Beth keeps the news on television night and day, braced for the moment they show Danny’s photograph. She would never admit it to anyone – what would they think of her? – but she almost looks forward to it. She waits for that moment like she used to wait for him to come home from school, her heart high in her throat in anticipation of the mundane celebration of his homecoming.
‘How are the people who live in Broadchurch coping with events?’ asks a reporter off screen.
Beth and Mark both flinch to see Reverend Paul Coates’ face fill the screen. ‘First and foremost, all our prayers are with the Latimer family.’ Beth, remembering their conversation in the supermarket car park, feels a chill of betrayal. Why is Paul doing this? Surely he should have asked her first? ‘It’s obviously a very worrying time but we all believe the police investigation will uncover what happened. We’re a strong community. I hope people who live here know that the Church is here for them, to offer whatever support they need, throughout the coming days, faith or no faith. I know the Latimer family quite well and we’ll do everything we can to support them at this time.’
‘He doesn’t speak for us!’ Mark bellows. ‘His God left my boy for dead.’ He punches his palm. ‘I’m not going to let him get away with this.’
He slams the front door so hard that it bounces on its hinges and hangs open. The church is only across the field. The camera crew might still be there. Beth screams at Pete to get after him. Now is not time for the world to see what Mark is capable of when he loses his temper. The unwanted memory of his last outburst slams hard into her; the unexpected blood on the knuckles; the remorse seconds later and the way the house was quiet for days afterwards. They were all scared but no one more so than Mark himself, and he hasn’t raised so much as a finger since. He had barely raised his voice until Danny died.
Beth turns her attention back to the television, but they have already moved on to the next story and she has missed her chance to see Danny.
Karen White stalks the alleyway that skirts the playing field. She has been here for over an hour but her perseverance pays off when she sees Chloe Latimer, dragging hard on a cigarette as she walks home. Look at her, thinks Karen: she’s a baby herself. The cigarette makes her look younger, not sophisticated the way she thinks it does.
Chloe’s free hand scrolls through her phone. She’s reading, not texting. With luck, she’s checking coverage of Danny’s death on the web and wondering why there isn’t more. That will make Karen’s job a lot easier. She reaches into her oversized handbag for the ten-pack of Silk Cut that she always carries for times like this. A shared cigarette, the flint flare of the lighter, is worth an hour on the doorstep.
‘Got a light?’ she asks.
Chloe turns around and Karen senses the flattery – that she’s being treated as an equal by this adult. She offers her a yellow Bic and Karen sparks it.
‘Are you Chloe?’ The girl’s instantly on her guard. ‘I’m sorry for what happened to your brother.’
Karen pulls out her second prop from her handbag. It’s Danny’s toy chimp, rescued from the beach. ‘I’m guessing this meant a lot to him,’ she says.
Chloe snatches it from her, furious, as Karen knew she would be. ‘What’re you doing with that?’
Karen keeps her voice soft. ‘You can’t leave it down there. It’ll get stolen, end up in the papers, you’ll never see it again. Too many vultures.’
Chloe’s eyes narrow. ‘How d’you know so much?’
‘I’m one of them.’ Karen grins and is gratified when her smile is returned. ‘I work for the Daily Herald.’
‘We’re not talking to the papers.’
‘I know. You’re right not to.’
They all say that at first. It’s a gut reaction and Karen knows better than to take it personally. Look at Sandbrook: both sets of families rejected her at first, but as the case dragged on, Pippa’s parents used press attention as a way to process their grief as well as keep the pressure on Hardy, while the other parents pulled up the drawbridge. If that’s what the Latimers need, Karen will respect it, but she has to give them the choice. It’s too soon to know which way the Latimers are going to fall. They won’t even know themselves yet.
Chloe is watching her intently. Suddenly aware that the cigarette is burning to a stub, Karen pretends to inhale. ‘I only came to give you that’ – she gestures to the toy – ‘to stop others from nicking it. If it was my brother, I wouldn’t want strangers having it.’
‘Thanks.’ Chloe clutches it to her chest. More years fall away from her.
‘Can I borrow your phone?’ Chloe only hesitates for a second before handing it over: Karen can see that she finds her intriguing.
