Broadchurch (39 page)

‘Why does it matter?’

‘Everything matters. I need to have the facts, Joe. I need to understand.’

‘If I can’t understand it, why should you?’ bursts Joe. The plea seems genuine, but Hardy’s not taking anything at face value. Joe has had a long time to replay this murder, long enough to reframe his intentions even to himself.

‘Did you give Danny presents?’

Joe’s face twists at the question. ‘Mobile phone, beginning of the year. I told him not to show Mark and Beth. And I gave him five hundred in cash the day before we went to Florida. It was part of our spending money. Ellie assumed Lucy had taken it and…’ shame blooms on his cheeks, ‘I didn’t correct her. She was livid.’

‘Why’d you give Danny that money, Joe?’

‘I wanted him to love me,’ says Joe pathetically. ‘I knew he wanted to stop, I thought it’d make the difference.’

‘If he wanted to stop, why was he at the hut that night?’

Joe can hardly get the words out. ‘I said it’d be the last time.’

Hardy orders his thoughts. Each answer throws up a dozen new questions and it’s hard to prioritise. For now, he must keep it broad. The detail will come.

‘The boat,’ he begins. ‘Why burn it so much later?’

‘I didn’t have time on the night,’ he says. ‘But I knew you’d find it if I left it any longer. I had to sneak out while Ellie was on duty, and the kids were asleep. I had to leave them by themselves. I was terrified something would happen to them…’ Joe trails off as the irony slams home.

Hardy moves on. ‘So today, you turn on the phone deliberately. But two nights ago, why call from the hut?’

‘I couldn’t take any more.’ His eyes plead for understanding. ‘I caused Jack’s death too. I knew you’d check the number. I thought it’d just be you. To confess. Ellie said she was tied to the desk all night.’ At the second mention of his wife’s name, Joe finally breaks down. ‘Does she know?’

‘No,’ says Hardy.

‘I can’t tell her,’ he snivels. ‘You have to tell her.’

Hardy is no longer able to hide his contempt. It bubbles under his skin and he’s very close to losing his cool when there’s a knock on the door.

‘Alec?’

It’s the Chief Super. Hardy suspends the interview.

They look at each other in sorrow, their last encounter forgotten. Jenkinson’s pink eyes and nose strip her of her rank, peeling her back to the human behind the badge. ‘The boys are with Pete Lawson,’ she says. ‘Ellie’s still in interview room Two with Nige Carter. She’s going round in circles. We can’t stall her for ever. D’you want me to break the news?’

‘No,’ says Hardy. ‘He’s my suspect. She deserves to hear it from me.’

He waits until Jenkinson’s court shoes are an echo in the corridor, then interrupts Miller’s interview without knocking. She whips around in disbelief.

‘Sir, d’you mind?’ She’s hoarse. ‘I’m in the middle of – for the sake of the tape, DI Hardy has just —’

‘Interview ended one thirty-three p.m.,’ says Hardy, shutting down the machine. ‘Take him away,’ he says to the PC on duty. Nige looks suspicious rather than relieved, as though this is a ploy to confuse him further.

‘He’s my suspect!’ says Miller as Nige is led away.

Hardy sits in the chair Nige has vacated. It is unpleasantly warm. ‘It’s not him,’ he says.

Miller draws her eyebrows together in doubt. ‘How d’you know?’

Hardy draws on his twenty years’ experience as a police officer: every interview, every confrontation, all the training. It is not nearly enough. ‘I have to ask you a couple of things. Where were you on the night of Danny’s death?’

‘What?’ She’s almost amused.

‘Just – I’ll explain – just – we need to keep this simple.’ He palms the air downwards in a calming gesture, intended to soothe himself as much as her. ‘I’ll ask questions, you give me the answers.’

She laughs out loud now. ‘What, you think it was me?’

He can’t soften the blow but he can prepare her for it. ‘Please, Ellie.’

Laughter is abruptly replaced by alarm. Her pupils blow black and huge. ‘Don’t call me Ellie,’ she says.

‘Tell me where you were the night Danny Latimer died.’

Her mind is working furiously, he can see that. Is she on the right track, or is she thinking about Tom? ‘At home. We’d just got back from Florida.’ Impatience briefly trumps her fear; she’s said this before.

‘So that night, what did you do? Unpack? Get ready for work?’

‘I went to bed. I get terrible jet lag, so I have these pills and they knock me out.’ Hardy needs to cut to the chase: any longer and he’ll start to patronise her, and that’s the last thing he wants.

