Broadchurch: The End Is Where It Begins: A Series Two Original Short Story (2 page)

Jenny sighs. ‘I’ll find something.’

Ellie ends the call and turns back to Cliff, ready now to challenge his earlier lack of respect. But their radios crackle into life at the same time. They’ve got a shout.

‘With respect,
Sarge,
’ he says, getting back in the car, the sarcastic emphasis on her title finally betraying his contempt, ‘are you sure you’re ready for this? It must be hard to mix work and family in your … after … what with the way things are.’

He means Joe. She won’t rise to the bait. By way of reply she executes a perfect three-point turn that shuts Cliff up, for a while at least.

While Ellie drives them to the address, Cliff gets the desk to run a check on Tim Yardley, the man who’s been reported for breaking into his estranged wife’s house. The answer bounces back immediately: Yardley’s never even had a parking ticket in his name. That doesn’t mean anything. Joe didn’t have previous.

Woodside Park is five miles from the Bideford Chase estate but a different world; a hushed, tree-lined avenue with big, detached houses. Gleaming cars are neatly parked on driveways, except for number 45, where a black Audi has been abandoned diagonally across the pavement.

The front door – Edwardian, original stained glass in the panels – is already open. Imogen Yardley, standing on the threshold, is pretty but very underweight, with lemony highlights that have grown halfway down her hair, as if she stopped caring what she looked like about six months ago.

‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ says Imogen. ‘I need you to get him away from my kids before he does something stupid.’

She steps aside, as though she wants Ellie and Cliff to see the whole picture at once. Tim Yardley stands in the middle of the hall, arms folded and feet wide apart, but his macho stance can’t hide the way his left leg jerks like there’s something crawling around in his trousers. There’s a sweeping staircase with two little girls sat on the bottom step; they’re around six and twelve, at Ellie’s guess. The youngest is tucked into her sister’s armpit, sucking her thumb like her life depends on it. Ellie tries to throw a reassuring smile their way but there’s too much to take in. The kitchen is at the far end of the house. Someone’s a keen cook; above the Aga is a long knife block, handles sticking out. She’s glad she can see both of Tim Yardley’s hands.

She tries for eye contact with Cliff to gauge whether he’s thinking the same thing, but when he locks on to her gaze, he’s unreadable. She can’t even get to the bottom of what he thinks of her. That telepathy you get with an established partner feels light years away.

Cliff takes the lead. ‘You said that your estranged husband threatened to take his own life?’

Imogen tucks her hands into her armpits. ‘He was hammering on the door and saying, “I’ll die before I let you take my children away from me.” What am I supposed to think?’

‘It’s a turn of phrase, isn’t it?’ Tim addresses Cliff. ‘You can’t go arresting people over a
turn of phrase
. I’ve got every right to be pissed off. I paid for this house and I’m living in a crappy one-bedroom flat in Bideford Chase. She’s threatening to take my children away from me.’

On the stairs, the girls start to cry; the little one wails while the big one lets the tears roll in silence.

Imogen turns to Ellie. ‘I’m not actually threatening to take them anywhere. I’m just applying for sole custody, with access for Tim.’ She looks at her husband – her voice is strangled: ‘But if you want to lose them, you’re certainly going the right way about it. It’s histrionic
shit
like this that split us up in the first place.’ She puts herself between him and the girls, like it’s on her to absorb whatever he’s got to throw at them. ‘Look, he’s upsetting them. I just want you to get him out of the house.’

‘Has he ever struck yourself or the children?’ asks Cliff.

‘No,’ says Imogen quietly. There’s a tiny spasm in her cheek, and Ellie recognises a woman who’s trying not to cry in front of her children.

‘Has he made any
threats
to yourself or the children?’ presses Cliff.

‘No, but …’ Imogen flicks a glance to the girls, then lowers her voice so that Ellie can hear her. ‘You hear about these men, don’t you? Going mad, killing their whole families. He’s not himself any more.’ She breaks down now, trying to whisper and not cry at the same time: ‘But he won’t get help, he won’t see a doctor. I can’t have him around my kids like this.’

She is weeping openly as Cliff and Ellie lead Yardley to the car, elbows loosely linked through his. At the car, he bucks so quickly that Ellie feels her arm pull at its socket. She tightens her grip on his thin arms and feels hard muscle rippling beneath. You forget, if you’re not careful, how strong men are when they’re angry. She’s glad of Cliff on Yardley’s other side.

