Broadchurch (24 page)

Paul looks pleased and then almost sheepish. ‘We should think how we announce it. I mean, I’m very happy to go on the local news, give them some quotes, save you the bother.’ Beth can’t resist a smile. He’s not your average vicar, what with the computers and now a hotline to West Country News. ‘I’ve got a feeling this service might end up being quite big. There’s going to be media coverage, but also people will want to come. We may spill out from the church. Are you all right with that?’

‘Big as possible,’ says Beth. Paul’s enthusiasm is infectious. She would invite the whole world if she could.

He leaves her at the top of Spring Close, as though he doesn’t want Mark to see them together. He doesn’t retrace their route over the pavements but cuts across the field. Beth can’t tell whether he’s going back to his church or back to Becca Fisher.

37

Karen White is no longer the only national newspaper journalist in Broadchurch. The town is crawling with them now, print and television. She knows half of them from years covering the courts, but while the rest of the pack catch up over drinks in the Traders, she’s in the inner sanctum of the
Echo
office, jealously guarding her exclusive. This afternoon she got a lead on something that will keep her ahead of the game, but it’s a long time now since she took the call and she’s starting to get nervous.

Olly wheels his chair across to Karen’s desk so that he’s virtually sitting in her lap. ‘It’s late,’ he says, placing his hand over hers. ‘How about we go back to —’

‘No,’ says Karen, firmly removing his hand. ‘We’re waiting for someone.’ She doesn’t confide her fears that they’ve had a change of heart.

‘Oh?’ says Olly. His obvious disappointment is shot through with intrigue.

‘Mm-hmm. Two people, actually.’

Right on cue, the door swings wide and a teenage couple walk hand in hand through the darkened newsroom, crash helmets swinging from their free hands. Olly’s eyes saucer in recognition.

‘Dean’s got something to tell you,’ says Chloe Latimer, nodding at the tall, good-looking youth at her side. ‘Tell her what you told me.’

Karen looks Dean up and down. The first she heard of his existence was in Chloe’s phone call. He’s a couple of years older than Chloe. Seventeen at least if he’s riding a motorbike. From the corner of her eye, she notices Olly’s raised eyebrows and silently wills him to stop. His poker face needs work.

‘I was in the Sea Brigade,’ says Dean. He has a strong local accent. ‘Jack Marshall threw me out.’

‘Go on,’ says Karen.

‘He was always wanting hugs from the boys,’ says Dean. ‘And he’d love to watch us getting in our trunks when it was hot. That’s when he’d go round, putting his arms on our shoulders. I was like, “No thanks, mate. No hugs from me.”’ He gives a little quiver of revulsion. ‘He took against me after that. Kept asking what was wrong with me.’

Karen stifles a whoop. She needs to get this straight. ‘This happened more than once, Dean?’ she asks.

‘
Loads.
’ Dean turns to Olly. ‘You must’ve seen it, during your time.’

Olly looks uncomfortable. ‘Maybe. A bit,’ he admits. ‘I didn’t think of it like that.’

‘I need this corroborated, I can’t just take your word for it,’ says Karen, but Chloe, media savvy now, is one step ahead of her. She has made a list of names and numbers of boys who were in the Brigade at the same time as Dean. Some of them have got stars beside them.

‘They’re the ones who’ve said they agree with Dean, and they’ll talk to you,’ says Chloe. Karen is momentarily lost for words. ‘Everyone knows he did it. Well, everyone apart from my nan, and that’s only ’cause he’s a Bible-basher like she is. They took my dad in when there’s a paedo on the loose. We all know what he’s like and the police are doing nothing.’

‘Have you been to the police with this?’ asks Karen.

Chloe shakes her head. ‘You gonna use it?’

Karen looks at the clock, then back at the list. If she and Olly work fast, this will make tomorrow’s front page. It will strike a blow for the Latimer family and against Alec Hardy. Thought about in those terms, the decision is easy.

‘OK, let’s do it,’ says Karen. ‘People should know. When we’re finished here, you need to put this in a statement to the police, OK?’

They hit the phones as soon as Chloe and Dean have gone. One boy after another confirms Dean’s statement. Their quotes make perfect copy and Karen knows as the words fill the screen that the
Herald
won’t have to change a single one. Some stories sensationalise themselves.

She hits send in time to make tomorrow’s first edition. It will be on the presses within the hour, on the vans just the other side of midnight and online not long after that. The other journalists will spend the night playing catch-up.

