Broadchurch: The End Is Where It Begins: A Series Two Original Short Story Read Online Free

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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