nige barely looks at it. ‘Don’t think so.’

‘Do you own a dog?’

‘Not really.’ A muscle in Nige’s cheek jumps.

‘Not really?’ Hardy is scornful. ‘What, sometimes you do? There’s a dog comes round part-time?’

Nige smiles. ‘No.’

‘Is this
amusing
to you?’

The smile is switched off like a light. ‘I don’t own a dog.’

‘Why was there a dog in your back garden?’

Nige squirms. ‘Someone asked me to look after it for them.’

‘The owner. This woman. Susan Wright. Who you said you didn’t know.’ Nige is looking anywhere but at the photograph. Hardy sighs. ‘If you’re going to lie, you have to be consistent. Because then there’s the alibi for the night of Danny Latimer’s death. The one you told us about when we were interviewing Mark. It was good enough then. But not now. Your mum already told us you weren’t in all that night. You went out at half ten for last orders. So where were you, Nigel?’

Nige’s mouth hangs open but nothing comes out. Hardy decides to switch gears. He brings out the crossbow, sealed in its clear bag.

‘This yours?’

He looks shifty but he doesn’t deny it. ‘Yeah. I keep it in the garage.’

‘You played video games with Danny.’

The change of subject has confused him. ‘Call of Duty, yeah. Sometimes with him, sometimes with his mate Tom, too.’

‘How often were you alone together?’

Nige’s eyes widen. ‘Dunno. Never thought about it. He was just Mark and Beth’s lad. I saw him when I was around.’

Hardy pretends to consult the file in front of him.

‘How do you know Susan Wright?’ he asks.

‘I don’t want to talk about her!’ Nige’s rage must be very close to the surface to rise this quickly. ‘You should arrest
her
, have
her
in here for harassment. She’s been on at me since the moment she arrived. It must be five months of it now. I can’t take it no more! I’ve told her, leave me alone, but she won’t. Not interested about that, are you?’

‘What’s she harassing you about?’ Nigel, evidently spent by his outburst, says nothing. ‘Susan Wright has told us she believes you killed Danny Latimer. She says she saw you on the beach, with a boat, dragging Danny’s body on to the shore.’

‘She’s lying!’ A spit bubble forms between Nige’s lips. ‘He’s my best mate’s boy, why would I do that?’

‘Then why’s Susan Wright saying otherwise? What’s she got to harass you about?’

Nige shrugs almost imperceptibly, as though admitting defeat quietly to himself. His lips work in silent rehearsal. Hardy has seen this tell enough times to know that a confession is seconds away, but even he is stunned when Nige says, ‘She reckons she’s my mum.’

55

Beth and Mark drive to the hospital in near silence, exchanging half-hearted reassurances that this thing with Nige is a mistake, yet another example of police ineptitude, another black mark against DI Hardy’s name. They tell each other that Nige will be out again by the time they get back to Broadchurch. But they aren’t convincing each other. How can they, when they can’t convince themselves? Suspicion is the first resort for both of them now.

When the hospital comes into view, Beth is thrust into the moment she’s been dreading. They haven’t been here since Danny was born. She is paralysed.

‘I feel disloyal,’ she says, hand on the buckle of her seat belt. ‘And I don’t know if I want to see it. I
want
to want it, but I don’t. My heart’s still full of Danny. There’s no room for another baby.’

‘There will be —’ begins Mark.

‘Mark, stop telling me how I’m going to feel,’ she says. ‘’Cause you have no idea, and
no
ability to understand. Shutting this out is not an option for me. I can’t do that boxing things off like you do. I have to carry a life in me. For another six months. Feeding off me, breathing from me, sharing my blood. I can’t let Danny go.’

Mark thumbs the line of her cheekbone. ‘Don’t load it with everything. Just let it be what it is.’

She nods for his benefit. She knows that he’s right, but her heart hasn’t caught up with her head yet. The longer this goes on, the more she fears that it never will.

White light pulses in the dark room; the monitor hums. The sonographer is brisk as she administers the cold slick of gel on Beth’s belly. She prods and probes for what seems like a suspiciously long time. Beth is unexpectedly gripped by the conviction that something is wrong and the equally sudden and certain knowledge that she cannot survive the loss of this baby.

‘All’s well,’ says the sonographer. ‘Everything’s where it should be. Do you want to look at the screen?’

Beth’s instinct is to say no, but Mark says yes for both of them and slowly the monitor is turned their way. She is almost afraid to look at the screen but Mark holds her hand and together they watch in wonder as the monochrome swirl of pixels coalesce into the first picture of their unborn child. The rest of the world – all the shit, all the grief, the relentless distrust – melts away. Beth laughs with delight to see the thin crescent moon of the skull, the zip of the spine. The baby’s heart is a cursor, blinking fast and strong.

‘It’s a fighter, this one,’ says the sonographer.

