It is the dark side of midnight on Thursday, 18 July.
The Miller family are back in Broadchurch after three blissful weeks in Florida. They arrived home four hours ago to a pile-up of post and carpets glistening with slug trails.
Three members of the family are asleep. It was a tough flight and the effort it took to keep the kids awake all the way home from the airport now seems worth it; they have crashed out in their beds, unbathed, teeth unbrushed. Ellie is out cold, the seal broken on the bottle of melatonin pills she bought at Orlando Airport.
Joe Miller is wide awake despite the jet lag. That sick twisted feeling in his guts, absent for three blissful weeks, is back. He told himself, while he was away, that he was… he hates the word cured, as it suggests he’s done something wrong, and he hasn’t. Well, they haven’t. It takes, two, after all. But it’s the only word that really seems to describe the way he felt on holiday. For the first time since it started, he felt utterly in the moment. His boys were enough. Ellie was enough. They had sex almost every night for the first time since trying for Fred. In Florida, Joe told himself that he was cured, but it came back, that longing swirled with shame. It came back on the road into Broadchurch. It came back stronger than ever. The last food he ate was an airline meal six hours ago but his appetite has vanished. He is literally sickening for Danny.
Joe Miller stands for a while on the landing, watching his wife and children sleep, and then at the ping of a text message he’s downstairs, feeling in the dark hall for the car keys. His is the only car on the one-track road. Now and then as he skirts close to the cliff edge, there’s a wink of moonlight on sea in the distance. Joe drives slowly, trying to order his thoughts. After the initial swoop of relief that Danny will see him again comes doubt. Danny wants this to be the last time. He’s been very clear about that. Joe thinks hard. There’s no way he can get his hands on any more money – Lucy hasn’t been to the house for months, he can’t make her his scapegoat again – so if he’s going to convince Danny to keep meeting, Joe’s going to have to persuade him with words. And if not… well, the thought of this being the last time makes Joe want to weep, but if this is how it’s got to end, then they must make this last time count.
He parks the car up at the usual meeting point, the half-made road flanked by high hedgerows, lush and lusty with summer foliage. There is a purity to this place, far from the traffic and CCTV of the town. Joe’s stomach clenches at the sight of Danny balanced on his skateboard, in the middle of the lane. The moon shines a spotlight on him. His hair’s got a little bit longer in the last few weeks. That top is new. Joe is too overwhelmed to speak, then Danny does a trick on his skateboard, a flip-over that Joe taught him. They both laugh: the tension is shattered, and Joe knows that it’s going to be fine.
‘Hiya,’ says Danny. The harmless word hits Joe like a bullet: Danny’s voice has broken while he was away. It’s a hook in Joe’s heart, but he doesn’t know which way it’s pulling him.
They do the final fifty yards to the clifftop hut on foot. Danny moves a rock to get the key out, and they’re into the place Joe thinks of as their haven. He takes a moment to appreciate the clean smell of it, the neutral seashell art and the colour scheme, so tasteful you don’t even notice it. How could anything that happens here ever be tawdry?
Joe sits on a chair and lets Danny sit on his lap. He is the perfect weight: the perfect size. When he’s on his knee, Joe catches their reflection in the window and is pulled up short. The difference between how it looks on the outside and how it feels on the inside is huge, too big to explain even to himself. He closes his eyes against the image and just breathes him in. But something’s wrong. Danny’s arms are open, loose. He’s in Joe’s arms but he’s slipping away.
‘We don’t have to stop this,’ murmurs Joe. The intended reassurance backfires: Danny moves out of the hug.
‘We do.’
‘I know I said tonight was the last night but… we’re not doing anything wrong.’
‘So why does it have to be a secret?’
Joe winces. He doesn’t like this gruff new voice at all. ‘People wouldn’t understand.’ Even as he says this, he knows that the problem is not that people wouldn’t understand but that they would. Danny knows it too.
‘I’m not going to meet you any more.’ Joe doesn’t recognise this new edge. Danny’s got harder, somehow, in the last few weeks. Florida now seems a million years away and Joe finds himself wishing they’d never gone. He shouldn’t have left him alone for so long. Three weeks is an age when you’re eleven.
‘I’m going. Try and stop me.’ Anger surges in Joe. Why come all this way just to reject him? There’s a cruel streak in Danny that he’s only just uncovering. ‘I’ll tell my dad about this.’
Panic turns up the dial. Mark will kill him. Joe blocks Danny’s way, to buy himself just a little bit more time.
‘Let’s not get silly, eh? What would you say, anyway: we meet and hug? So what?’ Joe’s been rehearsing the argument for ages. ‘You tell your dad, he won’t understand. And that’d mean no more Sunday lunches, no kickabouts with both our families.’ Danny is unmoved. Joe delves deeper, grasping at the thing that brought them together in the first place. ‘It means, next time when your dad hits you – or worse – you’re on your own. ’Cause I was there for you, when you needed me. You tell people what we’ve been doing, no one will understand. They’ll think it’s wrong and sick, and it’s not.’ He doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince any more. ‘And it will burn everything down. The whole of our world, the whole of our lives. And it’ll be on you. Is that what you want?’