Ellie walks down her garden path, one hand rooting in her bag for her house keys. The security light is activated as she gets to the porch.

‘Bloody hell, you work late.’

If she didn’t recognise the voice, Ellie would have screamed. As it is, her heart rate doubles. Lucy steps out from behind a bush, as though Ellie has failed to honour a long-standing appointment to meet in a dark suburban garden after midnight. Shadows rush in to fill the hollows of her cheeks.

‘You’re back, are you?’ says Ellie. She finds the right key and slides it into the lock.

‘Are you interested in what I’ve got to say?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ hisses Ellie under her breath. They’re directly underneath Fred’s bedroom. She might miss him, but that doesn’t mean she wants to spend quality time with him in the small hours of the morning. ‘That depends,’ she says. ‘Are you willing to give me back the money you stole from my children? Are you willing to seek proper help?’

‘How many times?’ says Lucy. ‘I didn’t take your sodding holiday money.’ Ellie gives an inward screech of frustration: the repeated denials are almost worse than the original theft. ‘And I don’t need that sort of help.’

She is lying on both counts but with such conviction that Ellie wonders, not for the first time, if she actually believes herself. Lucy leans in and speaks in a gruff whisper.

‘I saw something, Ell. I think you’ll want to know. The night Danny Latimer got killed.’ Ellie freezes with one foot inside the porch, hope soaring inside her. It doesn’t do, with Lucy, to let your desperation show, so she merely raises her eyebrows expectantly.

‘I just need a bit of money to stand me up again,’ says Lucy. ‘Only nine hundred pounds. A thousand. Lend it to me and I’ll tell you.’

Ellie is too disgusted to reply. She closes the door in Lucy’s face. Nothing changes. Even with everything that’s going on, Lucy only cares about herself. She would even use a boy’s death to her own ends. Ellie is ashamed to be her sister.

38

Jack Marshall’s infamy has spread. His picture is on the front of all the papers, not just the
Herald
, although Karen White’s report, with its headline HUGS FOR THE BOYS is the only one with the right to the word
exclusive
. The paparazzi have his shop surrounded.

Ellie and Hardy stand on the shop floor, blinking in the gentle strobe of flashbulbs. The photographers are silhouetted against the roller blinds, their cameras turning them into alien shadow puppets. They call Jack’s name repeatedly, but in very different tones to the ones they used to get Beth’s attention at Danny’s memorial. This is what a witch-hunt feels like, thinks Ellie.

‘I need protection,’ begs Jack. ‘I’m under siege!’

She asks the questions that protocol demands of her. ‘Has anyone threatened you or physically intimidated you?’ she says, even as the glass in the window shakes.

‘Stay inside,’ says Hardy, as though Marshall has a choice. He can’t take his eyes off the window either, flinching with every flash. ‘With a bit of luck it’ll all abate soon enough.’ He doesn’t sound convinced.

‘You’re doing this deliberately to see if I’ll crack. You’ve got me marked and nothing I say makes any difference.’

Hardy regains his composure. ‘Cooperate with us a bit more, then, and we can clear you of suspicion.’

‘You think I haven’t heard that before!’ snorts the old man. ‘Cooperate and we’ll make it all right. Next thing, I’m being charged.’

Hardy sighs. ‘All I want is to get to the truth of Danny Latimer’s death. If you’re not involved —’

‘I am not involved! I told you, I was in all night. If I’d been out, it’d be on my security cameras.’

Hardy and Ellie look to each other in disbelief, then back to Jack. ‘On your
what
?’ asks Hardy.

‘Security cameras, front and back. Had them installed after a break-in. Cost me a fortune. But my front and back doors are on there. If I’d left, it’d be there.’ Jack begins his sentence with the contempt of someone who’s stating the obvious, but he falters as he goes on. You see it all the time, people missing something vital because they take it for granted the police see their tiny worlds from the same angle they do. Sometimes literally, in this case.

‘Why didn’t you mention them before?’ Hardy doesn’t hide his exasperation.

‘I forgot,’ admits Jack. ‘I was angry.
You
had me all confused.’

His defensiveness lays bare his vulnerability. Ellie sees the chance to ask him about his past again and takes it.

‘Why don’t you tell us what happened, Jack?’ she says, her softness a deliberate contrast to Hardy’s severity. Jack’s face remains impassive but there is a tiny shift in his posture, a fractional lowering of the shoulders, and when he speaks the relief is clear.

‘I was a music teacher. Rowena was a pupil. A
girl.
No boys involved. I’m sure you can fill in the gaps. It was a relationship.’

