It’s barbecue weather really but Nige wants to cook a Sunday roast, so a roast it will be. The stove is rammed with saucepans, and steam curls around him. Mark pulls the dining table to its fullest extension and brings in the patio chairs. In the garden he uses the hose to rinse down the kids’ old high chair they always use for Fred Miller.
Beth lays the table with a rock-heavy heart. This evening, she and Mark are due to make a television appeal for help. What are they thinking, having everyone over, stuffing their faces, drinking wine, pretending everything is normal? She doesn’t have to reach deep for the answer. If the house is full of people, she doesn’t have to confront Mark about Becca Fisher. Whenever she thinks about it, a scream rises up from her belly, but for the time being she’s managed to suppress it. She can feel it now, crouching in the base of her throat, like a tiger waiting to pounce.
‘That’s quite a spread, Nige!’ says Liz. ‘You’ll make someone a lovely husband one day.’
‘They’ll have to catch me first, Liz,’ says Nige, as if he’s beating the girls off with a stick.
The Millers usually burst in through the patio doors waving bottles, but today they ring the front doorbell. It’s a nice gesture and Ellie’s remorse about hiding DI Hardy’s Sandbrook connection from her is plain. Beth is slowly coming round to her explanation that it was done for her own protection, and after the way she had a go at the paparazzi, their friendship is back on its old safe footing. She hugs Ellie hello and holds it for a second longer than usual to emphasise her forgiveness. It’s a relief to let the anger go.
After a couple of dropped pans and a bit of swearing, Nige is ready to serve. The Latimers and the Millers squash around the table in a parody of normality. Beth feels like she’s watching it all from outside her own body as Nige sits at the head of the table and carves the lamb, smiling goofily at the chorus of appreciation. Everyone’s talking a bit too loudly but for Beth the absence of Danny’s voice is an echoing silence, as conspicuous as an empty chair. It hurts her ears when Tom speaks, a one-sided prattle about his new Xbox game that Danny will never get to play.
Every time she looks up, Mark is staring at her and if it’s not him it’s her mum or Ellie. She feels their eyes, worse than the photographers’ lenses. She is overcome by the desire to disappear. Not to die – one look at Chloe sends that thought back to the shadows it came from – but to go away for a while. Out of this life and into someone else’s.
Still, she eats. Her appetite is coming back in ways that have nothing to do with her. She falls on the lamb and the potatoes: she wants meat, fat, iron and carbs. The parasite is making its presence felt.
Mark’s plate is virtually untouched. Joe, topping up the wine glasses, lays a supportive hand on his friend’s shoulder and Chloe reaches for her dad’s hand and squeezes it. Beth is momentarily shocked out of her own grief and into Mark’s. Then anger eclipses her sympathy, and the scream shifts closer to her lips.
The plates are cleared – no one will let her lift a finger – and Tom disappears to the toilet before the apple crumble and custard come out. Beth slips away while the others are passing bowls and spoons around. She is waiting for Tom when he comes out of the downstairs loo.
‘All right, sweetheart?’ she says. His eyes dart around, looking for help. He can sense what’s inside Beth: the need that pours out of her like smoke from an oven.
‘Yep,’ he says. ‘You OK?’
‘Can I ask you something? You can say no.’ Tom looks suspicious, frightened even and there’s no need, it’s such a simple and harmless thing she needs from him. ‘Can I have a hug?’
Sweet, soft little Tom; she can see him swallow his awkwardness and embarrassment in his desire to make her happy. She opens her arms to him and wraps him tight. He smells all wrong, the wrong fabric conditioner and shampoo and the wrong base note, the wrong hair and skin, but it will do, he’s the right size and so warm. ‘I miss his hugs,’ she says. Tom seems to squirm but even that reminds her of Danny. Just as Tom is beginning to hug her back, the doorbell chimes and he leaps from her arms.
‘I’d best get that,’ she says. Tom can’t get back to the dining table fast enough. Beth can’t decide if she feels better or worse.
Jack Marshall is at the door, unexpected but then so is everything now. She waves him into the living room, wondering if he’s eaten. He’s not exactly the life and soul, but it seems rude not to ask. There is plenty of food left and they can squeeze one more place setting around the table. She’s about to ask Jack, but something in the way he’s holding himself – perfectly upright – tells her this isn’t a social call after all.
When Beth steps aside to reveal their guest, Mark jumps up from his chair, almost upsetting his plate. ‘Everything all right?’ he asks. His cold manner suggests the opposite. Beth looks to Ellie; she is ashen.