Something swells from nowhere inside Beth, warming her through from her core. Not happiness: it’s too complicated and too soon for that. But the familiar and strange ache of love is unmistakable.

Ellie jumps as the rat-a-tat-tat on the door breaks the tension in the interview room. Hardy beckons her into the corridor.

‘Susan Wright says Nigel Carter is her
son
?’ she echoes. ‘And she’s accusing him of murder? What the
hell
is going on between them?’ But there’s a connection now, two incompatible jigsaw pieces turning out to be a perfect fit when turned upside down.

They go back to their respective interviewees.

When Susan learns that Nigel has blown their secret, Ellie observes something that could almost be happiness.

‘That’s the first time he’s even acknowledged it.’ Finally, Susan’s face softens and her shoulders drop. ‘They took him away from me, when everything happened. Twenty-five years. Then the law changed. You could request contact. It took me eighteen months to find him. The woman who adopted him, she never told him. She hid the contact request letters from him. So I tried tracking him down in other ways. He didn’t know anything about being adopted till I told him. That’s not right. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have done it like that. He reacted badly. He didn’t want anything to do with me. He pushed me away, avoided me. Tried to pay me off. When that didn’t work, he threatened me with that crossbow.’ Ellie used to interpret Susan’s monotone as detachment: now she hears the limitless patience of a mother. ‘He’ll come round. I can wait. Whatever it takes. He’s my boy.’

‘Does he know about your family?’ asks Ellie.

Susan narrows her eyes. ‘You don’t tell him.’ Her voice is low and scraping: it is like a knife to Ellie’s throat: if they were alone, Ellie would be terrified. She understands now why Maggie took Susan’s threat to heart.

She rubs her eyes. She’s so close now to understanding Susan’s actions, but one wrong word and she’ll clam up again. ‘Susan, here’s what I’m having trouble with: if you’re his mum and you want to be reconciled with him, why tell us you saw him on the beach that night? Because I’m a mum, and whatever my child had done, I’d want to protect him.’

‘I
am
protecting him. I told you because… I’m scared.
For
him. Because it’s
not his fault
.’ Susan’s whole face begins to tremble. ‘If he’s his father’s son, what is he capable of? What might he have done? I can’t just let it happen. Not again.’

56

Nige Carter has gone from being a man of few words to complete emotional incontinence. It’s all Hardy can do to make out what he’s saying, let alone pick out the relevant information. ‘It’s like everything you thought you knew about yourself isn’t true,’ Nige sobs. ‘That was stupid, threatening her with the crossbow, but with everything that’s going on… She doesn’t belong here.’

Hardy is unmoved. Injured doesn’t mean innocent. If anything, this gives Nige depth and complexity that they could never have guessed at.

‘Nigel, you have to tell me. Where were you the night Danny died?’

Nige wipes his nose with his sleeve. ‘That night, I went out, just for a few hours. Up to the estate past Oak Farm. They’ve been laying down pheasants. I just went and got a couple, that’s all. He’s got dozens, he doesn’t even know.’

‘You were nicking
pheasants
?’ Hardy can barely believe his ears. Lying to police under caution in a
murder inquiry
because of a bit of low-level poaching? Of all the provincial bollocks he’s encountered down here, this takes the crown.

‘The butcher in town takes ’em off my hands. Not like I’m gonna make my fortune working with Mark. Mind, I forgot to fill up the van, so I siphoned some diesel out of his tractor. And then I… cut the barbed wire, made it look like a break-in.’ Hardy recalls his first shout in Broadchurch, the dawn call-out to the top of the cliff, the angry farmer, the severed fence. It gives him no pleasure to know that it’s the only crime he’s solved since he got here. ‘I was nowhere near that beach,’ insists Nige. ‘Whatever she thought she saw, she didn’t.’

Hardy no longer has any idea which, if either of them, is telling the truth. With iron self-control, he says, ‘So she’s lying?’

‘Mate, I don’t even know who she is.’

The hand on the clock jumps, closing the gap on another hour.

Hardy needs to play hard as well as fast to cut through what’s connected to Danny and what isn’t. If that means breaking Nigel to see if anything else is left in him, so be it. He splays his fingertips on top of Susan Wright’s files. Essex police have finally come good and they now contain crime scene photographs as well as the press reports. It is harrowing stuff, even for the most detached reader. Hardy’s conscience pipes up; it has Miller’s voice. He hesitates for a moment; the progress of the second hand overrides his doubts. Nige is a suspect. He was seen with the body. The information in this file has a bearing on the witness accusing him.

‘Do you want to know, Nigel? Because in here are newspaper articles. About her. About her husband. Your family.’ Hardy pushes the file gently across the desk. ‘Interview paused. 3.02 p.m.’

He closes the door gently behind him, leaving Nige alone with his terrible legacy. Nige doesn’t strike Hardy as a fast reader, but the pictures speak for themselves. A long, strangulated howl follows Hardy down the curved concrete corridor.