Danny’s expression changes. ‘’Course not,’ he says. Thank God. He’s got through to him. Joe sinks into the chair, spreads his arms again. Danny runs not towards him, but out of the hut, the door springing behind him.
‘Shit. Danny!’ Danny runs through the dark, panicky, breathless, jagged. At the fence, he catches his hand on some barbed wire. It’s a shallow cut but the blood flows fast. ‘Danny. Dan!’
The skateboard is at Joe’s feet. He picks it up. Danny can’t go far without it. When he looks up, Danny has stopped at the rim of the cliff.
‘We shouldn’t have ever done this.’ There’s accusation in his huge blue eyes and tears too: he wipes them with the back of a bloody hand. Joe can’t stand to see him cry. He can make it all right, if only Danny will let him. Danny squeezes his eyes closed tight. ‘If I jump, everything’s all right.’
Even in Joe’s most paranoid fantasies, things never got this dark, this fast. ‘No, mate.’ He slows his breath to keep his voice steady; it’s an old paramedic trick, a way to avoid freaking out accident victims even when you’re panicking inside. ‘Don’t do that. Come on. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said those things.’ Danny shuffles forward. The tips of his feet are lined up with the edge. Blood trickles down his arm and drips from his fingers.
‘Please, Dan, please. Don’t be daft.’ Joe stretches out his hand. ‘Come on. It’s all right. We can sort this out. I’m sorry. Let’s go back together.’
Their hands are lubricated by the smear of blood on Danny’s palm, and Joe cocoons Danny tight in a hug. Relief is a drug in his veins. ‘There we go. It’s all right. It’s all right.’
Back in the hut, Joe turns the key quietly behind Danny’s back. He has never locked them in before, but this time is different and it’s only until they have come to an understanding. He almost gets away with it but at the last moment there’s a loud click as the lock tumbles. Danny whips around in fear. Joe sees the broken trust and knows that it’s over. He wants to weep, but he can’t, because everything now is damage limitation.
‘Promise it’ll stay between us. Then you can leave.’
‘What, or you’ll hurt me?’ says Danny. He squares his shoulders, a cocksure gesture that Joe’s seen Mark make when wronged in the pub or on the pitch. ‘I know what you want from me. You’re too scared to ask. Why don’t you do it to Tom instead?’
The line that Joe has taken such pains to respect has been crossed. To pollute what they have is one thing, but to bring Tom into it? Joe is not that man.
What he feels is too big to be contained by his own body. He has the sense of watching himself from above as he slams Danny against the wall. ‘You need to not say those things, Dan.’
Danny remembers his manners at last. ‘Please, get off me, please!’ he begs. That’s better. Of course, Joe intends to let him go but not until he’s said his piece. Danny is struggling, losing it, and he’ll never hear what Joe has to say until he calms down. ‘I won’t have you say that sort of thing about me! I helped you!’ Danny starts to flail. Joe bangs his head twice against the wall to shock him into silence. ‘We had something between us here! You won’t spoil it. You do not spoil it!’
Finally the message gets through: Danny stops fighting and starts listening. He is utterly still.
He is too still.
Joe is horrified to see that the hands he thought were on Danny’s shoulders are around his throat. He freezes with the boy in a stranglehold. Danny’s beautiful blue eyes are a maze of red threads. Petechial haemorrhage. Joe has been trained to save lives but the only skill he can draw on now is diagnosis. He knows death when he sees it. To loosen his grip will be to acknowledge what he has done. His hands let go of their own accord. Danny slumps down the wall and Joe has to catch him.
He holds him close and paces the floor of their sanctuary. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry,’ he cries into his neck. ‘Dan, I’m sorry.’ The embrace he was denied in life grows tighter and tighter in death.
Joe falls silent but the word sorry runs on multiple loops in his head, a chorus that becomes a deafening rush in his ears. His mind is both blank and racing at the same time. What the fuck has he done? How has this happened?
For a few minutes, carrying Danny is effortless. Then, as the numbness of shock wears off, Joe’s arms begin to ache and reality rushes in, followed by the primal instinct of self-preservation. Gently he lays Danny’s body down on the floor and strokes closed the blood-laced eyes.
It is not as though Joe makes a conscious decision to hide what he has done; rather, he finds himself going through the motions of it, wiping down the door handle with his sleeve and checking the cupboard under the sink. There’s a big box of cleaning products and a packet of latex gloves. He pulls them on without thinking and it’s only when he looks down at the white-gloved hands of a bad magician that he first understands that he intends to cover his tracks.
