Mark Latimer runs as if pursued, or pursuing. His is not the measured, purposeful stride of Beth in her running gear but a flailing, directionless lope. Only when he arrives at the Harbour Cliff Beach does he understand that this was his destination all along. He finds a deserted stretch among the rock pools and stops dead.
The sky is orange streaked with sooty black clouds, a fireball stretched across the sky. Mark rages, shaking his fist at the freak sunset. ‘Why?’ he asks over and over, although if there was anyone to hear him the word would not be intelligible. It comes out in an animal howl. He throws stone after stone into the choppy sea until his arm is sore. Anger flows out of him hard and fast but doesn’t diminish. When the stones are gone and there is only shingle and sand left, Mark drops to his knees and weeps. Salt water soaks his jeans and shoes.
He should go home to Beth. She needs him. Chloe needs him. But the thought of being back in that women’s world of talk and comfort repulses him. He needs to act. He makes a phone call to Bob Daniels, the only friend he has left on the force, saying he’s on his way to the station. He ends the call before Bob can ask why. It is a warm evening and his jeans dry quickly, a salty tidemark snaking around his calves.
On the harbourside, he stands a distance away from the station entrance and the abstract horror of it takes shape; Danny’s killer is somewhere in that round building.
Bob is waiting for him on the steps. A slap on the upper arm substitutes for a hug. ‘Jesus, Mark,’ he says. ‘Joe. I still can’t believe it.’
He shakes his head in anger and something else too: the subtext is clear: I didn’t think he had it in him. Mark knows they’re both thinking it.
‘I gotta see him,’ says Mark. ‘I need him to look me in the eye.’
What he’s asking would mean instant dismissal, and Bob’s got a family to support. Mark knows this. But he can’t help himself.
‘Mate.’ The word is freighted with twenty years of history: every pint they’ve shared and every game of football they’ve played. The kids, the wives, the lives. ‘For Danny.’
Bob throws a quick glance behind him. ‘Go round the back,’ he says, shaking his head in disbelief at his own action. ‘I can buzz you in through the side door. Nobody can know about this or I’m fucked.’
It is the greatest thing another man has ever done for Mark. He hopes his face conveys his gratitude because he doesn’t trust himself to say it. The door Bob opens leads straight down into the cells by way of a long, pale yellow corridor with a sour, antiseptic smell. Mark gives brief consideration to the logistics of getting him in here. How has Bob done it? Turned the cameras off? Neutralised an alarm system?
‘He’s in number 3,’ says Bob, sliding open a gate. ‘Two minutes.’
It is the only occupied cell. Mark lets the viewing panel fall open with a clang.
Joe Miller sits on the narrow bed in his white boiler suit. He looks tiny. Partly it’s a trick of perspective, framed by the hatch, but he is also somehow reduced. He is so much less than the man Mark thought he was, a pathetic little eunuch.
Mark’s face is a dark-red growling monster in widescreen. ‘You were our friend,’ he says. ‘You were in our house.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Joe raises his palms. A line from the post-mortem comes rushing back to Mark: Danny was facing his attacker. This blank egg was the last face his boy ever saw. The thought nearly sends Mark falling to the floor. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Joe bleats.
Mark’s cheeks run wet with tears and spittle. ‘You not man enough to kill your own boy? You had to take mine.’
‘It was an accident,’ says Joe. ‘I put him on the beach so you’d know. I could have left him at sea.’
This is at the limit of what Mark can take. ‘Have you heard yourself?’
‘He only came to me in the first place because you were no sort of father to him. Because you hit him.’
‘Don’t you use me as a fucking excuse!’ Mark feels something in his throat tear with the force of his words. ‘It was only ever once. And I’ll suffer for that my whole life now.’ Joe is crying too. How dare he? ‘You did things to him, didn’t you? I know they’re saying you didn’t, but you must’ve.’
‘I swear, I never did,’ Joe beseeches. ‘I only ever cared for him. You have to believe that.’
Mark pushes his face against the door, metal digging into his flesh. ‘I thought I’d hate you, Joe.’ He spits the words. ‘But now I see you here, you’re not even worth that. I pity you. Because you’re nothing.’
Mark slams the viewing panel closed before Joe can see that he’s lying. He does hate Joe; hate isn’t a strong enough word for the ball of dark energy in his chest, firing violent impulses along his body. He is glad of the thick cell door, not for Joe’s sake but for Beth’s and Chloe’s and the new baby’s. Given the chance, he would kick the life out of Joe Miller.
