Height, weight, eyes, ears, nose. Pulse, temperature, oxygen. Hardy sits passively in the Chief Medical Officer’s surgery, staring blankly at the anatomical posters on the opposing wall. The stethoscope slides cold across his chest. His medical file is as thick as a Russian novel. With an expensive pen, the doctor writes the final chapter.
Because he has nowhere else to go, Hardy heads back to the police station, and is half-surprised when his pass card still allows him access. In CID it is business as usual; the team are checking the shoe size of everyone who has been involved, even fleetingly, with the investigation. The list of men with size ten feet is small but growing. Paul Coates. Nige Carter. Steve Connolly. There are only two people left in the frame that they haven’t accounted for.
He is working up to the phone call when Jenkinson summons him to her office. ‘You’re done,’ she says. ‘Office clear by the end of the day, please.’
Hardy does the calculations: eight more hours. He can still do this.
Joe Miller lies on his belly along Tom’s bedroom floor, spitting dustballs as he fumbles under the bed. He retrieves a half-made model aeroplane, torn magazines, a shrivelled apple core and half a dozen odd socks, but no computer.
When Tom sees his dad’s legs sticking out from under his bed, he can’t hide his terror.
‘Dad, out!’ he screams.
Joe wriggles backwards and props himself up on one elbow. ‘Mate, where’s your laptop? Mum needs it for the investigation.’
‘I lost it.’ Tom shrinks into himself as a dishevelled Joe gets to his feet. ‘Ah, a week back? Maybe longer?’
Joe looks him in the eye. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘You’ve both had a lot on your mind.’ It sounds feeble, like the excuse it is.
‘Don’t lie to me, Tom.’ Joe puts his hand on Tom’s shoulder and searches his face. There is the threat of a threat in his voice. ‘Where’s the computer?’
Ellie staggers into the station like a zombie. She was kept awake all night by the creeping feeling that Tom is hiding something from them. Susan Wright’s description of Tom echoes in Ellie’s head: lying little shit. Despite this, she is confident that he’s guilty of something innocent. He’s probably lost it, or swapped it, or he’s bypassed the parental controls and looked at a website he shouldn’t have. Ellie laughs bitterly to herself: it has really come to something when you take comfort in the idea of your child watching Internet pornography.
The suggestion that Tom is somehow involved in Danny’s death is obviously ludicrous. Hardy has finally lost the plot: with so little time left, he is inventing straws for the express purpose of clutching at them. Nige has done a runner, as has Susan Wright, the only person who could put him at the scene, and Hardy is panicking, tying mismatched loose ends together for the sake of it. She glances up at his office: the blinds are open but the light isn’t on, meaning he must still be in with the doctor. Ellie wishes she could play the boss at his own game if only to show him how stupid he’s being, but she has exhausted every lead she’s had. She scrolls through the case files on her computer for confirmation: there isn’t a single box unchecked. She rewinds the case in her mind’s eye, looking for inspiration.
It occurs to her that there is one interview that was never entered on the system.
Ellie deliberates for a long time whether to pursue it now, then something inside her propels her into action. If it takes the heat off Tom, until they can get to the bottom of what he’s hiding, it’s worth a shot. She writes a cheque that will eat up all her overtime and puts it in her handbag.
It is the first time in months that Ellie has been to Lucy’s house, and it’s in a shocking state. It has the bare, temporary appearance of a squat. Lucy doesn’t look much better. She’s dyed her hair again, a bright bus red presumably intended to make her look young and funky. It puts ten years on her, but her face lights up when Ellie hands over the money.
‘Oh, my little baby sis, you never let me down.’ She goes to hug Ellie, who remains rigid, hands still in pockets.
‘Look, we’re running out of time,’ she says. ‘My boss is on his way out and I’m scared to death another child is gonna get hurt, so you just tell me what you saw.’
Lucy pockets the cheque, as though afraid Ellie will snatch it away mid-sentence. ‘Night of Danny’s death, I was up really late. I took a break at around four,’ she says. She doesn’t have to explain what she was taking a break from: the only question is whether it was the online slot machines, poker or bingo, and Ellie couldn’t care less about that. All she wants is the statement. ‘I was looking out the window down the road and I saw a man in the distance, dark clothes, bald head under a little black hat, and he was shoving what looked like a bag full of clothes into someone’s bin. The bin truck was just coming up the road.’
The description matches Susan Wright’s statement. It matches Nige. Ellie puts a hand on the wall to steady herself. Dismissing Lucy has been an unforgivable oversight, possibly a career-ending fuck-up. If Lucy’s telling the truth – and Ellie’s gut tells her that she is – then Ellie has let Danny and his family down in the worst possible way. With huge effort, Ellie keeps her cool. She tells Lucy to come into the station when she’s cleaned herself up, to make it formal and give them a proper description.
Frank stops Ellie on the way in to CID and tells her that Hardy’s been given until the end of the day. She finds the boss in his office; he is still there, but only just. His complexion is working its way through a variety of mineral tones: if yesterday was chalk, today he is granite.