‘Did you notice Joe come to bed?’

‘No.’ Fear loosens her lower lip: it trembles like a child’s. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’ Hardy stands up and brings his chair around the table so that he’s sitting next to her. ‘What’re you doing, why you coming round here?’

He makes sure he keeps eye contact. ‘It was Joe.’ Miller throws her head from side to side as if to shake his words free. ‘Joe killed Danny Latimer.’

‘No he didn’t. What the fuck?’ She bucks backwards, her chair scraping across the floor. ‘No, he didn’t. He wouldn’t.’ Hardy watches in horror as her face falls apart. Lines he has never seen crack the panes of her cheeks and forehead. He needs to counter this emotion with fact: the merciless equivalent of a slap to a hysterical face.

‘We have him in custody.’

‘Who’s got the boys?’ she says in panic.

‘Pete,’ says Hardy.

She gets to her feet only to double over. She staggers into the corner of the room and retches. Hardy identifies the contents of her stomach – tuna sandwich, baked beans – as they reverse up her throat. Thin yellow liquid splashes his shoes and trousers but he stoops to comfort her, his hand resting uselessly on her arm. She’s falling down a bottomless hole and neither he nor anyone else can catch her. He wants to help her, but he’s never been any good at saying the right thing. For a moment, he thinks about telling Miller about Tess, that he knows what it’s like to be betrayed by your spouse. As soon as the thought is formed, he understands that he can’t insult her with the comparison. After a minute or so, Miller’s gagging noises are replaced by racking sobs.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Hardy. The word has endless applications. Sorry it took so long. Sorry it’s him. Sorry it’s you.

‘But… no… Susan Wright.’ Miller is agitated by hope. ‘Lucy. They
saw
Nige.’

‘They saw Joe,’ says Hardy evenly. ‘Same build, facial similarities, bald head beneath the hat. They thought it was Nige, but it was Joe.’

‘No. Not Joe. Not. It’s not Joe.
Please.
You’re wrong.’ She presses her cheek against the smooth concrete wall of the cell. The porous surface soaks up her tears like a sponge.

‘I’m not,’ says Hardy.

‘The boat,’ she says, hope punching through the despair. ‘I was working when the boat was set alight. He wouldn’t have left the kids.’

‘He’s confessed to that too.’

Miller’s tears stop like the tap has been turned off. She wipes a slick of snot with the side of her hand.

‘I want to see him.’

64

There are twenty paces between interview rooms 1 and 2 in Broadchurch police station. Ellie walks on rubber legs, counting every step. Too soon she arrives at the door she’s touched a million times. Now it feels like a portal to another world. She lets her fingertips rest on the wood for a second.

‘You don’t touch him,’ warns Hardy at her shoulder. ‘You don’t do anything that might jeopardise a conviction.’

‘What am I gonna do? He’s bigger than me, there are cameras everywhere.’

Joe, ridiculous in his white boiler suit and canvas shoes, leaps to his feet at their entrance. A beast rears up inside Ellie at the sight of him; she is a wolf in a woman’s costume.

‘Sit down,’ she growls. He obeys. ‘Is it true?’ His inability to answer is the confirmation she needs. It is only anger that keeps her on her feet. Only the buzz of the CCTV cameras in the corner and the presence of Hardy keep her from lashing out.

‘I never touched Tom or Fred,’ says Joe. ‘I never touched Danny. Ell, I’ve always loved you —’

‘He was
eleven
!’ Her shriek cuts him dead.

‘I can’t explain it…’ he sobs, tilting his face up to her like one of the boys. He actually expects her to comfort him. ‘Can I see Tom?’

At this crass demand, the wolf rips through to the surface. Ellie lunges at Joe, knocking him off his chair. He curls up on the floor. Her first kick gets him in the balls, then she alternates between the head and the ribs. The aftermath of every beating she’s ever seen comes back to her so she knows exactly where to aim to cause him maximum pain. She doesn’t recognise the noises that come tearing out from a place inside she never guessed existed. It only lasts a few seconds: Hardy shouts for help and two PCs burst into the interview room to pull her off her worthless sick fuck of a husband. Their hands are on her arms when she brings her toes hard against his kidneys. Hardy steers her into the corridor and closes the door on Joe. The rage subsides as rapidly as it came. By the time she’s back in Hardy’s office, a strange, deep calm has descended and she concerns herself now with practicalities.