Danny’s life is over, and so in all the ways that count is Joe’s, but do Ellie and the boys deserve to go through hell? Put like that it is not a choice at all but an obligation.
What he is left with now is a hundred tiny choices and each must be right. He spins on his heel in the open night, wondering where to go. He searches the sea for inspiration and it provides. Down on the beach is a line of small boats. One he knows in particular.
He ties plastic bags over his walking boots. He pockets a rag and some household cleaner. On the short walk to his car, he inventories the stuff in the boot. He’s glad now he didn’t tidy up the car before Florida like Ellie nagged him to. He has to rummage through the jumble of family life – Fred’s wellies, a torn luggage tag, a bicycle pump – to find what he’s looking for. There’s his old gym bag gathering dust under Fred’s travel cot. He will need that, but not until later. He fumbles in the dark until at last, wedged into a corner, his fingers close over the cold steel of the bolt cutters, still there from the time Tom forgot the combination on his bike lock and Joe had to cut it free.
Thin clouds scud across the full moon as Joe half-runs, half-falls down the cliff path, Danny’s skateboard under his arm. He uses the bolt cutters to snap the chain that tethers Olly’s boat and pulls it along the beach, as close to the shoreline as he can.
The next trip to the beach, with Danny warm and limp in his arms, is hard work. Danny’s weight throws Joe off balance and he can’t see the sand-steps under his feet. By the time he reaches the boat, he is drenched in sweat and his muscles are in spasm. His arms want him to drop Danny, but Joe lays him down in the hull as gently as though he were sleeping. Danny’s bleeding hand brushes against the side of the boat: Joe wipes it clean. The skateboard goes in next. Joe pushes the boat out into the water and they’re off, the outboard motor churning the black sea to foam.
He waits until they are a mile offshore to look down. Danny’s gone, he tells himself. Do what you have to. This isn’t Danny. Not any more. His stomach clenches like a fist as he starts the clean-up operation, spraying Danny’s skin with the cleaner and then wiping him down. When he has scrubbed every inch of Danny’s skin, he hauls the body to the side of the boat. He lets go, preparing himself for the splash but it does not come and he realises that he is still holding Danny. It’s as though his hands are glued to the boy.
He can’t do this. He can’t do this. He can’t do it to Danny. He deserves better than to be dumped at sea. Mark and Beth deserve better. Joe drops the body to the floor of the boat. He looks behind him; the water has carried them a mile or so along the coast: the lights of the town and the amber cliffs call them home.
Joe starts the motor again and heads for Harbour Cliff Beach. There he places Danny gently, respectfully, on his back in the middle of the beach. He lays the skateboard parallel, hoping that one day, Mark and Beth will work out that this last gesture was done out of love.
There is no time for him to cry over the body but as he gets back into the boat and retraces his route, it strikes him how vulnerable Danny looks. He recognises the thought as irrational, grotesque, but he can’t help hoping that the tide will be kind. He keeps his gaze trained on the beach until the outline of Danny’s body is absorbed into the liquid dark.
It has gone one o’clock by the time Joe gets back into the hut and the next hour passes in a blur of activity. He puts on new gloves, ties new bags around his feet, and cleans the hut from top to bottom, wiping down surfaces, vacuuming the chair where they sat, the sofa where Danny lay, washing the walls and mopping the floor. The incantation sorry sorry sorry is replaced by shit shit shit. Joe works manically, his goal the aseptic cleanliness of an operating theatre.
When he’s satisfied, he strips completely, shivering naked in the moonlight before putting everything he’s been wearing inside a bin liner along with the latex gloves and his boot coverings. In his sports bag is a tracksuit: it’s soft against his skin, a tender touch that he doesn’t deserve. There’s a black wool hat tucked in a side pocket that must have been there since last winter. He pulls it down over his ears. There is still more to do.
On the drive back into Broadchurch, the incriminating bin liner crackles on the passenger seat. Joe knows that the refuse collection starts at Lucy’s end of town the hour before dawn, and throws the lot into a communal bin behind some garages.
It is four o’clock in the morning when Joe gets back to Lime Avenue. The full force of his exhaustion suddenly hits him. Gravity doubles its force and he wants nothing more than to lie down. First he must wash, to rid himself of traces of Danny and because he feels toxic, like he’ll poison the whole house. He turns the shower as hot as he can take it, then a little higher still. After ten minutes under the water he still feels filthy, so he stands before the bathroom mirror and scours his face and hands with a nail brush. ‘Come on,’ he tells his reflection. ‘You can do this, you can do this, you have to do this. It’s gonna be all right.’
When he crawls into bed, Ellie readjusts herself but doesn’t wake from her stupor. Behind her, Joe balls himself into the foetal position. His scream is an absence of sound, a wordless cry that goes on and on. A small detached part of him observes and diagnoses the full nervous breakdown as it happens. He feels the searing clutches of an army of devils, come to drag him irretrievably into hell.