Hardy hates walking on the beach. You never know where you are with sand. It shifts and tricks you, slows you down. And this beach, of all beaches, still seems to hate him as much as he hates it, coarse sand sucking at his feet.
The uniforms are just about holding back a growing crowd of early-morning rubberneckers, beach mats rolled up in their bags. There’s a helicopter overhead: its blades drown out their murmurs. Hardy watches a PC unspool a line of crime scene tape but that’s all until he rounds the promontory and there on the shore is —
The world seems to tilt on its axis and Hardy grabs uselessly at the air for support.
The tape forms a three-sided square that frames a little boy’s body. He lies face down in the sand, one cheek visible. He’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, blue trainers with a yellow flash. His brown hair is damp and matted.
Hardy feels in his pocket for the pills – he learned to swallow them dry a long time ago – and remembers too late that they’re on the bedside table in his hotel room. He breathes evenly, the way he’s been taught to, and the panic attack begins to subside. ‘Don’t do this to me,’ he says under his breath. He wants to close his eyes, lie down and go to sleep, but his training kicks in and somehow he keeps putting one foot in front of the other. ‘Come on,’ he says, and forces himself to take in every detail of the scene that’s too much to bear. He looks up at the cliff, the grass fringe at the top, the sheer golden face and the rocks that surround the body. He tries to picture the trajectory.
‘Oh God,’ says a female voice behind him. ‘No, no, no —’
There’s a mumsy woman in a suit with mad curly hair staggering towards him. Automatically Hardy puts himself between her and the body as he tries to guess who she might be. Is she the kid’s mother? How the hell did she get past the tape? Bob’ll get it in the neck for this.
‘I know him, he lives here, he has tea at my house, he’s my boy’s best friend,’ she’s saying.
A mother but not the mother. And she’s given them an ID. They need to calm her down, get the facts from her. Hardy orders her off the beach, but with shaking hands she pulls a police badge from her handbag. He gets her name and rank in a flash but it takes him a further moment to absorb that this tearful woman is job.
‘Oh God – Beth, does Beth know?’
‘Calm down, DS Miller,’ says Hardy, although he finds that her hysteria is fuelling his own calm. The more out of control she becomes, the more professional he feels.
‘No, you don’t understand – I know that boy – Oh God, Danny.’
‘Shut it off,’ snaps Hardy. ‘Be professional. You’re working a case now.’
‘Shut it off?’ Miller looks stricken and he knows how he’s coming across, but it’s either this or a slap to the face. It works. She stops crying.
‘Alec Hardy,’ he offers her his hand.
‘I know. You’ve got my job,’ she says.
‘Really?’ says Hardy. ‘You want to do that now?’ Behind his bluntness, he’s encouraged. At least now she’s talking like a copper. It doesn’t last long.
‘You don’t even know who he is,’ Miller accuses, like it’s Hardy’s fault for not growing up in this one-horse town, like it’s bad policing not to be on first-name terms with all the locals after one week.
‘Tell me!’ he shouts over the crashing surf.
‘Danny, Daniel Latimer.’ Hardy hears the full name for the first time and knows that within hours it will have a terrible celebrity attached to it. ‘Eleven years old. Goes to school with my son Tom. Family lives here, Dad’s a local plumber.’
‘Is this a suicide spot?’
‘He wouldn’t do that.’
Christ, he’s got his work cut out with this one. No wonder he got the job if this was his competition.
‘Answer the question.’
‘No. There are other spots, one about three miles west, another inland.’ She’s on the defensive again. ‘He’s not that sort of kid.’
Hardy’s heard enough from DS Miller and tells her to find out where the scene of crime officers are. Something about the neat way the boy has fallen doesn’t make sense and he needs Forensics to capture what he can see. There’s a cigarette butt by his feet that needs bagging up. No way he’s letting evidence get away this time, not if he has to pick through every grain of sand on this beach himself.
As Miller makes the call, he wonders whether her relationship to the dead boy will make her an asset to the investigation or a liability.
The tide inches closer.
Beth is a runner but she has never moved like this. Her flimsy pumps hit the ground without absorbing the shock but she doesn’t register the jarring in her joints. She clears the High Street in seconds flat and rounds the bend into the harbour. People huddle in groups of three and four, whispering and nodding towards the beach. Only Jack Marshall is on his own, standing sad sentry outside his shop.
Beth has no time to process this. She keeps moving, powered by a formidable internal force. She’s breathing heavily but there seems to be an endless supply of energy. Her world has shrunk to this: the need to get to the beach and confirm that whatever they have found there is not Danny so that she can get on with looking for him. All the while, the freezing cold water of fear rises around her, lapping at her chin.
Squad cars and vans crowd the seafront car park. Their primary yellow-and-blue livery looks garish and wrong against the soft blues and golds of the coast. Beth is forced to calm her pace as she slaloms through manoeuvring cars, elbows the bucket-and-spade brigade out of her way and then she’s on the beach. The sand threatens to slow her down so she kicks off her shoes, snatches them up and carries them. It’s coarse beneath her feet. At the foot of the cliff, police tape flutters white and blue in the breeze. The officers on duty are trying to persuade the gawkers that there’s nothing to see. It’s easy for Beth to dodge to one side and slip under the cordon.
Halfway to the horizon a dark dash breaks the sand. If she hadn’t been told that it was a body, would she know what it was? A few steps closer and she sees that it’s too small to be a man, but it could be a woman. The nightmare reels her in and she keeps going.
A familiar silhouette steps between Beth and… it, and Ellie turns slowly towards her. Beth recoils for a second because something is horribly wrong with Ellie’s face. She looks like she’s had a stroke. When she sees Beth it gets worse.
‘Beth!’ she says, running towards her. ‘Get off the beach!’
‘What is it?’ says Beth. ‘What’ve you found?’ She’s giving Ellie one last chance to tell her that everything’s OK.
Ellie blocks her. ‘You can’t be here.’ Beth almost wants to laugh. This is her beach as much as anyone’s. How dare they tell her where she can and can’t be? She keeps putting one foot in front of the other. She’s fitter than Ellie and it’s easy to give her the slip. The police behind her are close enough now that she can see their long shadows chasing hers across the rippled sand but still she keeps going, running towards the heart of her nightmare and then she sees the same too-bright colours flash before her again. Blue suede with a yellow flash. Danny’s shoes, shoes that she bought herself, are not quite covered by the makeshift shroud. What is left of Beth’s controlled facade crumbles to powder.
‘Those are Danny’s trainers!’ Her voices bounces off the cliffs. ‘Those are Danny’s trainers!’
She repeats this phrase over and over even as the police catch up with her and grip her upper arms. The black-and-white police uniforms flash in and out of focus. Sounds and voices come and go. Beth bucks and flexes but she can’t escape them. She can’t leave him there with his feet sticking out like that. He gets cold feet when he’s asleep. She needs to tuck him in properly. She twists her body one last time in a futile effort to break free. As they drag her away, her heels carve gullies in the sand.
The rising tide of panic closes over Beth’s head. The horror rushes like dirty water into her lungs. It floods her heart. She doesn’t care if she drowns. She would welcome it.