Broadchurch (9 page)

‘What about you?’ she asks. ‘What do
you
want?’

Olly looks bashful for a moment. ‘Work on a national. I want to be you, basically.’

‘Careful what you wish for.’ She smiles.

‘How come you were here so quick?’

It still isn’t time to let him know about her one-woman mission to find out where Alec Hardy has been or how he got here. She deploys distraction.

‘
If I report on this, I need to understand the town, the people. You help me with that, I might be able to help you. What d’you think?’

Olly beams. ‘I think, good.’ Karen notices his white, even teeth. It will be no hardship spending time with this one.

Ellie Miller takes a breather, going for a slow walk along the seafront. It’s a glorious day but there are only a handful of people out. It looks bare without its usual milling crowd of kids and without the cover of chatter, the gulls and waves seem exaggeratedly loud, like someone’s turned up the volume on a soundtrack of seaside noises. The few children around are hand in hand with their parents, even the older ones. She can’t see anyone local letting their kids out alone for a long time. Tom’s old carefree life of coming and going as he pleases is on hold until this case is solved.

Something catches Ellie’s eye and she looks up at the bench on the hillside. A young woman in expensive-looking clothes and inappropriate shoes is picking her way down the sandy path. Ellie does a double take to see Olly up on the bench, mooning after the woman. She climbs the hill to join him.

‘Who’s your new friend?’ asks Ellie, sitting down heavily next to him. Sweat dampens her hairline.

‘She’s a colleague,’ says Olly importantly. ‘A reporter from the
Herald
. I’m helping her get a feel for the town, give her a bit of local colour. She reckons the story won’t be picked up by the nationals the way things stand.’

Ellie interprets it as a slight, although she’s got nothing to do with the press. Maybe she’s being paranoid.

Olly squirms. ‘Did Mum talk to you before she went?’

‘Went where?’ she asks with a sense of foreboding.

‘Bournemouth.’

Bournemouth, where the big casinos on the seafront welcome people like Lucy with open arms and chips stacked high on the baize. Ellie can’t help the plunge of disappointment in her belly, even though she should know better by now. She really needs to lower her expectations of Lucy, but she can’t seem to reprogramme their relationship. Part of her is still a little girl in thrall to her glamorous big sister.

‘She told me she was skint,’ says Olly miserably. They both know how Lucy can afford a trip to the bright lights. Her sister lives from win to win, the freak incidents of good luck that she uses to justify her behaviour on the other 364 days of the year. Ellie wonders how many thousands of other people’s money Lucy squandered before a bet came good. Her debt to the Millers currently stands at over five grand, and that’s just the stuff she’ll admit to. The last time Lucy came to her for big money was when she pleaded for Ellie to pay for her rehab. In the relief of Lucy finally admitting to her problem, Ellie wrote a cheque without even asking Joe. She would have paid double for Lucy to get proper, professional help. The whole lot was gone in three days, pissed away in online poker rooms.

‘When’s she going to learn?’ Ellie asks, but it’s a rhetorical question.

‘I thought you’d made it up about the rehab thing,’ says Olly. Ellie can only shake her head. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him about the most recent aberration, the worst one yet.

‘I’d better go,’ he says. ‘See if anything fresh has come in to the newsroom.’

She watches him shuffle off, kicking a cloud of sand behind him. There’s a hole in one of his shoes that rekindles a deep fondness in Ellie. It’s a mercy that he earns as little as he does; he has nothing for Lucy to take.

Anger boils inside Ellie. She shouldn’t have to deal with Lucy’s shit on top of all the rest of it. Danny Latimer’s death has put everything into sharp perspective. She fires off a sarcastic text.

Have a great time in Bournemouth! Didn’t realise hairdressing paid so well.

Looking forward to getting my children’s money back on your return.

There is no reply, but that’s Lucy for you when she’s off on a bender. Ellie won’t hear from her now until the money runs out and she comes crawling back to Broadchurch, cap in hand.

There are reporters outside Beth’s house and a policeman inside. She can’t get away from people and she can’t have the only person she wants. She is desperate to spend time in Danny’s room, curl up in his bed and breathe in the scent on his pillow but the police tape across the door makes her a stranger in her own home as well as a prisoner in it. The closest she can get is sorting the laundry that’s in a pile in her own bedroom and she goes through the pointless motions of turning down the collar on his shirts, pairing his socks and folding his T-shirts. The deflated outfits taunt her.

