Oliver is waiting in reception. Ellie braces herself for a tussle. Either he’s after inside knowledge or Lucy’s sent him to do her dirty work. She isn’t sure she has the energy to fight him on either count. She doesn’t even have the energy to walk down the stairs. Waiting for the lift, she is suddenly aware of her body: the gnawing hunger in her belly, the acid tug of too much coffee. She has half a mind, as she descends to the ground floor, to give Olly the scoop on Jack Marshall’s alibi right now and let the press exonerate him. They’ve still got time to make the papers. It’s clear that the public pay more heed to the Echo or the Herald than any statement from the Wessex Police. But she’s not convinced that they’d run with it: Jack Marshall’s innocence gives the lie to their smear campaign, so they’ll probably just bury the story. Dirty old men sell papers; doddery old victims don’t. What’s more, she hasn’t let Hardy know about the CCTV yet, and she wants to do this by the book. By the time the lift doors open, Ellie has made her decision. She will log it all properly tonight and, if Hardy approves, feed it to the press in the morning.
Oliver isn’t wearing his wheedling, give-me-a-story expression, so this must be about Lucy. Ellie’s heart plummets.
‘Your mum can come to me if she wants,’ she snaps. ‘I’m a bit busy, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Olly clicks his tongue. ‘It’s nothing to do with her. It’s about Danny. Well, it might be. Have you identified that burning boat yet?’
So he does want a scoop. ‘Oliver, what have I told you about giving you preferential treatment?’ She’s overcompensating because she came so close to doing just that. ‘We’ll call a press conference when we’ve got something to say.’
He is up in arms. ‘Would you just hear me out before you go making accusations? It’s my dad’s boat. She’s missing.’
The conversation flips 180 degrees as Ellie realises the implications of this. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ she asks, but she should have checked herself. Half of Broadchurch knew about that boat. Half of Broadchurch have taken it out.
‘I sort of went off her after Dad left. I don’t go on the water from one week to the next these days.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a picture, have you?’ says Ellie.
Olly scrolls through the camera roll on his phone and comes up with a picture of himself and Tom in the little dinghy, surrounded by tackle. ‘This do you?’ He attaches it to a text message and puts Ellie’s name in the recipient box but he dangles it like a carrot. ‘If you find out it was Dad’s boat, can I have the story? Don’t announce it. Give it to me.’
‘You’re incredible,’ she says.
The chastisement works. Olly hits the right key and seconds later a buzz in Ellie’s pocket heralds the picture’s arrival in her own phone.
Upstairs, she emails the picture through to SOCO and spends the interim drafting a document for the press office about the new development with Jack Marshall. She emails it through, knowing it won’t be read until the morning but satisfied that one more job has been crossed off the list.
Brian comes up to CID to give her the news in person. She has never seen him out of his boiler suit before: he looks odd in normal clothes.
‘It’s the same boat,’ he says. ‘I’d bet my mortgage on it.’ It’s the first positive lead they’ve had in days. Ellie feels weak with relief. She slumps back in her chair, catching a glimpse of herself in the window as she does. God, she looks like shit: matted hair, no make-up. On her next day off she’s going to book herself in for a haircut. Not with Lucy. Somewhere posh. Somewhere they do your nails at the same time. Brian breaks into her reveries of a makeover.
‘Listen, d’you fancy a drink one night?’
‘Sorry, what?’ It takes five seconds for her brain to catch up with the words. ‘I’m married, Brian.’ She cocks her head towards the picture on her desk: all four Millers, grinning at the camera.
‘That’s an issue, is it?’ He perches on the edge of her desk.
‘Happily married, Brian.’
‘Oh, OK. Fair enough.’ He slides off her desk and retreats from the brink of harassment. ‘Well, there we go. D’you want anything from the kitchen, cup of tea…?’ Somewhere beneath Ellie’s indignation is a ridiculous flare of offence that he’s willing to give up so easily.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m fine.’ Brian saunters back to his lab and Ellie puts her face in her hands, trying to process the surreal little interlude. She quickly gives up. Her priority now is to tell Hardy about the boat.
‘Something weird,’ she pokes her head around his office door. ‘We’ve got an ID on the burned boat. It used to belong to Olly’s dad.’
Hardy goggles at her. ‘The boat that was used to transport Danny Latimer’s body used to belong to your brother-in-law?’ There’s a world of judgement in his words: of her lax investigation skills, of her family, of her home. Ellie tries to let it roll off her.
‘It was left just off the beach with the motor chained up,’ she says. ‘Olly barely used it any more – bad associations, that’s why it took him so long to report it missing.’
‘Who knew it was there?’
‘Lots of people. It wasn’t a secret.’
‘See if Forensics can get any other DNA or prints off the shards, match them against all the elimination prints. Call Brian now, get him to prioritise this.’ The name triggers a reflex giggle in Ellie. ‘What’s funny?’
She’s got to tell someone, and she doesn’t think it would go down very well with Joe.
‘He just asked me out,’ she confides.
‘Brian?’ Hardy wears his does-not-compute expression. ‘Why would he do that?’
‘Thanks very much!’
‘You’re married. Flattering, though.’
‘I suppose. But SOCO… They’ve had their hands everywhere.’ Ellie wrinkles her nose and waggles her fingers.
‘Dirty Brian,’ says Hardy, with a playful roll of the Rs and a rare smile. Ellie can’t remember a moment of genuine good humour between them before: naturally she seizes on it and ruins it.
‘Sir, what if we don’t get the killer?’
His face shuts down, the joke cancelled. ‘We will.’
She takes a deep breath to galvanise herself. ‘You didn’t on Sandbrook.’
Hardy freezes: no blinking, no breathing. Then he puts down the pen in his hand.
‘How long have you been waiting to bring that up?’
Since the day Jenkinson first uttered his name, she thinks, but lets a shrug answer for her. ‘That was different,’ says Hardy.
‘How? It all got hushed up.’
‘I didn’t want that,’ he says softly, although there is no one there to overhear them. ‘A mistake was made. A big mistake.’
‘By you?’
Hardy seems to shrink in front of her, like the authority has all been drained out of him. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
But Ellie knows she might not get another chance. ‘Sir, these are my friends, people I’ve known all my life. We can’t let them down.’
‘We won’t,’ says Hardy. He is looking straight at her but his glasses reflect the computer screen before him, white windows of words and numbers, and Ellie can’t see into his eyes.
It’s nearly one o’clock in the morning now. Before powering down her computer, Ellie emails Olly a copy of the Jack Marshall press release. It’s too late to make the papers, but he can have the online exclusive. It’s her way of saying thank you for coming forward about the boat, and for holding back when it might have made things awkward for her. He’s a good boy really.