Ellie Miller has long perfected the art of getting up without disturbing her family, but this is an early start even by her standards. The sun is up but it’s still cold and she pulls on her big orange coat, the one that lets the kids spot her from a hundred paces. Joe has a similar one in royal blue. Mum Coat and Dad Coat, the final surrender of style to parenthood. In the kitchen, she melts inside to see – she was so tired that she missed it last night – that Joe has made her a BLT sandwich for breakfast and two Thermos flasks of tea to kick-start her day.
The clifftop hut is a crime scene now, a cordon flapping between pegs, the entrance tented. Hardy is at the cliff edge, his back to the hut, the wind combing his fringe into a spiky quiff. He’s staring at the sea like it’s hypnotising him: when he does look at Ellie it is with annoyance, as though she has broken a sacred trance. When she hands him the Thermos he looks utterly baffled.
‘It’s freezing,’ she says. ‘Long weekend working, big day ahead. Thought this would help.’ Hardy takes it and looks at it without thanks. ‘Have you got children?’ she asks.
‘Why?’
‘They must have shit manners.’ He doesn’t react. She hates this way he has of making her wonder if she has actually spoken at all. Instead, he makes a sudden flailing movement, as though he’s tripped over something. It’s not the first time she’s seen him do this. He’s ill at ease on the lumpy turf up here and those shoes, a knackered pair of brogues with the sole peeling away from the leather, aren’t doing him any favours.
‘You need a good pair of boots.’ She studies his feet. ‘What size shoes d’you take? Eleven?’
‘No thanks,’ says Hardy. He cranes forward to look at the beach. ‘Makes no sense. Why move him to Harbour Cliff? Why not just throw him off here? Perfectly good cliff for chucking a body over.’
Ellie is appalled. ‘Can you not talk about it like that, please.’ Mentally she retracts her offer.
She chooses to take his silence as apology. In the distant harbour, a handful of fishing boats head out.
‘Any boats gone missing recently?’ Hardy asks. ‘A boat’d leave no tracks.’
It’s a good point, and Ellie’s pissed off that she didn’t think of it herself. ‘Moor it on the shore to leave a body, any evidence washed away.’
Hardy nods. ‘What time’s Mark Latimer coming in?’
‘Nine.’ Ellie needs him to know he’s wrong. Just because she can’t think of an innocent explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Her head’s all over the place and she’s tired. There’s probably something really obvious that she’s missing. She’ll kick herself when the penny drops. ‘Sir, he’s not in the frame.’
‘Look at the evidence in front of you. Stop behaving like you’re his bloody solicitor.’
He leaves her there at the edge of the cliff, the wind twisting her hair to dreadlocks.
The sedative they give Beth gets her to sleep but doesn’t keep her there. On every waking there are a few beautiful seconds of normality before it all hits her again. If she wakes, and goes back to sleep, four times in one night, that’s up to ten seconds’ reprieve from the nightmare.
She drags herself groggily to the toilet. Danny is everywhere. In the bathroom, his shampoo is a genie in a bottle. No one else will use it, but the thought of throwing it away is abhorrent. She steps on the scales: she’s lost five pounds in as many days. Her ribs and hip bones jut to frame a gently convex belly. When Mark tries the door, she jumps guiltily off the scales.
He’s next in, locking the door behind him. They never used to do this. From the landing Beth hears the tap of keys on his phone, the swish of a message being sent and then in reply comes a text alert in Nige’s ringtone. What good will he be, hopeless bloody Nige? What can Mark say to him that he can’t say to his wife?
She doesn’t want to go downstairs. There’s always someone there now. But she doesn’t want to stay up here, either, with Danny’s bedroom sucking at her like a dark star. She tiptoes down the stairs, a stranger in her own house.
In the sitting room, Pete empties a postbag on to the table. Some of the envelopes simply say Latimer Family, Broadchurch, but still they have made their way from Newcastle, London, Birmingham, Cardiff and beyond to this little house in Dorset. The kitchen sink is full of flowers and the worktops are piled high with food. Casseroles, pies, cakes and biscuits. They didn’t have this much on the buffet at their wedding.
‘What do we do with it all?’ she says, picking up a jar of home-made jam. It’s almost laughable the way people’s minds work: Those poor people with the murdered son, I’m sure a bit of home-made bramble jelly will make it better.
‘I’ll take some,’ Pete licks his lips. ‘Some amazing pies there.’ Someone needs to fit this bloke with a ten-second delay between his brain and his mouth. At least this time he realises and has the grace to look embarrassed.
‘What happens now?’ says Beth, giving him the opportunity to make himself useful. ‘We gave them a list of suspects. How far have they got?’