Her thoughts swirl with guilt; guilt at not having protected him, guilt at taking him for granted because she thought she had him for ever.

The crying is constant now. The red rings around her eyes are permanent, where the skin has been seared by salt. She drifts in and out of it, only realising the tears are coming when the stinging starts up again.

The metallic taste in her mouth, though, the copper-coin tang that comes and goes, she can’t attribute that to tears. Every time it happens she craves – whether by hormones or Pavlovian association – cheese-and-onion crisps. In fact, it’s the only thing she can imagine eating. It is the first sense of purpose she has had since it happened. She thuds downstairs and starts opening the kitchen cupboards.

‘Where are the crisps?’ she asks Liz, who’s ironing creases into Mark’s jeans.

‘You don’t need crisps,’ says Liz. But by now the craving for cheese-and-onion crisps is inseparable from the craving for freedom. Liz looks at Beth again, and recognises her determination. ‘OK,’ she says, setting the iron down. ‘Let me go for you.’

‘Mum, will you STOP SMOTHERING ME?’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Liz through a cloud of steam. ‘I want to help you.’ Her own eyes start to shine.

‘You can’t,’ says Beth, pocketing her car keys. She doesn’t look back.

It feels good to be behind the wheel again, but the problem with driving somewhere is that sooner or later you have to arrive.

In the supermarket car park, Beth observes an unwelcome phenomenon; people staring, then looking away when she notices. Their glances cross for a split second and then bounce off each other like two marbles colliding. Just when she thinks she can’t tolerate it happening one more time, a woman, protected by her own windscreen, gawps and forgets to lower her gaze, and that is worse. It is worse.

She tries to act normally. She has been coming to this supermarket since she was Danny’s age. What could be more normal, more everyday, than shopping here? She picks up a basket and sets one foot in front of the other. A young couple do the supermarket trolley equivalent of a handbrake turn, steering abruptly down a different aisle. Shoppers cast their eyes down, or suddenly start studying labels with real intent. And here’s the one that really hurts: a mother pulls a child out of her way as if loss is catching. Beth is radioactive.

Somehow she finds the crisps and pays. As she puts them in the boot of her car, an old man comes up and takes her hand.

‘We’re all so sorry,’ he says. Beth knows that she should thank him but now
he
feels radioactive, his pity a toxin. She pulls her hand away and locks herself in the car. Blind with tears, she over-revs the engine as she prepares to reverse.

Bang
. The seat belt cuts into her belly as she reverses hard into a concrete post. The boot flies open. She gets out of the car and kicks it where the metal has crumpled, not caring if she breaks half the bones in her foot. She can feel the eyes on her again as she screams and swears. Come on then, she thinks, hold my hand now, tell me you’re sorry now, go on, I fucking dare you. But she hasn’t got the strength to continue for long. She sinks down against the car, breathing hard, not knowing what to do.

Someone above is speaking her name. ‘Beth.’ It’s Paul Coates, the vicar from her mum’s church, although Beth isn’t a believer and knows him more from Mark’s five-a-side league. If he tells her that Jesus takes the ones he loves the best, she will hit him. ‘You all right?’

She doesn’t mean to tell him: it comes spilling out. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she says. Paul helps her to her feet, as though she’s about to drop and not just a few weeks gone. They sit side by side in the boot, with the hatch up to make a little shade. It’s weirdly intimate. ‘Only found out two weeks ago,’ she says. ‘Haven’t even told Mark.’

‘Do you have anyone you can talk to?’ There is something practised and professional about Paul’s understanding face, but it is no less comforting for that. ‘Your mum, maybe?’

‘Not now. And don’t you tell her either.’ He has to keep secrets, doesn’t he, or is that Catholics? She’s a bit rusty with Church. She realises that she’ll have to get reacquainted with it. The image of candlelight and a half-sized coffin imprints itself before she can censor it.

‘What’re you going to do?’ asks Paul.

‘Can you stop asking me bloody questions?’

‘Sorry. I do that. Apparently.’