‘If there’s anything you need me to do on the paperwork or stuff I’ve been following up, my desk is a mess.’

‘It’s fine,’ soothes Hardy in the low hush of a father reading a bedtime story. His tenderness is more than Ellie can bear. She longs for the old world order, the sarcasm and the sparring and the knowledge that she could put up with his shit at work because she always had her family to go home to.

‘We’ve booked you a family room at the hotel by the roundabout,’ he continues softly. ‘Pete’ll meet you there with Tom and Fred. You can pick some stuff up on the way. Don’t talk to anyone. Shut the curtains, lock the door, don’t answer the phone to anyone who isn’t me. Do you understand?’ She can only nod. ‘Your car’s outside now. I’ll see you soon.’

Ellie has to walk through CID to get her coat and bag. She risks a glance around the office and sees not accusation but pain on the faces of her fellow officers, her friends. The framed family photograph on her desk has been rebranded with lies. She flips it face-down. As DS Ellie Miller leaves CID for the last time, there’s the sound of a woman weeping.

The police cordon has isolated the Millers’ house from the rest of Lime Avenue. Squad cars parked horizontally across the street make a roadblock. Her neighbours regard her with fear and accusation. Ellie remembers with a jolt how sure she was that Susan Wright must have known what her husband was up to. Now it seems that that weird, wretched woman is the only person in the world who might understand a little of what she’s going through.

Brian is in the hallway in his boiler suit, mask looped around his neck. He’s got Joe’s blue Dad Coat in an evidence bag. In a trance, Ellie accepts the forensic shoe covers and gloves.

‘I’ll accompany you round while you get your stuff,’ says Brian. ‘I’m so sorry, Ellie.’

In the sitting room, she picks up a couple of DVDs for the hotel. A fat black slug sits on the centre of the carpet. She brings the ball of her foot down hard on it; glistening white innards shoot out like ointment from a tube. Upstairs, she chooses the boys’ clothes with care but stuffs items from her own wardrobe into a suitcase at random.

In the porch, she looks back into her shabby home: the half-painted walls, the kids’ toys, the books and the music and the photographs. She tries to remember it the way she left it that morning, when it was a haven, a place of happiness, but it’s already too late for that.

In London, Karen White is heading north across Blackfriars Bridge in a taxi when DI Hardy calls her mobile. It’s a bad connection and the distortion makes him sound more robotic than ever.

‘You, mate, are a bastard,’ she greets him. ‘I’ve had Olly Stevens on the phone. You gave the Sandbrook story to him.’

‘We have Danny Latimer’s killer.’

Instantly Karen forgets about the story she was chasing. ‘Who is it?’

‘We’ll be making a statement in three hours. Nobody else will have advance warning. If you’re down here, you’ll have first access.’

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘But why’d you call me?’ The phone goes dead. Karen looks in her handbag; there’s an unopened packet of Marlboro Lights, a fully charged iPad and her purse. Good enough. She knocks on the glass partition. ‘Waterloo, please.’

The cab makes an illegal U-turn and re-crosses the river.

65

Hardy gathers the Operation Cogden team in front of the whiteboard. He still doesn’t know them all by name: he used to rely on Miller for that sort of thing.

‘At 5 p.m., I will tell the family,’ he says. ‘I’ll then make a short statement to the media. And then we all need to be on hand. This information is going to run a crack through this community. Nish is distributing a list of responsibilities for individuals and groups. You all know DS Miller. She has been removed from the case and put on leave with full pay. There is
no
suggestion
she knew.’ He draws a line with his finger in the air. ‘There is
no suggestion
she covered anything up. You’re her colleagues and friends. This is unthinkable for her. She’ll need you. She’ll need all of us.’

There are no raised eyebrows, nothing to hint that anyone suspects Miller’s guilt or complicity. But Hardy’s next speech will have a very different audience.

Mark Latimer lets him into the house with no sense of occasion. Visits from the police are routine here now and the family wear their pain like old clothes. They have waited so long that they have stopped being ready. When he asks them to sit down, they do so without anticipation, lined up on the sofa in the same order as the day he and Miller confirmed the news: Beth, Mark, Chloe, Liz. Hardy perches on the edge of a dining chair.

‘We’ve charged someone with Danny’s murder,’ he says.

‘Oh God,’ says Beth. Her hands cup her belly, then her mouth. ‘I don’t want to know,’ she says, turning her face away.

‘No, no, that’s good,’ says Mark.

‘Is it someone we know?’ says Beth.