DS Ellie Miller doesn’t walk any more. She trudges. She drags her exhausted feet from one place to another, hope dimming a little with every step. She takes her time on the walk to Harbour Cliff Beach. She has no idea why DI Hardy has called her down here. It hasn’t been a crime scene for weeks now.
She hears the sea like a rumour. The sandstone ripple of the cliffs reaches away from her to the vanishing point. She squints into the sun, on the lookout for Hardy’s matchstick-man figure. It’s only when she shifts her focus downwards that she finds him. He is sitting on the sand, folded in on himself with his knees drawn up to his chest, halfway to the shoreline. The sun plays upon him, breathing life into him; his skin is golden, his hair almost auburn. Maybe there is hope for him after the police.
‘They’ve caught Nige Carter,’ she says. Hardy scrabbles to his feet, brushing sand from his suit. He looks at Ellie as though she’s spoken to him in a foreign language. ‘Nige Carter?’ she repeats. ‘They found him hiding out in the hills in Mark Latimer’s van. He’s back in custody. He’s a shoe size ten,’ she reminds him.
Her words don’t have the impact she was expecting. He’s given up, she thinks. He’s had enough. Even though he is clearly broken, she envies him. At least freedom is imminent for Hardy. She can’t imagine a time when this will no longer be her life. She can barely remember a time when it wasn’t.
‘I was here before, on this beach,’ he says. ‘I came here as a kid. We had a tent on some campsite near the cliffs. I tried looking for it when I first came.’
Ellie doesn’t know what surprises her most; that he’s been here before or that he used to be a little boy. She pictures him in a suit, surly and unshaven, aged eight. ‘You came on holiday to Broadchurch?’
He nods. ‘Didn’t remember it was here till the day I came back. Freaked me out. Those bloody cliffs still the same. I used to sit under them, get away from my parents arguing.’ His attention shifts to the horizon. ‘They spent days sniping and shouting. The third day in, I sat here, all day, on this beach, right into the night. Thinking, I’m not going to have a family soon. When I got back they were livid. They’d been out looking for me. They didn’t think to look on the bloody beach, mind.’
‘Did your mum and dad split in the end?’
‘No.’ Hardy kicks at the rough sand. ‘Kept bickering till the day my mum died. Last thing she ever said to me: God will put you in the right place. Even if you don’t know it at the time.’
The two detectives face the horizon together, listening to the drag and deposit of shingle in the waves. It’s a repetitive, hypnotic sound that brings about an eerie peace deep within Ellie. Broadchurch has always felt like the middle of the world to her. Right now, Harbour Cliff Beach feels like the edge of it.
The lull is shattered by the ring of her telephone. It’s Nish. Ellie listens, then cuts the call. She is as adrenalised now as she was peaceful ten seconds ago.
‘It’s Danny’s phone,’ she tells Hardy. ‘It’s back on. They’re tracing the signal now.’
Hardy doesn’t share her excitement, but nods decisively. ‘I want the tracking signal coordinates sent to my phone. You get back and question Nige Carter, get the truth out of him.’ The shutters have come down again and it’s hard to believe that this is the same man who has just confided in her. ‘Go on, go. Go!’ he barks. Her trudge has a new impetus behind it as she heads back towards the station. If Nige is in custody, then who’s got the phone? Are they looking for two people after all? For the first time in weeks, she feels that the answers to her questions might be within reach.
‘Miller!’ What now? She turns back, shielding her eyes to see him. They are separated by a tract of sand and the breeze is picking up again. Hardy has to raise his voice. ‘You’ve done good work on this, Miller. Well done.’
It is the first praise he has ever given her. Ellie shivers, as though someone has walked over her grave.
The sun is an old bronze coin, low in the sky.
Hardy walks the length of Broadchurch High Street without looking up from his screen. His progress is tracked by a red pin: Danny’s phone by a blue. It is too soon to be precise about the location. That will come as he closes in. For now, the blue pin is merely a triangulation point between three possible locations. He speeds up, noticing as he does that his vision is pin-sharp and his legs strong and obedient. It is as though his illness, recognising the gravity of the moment, has decided to suspend play for a while.
The dull end of the High Street abruptly gives way to nondescript suburbia. Hardy zooms in. He looks up, makes a mental calculation, then turns left into an alleyway. It’s the first time he’s entered this hidden network of pathways and with none of the landmarks he has come to rely on, he loses his bearings and is temporarily a stranger in Broadchurch once more. A glance down at his phone roots him again. With technology as his guide, he covers the footpath in fifty paces and comes to the playing field. The red pin is almost overlapping the blue. Hardy stands equidistant between St Andrew’s church dead ahead, the Latimer house to the right, and there to the left…
He puts his handset in his pocket and bears left across the field. With one final alleyway to negotiate, Hardy checks his phone again. Here, in Lime Avenue, the two pins on his screen converge.
The Millers’ garden path feels a mile long. The front door is open. Tom and Fred are in the sitting room, laughing at a cartoon. Hardy is pulled up short by the black device in Tom’s hand, but it’s a TV remote, not a phone. He clears his throat and the boys look up, but he only takes their attention away from the screen for a moment. They are used to seeing policemen in their house. Hardy backs into the hall and continues through the kitchen. The knot in his stomach pulls taut as he walks through the unkempt back garden. The shed door is ajar. Hardy pauses. His bile rises for reasons that have nothing to do with his illness.
It’s dark inside the shed and his eyes take a while to adjust. He turns slowly around and takes in the logs drying out, the skateboards in two different sizes, the bikes and the camping equipment. In the middle of this, Joe Miller stands, wearing jeans and a checked shirt, his left arm curled protectively around his body, his right hand holding Danny’s phone to his lips in a loose kiss.
‘I’m sick of hiding,’ he says.