Ten days have passed since Harbour Cliff Beach gave up its second body of the summer. Already the newsagent’s has been boarded up, an estate agent’s hoarding nailed across the door offering the premises for rent. Despite its prime location between the harbour and the beach, there has been no interest. Sand gets everywhere but mud sticks.
Jack Marshall’s only public exoneration is a sheet of newsprint taped to the window. In the photograph, which was taken on the last night of his life, he is wearing his Sea Brigade uniform. The accompanying report, written by Oliver Stevens, has a one-word headline: INNOCENT.
It is half past ten in the morning and Karen White has already been up for five hours. Her journey began in London at dawn with a black cab, took in a long train ride and now she’s in a minicab, windows wide as they speed along the only road into Broadchurch. They keep loose pace with another minicab, a grey Vauxhall, that left Taunton station at the same time. The passenger is a skinny middle-aged woman in a black hat with an old-fashioned lacy veil. She’s too formally dressed to be press. It looks like Karen’s the only hack who’s bothered to make the journey.
She checks her BlackBerry and thinks about calling Olly. Their last conversation was his panicked small-hours visit to her hotel bedroom. He was almost in tears as he told her that they’d fucked up, that Jack Marshall’s alibi had suddenly come good, and even though he should have known better he begged her to stop the story that had already gone to press. She hadn’t slept, but skipped town the following morning and steeled herself to ignore Olly’s barrage of texts and calls and then, a few days later, his email of the over-emotive piece he’d written for the Echo about how Jack Marshall had been hounded to death. Karen tried to get the Herald to print a more restrained version of the same story. Danvers, furious at her fuck-up, allowed her a single paragraph on page thirteen. She knew she was lucky even to get that. The story is dead.
In the intervening week and a half, Hardy has come up with no new leads. This means no reporter will touch the story again until there’s an arrest at least, probably until someone’s been charged.
Her last contact with anyone in Broadchurch was a curt email from Maggie Radcliffe saying that she hoped Karen was pleased with what she’d done. Karen didn’t bother to dignify it with a reply. Of all the sanctimonious shit… she didn’t notice Maggie taking Jack in when it all kicked off. Her precious Broadchurch turned on him happily, eagerly, like a bunch of Elizabethans cheering at a public hanging. The bottom line is that there’s still a killer walking free and, a month into the investigation, Alec Hardy is no closer to catching him than he was the day after Danny died.
Naturally she has regrets: a man is dead, after all. She is sorry that in putting Broadchurch on the map, she opened the floodgates for the tabloids and the inevitable muck-raking. She’s not happy about the way the red-tops went after him. But she did what she had to to bring Danny Latimer’s case into the public eye, and she won’t be made to feel guilty for that. Maggie should know that already; when Olly grows up a bit, he’ll realise it too. But she won’t let the blood be on her hands. She – they – wrote the best piece they could from the sources they had. At the time, Karen would have bet her mortgage on Marshall’s guilt. All the evidence pointed in his direction and the police found nothing to contradict it until it was too late. If Hardy and his team were even halfway competent they would have checked Marshall’s house out properly the first time they cautioned him and he would have been dismissed before they had even had a chance to consider him. Checking for CCTV, for fuck’s sake: how basic does it get? And when they had exonerated him, they should have put a wire out then and there. They knew that the vigilantes were after him. Karen is sickened that Hardy actually seems to be doing a worse job in Broadchurch than he did in Sandbrook. He needs to be taken off this investigation and replaced with someone competent.
Until that happens, the Latimers won’t be getting the coverage, or the justice, they deserve. Karen is still in touch with Beth, just as she is still in touch with Cate Gillespie, and she has promised her one last-ditch attempt to keep Danny in the public eye. Today she has fought back with the only weapon she knows how to wield. She looks down at the copy of the Herald on her lap, a first edition bought from a vendor at Waterloo station. Hardy’s bloodshot eyes stare blearily out from the front page. She’s pleased with the headline.
The minicab turns into Church Road. Black-clad mourners stream up to St Andrew’s. The bells sound one note over and over in an insistent, dolorous toll. The grey Vauxhall pulls up to the kerb in front of them. The passenger climbs slowly out of the back seat and stares up at the steeple through her veil.
Karen White folds the newspaper on her lap and reaches into her purse for the fare. Everyone else is here to bury Jack Marshall. She is here to bury Alec Hardy.