Maggie Radcliffe and Lil Ryan stand side by side in front of Ellie.
‘Hi, Maggie,’ says Ellie. ‘You better? Olly said you were under the weather.’
You would need to know the couple well to notice the subtle shift that has occurred. It’s not that their appearances have changed. Lil is still soft and dark where Maggie is hard and brassy, but right now, Maggie is subdued while Lil’s gaze is shot through with steel.
Maggie opens her mouth but nothing comes out. She looks to Lil, who says, ‘I’ll tell her if you can’t.’ The two women join hands and Maggie seems to draw strength from Lil’s touch.
‘I had a visitor,’ she begins. ‘I was threatened, in the office, by Susan Wright.’ Maggie and Lil exhale as one with evident relief at getting the name out. ‘The one with the dog who works for the RIB boat? I found out that she’d been using an alias, Elaine Jones, and I called her out on it. She came into the office when I was alone and she said…’ A shudder racks her. ‘She said she knew men who would rape me. Us.’ She drops her eyes to her lap; clearly, the threat has been a violation in itself.
‘Oh my God.’ Ellie is horrified. She writes the name ELAINE JONES in capitals on her notepad. ‘Maggie, I’m sorry. I’ll have uniform go out and talk to her.’
‘Only uniform?’ says Lil. She’s more aggressive, fighting Maggie’s corner, than Ellie has ever seen her on her own behalf. ‘She made rape threats. She’s using an assumed name.’
Any other summer, this would have shot to the top of Ellie’s list. It needs to be flagged as a potential hate crime, for a start. But now… ‘I’m in the middle of a murder investigation.’ It comes out snappier than she intended. ‘I’m sorry. But you must understand that we have to prioritise the Danny Latimer case. And a visit from the police can be pretty powerful. I’ll send them out today.’ At this, Maggie looks slightly mollified. Ellie keeps to herself the irony that a routine uniform call-out currently has a better chance of making progress than one more piece of evidence tossed into the swirling black hole that is Operation Cogden. ‘You’re welcome to follow it up yourself.’ Only after Ellie has made the suggestion does she hear it through Maggie’s ears. It sounds like she is subcontracting her own job to the press. Perhaps she is. Perhaps that’s what it has come to.
‘Thanks,’ says Maggie sarcastically, but something inside her has shifted and it’s a trace of the old Maggie. She leaves with Lil hot on her heels. Ellie puts a call in to uniform, telling them to remain sensitive to the possibility of a homophobic attack. She kicks back on her chair and stares for a while at the white sky outside her window. Middle-aged women making rape threats to each other. What the hell is happening to this place?
Maggie goes back to the Echo with a sense of purpose for the first time in days. If even Ellie Miller won’t take the threat seriously, then she’s got no chance with that miserable Scot. He doesn’t do hunches, that one. But if she can put evidence in front of him…
Maggie has been scared even to research Susan Wright; of course, she doubts that the woman who lives in a caravan and deals in violence has the capability to bug her office, but something closer to superstition has stopped her taking this into her own hands. But not any more. Maggie will not be cowed any longer.
She lines up everything she needs: her trusty old Rolodex, a glass of red, her e-cig and her telephone. There’s a determined set to her mouth.
She flips through the Rolodex to familiarise herself with the old names. It needs updating: a couple of these people have given up the game, and a couple more are dead now. But there are still plenty of contacts she can turn to. Mentally, she lists them in order of usefulness, and puts in a call to Mick Oxford, a brilliant hack whose Fleet Street nickname was the Walking Encyclopaedia. ‘I didn’t die, just moved to Dorset,’ she says, when the sound of her voice on the line is met with disbelief. ‘I’m looking for anything from your archives on a Susan Wright, cross-reference with the name Elaine Jones. Any time from 1985, give or take a year. There’s a bottle of Jameson’s in it for you, petal. I’ll email you my details. Love to the family.’
With every contact she calls, she can feel her old strength returning. She’s ten phone calls in with two dozen more to go when Olly walks in.
‘You’re back!’ he says with a gratifying smile. He is right in more ways than he can possibly know.
‘Indeed I am,’ she says. ‘Should’ve done this ages ago. Pop your bag down, make yourself useful. Ring these numbers, tell them I’m looking for anything I can get on Susan Wright.’
Olly’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘That woman with the dog? What’s she got to do with any of this?’
She wonders again whether to tell Olly about the threat. She finds that she can’t, although for different reasons now. Before, fear kept her mute. Now it’s pride. She is ashamed that it has taken her so long to get her act together.
‘That’s for us to find out,’ says Maggie. ‘If the police won’t look into her, we’ll have to do it ourselves.’
Olly picks up the phone to make the first call but is distracted as the fax chirrups into life behind him. He turns around and looks at it in wonder. ‘Who still uses a fax?’
‘All right, child of the future. My old contacts would still be using inkwells if they’d let them.’ She pulls the pages off and reads them. ‘But I’ll tell you what, Mick Oxford knows how to find anything you need. You won’t have to go through my Rolodex after all.’