‘Sir,’ she says, shifting her weight from foot to foot. ‘I was talking to my sister. She saw a man on the night of Danny’s murder, throwing a bag of clothes into a dustbin. She gave me a description: height, build, short hair, possibly bald. It matches Nige.’
Hardy is agog. ‘Why’s she coming up with this now?’
Ellie can’t meet his eye. ‘I think something jogged her memory.’
Hardy’s not as fired up by this statement from Lucy as she thought he would be. The fight has gone out of him already; she’s surprised and then disappointed.
‘Did you find your boy’s computer?’ he asks.
Why, after what she’s just told him, is he still on about this? ‘He says it was stolen.’
‘Do you believe him?’
It breaks her heart to say no.
‘I called Tom and Joe,’ says Hardy. ‘They’re coming in.’
Ellie gasps. ‘When were you going to tell me?’
Before Hardy can justify himself, there’s a knock on the door. ‘Ellie?’ says one of the female PCs. ‘There’s someone outside wanting to talk.’
Kevin Green is looking haunted on the harbourside. If it weren’t for his red T-shirt with the Royal Mail logo, Ellie wouldn’t have recognised him. Even now it takes her a while to pinpoint him as the postman Jack Marshall reckoned he saw arguing with Danny at the beginning of the summer. So much has happened since then. His appearance has changed, too: he’s lost weight and his previously clean-shaven face is covered by a ragged beard. What can he possibly want now?
‘I was lying,’ blurts Kevin. ‘I did have a row with Danny a few weeks before he died. Someone had keyed my van, left this big long line. And he was the only one about that time in the morning. I thought it was him.’
The repercussions of this lie come screaming at Ellie: taking Kevin at his word made a liar of Jack Marshall, for a start. Would they have gone after him so hard if they had believed him on this?
‘Why did you lie to us?’ She’s too tired and sad even to get angry.
‘I was a bit panicky,’ says Kevin, warming to his confession. ‘Boy dies, you get seen having an argument. I thought, he wasn’t around to say otherwise. I haven’t slept in weeks. It’s been giving me merry hell. So I thought I should tell you. Am I in trouble?’
Ellie resists the urge to push Kevin backwards into the harbour. ‘What shoe size are you?’ she asks resignedly.
‘Eleven and a half.’ Kevin wears a rabbit-in-the-headlights expression. ‘Why?’
Hardy is in the family room with Tom and Joe Miller. A video camera nestles on a tripod and Tom blinks nervously into its lens. Joe is more restrained than in their last interview, although the effort of staying silent leaks into his body language, his left leg jiggling uncontrollably.
‘My computer got nicked,’ says Tom in answer to the first question. ‘At school. I left it in a bag and then it was gone.’
Hardy leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him. ‘You mustn’t lie to me, Tom.’
Tom looks in panic to Joe, who manages to button his lip. Hardy places the bag of smashed-up computer components in front of Tom, who flushes red.
‘Paul Coates said you threatened to accuse him of all sorts of shenanigans if he were to give this to us.’
Joe is incredulous. ‘You threatened the vicar?’ Tom darkens further.
‘I think you smashed it up because it had your emails with Danny on it,’ suggests Hardy. ‘Are these your emails?’ He pulls out a batch of printouts from his file. Tom recoils from the paper as Joe leans in close to read.
‘How did you get those?’ Fear thins Tom’s voice.
‘They’re stored on your server. We haven’t seen these before because Danny was using a different email address than his home computer. And you’re the only person he wrote to from this address. No, no – actually, you and one other person. We think he sent them from his smartphone.’ At the mention of the phone, Tom looks relieved. That’s one less secret for him to keep. ‘Where’d he get that from?’
‘He said he’d saved up from his paper round,’ says Tom.
‘In these emails, Danny’s asking you to stay away from him. He says that he doesn’t want to see you any more and you’re no longer friends. Why was that?’
‘He said he had a new friend,’ says Tom. ‘Someone who understood him better than me.’ Hardy registers the wording; it’s a strange insight for a pre-teen boy. It has the ring of something parroted from an adult.
‘You email back, “I could kill you if I wanted”.’
Joe can no longer override his protective instinct. ‘For God’s sake, it’s just kids!’ he jumps in. ‘It’s just boys falling out.’
‘I’m talking to your son, Joe. Not you.’
Joe reluctantly sits back in his chair but his outburst has unnerved Tom. Hardy pushes as hard as he can before the boy clams up completely. ‘Did you kill Danny, Tom?’
‘No.’ Tom shakes his head.
‘If you’re lying to me, there’ll be very serious consequences. If you want to tell me that you were involved in Danny’s death —’
Now Joe really loses it. ‘That’s enough! You want to question him like this, we need a solicitor.’
Hardy looks from son to father and makes a judgement.
‘Fine. We’re done for now. We need a DNA sample. Then you can go.’ They stand up to leave. ‘Oh, Tom? What’s your shoe size?’
Tom blinks at the apparent non sequitur. ‘Five.’
Hardy writes it down. ‘What about you, Joe?’
‘Uh…’ says Joe, as if he has to think about it. ‘Ten.’