It’s Mark’s first day back at work. Nige can’t carry the load for ever, and they need the money. Beth makes him a packed lunch: ham-and-mustard sandwiches, banana, those sodding crisps that she never wanted once she’d got them home from the supermarket and a can of Coke. She wonders, as she presses down the seal on the Tupperware, what happened to Danny’s lunchbox. Last she remembers of it was carrying it across the school playing field the day they lost him. There are lots of tiny holes like this in her memory now, trivial things that it nevertheless disturbs her not to remember.
‘Will you be all right, back at work?’ she asks Mark.
‘I’m always all right, me,’ he says. There’s a pause. ‘When do we talk about the baby?’
She shuts him down. ‘Not today.’
‘You’ve been saying that for weeks now. We need to plan. One way or the other.’
She’s not doing this. Not now. ‘Have a good day at work. Send my love to Nige.’
She waves him off to a day of other people’s houses, tense on his behalf. They won’t know how to treat him. They’ll be embarrassed for him, embarrassed for having problems as trivial as a blocked U-bend or a temperamental boiler when his own life has been torn apart, and they’ll overcompensate with biscuits and mindless chatter.
Beth envies Mark the escape. She has put her old employers at the Tourist Information out of their misery and handed in her notice. How can she go back to her old job? Broadchurch has become synonymous with a child murder. The few happy families who haven’t cancelled their summer holidays won’t want the dead boy’s mum giving them directions to the RIB boat.
As if embracing the spirit of new beginnings, Chloe is taking a day trip to Exeter with her friends, an epic bus and train relay that she’s been doing since she was fourteen, but it feels bigger and further away than usual today. When Beth drops Chloe at the bus stop, the girls pick up on Beth’s nerves as well as Chloe’s own desire to get out of Broadchurch.
‘We’ll look after her, I promise,’ says Lara, linking an arm through Chloe’s. Lara is Bob Daniels’ eldest and she’s grown up with Chloe. Beth still has her number in her phone from years ago when she used to pick both girls up from their ballet class.
The concern flows both ways. ‘Will you be OK in an empty house?’ asks Chloe. Beth nods so she doesn’t have to lie outright. She’s not going home to an empty house. She loops around the block to cover her tracks, then takes the road out of town, on her way to the meeting that Karen White set up, driving a little too quickly so that her doubts cannot catch up with her.
After two hours in the car, Beth finds herself pushing open the door of a Little Chef on a quiet A-road in a part of the country she’s never been before. She is the first one there. There is still time to back out as she orders an overpriced coffee that she doesn’t really want and watches tyres whip drizzle into spray on the road outside.
As the caffeine hits her bloodstream she wishes she had gone for decaf. She’s a nervous wreck. When the door opens, she gets a jolt, like she’s seen someone famous. Cate Gillespie’s face tells her that the recognition is mutual and Beth realises that’s her too, now, that grotesque celebrity who can silence a room.
‘God, this is weird, right?’ she says, as Cate slides into the opposite seat.
‘Yeah,’ says Cate grimly. ‘Listen, I’m sorry for what you’re going through.’
She orders a pot of tea. Up close, their differences are obvious. Cate’s a few years older than Beth and better-spoken, like she’s been to university. She reminds Beth, if she’s honest, of those middle-class mothers, the ones who’d moved to Broadchurch from London or wherever, who used to look down on her in the baby groups when Chloe was tiny. Despite this, their bond is fast, deep and true.
‘I understand your pain.’
‘You’re the first person to say that who I’ve properly believed.’
Cate twists her mouth into a sympathetic smile. There is a vestige of prettiness that suggests she was beautiful before it happened. She still is, in that all her features are still even and her eyes are still bright green and her hair is still glossy, but a disfiguring grief emanates from her.
‘D’you get those people,’ says Cate, ‘who are so desperate to let you know how deeply they feel your pain and you’re thinking, “Piss off, you haven’t got a clue”?’
‘Yes!’ says Beth, giddy with the relief of having it articulated for her like this. ‘And it’s like they stick to you, they won’t leave you alone, they’re so desperate for you to be grateful.’
‘And they haven’t got a clue about grief, not real grief, not like this…’ Cate waves her hand vaguely at Beth. ‘I used to assume that grief was this thing inside that could be fought and vanquished. But it’s not. It’s an external thing, like a shadow. You can’t escape it, you have to live with it. And it never grows smaller, you just come to accept that it’s there. I kind of grew fond of it, after a while.’ Beth has no idea what her face is doing but Cate suddenly breaks off. ‘Is that mad? Am I too bleak, too quick?’
‘You’re the first person I’ve met to talk any sense,’ says Beth. Even Mark doesn’t understand her like this. She feels that she and Cate can say anything to each other. Forget Paul Coates, forget Mark, Ellie, even her mother and Chloe. This is the relationship she’s been looking for.