‘You
bitch
!’ he screams, tendons popping on his neck. Cliff pushes him into the car, and the monster is back in the box as quickly as it escaped.

‘I’m sorry for the language just then,’ says Tim, like he’s apologising for bumping into someone on the street. ‘It’s just that Imogen’s blown this up out of all proportion. You just say things in the heat of the moment. I’d never hurt my children.’

The phrase rings an alarm bell but Ellie can’t think why. She checks him in the rear-view mirror. He looks utterly composed, and that’s what she’s frightened of. She knows, now, that it’s the quiet men you want to watch. Because when they snap, they shatter worlds. She lowers the window and feels the cool air on her cheek.

Back at the station, they hand Tim over to the custody sergeant who puts him on suicide watch. They study him on the monitor, a little black-and-white man sitting with his head in his hands. ‘He’s not going to top himself,’ says Cliff. ‘He’s embarrassed more than anything.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ says Ellie. ‘We’ll keep an eye on the whole family, though.’

‘Right you are,’ says Cliff doubtfully.

On the drive home, Ellie can’t stop thinking about Tim Yardley. She replays what he said in the car.
I’d never hurt my children
. Only now does it dawn on her. No one accused Tim of threatening to hurt his children. As far as he’s concerned, they pulled him in because he’s a danger to himself.

When she picks Fred up from Jenny’s, he’s happily dressed in pink tights and a Tinker Bell sweater; after weeks being with him almost 24/7, and now having been separated, Ellie’s even overjoyed to see the bag full of pooey clothes. On the drive home to their poky studio – she’s paying rent as well as the mortgage on Lime Avenue – she tells him about her day with Mr Potato Head, and automatically looks to the other side of the back seat for Tom’s reaction.

That night, Ellie calls Tom at Lucy’s. As usual, Lucy’s muttered entreaties end in an explosive
No
! from Tom, and a slammed door. It’s on tonight’s
No!
that Ellie first learns that Tom’s voice has broken. There is a corresponding rupture in her heart.

He thinks she’s lying; he thinks she set Joe up. There’s only one person who can persuade Tom she’s not lying, and that’s Joe, when he stands in the dock and pleads guilty. This cruel-and-kind blow is the only thing that will shake Tom out of his denial. There’s one thought that keeps coming back to her, and it’s as dark as hell. Despite Joe’s protestations, and despite the lack of evidence of abuse on Danny’s body, there’s no way they’ll ever know what went on between the two of them. Whatever Joe did to Danny … Ellie can never discount the possibility that he did the same to Tom. Are there fresh revelations to come?

That night, she takes Fred into bed with her, in defiance of the strict bedtime routine that Joe worked so hard to establish. She knows it’s not fair on Fred but he is her comforter; she is saved in the dark hours by his soft little hand on her face, his creamy breath, the puppy-dog smell of his curls.

He still calls
Daddy
when he wakes in the night.

Ellie has been keeping a discreet eye on Imogen Yardley and the girls for a couple of weeks. There have been no further incidents, and she’s almost coming round to Cliff’s belief that it was a one-off when they get the call. This time, it’s not from Imogen but from a barmaid at the Joiner’s Arms who says that when she refused to serve Tim Yardley any more alcohol, he told her that he was ‘going home to end it all’.

Ellie engages the lights and the sirens; cars part to let them through the rush hour, but when they reach the roundabout, she takes the first exit, towards Woodside Park.

‘Wrong turning!’ splutters Cliff. ‘He lives in Bideford Chase.’

‘Going
home
to end it all,’ Ellie reminds him over the blare of the sirens. ‘He still thinks of the family home as his. You saw him.’

‘Sarge, turn the car round! This is a man’s
life
here.’ He genuinely thinks she’s made the wrong call. ‘Please, Sarge. He’s gone back to the Chase. I’ll stake my career on it.’

Ellie pulls rank. ‘You stake your career on it if you like, Kendall. But I’m not staking anyone’s life.’

For all Ellie’s bravado, she’s only 90 per cent certain she’s right. There’s a chance that he has gone back to his little flat in Bideford Chase. But if he hasn’t, and he’s as drunk as the barmaid said he was, and he’s in Woodside Park, then the picture gets much darker.

They kill the blues and twos on the corner.

‘His car’s not here,’ says Cliff, when they pull up outside number 45. There’s panic in his voice but triumph too, like being right would be his consolation prize for Yardley’s suicide.

