Chapter Text
2nd June 2018 – Broadchurch CID
Blue eyes. Dark hair. A black training jacket with a red football jersey underneath. A big toothy grin and sticky-out ears.
The face dominated every newspaper, news reel and social media page. Underneath his name and age as well as a phone line were printed in bold black letters. It must be running hot with calls, Alec thought. Police up there would have a hard time sifting through the supposed sightings, the nosy enquiries and the nutters, who flocked to such a case like vultures. He had seen it often enough in his career. Even Broadchurch had had a brush with it, when Danny’s body had been found. Steve Connolly, the reluctant psychic as Alec had dubbed him. He sneered as much in remembrance as in sympathy with his colleagues up north.
Joshua Dawley. Aged twelve. Huddersfield.
Alec folded the newspaper so only half the face remained visible and pinched the bridge of his nose to ward off an oncoming headache. It was barely eight and he was already fighting the throb in his temples. The neon lights were too bright and irritated his tired eyes. Cases like that, children, always stole his sleep, no matter if it happened on his patch or not.
“No new developments, are there?” Ellie pushed her way into his office and put both mugs down on his desk, indicating to the copy of the Echo. Even local papers had picked up on it and were spreading the news far and wide. #FindJosh had become a nationwide campaign.
Social media was often a bother, making their job harder than it needed to be and blowing personal opinions out of proportion, endangering innocents and whole investigations but in this case Ellie thought the possible benefits outweighed the risks. The more people knew about it, the more hope there was of finding Joshua safe and sound.
No one knew where the boy might have gone. It had almost been four days already. On the evening Joshua had been reported missing, a trail had been found leading to a bus stop, but the dogs had lost it there. Ellie could only imagine the agony of his parents as they waited for news, simultaneously wishing and fearing the phone to ring. She shuddered.
Alec shook his head. “No,” he confirmed in a dejected voice. It was not one of their cases. It was not even close to Broadchurch, but the disappearance of Joshua had drawn national public attention and everyone felt somehow invested in it. Parents all across the country hoped and prayed for his return while they hugged their own children close, thankful that they were safe.
A member of the police, but a father, too, Alec felt torn. The boy had been missing for almost 96 hours. Search parties were out all across the region. Local uniform. K9. Volunteers. He dreaded to think what they might turn up. Time was against them. Statistics were, too.
The previous evening the dogs had found another trail close to a lake near where the boy lived, but search had been interrupted by the fading light and only resumed that morning. Divers checked the lake or scanned the shores with a special sonar appliance while the K9 units were patrolling the shoreline and reeds surrounding it. A fingertip search where every participant hoped and prayed to come up empty-handed.
To Alec it felt too much like Sandbrook. A missing child. The mention of water. It was enough to make his old nightmares reappear, only this time it was a little boy he carried onto the bank, his hair matted with dirt and grass, the blue eyes dulled forever, frozen in an accusing glare.
He pitied the poor sod who would find the child. Everywhere in the papers and the news people talked about the mass of hints from the public, leads still to be explored but Alec knew that behind the scenes reality looked much bleaker. The wide national appeal told him that his colleagues had no clear lead, no area to concentrate on or a suspect.
There was no trace of Joshua and his chances dwindled by the hour.
“Have you slept at all?” Ellie was not one to sugarcoat things and she also knew better than to offer worn-down platitudes and false hopes to him. Alec had never dealt in them, not in his job or in private. Because of it he was often seen as cold and uncaring, when the opposite was true. Words did not help and clinging to a fading hope just made the crash so much harder in the end. Alec had never had much respect for any of his colleagues who kept telling families that ‘everything would be alright’. It turned out to be a lie too often.
“Hour or two,” he replied tiredly, taking a long swig of the tea. It was strong, just as he liked it and helped to wash some of the weariness away. The respite was only brief, though. It was not the first sleepless night and not the first nightmare he had woken to recently. It would not be the last, either. At least Daisy was settled at uni and did not hear him scream at night, Alec thought bitterly.
“Have a bite. You need to keep your strength up and toast won’t cut it,” Ellie said as she pulled a pack of chocolate hobnobs out of her bag and pushed it across the table towards him. Alec had half a mind to shove it right back at her, but after a moment’s hesitation he relented and pulled one of the chocolate-coated biscuits out of the pack. A bit of sugar would not hurt.
“Where are we on the arson case up at the old farm?” Alec heaved a sigh and used all his willpower to pull his thoughts back to the small coastal town he called his home. There had not been a major crime in town for years.
Danny. Trish. They had been tragic and horrifying anomalies. Broadchurch was a small town, its crimes fitting in proportion. Thefts, pub brawls, siphoned diesel or missing poultry.
He should be glad for small mercies.
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+++ child’s body discovered at Blackmoorfoot reservoir amidst search for missing Joshua Dawley - Police confirm suspicious death +++
By late afternoon the news were streaming all across national television, news websites and had been read out tinnily from the old radio at Broadchurch CID twice in the short time it took Alec to make some tea. He had not expected anything else and felt both relieved by the finality of the news as well as grief-stricken for the loss of a child so small and the family left behind. Expected or not, it was devastating.