Beth gets a surprising glimpse of the man behind the dog collar; she gives the first genuine smile in days and he returns it. ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ he says. ‘You can come and see me. If you need to talk.’

‘I don’t know if I believe in God.’ She needs to get that out there.

‘It’s not compulsory,’ he says, like it’s what he was expecting. ‘I’ve been praying for you. Ever since I heard. And for Danny, too.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, and means it.

Her eyes are dry as she drives her broken car home. Back in Spring Close, she waits for the metallic wash to flood her mouth again but it doesn’t come and she feels foolish. She has a cupboard full of cheese-and-onion crisps for no reason. The only other person who liked them was Danny. Now that the craving has subsided, the sight of them makes her feel sick.

Nobody in her house makes the connection.

14

They’ve found the postman who was on shift the day that Jack Marshall says he saw Danny. Ellie and Hardy catch Kevin Green on his round, up on the far edge of town, where the new-build houses abruptly give way to the countryside. He’d be hard to miss against this backdrop of muted greens with his fluorescent yellow tabard and the scarlet bag over his shoulder.

‘Did you ever see Danny Latimer?’ she asks. Kevin doesn’t seem surprised by the question. What else could it be about?

‘Yeah, all the time. He did paper deliveries to a few houses up here, including the hut. When I heard, I thought, I’d only seen him a couple of days previous.’ He’s not the first person to have this reaction: Ellie’s learning that people are astonished that someone could die so soon after their last sighting, as though every encounter bestows some kind of immortality.

‘Did you ever talk to him? I’m thinking particularly about the last week in June.’

Kevin thinks. ‘I might’ve waved and said hello. I didn’t really know him to talk to.’

‘You didn’t ever have an argument?’ Hardy cuts in.

‘What’m I gonna be arguing with a paper lad about?’

Ellie employs her new catchphrase. ‘Where were you Thursday night?’

‘Thursday, I’d’ve been with the boys. We had a golf championship on the PS3 and got hammered. Six of us, there was. We didn’t finish till gone four. My missus had to wake me at seven, I was out cold.’

‘We’ll need the names of who you were with,’ says Hardy.

Finally Kevin looks rattled. ‘You don’t think I had anything to do with it?’

‘We just need to rule things out,’ soothes Ellie. ‘No need to worry.’

They begin the short walk back to the station.

‘Don’t say, “no need to worry,”’ says Hardy when they are out of Kevin’s earshot. ‘Don’t reassure people. Let them talk.’

She’s had enough. ‘Can I just say: you aren’t going to rock up here and try to mould me! I know how to handle people. Keep your broody bullshit shtick to yourself.’ She remembers who she’s talking to. ‘Sir.’

Ellie doesn’t know him well enough to guess whether his silence is a sulk or genuine indifference, but she is shaken. She has never lost her temper like that with a colleague, let alone a superior, before. She works twice as hard on the phones when she gets back to the station. Four friends confirm Kevin’s alibi: he was with them all night. She presents her findings to Hardy.

‘So did Jack Marshall get it wrong?’ she asks.

Hardy pushes smeared glasses back up a sweaty nose. ‘Do we have any reason to disbelieve this postman?’ he asks. ‘How’s Marshall’s eyesight? Would he have any reason to lie? And do we think the money found at the house is connected?’

‘You know you do this incessant question list? Like bam bam bam’ – she chops the air with her hands – ‘no space for anyone to reply? It’s like you really enjoy it.’

‘Do I?’ Hardy shuts up for all of five seconds, and seems to recalibrate.

‘First murder,’ he says, in a convincing impression of a normal human being. ‘How are you finding it?’

‘Grim.’

‘What did you make of Mark and Beth’s list?’

‘It made me want to cry,’ she admits. ‘Some of their best friends, Danny’s teachers, babysitters, neighbours. They’re traumatised. Not thinking straight.’

‘Or they’re smart. We didn’t ask for a list. They may be trying to direct where we look. Taking focus away from their household.’

Ellie is aghast. ‘They didn’t kill Danny.’

‘You have to learn not to trust.’

‘I have to
what
?’ Anger shoots from her core out to her extremities, making her hands twitch. There’s a large hole-punch on her desk and she finds herself wondering if it would make a good weapon. ‘That’s what you’ve been sent here to teach me, is it? The benefit of your experience. Fantastic.’