Broadchurch: Across the Pond

Chapter 17

TW: more interrogation, more detailed description of murder

Sanchez greeted his interrogators with a smug smile. "Here to release me?"

"We've some more questions." Alec sat down and restarted the recording. "Interview resumed, one-fifty PM. First, you should know that Alice told us everything. Including what you did."

"I heard yelling," Sanchez said. "Alice confessed because you frightened her. That's coercion. It won't hold up in court."

Alec ignored the accusation. "You're really not getting this. Alice flipped on you. Never trust a pretty girl, mate."

"Now you'll tell me that if I confess I'll get a better deal, and that if I lawyer up it all goes out the window."

"Alice said that you snapped Leslie's neck," Ellie told him, ignoring the lawyer comment. "And that you helped dispose of the bodies."

Sanchez looked near tears. He was close to the breaking point; he needed one last push. Alec provided it with some very different pictures: Dawn Underwood on the autopsy table. He set them on the table slowly, precisely, lining them up one by one until Sanchez's surrogate niece stared lifelessly up at him from four different angles.

That did it. Sanchez buried his face in his hands, a broken man. Alec stared at him unblinkingly. Ellie let her boss take the lead. This—intimidation—was one of his specialties.

"If I confess to it all," Sanchez said slowly, looking up, "you have to promise to get Alice a good deal. She can't spend the rest of her life in prison."

"This girl turned on you, and you're still willing to take the fall for her?" Alec asked incredulously.

"You don't get it," Sanchez told him desperately. "Alice--she's pregnant. With my child."

"How far along is she? Supposedly?"

"About...seven months? She said she was carrying inward. It happens. I've read about women not knowing they were pregnant."

Ellie stepped out. It took less than five minutes to get the truth out of the now-hysterical Alice. Ellie returned and plopped back down with a smirk. "She's lying,"she reported baldly. "She was never pregnant."

All of Sanchez's composure and common sense fled at the last word. "N-no. She wouldn't. She couldn't."

"Well, she's sure as shit not pregnant now," Ellie said. "I've had two kids, I'd know."

"So...she lied?"

"Quite."

"I-I did everything for her. For our baby. So we could be a family. And she lied. She lied."

"Quit blubbering," Alec said contemptuously. "Tell us everything. Make Alice pay for what she did to you. Take her down with you."

Ellie added another layer of despair. "You don't have anything left to lose. Calling a lawyer's not gonna reverse what she did."

"I did this for our baby. If there's no baby...nothing matters." Bereft, Sanchez spilled his heartbroken guts.

Six months ago, Alice was transferred from delivering mail to being Detective Sanchez's secretary. He was reluctant at first, insisting that he didn't need a secretary; Chief Boden said that the state of his office suggested otherwise. Sanchez gave in, and met Alice. Sparks flew immediately. Small and unassuming, she was surprised that he noticed her at all, let alone was polite to her. When Sanchez finally worked up the nerve to ask her for a drink, she jumped on it. They closed down the bar that night, talking until two in the morning. They went out to lunch the next day, and dinner that night. He was taken with Alice, and she seemed the same with him.