The identity had not yet been confirmed, but that was just a formality. The body needed to be officially named, a post mortem carried out, an investigation set-up. A missing child had turned into a murder case. Alec well remembered the chaotic upheaval when the same had happened during the Sandbrook case. It had been his first investigation of that scale as SIO. It proved to be his downfall, too.
In the blink of an eye all hope had been crushed and officers who were, against their better judgement, holding onto the hope of finding the missing girls alive and well, plummeted into a well of despair with no time for respite. Long, sleepless nights searching and sifting information had become even longer.
Somewhere up in a station in Huddersfield, away from the public eye, the same was happening now. The search parties would be replaced by SOCO, Joshua’s parents would be told that the body discovered was most likely their son, the SIO would rush to the mortuary and brief their team. Duty would push the urge to hurry home and hold one’s own children close to the back of everyone’s mind. Family dinners and bedtime rituals would fade to memory while everyone worked to solve the most soul-destroying crime imaginable - a child’s murder - knowing it would not change a thing. A family had been cruelly torn apart and could never be fixed, even if the perpetrator was found and sentenced. Answers did not bring back the dead.
Alec remembered how all eyes had rested on him as SIO during Sandbrook. How the weight of their trust – in his rank, his abilities, his team, had been nearly enough to crush him. Everything had been on him back then, rendering him blind to the things happening in front of his nose. He sighed and stirred his tea as he tried to dredge his thoughts back from the past, the memories of a muddy overflowing river, a pendant and a corpse.
“They found him then?” Ellie materialised by his side in the small kitchenette, standing so close their elbows almost bumped. Her face was pale, too and she looked as anguished as Alec felt. For her it had always been harder to part with even the smallest shrivel of hope and she was simultaneously worse at disguising it. Where Alec pulled back into himself and hid behind a stoic mask, Ellie carried her heart on her sleeve and let the world see her emotions unabashedly. What Alec had formerly perceived as weakness he now recognised to be a strength. It took courage to face your feelings and not hide them inside.
“Dog walker,” Alec confirmed in a low, subdued voice. He sincerely hoped it had been the dog rather than its owner who spotted the body of Joshua. The site of discovery lay close to a lake and Alec did not wish the sight of that on anyone.
“It’s always the dogwalkers, isn’t it?” Ellie uttered. Even back during Danny’s case it had been Susan Wright who had first seen the body - and the murderer - though she had not reported it back then.
“Another reason not to get one,” Alec said and heard Ellie grunt in agreement. Tom had never stopped asking for a dog and had recently got it into his head to join the K9 squad. Ellie was not thrilled at the idea. She knew too well of the horrors he might see in this line of work, especially with the pictures of tracking dogs all over Huddersfield.
“The poor parents,” Ellie mumbled while she stared into the murky brown of her own mug, pushing the teabag under water repeatedly as if she tried to drown her despair in it. “I can’t imagine what they must be going through. I mean, I’ve seen it… Beth, but…” Alec nodded grimly. He too remembered the wails of Beth Latimer as she had thrown herself across the beach towards Danny’s body back then. Or the anguished cries of Cate Gillespie after Pippa had been found.
“I just hope they nail the bastard.” Ellie gave her teabag one last violent stab under water before she fished it out again to chuck it in the trash. Alec looked away. Even the soaked teabag was enough to remind him of the sight of a bloated, muddied corpse, tossed away as if it was nothing more than garbage. He swallowed against the bile suddenly rising in his throat.
Ellie, sensing his distress, reached out to gently squeeze his arm. “Sorry.”
He shook his head and stepped away, needing to establish both an emotional and physical distance to reign in the intense feelings welling up inside. The silence felt leaden between them as both detectives thought about the implications of what little information had been released. Sadly, the abyss of human cruelty knew no bounds as previous cases had shown them.
Alec made a mental note to call Daisy once he got home from work. Even when children grew up, being a parent never stopped and though she was an adult herself now, he longed to hear his daughter’s voice, telling him about the hardships of life as a student.
“Come over tonight,” Ellie asked, hiding the plainer meaning of ‘don’t be alone tonight’ in an invitation. “Fred’s been missing you.”
“Was gonna call Daisy when I get home,” Alec replied softly. It was not unusual for him to spend the evenings, sometimes even nights, at the Miller house, but he already knew that if he was lucky enough to fall asleep, nightmares would certainly find him. Even after all these years Sandbrook and Pippa were never far from his mind. The case of any missing child always brought it back. He would much rather Ellie’s boys did not witness any of his old ghosts.
“After then. Come for dinner. I’ll let you get back home afterwards. Just, don’t bury yourself in the past tonight, Alec.” Again, Ellie rested her hand on his arm, offering comfort and understanding. She knew what was on his mind. Daisy’s absence would be felt much more keenly with memories of Pippa and news of Joshua Dawley mixing.
He nodded.
“Alright. Just dinner.”
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