‘They’ll tell us when they’re ready,’ says Pete. Us. Like this is happening to him, too. Like he’s on the inside of it. He turns to Mark. ‘You should get going, they’re expecting you.’
Chloe says what they’re all thinking. ‘Why’d they want to talk to you, Dad?’
‘Routine, I expect,’ says Mark. ‘To them, at least.’ It’s because he had a go at the vicar, that’s what it is. Pete got there before Mark could do anything really stupid like throw a punch, but he heard the threats and now they’ve got him down as a nutter.
Beth watches him go, envious on some level that he’s got an excuse to leave the house. She hates being shut up. Mark says she’s like a dog, she needs walking twice daily. Back in the bathroom she snaps on rubber gloves and cleans the grouting with a toothbrush, scrubbing until the damp comes away.
Pete gives her half an hour before he’s there with a cup of tea. She will wait until he’s gone then tip it down the sink. He doesn’t go, only hangs around clearing his throat.
‘They did ask,’ he says eventually. ‘The night before Danny was found, you and Chloe were in, watching TV…’
‘We watched a film on Sky, comedy. Ashton Kutcher.’ It wasn’t even funny but she wishes she had laughed harder now.
‘Where was Mark?’ She knows what he’s trying to do and she’s on the defensive. She’s not going to make it easy for them to waste time on Mark when they should be looking for the real killer.
‘He was out.’
‘And he got back…’
‘Dunno. I was asleep.’
‘He was working.’
‘That’s what he said.’
Pete frowns. ‘You don’t know who for?’
What is the point of this? It’s never been part of their routine for Mark to inform Beth where he’s working. She’s not that interested. It’s not that interesting. She resents the way they’re turning every little blip in domestic administration into something sinister. She folds her arms. ‘No.’
‘OK, thanks.’
Beth turns her back on Pete and scrubs until the only dirt left in the bathroom is a ring of dried suds around the base of Danny’s shampoo bottle.
The promised extra officers are here at last. Ellie’s never seen this many detectives in one station before. Unfamiliar people make coffee in the staff canteen. They need more kettles and one of the new recruits is using Frank’s special big mug.
It is hard not to feel intimidated by the influx. Everything has been scaled up. Of course Ellie is gratified that Wessex Police have put their money where their mouths are for once: anything less and she’d be fighting for more. But the swell of voices drives home how much work still lies ahead of them. The case, that she had hoped would be simple and short, is getting bigger, the mountain growing even as they try to climb it. Despite their hard work, they remain stuck in the foothills, and Ellie is exhausted already. She hasn’t slept more than four hours since Danny’s body was found.
The air-con in CID struggles to cope with the heat generated by the extra bodies. Nish wipes the sweat from his brow, leaving a smear on his cuff. Everyone is tense, waiting for Hardy’s briefing.
Ellie pops her head into the boss’s office; he is bent over a letter. ‘Ready when you are, sir.’ Hardy folds the paper into an envelope that he tucks into his inside breast pocket.
‘You do it,’ he says, his beady eye unblinking. Fear rinses through her. Is he taking the piss? She’s never briefed a team on something this big before and he must know it. ‘On you go,’ he says.
She fights the urge to hide in the toilet and steps out in front of her assembled colleagues. She hates public speaking almost as much as she hates DI Alec Hardy.
‘Good morning, everyone.’ Her voice sounds reedy in her ears. ‘I – um, welcome, I’m Ellie, DS Miller. So we’ve. Lot to get through, we’re already behind because of the weekend and not having resources, which are here now, which are you. So.’ She’s shaking. Can they tell she’s shaking? She clasps her hands in front of her. ‘So you know we need to, you know, hit the ground running. Priorities today: house-to-house enquiries, ah, CCTV retrieval, technical data retrieval from phones, and um, alibi follow-ups. On, on top of that, there’s a lot of information that’s come in we need to sift through. Nish will be the office manager, so if you see him, he’ll have actions to give you.’
She finally gets Hardy on his own by the kettle.
‘Very inspiring,’ he says, reaching for the last mug on the shelf. She slams the cupboard door, sadly missing his fingertips.
‘Don’t do that to me again!’ she says. ‘What is it, just because I’m not running to arrest Mark Latimer, I get thrown to the lions?’
Hardy dunks what looks suspiciously like a herbal teabag. ‘You didn’t mention how they can discount Mark Latimer, or your own exhaustive list of suspects.’ She’s about to tell him what she thinks of his constant sarcasm when his next comment disarms her. ‘We’ll need to interview your son. He should have an appropriate adult with him. Not you, obviously. Latimer’s downstairs. We should start.’