‘I won’t call you,’ she says, tapping in her own number. ‘I won’t come to the door. I won’t stop you on the way to the shops, like the others are going to. But if you or your family need to speak, or you just need a friend when it’s getting a bit much, you call me.’ She saves it as A FRIEND before handing the phone back. ‘Thanks for the light.’
Karen takes her leave. She knows to quit while she’s ahead. Around the corner, she flicks the cigarette away with a grimace of distaste.
It’s dusk and the gnats are out in Mark Latimer’s garden. DI Hardy, fatally attractive to midges, is tempted to take the interview inside, but Beth is hovering at the window and he needs Mark on his own. The stats are a signpost pointing this way. Most murdered people know their killer: over two-thirds of murdered children are killed by a parent, with fathers more likely to kill than mothers. And Mark Latimer is squirming like a man with plenty to hide.
‘Thursday night, the night Danny went missing, where were you?’
‘On a call-out? Came through early evening, dunno, half six – this family’s whole system had packed in.’
‘How long did that take?’
‘Most of the night. It was a nightmare boiler. I was there pretty late.’ Mark’s eyes drop to Hardy’s notebook, watching the words go down.
All the while Hardy is assessing Mark. He’s tall, with the well-defined muscles of a man who spends all day crouching, pulling and lifting. He could pick me up, thinks Hardy. He looks down at the hands and tries to marry these large palms and long fingers to the ligature prints on Danny’s neck.
‘No. There wasn’t a call-out.’
Mark does his best to look mystified. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘We have CCTV footage of the car park at the top of Briar Cliff. You were there at 1.23 a.m.’ Mark looks over his shoulder. Beth’s still at the window. He throws her a little-boy smile that’s vanished by the time he turns back to Hardy.
‘So you’re snooping on me now?’ he hisses.
‘We were checking CCTV in the area. Now, what did you do that night?’
‘What, am I a suspect?’
‘The first thing we do is eliminate people from the investigation. You tell me where you were, who you were with, how long for. I eliminate you from suspicion. It’s entirely methodical. You don’t tell me those facts, I can’t eliminate you. And if I can’t eliminate you, you’re a person of interest.’
‘In the murder of my own son?’
Hardy is damned if he will let Mark play that card.
‘I’m sure this is all very straightforward.’
He can see Mark weighing up his options. If that’s not panic in his eyes now it soon will be.
‘I met a mate. We went off together. They dropped me back at the car park later, then I came home. Three, maybe four in the morning.’
‘What’s your mate’s name?’
Mark’s eyes slide to the side. ‘Can’t remember.’
Sometimes, killing makes people clever. Self-preservation kicks in and the murderer discovers hitherto untapped reserves of resourcefulness and ingenuity. It’s almost as though points are added to their IQ. Hardy wonders if Mark was always this thick, or it’s grief making him thick, or the whole thing is an elaborate double bluff.
‘You can’t remember the name of your friend? Where’d you go?’
‘I think we had a drink, bite to eat, drive round…’ Something that’s almost a smile pulls at his mouth.
‘You think?’ says Hardy. ‘It was three days ago.’
‘Yeah. And a lot’s happened since then.’
Beth’s still staring at them attentively, as though trying to lip-read. Hardy steps to one side, so that he’s hidden behind Mark.
‘And is there any reason you wouldn’t want me to know the name of your mate? This is only about who killed Danny. Nothing else.’
Mark rolls his neck. ‘It’ll come back to me. I’m knackered, I haven’t slept, all the stuff on the news, my head’s not straight.’
Hardy changes tack. ‘When you came in, you went straight to bed. Can your wife confirm when you came back?’
‘No, she was asleep,’ says Mark.
It’s an admission and they both know it. They’re getting somewhere. Hardy draws breath for his next question but his phone rings. He paces to the edge of the garden, leaving Mark to wonder.
‘Sir, it’s El – Miller,’ she says. ‘I’m at the clifftop hut. We’ve got a match for Danny’s fingerprint up here in blood. We think this is where he was killed, then moved two miles along the coast.’ Hardy registers silent approval: Miller is bullet-pointing, the way he likes it. ‘SOCO say the place has been meticulously cleaned, but they’ve also found a set of fingerprints by the sink. I messaged them through to run a match against elimination prints. They belong to Mark Latimer.’