Her smile falters as she reads the grainy fax. The horror story before her gives credence to Susan Wright’s threat. Maggie has no doubt now that she knows men who would commit rape, and worse besides. But as well as writing the lines, she knows how to read between them and there is a subtext to this story, a vulnerability that Maggie will not hesitate to exploit.
‘This is golden, Olly,’ she says ‘Golden!’ She gets Olly to drive her to the caravan park. Her new-found bravado only goes so far. With him waiting in the car, Maggie raps hard on the glass front door of number 3. When there is no answer, she tapes something to the door: an envelope with her name on it and the Broadchurch Echo masthead crouched in the bottom right-hand corner.
That night, when Lil comes to collect her, Maggie can’t stop grinning.
‘What are you so happy about?’ she asks as Maggie sidles into the passenger seat.
‘I’ve got her,’ says Maggie simply.
Lil returns her wide smile and leans over to kiss her on the cheek. ‘Welcome home.’
Hardy has put a rocket up the detectives looking into Paul Coates. Miller lists all they’ve come up with:
‘Assistant curate at Dorchester for three years prior to Broadchurch. All fine. Before that, little village in Wiltshire. Spoke to the parish there – also fine, but then I tracked down a parent from the youth group. According to them, he turned up a bit drunk one night and threw a Bible at a boy’s head. The boy got taken to A&E. Paul was gently moved on.’
‘I think it’s time to bring our man of the cloth in for a little chat,’ he decides.
They keep it informal at first, leaving the interview room door open and leading with the last time Coates used Olly Stevens’ boat.
‘I only used it once, probably over a year ago. I thought, being as I was here now, I should be a bit more, y’know, fishermanly. So I took the boat and a rod and I caught nothing. Got a nice sunburn, though.’ His smile is saintly; Hardy prepares to wipe it off his face.
‘How long have you been going to Alcoholics Anonymous?’
It works: there’s almost a snarl in its place. ‘I see. I make a complaint about your failings with Jack Marshall and you come after me.’
Hardy doesn’t bite. ‘Not at all. Why Yeovil?’
‘Because I can have privacy and not bump into parishioners.’ Coates’ self-possession is slipping by the second. ‘Why is this relevant?’
‘Were you drinking on the night of Danny’s death?’
‘I haven’t had a drink for four hundred and seventy-three days.’ He turns to Ellie. ‘Is he always this objectionable?’
‘He is excelling himself today.’ As much as Hardy would like to think that Miller’s siding with the suspect to lull him into a false sense of security, he doubts it. He consults the file before him.
‘In your last job, you assaulted a child after you’d been drinking.’
Coates has the resigned intonation of someone who has trotted out an excuse time and again. ‘I didn’t assault him, it was a joke gone wrong, he was twice my size.’
‘You have no alibi for the night of Danny’s death.’
‘Why would I kill him? What possible reason can you dream up for me to murder an eleven-year-old boy?’ Hardy doesn’t have to dream up reasons. There are as many motives as there are killers.
‘You won’t mind giving a DNA sample, will you?’ he says. ‘I’ll do the honours, you wait here.’
As he walks off, he hears Coates say to Miller, ‘I’m sorry, but he is a knob.’
‘I know,’ she replies. To Hardy’s surprise, this time it stings.
Pulling on the latex gloves sends up a little cloud of powder that settles in drifts over Coates’ black shirt. The vicar opens his mouth for the swab as directed. Hardy deliberately asks the first question as he twirls the cotton bud inside the other man’s cheek. ‘So what, religion took over the booze? Swapped one addiction for another?’
Coates preserves some dignity by waiting until he can speak again.
‘You enjoy trying to rile me, don’t you? What’ve you got against me?’
‘Honestly?’ says Hardy. ‘You worry me. You were so eager to get in front of the cameras as soon as this kicked off. Like you wanted to own this for the Church. And you were round at the Latimers’, like a fly round shit. I watch this happen every time. A terrible event, and the Church piles in gleefully because suddenly people pay you attention. When for the rest of the year, you’re just that building no one goes in.’
‘You have no concept of faith, do you?’ says Coates. ‘I didn’t muscle in. People turned to me. Straight away. People who wouldn’t normally even think about religion. They asked me to speak. They asked me to listen. They needed me. And you know why? Because there was a fear that you couldn’t address, a gap you couldn’t plug. Because all you have is suspicion, and an urge to blame whoever’s in closest proximity.’ Hardy folds his arms against the tirade. ‘Look, you can accuse me, you can take samples, you can belittle who I was in the past. But you don’t get to belittle my faith, just because you have none. People need hope right now, and they’re certainly not getting it from you.’
He waits for Hardy’s reaction like he’s expecting some kind of conversion. Hardy keeps his arms folded and his mouth closed. He will not give Coates the satisfaction of knowing how shaken he is.
The words echo in his head for the rest of the afternoon. It is not true that he has no concept of faith. He has always believed in evidence and procedure. But where do you go if they fail you, as they are now? What happens then?
If Hardy were a different sort of man, he would pray for a miracle.