The interview rooms in Broadchurch police station face dead south. The walls are studded with glass bricks that refract the sun as it crawls from east to west, turning the rooms into giant sundials. An officer who’s been there for a while can tell from the angle of the beam what time of day it is.
Right now, an unforgiving morning light is trained hard on Mark Latimer. Dark crescents cup his eyes. He’s been crying. Small wonder he’s got his movements wrong. Ellie checks that Hardy isn’t looking, then gives Mark an encouraging smile. She’s confident that they can uncross these wires and have him home again within the hour.
‘Sorry about yesterday afternoon,’ he says with a strange half-smile. Something twitches in Ellie’s subconscious; she’s seen that expression somewhere before but can’t place it. ‘What with everything, I was a bit hazy when you were asking me all those questions.’
‘It’s more that you tried to lie,’ says Hardy.
‘I was confused. All the days, blending into one. That boiler I said I’d done, that was Wednesday night. You know what it’s like.’
‘And on Thursday night, you were with a mate.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But yesterday you could not remember the name of that mate.’
‘It was Nige. Who I work with.’
‘OK. You couldn’t remember the name of the man you work with all day.’
‘It’s the shock, doing funny things.’ He gives that strange half-smile again and distress slithers through Ellie as she knows where she’s seen it before. Danny, at an Easter barbecue a few years ago, swearing blind he hadn’t eaten Chloe’s Easter egg with chocolate all over his lips. The knowledge that Mark is lying is like a lead weight falling through her.
What the hell could he be hiding? That innocent explanation slips a little further out of reach. ‘We’ll check with Nige,’ she says.
‘You go ahead, Ell,’ says Mark.
Hardy hands Mark the photograph of the hut on Briar Cliff.
‘Ever been there?’
She expects him to study the picture but a glance is all he gives it. ‘Did a job there, weekend or two back. Burst pipe. Nicky, who does all the paperwork for us, she’d have the exact date on the invoice.’
‘If it’s a rental property, who called you out?’ says Hardy.
‘This woman, can’t remember her name. I picked the keys up from her at the caravan park.’
Ellie gives up and lets Hardy take the lead. He’s right, she’s equal to this.
‘Just you, or Nige as well?’
‘Just me. Nige was away with his mum.’
Hardy takes a second too long to shuffle the papers in his file.
‘Mark, d’you own a boat?’ he asks.
‘Yeah.’
In the corridor outside, Hardy goes through the list of all the reasons why it’s got to be Mark.
‘A boat. Prints at the murder scene. And an alibi he made up overnight.’
‘You don’t know that, sir,’ she says, although with less conviction than before. ‘We’ll look at the boat, talk to Nige and confirm whether Mark did the work at the hut.’
‘Ask Pete what Mark told Beth about Thursday night, see if it marries up. And while we check, Mark stays here.’ Ellie’s stomach tightens around her meagre breakfast. She had hoped that they could get to the bottom of this without putting Beth on high alert.
‘D’you understand what it’d do to that family, to this town, if it was Mark?’
‘What’re you looking for, Miller? An easy answer? The least pain? It won’t work like that.’
‘I know,’ she says miserably. She is beginning to see herself as Hardy does, stubbornly keeping faith in something that might never have been true.
The harbourmaster ferries them past the jetty. A life jacket presses heavily on Hardy’s chest, rustling the letter in his breast pocket, as if he needed reminding of its contents.
Miller’s got good sea legs – probably bred into her – and the drizzle rolls off her orange coat as she stands on the prow, looking for Mark Latimer’s boat. Hardy hates being on the water. The to and fro of the waves is a cruel mockery of the symptoms that plague him. Masts sway dangerously before him. Miller reaches out to throw off the sea-green tarpaulin. The Old Boiler – someone’s idea of a joke, surely – is painted yellow and, as far as Hardy can tell, in good nick. Bigger than most of the glorified dinghies, this one’s got a sort of windscreen roof and a steering thingy. He takes pride in not knowing the right words for them.
Miller jumps on board and holds out her hand for him to follow. Hardy refuses. The realisation shoots from nowhere that he can’t remember the last time he held a woman’s hand. It is unexpectedly, inconveniently, painful.
‘Only needs one of us,’ he says briskly. ‘Minimise the risk of contaminating a crime scene. Know when it was last taken out?’
Miller doesn’t answer. She has dropped to her knees at the front of the boat.
‘Shit,’ she says.
Hardy pulls his own focus to where her gaze is fixed. Drops of red liquid have dried to brown. It’s blood.