‘I found this,’ replies Jack, uncurling his palm to reveal a small black box. Beth leans in and then jumps back. It’s a phone. Danny’s battered old Nokia. ‘I heard a beeping coming from the delivery bags. I found this at the bottom. He must’ve left it on his last round. The battery was going, that’s what the beeping was.’
Ellie flies across the room in her haste to retrieve the phone but it’s too late: it’s gone from Jack’s hand to Mark’s. She all but snatches it from Mark: he holds it for a fraction too long before releasing it. She wraps it carefully in a paper napkin.
Mark’s voice is measured, too measured. ‘Why’ve you got this, Jack?’
The old man looks at them all in turn. ‘Mark, Beth, they’re going to say things about me. And those things aren’t true.’
Beth’s stomach contracts around the greasy paste in her stomach. What the hell is going on? Ellie doesn’t look surprised and neither does Mark. She feels her gorge rise.
‘Get him out,’ Ellie orders Liz, who is clearly as much out of the loop as Beth is. Still, she does what she’s told, gently guiding Jack to the front door.
‘Something happened before I was here,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘And they’ll be saying I did it. I’m looking you in the eye, because he was your boy, and I’m telling you I’m not that kind of man.’ There’s a commotion outside and the now-familiar click of camera shutters starts up. Joe Miller pulls the living-room curtain closed. ‘Please believe me,’ pleads Jack Marshall, as he steps into the barrage of press. ‘Beth. Mark. You have to believe me.’
Before Beth can process what’s happened, there’s another click and a flash from the opposite direction. All heads turn to look at the back garden, where a photographer on a ladder peers over the back fence. Seconds later, another head appears at his side. They’ve got the house surrounded.
‘Bastards,’ says Mark, making a run for the back garden, Joe and Nige at his heels. ‘Get out!’ he roars. ‘Go on! Before I smash all that!’
He doesn’t get a chance to make good his threats. Joe charges at the fence with the garden hose in his hand. He lets a cannon of water fly over the fence, drenching the photographers. The mood shifts suddenly; the men’s laughter is catching: even little Fred is cheering. ‘Genius!’ says Mark, clapping Joe on the back.
The lightness is short-lived. ‘What’ve we done to ourselves, eh?’ says Mark. This, realises Beth, is the consequence of talking to the press. These are the floodgates that Ellie warned them not to open. They issued the invitation themselves.
But floodgates work both ways. Finally, eleven days after Danny was left on the beach, a proper press conference has been called.
It is the first time Beth has been back to South Wessex Primary since that morning. The playing field where she brought his lunchbox, where Beth knew her last few seconds of peace, is sunbleached and empty now. Beth can’t bear to look at it, but inside it’s worse: this is the school hall where she watched assemblies, nativity plays, end-of-year concerts. She used to perch on these undersized chairs, camera phone in hand, recording Danny’s off-key singing. Now she is on stage in a performance no parent should ever have to give, sitting behind a black cloth between her husband and daughter as Pete pins microphones to their collars. Karen White is in the front row. Beth mouths a ‘thank you’ to her and gets a warm, encouraging smile in return.
‘Why do they need all of us?’ asks Chloe. She is pale with nerves: her freckles stand out even under thick make-up.
‘So people understand how much losing Danny meant to us,’ says Mark. ‘How strong a family we are.’
His hypocrisy is more than Beth can take. The tiger crouching in her throat will not stand for this, but now is not the time to free the scream. Instead, Beth leans in to her husband and whispers, so quietly that only he can hear her: ‘I know about you and Becca Fisher.’
Her words gouge lines on his face, giving her a rush of sick satisfaction. There’s a buzz of feedback as the microphones go live, a storm of flashbulbs, and they’re on.
Not much grows in the modest yard behind Jack Marshall’s house on the edge of the beach. The paved area is cluttered with boating paraphernalia, frayed ropes and broken machinery. An old metal bin serves as a brazier. Jack watches as the flames lick the air.
A battered cardboard box stands on a warped wooden table. From it Jack takes a pile of photographs and sifts slowly through them. Boys in their swimming trunks. Danny changing out of a wetsuit. Jack with his arms around Tom Miller. These pictures did not make it on to Danny’s memorial wall outside the Sea Brigade hut.
In amongst these is another picture which makes Jack catch his breath: with shaking hands he puts it to his lips and kisses it, letting his eyes close for a long time. When at last he opens them, it’s to stare at the photograph some more, as if debating what to do with it. Finally he secretes it in his pocket.
The rest of the pictures he throws into the smoking brazier. The glossy paper burns slowly at first, then quickly. Ashy flakes swirl around Jack and settle in sooty deposits on his collar. The picture of Danny with no top on is the last to go, curling at the edges before shrivelling to nothing.