Broadchurch: The End Is Where It Begins: A Series Two Original Short Story (3 page)

Cliff is at Ellie’s side. ‘Seriously good call, Sarge.’ Finally, she has his respect, and more importantly, her own. She followed her gut, overrode a colleague and saved three – she looks down at Tim Yardley, whose breathing is already regulating – possibly four, lives in the process.

‘Can I get a bit of space?’ comes a voice from behind her. The second paramedic is there, bag in hand. He’s youngish, with a shaved head. In his green overalls, his resemblance to Joe hits Ellie like a cannonball to the chest. She tries to close her mind’s eye against the image of Joe in his uniform, coming home from work, dropping his keys on the table in their old house, but she can’t, and she grows unbearably hot, like someone’s lit the gas inside her. She will never be free of what he did, or her own blindness. Great, so she knew Tim Yardley was dangerous the moment she saw him – but where was that copper’s instinct when she was sleeping with a murderer? She sees it now. For her whole career, whatever she achieves, she will always be a failure because she didn’t see what was happening in her own house. She looks around to check if her burning cheeks have registered with the others, but Cliff is with Imogen and the girls, and the paramedics are working on Tim. Ellie’s nose is slippery with sweat, and her shirt is plastered to her back. She has a sudden urge to tear off her cravat, leave the house, and keep walking until she hits the moors.

It is only through extreme concentration that she is able to drive back to the station, and then to Jenny’s. Driving works like meditation, pulling her into the moment, but she’ll have to stop the car at some point and she knows there’s something bad lying in wait for her when she does, like lava bubbling out from her belly to her fingertips. She holds it together through Fred’s bath and bedtime but it builds and builds inside her, and when he is finally asleep, she cries into a pillow, racking sobs and silent screams, for what feels like hours – for her broken marriage, her scattered family, and for the career she cannot afford to lose for reasons that go far deeper than money. Salt water is like sandpaper on her skin.

Ellie only knows that sleep has come because of the nightmares; real-life flashbacks mix with her dark dreamscape, so that she sees Tim Yardley with a knife to Danny Latimer’s throat, Joe with his arm around her neck, Tom and Fred cowering on a sofa beside them. In the worst nightmare, she’s back in the mortuary at the Broadchurch cottage hospital, a row of little bodies lined up on slabs: Danny, Tom, Fred, the Yardley girls. She is woken by the swill of saliva in her mouth and for the first time is grateful for the mean dimensions of her bedsit; it is only three steps to the toilet. After that dream, she doesn’t go back to sleep, just sits up in bed with one hand on Fred’s gently rippling ribcage.

She is still on autopilot when she drops him at Jenny’s the next morning and calls in sick. She spends the next nine hours rocking in bed, unable to eat or drink even water, moving only to pick up a voicemail from her chief super; Yardley’s going to make it, and he’ll be sent to a secure hospital on his release. Brownie points waiting for Ellie back at the station when she’s well again.

She has the feeling she will never be quite well again.

By the time she picks Fred up in the evening, Ellie has come to a realisation. It was too soon after Danny, after Joe, to go back into uniform. One crisis and she’s broken. It’s one thing to be able to predict the emergency, but she’s not ready yet to deal with the feelings a live crime scene throws up. If she’s going to break down every time she sees a family man lose it, or sees a paramedic, how can she work in the community? She can’t hold her head up high in uniform after all. Ellie looks wildly around her little room, as though the answer might be written on the walls.

Where does she go from here?

The following Monday, Ellie Miller pulls on her yellow hi-vis jacket with
TRAFFIC
emblazoned across the back. You need a good complexion to carry off fluorescent yellow and since the aftermath of the Yardley case, Ellie looks like she’s been drained of blood.

This is her second new job in as many months and although no one’s said it to her face, she knows it’s her last chance. In her snakes-and-ladders life, she’s choosing to slide downwards. She is bitterly aware of the irony that while she has gained her colleagues’ respect, she now understands that she doesn’t deserve it. It’s either this or leave the force, and then Joe’s won. She is hanging onto her career by her fingernails, marking time until his plea hearing next week.

Ellie has always prided herself on putting people before anything else but life as a Black Rat is about enforcing the letter of the law, or rather its numbers. She’s reduced to the digits and codes of traffic policing: stopping distances, speed limits, milligrams of alcohol and penalty points. Even her fellow traffic officers, infamous for their pedantry, started calling her Robocop after her first shift.

Inside Ellie’s locker, there’s a photograph of Tom and Fred before the blast. She marks a tally on the picture’s white border, inky scratches in the gloss, to count down the days until Joe stands in the dock at Wessex County Court and says the magic word that will give her back her son.

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