‘And you had sex, how many times?’ asks Hardy.

Jack wrinkles his nose in disgust. ‘You think I put notches on my bedpost?’

Hardy folds his arms. ‘Who told the police?’

‘Her father.’ Jack’s defiant stare suddenly gives way to an unfocused glaze; Ellie shifts into his line of sight, but she can’t make him meet her eye again. ‘I was made an example of. Served a year. I was lucky to make it out alive. She was fifteen years and eleven months. Four weeks and a day later, nothing would’ve been amiss. I served my time.’

‘Did you ever have contact with the girl after you were released?’ asks Ellie.

‘I married her.’ This catches Ellie off guard, and she consciously steels herself against what might yet turn out to be a sob story. ‘The week after I came out of prison. She was seventeen, I was forty.’

Reverend Paul Coates is braving the crowds outside the newsagent’s to wait for the police.

‘You need to protect him,’ he says as Ellie and Hardy shoulder their way through the scrum. ‘He’s my parishioner. He’s scared stiff.’

Hardy looks Paul up and down. His eyes linger on the dog collar like it’s a stain. ‘You’re certain he’s innocent, are you?’

Paul is unbowed. ‘You’re certain he’s not?’

‘Your concern’s noted.’

Ellie follows Hardy back to the nick in a hail of bullet-points. ‘What he said doesn’t alter the facts,’ he says. ‘Jack Marshall has a conviction. He’s still a suspect. We can’t be distracted by his convincing sob story, or this press. We persevere with the evidence. Williams is going over the CCTV as we speak.’

As if on cue, SOCO Brian is waiting for them upstairs.

‘Next time you have a crime scene on a beach, call someone else,’ he says. ‘It’s been a bloody nightmare. Layers, moving, shifting, it’s impossible. We’ve eliminated about four hundred separate pieces of evidence as detritus or irrelevant.’

‘I prefer relevant,’ scowls Hardy. Brian holds up a clear bag containing four cigarette butts.

‘All within three feet of one another. Four feet from where the body was found.’

‘What makes them special?’ says Ellie.

‘Timing. If they’d been there more than a couple of hours earlier, they would’ve been washed away by the high tide. But there’s no trace of tidewater on them, so they must’ve been left there that morning. Around the same time the body was. They’re high-tar cigarettes which is quite unusual these days. If they were bought locally, you might be in with a shout of people remembering the purchaser.’

Hardy says what they’re all thinking: ‘All that way to drop off a body, then stand and smoke. It doesn’t make sense.’

When Brian has finished, Hardy retreats to his office. He pulls closed the Venetian blinds then turns out the light, so that only pinstripes of white leak between the slats. There’s a sofa in one corner, and he lies awkwardly down on it, long legs dangling over the edge.

He closes his eyes and has his suspects line up in an imaginary identity parade. It’s a little technique he’s used since day one on the job whenever there’s more information coming in than he can process. It served him well in the early stages of Sandbrook and he hopes it will bring him a similar clarity now.

Mark Latimer naturally remains in the frame. Obeying the axiom that the closer to home, the greater the likelihood of guilt, he is a prime suspect. Even with Becca Fisher’s testimony, there is still a two-hour gap in his alibi. He hit Danny on one occasion. Correction: he hit Danny on one occasion that they know of.

Jack Marshall is equally plausible, although for very different reasons. A bachelor from out of town with a conviction for sex with a minor who was later persuaded to marry her abuser, suggests that Marshall is a skilled groomer. Just because Danny’s body showed no signs of sexual assault doesn’t mean that none took place. Experienced abusers know that there’s more than one way to molest a child. Experienced criminals of any persuasion know how to make contact without leaving a trace. As leader of the Sea Brigade, Jack Marshall had little boys on tap. He had Danny alone in his shop every morning and the boy’s phone in his possession after he died. His house is a stone’s throw from the deposition site. He has obstructed the investigation at every opportunity: the longer Hardy thinks about Marshall’s forgetfulness, the more convenient it seems.

Reverend Paul Coates takes his place next to Jack. His lack of alibi is a red flag and the church is a minute’s walk across the field from the Latimers’ house. He had a relationship with Danny and dozens of other boys through the computer club. But it’s his eagerness to get his voice on the airwaves and his face on camera that really disturbs Hardy. He’s seen this before, the urge the guilty have to perform for the media. It’s a kind of sick pride in what they’ve done, an inability to let their involvement go unacknowledged, no matter how tangentially.