Ellie squats to peer through the letterbox: low lights are on but no shadows suggest movement. She can see Imogen’s phone and keys on the hall table. Her heart freefalls through her body: are they too late?

‘I think we should go to—’ says Cliff, but he’s silenced by a scream from inside. Instantly his demeanour changes; he looks to Ellie for guidance. She nods to the glass in the door, and within seconds he’s put his baton through one of the panes, and is reaching through shards to unlock the door from the inside.

Whimpering voices make a dissonant chord, telling Ellie there are at least two people alive in there. She follows the sound into the sitting room.

The Yardleys are all sitting on the sofa, the girls upright like Victorians posing for a photograph. Tim and Imogen are more of a modern snapshot, his arm slung matily around her neck. It would look casual if it were not for her round-eyed terror, and the six-inch knife trembling in his hand.

‘We’re a family,’ says Tim. His voice is scraped and raw. ‘We do everything together.’

Ellie can smell the whisky on his breath from here. She senses Cliff tiptoe back out along the hallway, and hears the call he puts out for back-up: his voice is subdued, and Ellie can only make out the words ‘hostage situation’ and ‘ambulance on standby’.

Imogen parts her lips in a silent plea. Ellie thinks fast: hostage negotiation is a specialism and one she’s never been trained for, or not since she was a cadet and even then they didn’t do it in much depth. She dredges her memory for the right thing to say: nothing. She’ll have to wing it.

‘If we can’t be together, what’s the point?’ Tim says, but he’s desperate rather than confrontational. Ellie gets close enough that he could turn the knife on her. Up close, it’s even bigger than she thought: expensive steel, well looked after, kept nice and sharp. She puts herself between him and the weeping girls, even though he’s an inch away from her abdomen.

‘Let’s let the kids go, shall we?’ she says. ‘They don’t need to hear this.’ Even as she’s talking, Cliff’s leading them by the hands out of the sitting room and into the hall. Gingerly, Ellie steps an arm’s length backwards.

‘I promise you, you won’t feel like this for ever. You can’t. You can’t sustain it. It gets old. It wears you out. You live with it.’

Yardley lets out a noise that’s part snarl, part sob. ‘You haven’t got a clue what I’m going through.’

Ellie holds her hands up. ‘You’re right, I don’t know exactly what you’re going through. It’s obvious your life’s gone to shit.’ Yardley blinks rapidly;
good
, thinks Ellie. She’s halfway to disarming him. ‘But I’m the last one to judge you for that. No one ever knows what’s going on inside someone else’s marriage. Christ, half the time we don’t even know what’s going on inside our own.’ She doesn’t care that Cliff can hear her open her heart like this. ‘Doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you. Look. You’ve got two little girls out there. Put the knife down now, and they’ll remember this as the day their dad started to get better.’ She has no idea, now, if she’s on solid ground but she’s impressed by the authority in her own voice. ‘I promise you.’ Yardley relaxes, but as his shoulders drop, the knife falls towards Imogen’s throat. ‘OK,’ says Ellie, maintaining the illusion of calm even as her legs jellify underneath her. ‘You’re doing so well. But I need you to drop the knife now, please, Tim.’

He places it on the arm of the sofa, giving Imogen the space she needs to slip out of his headlock and fly past Ellie into the hall. Before anyone can intervene, the blade glints under the light as Yardley turns the knife on himself, tip to jugular. Ellie acts on instinct, flying at him to bat it away. It only occurs to her that she’s put her life in danger and broken every protocol as the knife somersaults across the room, tip glancing against the wall, smashing a picture on the way down. She’s a second too late; he’s already drawn a red stem across his neck and a poppy blooms wild at one end.

‘Christ,’ says Cliff. He’s with Ellie as they intercept Yardley on his way to the floor. In the hall, Imogen has buried her girls’ faces in her chest. They are huddled so tight you can’t see three individuals, just a tangle of clothes and hair.

‘I’m sorry,’ gurgles Yardley. A scarlet bubble repeatedly forms and pops on his lips.

‘Is he going to die?’ says Imogen, and Ellie’s glad it’s not up to her to answer, as the ambulance wails and screeches to a halt outside. A female paramedic is in the sitting room within seconds.

‘Is he going to make it?’ asks Ellie.

‘I think so,’ says the paramedic, crouching over Tim.