The Broadchurch Echo newsroom is in its customary state of chaos. The paperless office is but a dream here, desks buried under reams of loose pages. The sleek new monitors on the desks are attached to a creaking computer system that hasn’t been properly upgraded for years. Here comes Maggie Radcliffe, the editor: she’s never been upgraded either. She’s been in local news since cut-and-paste meant scissors and glue, and smoking at your desk was de rigueur. Now, an electronic cigarette twirls between her fingers as she squints at an Excel spreadsheet of falling revenues.
Olly Stevens, Maggie’s latest protégé, comes in, dark hair tousled in a way that only the very young can get away with. He’s looking pleased with himself. ‘Reg didn’t make it,’ says Olly, referring to the veteran photographer who spends more time in the Red Lion these days than behind his lens. But Maggie still uses him; she sees him in the supermarket every weekend, and they look after their own in Broadchurch. ‘So I did it myself with my camera phone.’ Olly transfers the pictures of Tom Miller wearing his ‘gold’ medal with pride from his phone to the screen on his computer. There’s enough here for a double-page spread.
‘Aw, look at their little faces!’ says Maggie. ‘You’ve almost got an eye.’
She’s still looking over Olly’s shoulder when an email beeps its way into his inbox. ‘Oh my God,’ he says, fingers hovering over the mouse. ‘Daily Mail. My application.’
‘Open it!’ says Maggie.
He processes what’s on screen in half a second and his face falls. ‘Bastards.’
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she soothes. ‘There’s plenty of other newspapers.’
‘I’ve tried them all now,’ he replies glumly.
‘You’re good, petal. Your time will come.’
Further encouragement is interrupted by a text alert on Maggie’s phone. She glances down. ‘Yvonne says the beach is closed for some reason. Go down and check it out, will you?’
Hardy is back at the clifftop for the second time that morning, this time with DS Miller at his side. They climbed the steep coastal path to get here. Now police tape keeps the ramblers and rubberneckers out of the way. It’s the closest thing there is to a fence. Hardy can’t believe that people are allowed to walk up here without a safety barrier. Everything about the countryside is a deathtrap. He gets as close to the edge as he dares. A couple of feet below the grass verge is a shallow ledge, a place for people to think twice before jumping.
The Scene of Crime Officers crouch and crawl in their white suits, fingertips searching for clues, overseen by Brian Young. His hood is down and his mask off to denote his authority; the breeze runs its fingers through his puff of black hair.
‘How’s it going?’ Hardy asks him.
‘It’s looking like the fall was faked,’ says Brian. There’s a question in his voice; he’s not doubting the evidence, more asking why. ‘Angle of the body was wrong, too arranged. And up here there’s no flattened grass or slippage, no loose rocks. No fibres, no handmarks, no sense of a downward trajectory.’
‘You mean he didn’t fall?’ asks Hardy. ‘Could he have jumped?’
‘Unlikely, given where he was found, and the trajectory of the cliffs.’ Brian motions the fall with two hands. ‘Ask me, someone tried to make it look like an accident. I don’t think he was up here at all.’
‘See?’ says Miller. ‘Not Danny. He wouldn’t do that.’
‘Get on to the pathologist, tell him to hurry up, even if it’s just preliminary,’ he replies.
They go on foot back down to the beach. Miller talks Hardy through the different ways to access the cliffs from the town and he listens attentively. He still can’t quite get his bearings, although he is starting to slot the different parts of the town together and to internalise his sense of direction, so that the place is slowly replacing the one frozen image from his past.
The mobile homes in the caravan park have a toytown look about them from above that is not lessened by proximity. Outside number 3, an unsmiling woman leans with a large brown dog at her feet, mug in her hands. Hardy takes a mental snapshot of her.
A battered red Nissan crunches to a halt behind them. A brown-eyed manchild jumps from the driver’s seat and walks towards them, smiling. Miller quickens her pace towards her own car.
‘He seems to know you,’ says Hardy, seconds before the kid calls out, ‘Auntie Ellie!’ Miller glows bright red, to Hardy’s amusement. She needn’t be embarrassed; she’s quite capable of looking foolish all on her own.
‘Olly Stevens, Broadchurch Echo,’ he says, and it’s not funny any more.
‘No statements now,’ says Hardy automatically. He slams the car door on Olly but his voice comes through the window. ‘I heard there was a body. Has it been ID’d? Please?’ he says in the wheedling tone of a kid asking for an ice cream.
‘There’ll be a statement, Oliver,’ says Miller. She drives away, leaving Olly in a cloud of sand.
Ellie can’t remember the last time she drove to Spring Close: it’s quicker to walk across the playing field that connects both their homes. She tries to focus on the mirror, signal, manoeuvre of the journey rather than what’s at the end of it.
