Free Broadchurch: The End Is Where It Begins: A Series Two Original Short Story by Erin Kelly, Chris Chibnall Page A

mean, who trains for years and then thinks, I know, I’ll spend my life breathalysing old ladies?’ He chucks her the car keys. ‘I would say your carriage awaits, but you drive, you’ll want to get your bearings.’
    When Cliff sits in the car, it bounces. Ellie’s barely started the engine when he tears into a steak slice. Flakes of pastry flurry around the front seat, settling like dandruff on Ellie’s epaulettes.
    They drive through the countryside, Ellie taking in as much as she can of Cliff’s running commentary. After ten minutes, she finds herself yearning for Alec Hardy’s brooding and sulks. At least he was quiet. She wonders where Hardy is now: under a doctor’s observation somewhere, she hopes, contemplating the salvage of his own career from the confines of a hospital bed.
    The closest Cliff comes to acknowledging her situation is saying, after clearing his throat several times, ‘I’ll tell you my ambition. To retire in this uniform. I’m proud to wear it.’ The grating joviality is entirely absent now; he’s almost snarling. He looks dead ahead, through the windscreen, and she can’t decide whether he’s telling her she should be ashamed or she shouldn’t, whether he’s trying to comfort her or put her in her place.
    ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ she says, trying to keep her reply as oblique as his statement. If he’s playing games, she won’t be drawn in. Instead, she concentrates on the lie of her new patch.
    Everything’s on a different scale out here; instead of the soft hills Ellie’s used to there are wild purple moors with rocky crags. Even the sky feels bigger. It’s like she can sense the coast on either side, but there’s also a feeling of claustrophobia, a point of no return, on the ground, as the peninsular begins to narrow into Cornwall. After an hour on the road, Cliff suggests they head to ‘where the action is’.
    As they roll over the crown of a hill Cliff gestures to a grey smudge on the edge of town. ‘There’s our destination. Bideford Chase estate. Ninety per cent of our shouts come from there. Biggest smack problem in the county. We don’t let our kids play with kids from the Chase. The law begins at home, that’s my motto.’
    Ellie doesn’t suppose Alec Hardy has ever had a motto in his life.
    Up close, the Bideford Chase estate is a grim little collection of low-rise flats centred around a bleak, almost Soviet-looking precinct where most of the shops are boarded up.
    ‘This’ll do, ease her in gently, there’s a nice big space for you there,’ says Cliff. Ellie makes a point of ignoring his detailed parking instructions and does it her way, a slow balletic reverse curve that gets her an inch from the kerb.
    Cliff walks Ellie round the estate block by block. A girl of about six pushes a brick around in a toy buggy.
    Ellie bends to her level. ‘Hello, what’s your name? Where’s your mummy?’
    ‘Fuck off, plod,’ says the little girl, before darting into the open front door of a ground-floor flat.
    ‘Another generation born and bred on the welfare state,’ says Cliff, and he’s off again.
    After an hour of his social insights, Ellie starts to zone out and make her own observations. No wonder the kids are running wild; the playground has been vandalised so it’s just a mess of frames with no swings or roundabouts attached. The SureStart centre is boarded up, the entrance barricaded by an old mattress. Immediately Ellie starts thinking of outreach work; she’d forgotten that about uniform, how proactive you can be, the difference a friendly, familiar face can make. She feels old skills begin to uncurl after a long sleep. Maybe she’d been looking at her career all wrong, even before Danny’s murder. Maybe going full pelt for promotion after promotion isn’t what she was meant for. Community policing is why she joined the force in the first place.
    The positivity doesn’t last long. Ellie’s mobile vibrates in her pocket: it’s Lucy,