‘What’s it been, five weeks?’ asks Cate. ‘Marriage still OK?’
Abruptly Beth realises that she can’t say anything to Cate. The stuff with Mark is too messy, too tawdry for this conversation, it’s disrespectful to Danny and Pippa. She swallows hard, then settles for, ‘Up and down. You?’
Cate’s set face says it all. ‘Divorced. Most couples with a murdered child get divorced, you know that, right? You’ve googled all of this, I presume. Just like I did.’ She brings her cup to her lips but doesn’t drink from it. ‘Karen said you’ve got DI Hardy in charge.’ She leans in close. ‘Listen, Beth, that man is toxic. They lost evidence, they ballsed up the trial. The man who killed my daughter is still out there because of that man. Do not believe anything he says.’
Beth feels sick. She has no choice but to trust Alec Hardy. And this is different to Sandbrook, isn’t that what everyone keeps telling her? ‘OK, but —’
‘God, there’s so much I want to tell you,’ says Cate, and for the first time it occurs to Beth that this is a kind of therapy session for her as well. The thought is unsettling: she realises that, in a fucked-up sort of way, she wants Cate to maintain the role of authority here. ‘But you’ve probably got questions.’
‘Yeah, I have,’ says Beth, wondering where to begin. ‘My husband’s gone back to work —’
‘Wow, he didn’t waste any time,’ says Cate sardonically. ‘There’s the man for you, has to do things, can’t bear to be thinking.’
‘And my daughter, she’s going to be back at school in a couple of weeks. But I don’t want to go back to work, it doesn’t feel right.’
‘Of course not,’ says Cate. Beth is so relieved. Maybe she’s got the real answers.
‘I just keep feeling, I wish there was a guidebook for this,’ she says. ‘Because minute to minute, what do I do? What do you do?’
Cate seems to hollow out and Beth feels a corresponding void deep in her own belly. ‘I worked for a little bit,’ she says flatly. ‘But I got these terrible headaches and I couldn’t concentrate, let alone do people’s accounts. But also that nagging sense of pointlessness. What does it matter if I don’t finish this work? The worst has already happened.’
This is not what Beth wants to hear. ‘So how do you keep busy, during the day?’
‘Honestly?’ Beth nods even though she knows she’s not going to like it. ‘I go to bed. I sleep. Then I wake up and it’s still the same so I have a drink. And then another drink. And then I cry. Maybe a couple of hours. And then I watch TV, unless it reminds me of my little girl, which it does, nearly all of the time, in the maddest ways. So I take a sleeping pill.’ She picks up on Beth’s distress at last. ‘Sorry. You probably came looking for answers. I don’t have them. My life got stolen that day. The best part of me was killed. And I can’t get back from that. Maybe you’ll do better than me.’
The conversation dries. Beth’s desire to get away from Cate is suddenly as strong as her need to be with her was a few minutes earlier. They have a half-hearted tussle about who should pay for the drinks, solved only when the waitress tells them that the bill has already been taken care of, that it’s on the house. Beth doesn’t understand at first, but at second glance the waitress has clumped wet lashes and blotched cheeks, and it’s obvious what has happened.
‘Please,’ says Beth, rooting for her purse. ‘I can’t let you, I can’t…’ her voice cracks. What she wants to say is that it feels obscene to accept this hospitality, that it feels like she is profiting somehow from Danny’s death, but she can’t bring herself to speak so she tries to pay instead. Her fingers shake as she fumbles for coins until Cate’s still hand presses lightly down on hers.
‘Let them,’ she says gently, and nods at the waitress, who scurries off gratefully as though she’s been given dispensation. Beth understands that this has happened to Cate before, possibly dozens of times, and that this won’t be the last time it happens to her.
They go their separate ways with promises to meet again. Beth has no idea if Cate means hers: she has no idea if she means it herself. The rain is coming down in sheets now, and she sits behind the wheel, unable to drive. She watches Cate pull out of the car park with the feeling that all hope for a normal life is going with her. She had thought that nothing could match the horror of the past. Now she dreads the future.
She checks her phone before driving back to Broadchurch. There are no missed calls but one text message that sends her heart flying to her throat. It’s from Lara.
Tell Chlo we hope she’s OK. Lara xx
She calls Chloe first to find out what’s going on. The phone is turned off. Keep calm, keep calm, thinks Beth as she hits Lara’s number. Life isn’t that cruel. She manages to keep her panic under control as Lara tells her how Chloe was very quiet the whole way to Taunton and jumped off the train seconds before it pulled out, before the other girls could stop her and without telling them why.
This cannot be happening.
This cannot be happening again.
Alone in a strange car park, miles from home, Beth calls Mark.