Then they pull up outside the Latimer house and reality bites down hard. She knows this place almost as well as her own. She can see it across the field from her kitchen window: they’ve spent more boozy Sunday afternoons here than she can count. And yet it looks strange, unfamiliar, as though she’s never been here before. She feels the double responsibility of a friend and a police officer, in that order, and suggests to Hardy, as they get out of the car, that she leads because she knows them.
‘How many deaths like this have you worked?’ asks Hardy.
She feels about an inch tall. ‘This is my first.’
‘You can’t make it better. Don’t try.’
‘You don’t know how I work!’ He’s treating her strength – finding the calm in the chaos – like it’s some kind of Achilles’ heel.
Hardy speaks in bullet points, his rolling Scottish Rs giving his words punch. ‘Most likely premise is abduction. Was he taken, if so who by? Watch them. Every movement. Anything that doesn’t make sense, tell me. The closer the relationship, the greater the likelihood of guilt. Don’t look at me like that.’
Ellie didn’t realise she was.
Inside, the Latimers line up on the sofa, Beth and Mark, Chloe – still in her school uniform – and Liz. Beth is shaking, hands fluttering from her belly to her mouth and back again. Mark is so still he barely seems to be breathing.
Hardy pulls up a chair from the dining table and faces them. Ellie feels a fierce protective urge that takes her by surprise: she doesn’t want him anywhere near them.
‘The body of a young boy was found on the beach this morning.’ Ellie hears the stock phrase from the outside for the first time. The euphemism, designed with such care, serves now only to insult and delay.
‘It’s Danny, isn’t it?’ cries Beth. ‘I saw his shoes.’
Liz makes the sign of the cross.
‘Plenty of kids have those shoes,’ says Mark, and then to Hardy. ‘I’m sorry, you talk.’
‘We believe it’s Danny’s body,’ says Hardy. Ellie waits for the condolence, but no, that’s it, the bare and brutal fact.
‘Was it him, Ellie?’ asks Beth. At Ellie’s nod, Beth collapses as though her spine has been unstrung, her mouth stretched around a silent scream. Chloe makes a choking sound and turns wide frightened eyes up to her father. Mark hooks his right arm around his wife and she leans in to his chest. His left arm reaches round to include Chloe and Liz and he mutters over and over the wretched little lie that everything’s all right.
Ellie is rooted and helpless as she watches them grasp at each other, raw in their grief, a terrible family portrait that will never be complete again. Her own tears are hot in her skull. She wonders how she will ever contain them and, as the picture before her blurs, she realises she has failed.
A cup of tea. It’s all she can think of to do. Ellie feels like a WPC from the seventies as she rootles through Beth’s cupboards, looking for the sugar.
The tears give way to mute shock surprisingly quickly. Beth and Chloe hold hands so tightly that their fingertips are purple with trapped blood.
‘Was it an accident?’ Beth asks. ‘Did he fall?’
She addresses the question to Ellie but Hardy responds. ‘We don’t know yet,’ he says. ‘Can you think why he might’ve been up on the cliffs last night or this morning?’
‘He wouldn’t have been,’ says Beth.
‘Well, he obviously was,’ snaps Mark. Hardy’s eyebrows shoot up. Ellie resolves to explain how Mark’s bark is worse than his bite. Then she remembers the way he shouted at Nigel in the van that morning, and feels a chill in the pit of her belly.
‘How was Danny these past few days?’ says Hardy. ‘Was anything bothering him?’
‘He didn’t kill himself, if that’s what you’re suggesting,’ says Mark. ‘He wouldn’t. He knows he can talk to us about anything.’
‘He’s been just… normal,’ says Beth. The word sounds funny, as though she knows that normal is a word that will never apply to her again.
‘And you last saw him, when?’ presses Hardy.
‘I looked in on him about nine o’clock last night,’ says Beth. ‘He was in bed reading. And this morning…’ Beth falters, and it breaks Ellie’s heart to see the self-blame begin to take hold. ‘He’s up and out before anyone else, on his paper round. But he didn’t turn up for that.’
She opens her face up to Hardy: Ellie reads her blind faith and her spirits plummet further. Now obviously isn’t the time, but at some point soon she will have to learn about Hardy’s last case. Ellie hates him for putting her in this position.
Hardy pencils something in his notebook. ‘Any signs of forced entry or disturbance around the house?’
‘Nothing.’ Mark acts like it’s a stupid question. Silence hangs. ‘I want to see the body.’
Five pairs of eyes swivel in his direction. ‘You might be wrong.’ He shrugs. ‘So I want to be sure. I want to see.’