It’s dark and wet outside now. Ellie and Tom race raindrops down the windowpane while she waits for the call to come from Hardy. She doesn’t know if she still has a right to know what’s happening. What is she now, a witness?
A hammering on the door makes them both jump and Fred murmur in his sleep.
‘It’s Lucy.’ Ellie slides back the bolt and lets her in. Everything is stripped away, the arguments and the money and the lies, because family is where you go when there is nowhere and nothing else left. They hug for a long time and then, without being told, Lucy understands that Ellie needs to go.
‘Take as long as you need,’ she says, helping Ellie into her orange coat like a child.
As she hits the edge of town she wishes she’d worn something less recognisable. The Mum Coat marks her out like a buoy in the harbour. She puts her head down and travels via the back alleyways. Even so, someone sees her crossing the road near the Echo, and it’s the last person in the world she needs to see right now.
‘DS Miller,’ says Karen White. Ellie’s legs flex beneath her as if to run away and she looks up and down the street for a photographer, but it looks like Karen is alone. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and Ellie can’t work out if she’s expressing sympathy or apologising for the ambush. ‘They’re all going to be after your side of the story.’ This is more like it. Ellie braces herself for the barely veiled blackmail: give me an exclusive and I’ll look after you. What Karen actually says takes Ellie’s breath away: ‘Don’t talk to anyone.’ She steps back into the shadows before Ellie has time fully to recognise the favour, let alone thank her for it.
She keeps trudging, sticking to the paths and minor roads. Her eyes stay on her feet. There is no need to look up. She could walk this town blindfold. She could draw a map from memory and name every street.
At the edge of the playing field, she stops. The church is in darkness but lights blaze in every room of her own house: she can see the indistinct figures of the SOCO team and recoils to imagine them rooting through her kitchen, her wardrobe, her life.
Slowly, Ellie turns her head towards Spring Close. There is no movement there: only Beth, framed in her bedroom window, hands on the sill. Ellie puts her head in her hands and when she looks up again, Beth has gone. A chink of light expands and contracts to show Beth’s back door opening. It is the least Ellie can do to meet her halfway. The two old friends walk slowly towards each other. There is so much Ellie wants to say to her, but she will give Beth the first word. She is braced for tears, rage, violence.
She gets silence. They stand opposite each other for a long time. Finally Beth moves her head from side to side, slowly, deliberately, almost sarcastically.
‘How could you not know?’
As she walks back towards her house, Ellie howls inside. Beth’s reaction is a barometer for the rest of the community. It is nearly a relief to know that she has to go. Miraculously, her voice holds steady during a quick call to a whispering Lucy. Tom is finally asleep, an arm curled protectively around Fred. She retraces her steps back through the alleyways, cutting into the High Street at the Traders, and makes it up the stairs to Hardy’s room without anyone seeing her.
He sits on the bed while she slumps opposite him in a tub chair, still in her orange coat.
‘I want to kill him.’ She’s not ashamed of it; it’s almost a point of pride. ‘Help me understand,’ she says, deferring to Hardy’s experience. ‘Because I can’t. Do you believe him? Do you think it’s possible? He says he was in love. How could he, how could any adult be in love with an eleven-year-old boy? Is he a paedophile? The pathologist found no evidence of abuse on Danny, and I asked Tom and he said Joe never touched him. So what does that make him?’
Hardy takes his glasses off. ‘Just because he didn’t abuse either boy, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have gone on to,’ he says in his new, soft, good-cop way.
‘Doesn’t mean he would’ve, either.’ She hears her own desperation.
‘We’ll never be sure.’ His voice is heavy with sorrow. ‘Maybe he was romanticising, in order to justify what he felt. Or maybe that’s as it was. I don’t have those answers. People are unknowable. And… you can never really know what’s in someone else’s heart.’
‘I should’ve seen it.’
‘How?’
‘I’m a bloody detective! Miller, such a brilliant copper, the murderer was lying next to her.’ For the first time it hits her that Hardy knew before she did. How long has she been making a fool of herself? ‘When did you suspect?’
‘Last day or so,’ he says. ‘It always had to be someone close. There was the description. Who could it be if it wasn’t Nige? The way Joe behaved when Tom was interviewed. And then Danny’s email account on the missing phone. It only had two contacts. Tom… and Joe.’
Ellie’s humiliation is complete. ‘All along, you said don’t trust.’
Hardy lets all the air out of his lungs. ‘I really wanted to be wrong.’