Broadchurch: Old Friends (Story 3): A Series Two Original Short Story by Erin Kelly, Chris Chibnall Page A

from everyone. There’s something that needs her attention back in Broadchurch and she doesn’t want to be drawn on it. She quickly changes the subject to the weather forecast before saying goodbye and starting to pack her suitcase.
    Jocelyn did not, as a rule, become attached to her clients, but Jack and Rowena Marshall were an exception.
    She thought of them both as her clients, even though he was the criminal. The charge: unlawful sex with a minor, the May-to-December relationship consummated just over a month shy of the girl’s sixteenth birthday. Jack was the first sex offender Jocelyn ever represented, and her last ever defence case. He was also her final client before she got silk. He could barely afford her then and he certainly wouldn’t be able to now.
    So why did she take him on? She certainly wasn’t fishing for friends in the pool of dirty old men or nymphomaniac schoolgirls. Initially, she met him for the experience – when prosecuting sex crimes, it pays to know your enemy – and to placate Neil, her overworked clerk. He dangled the buff file by its red ribbon and let it swing before her eyes like a hypnotist’s watch.
    ‘Bloke wants to plead not guilty,’ said the clerk. ‘I need someone to persuade him not to take it to trial. You won’t win, and he can’t afford it.’ (Neil was afflicted with a conscience, a terrible handicap in a clerk.)
    Jocelyn raised one eyebrow at him. ‘Why me?’
    ‘He’s a stubborn old fucker. I need an unstoppable force for my immovable object.’ Neil let the file drop onto her desk.
    ‘I didn’t say I’d take it!’ she called at Neil’s retreating back, but she was already tugging at the ribbon.
    Jocelyn invited Jack and Rowena to come down from Yorkshire for the express purpose of giving them a bollocking. She was rightly famous for her bollockings. She never prepared them but they seemed to come out of her mouth fully formed, as eloquent as any closing speech. It broke the ice and gave clients a taste of what they would undergo in court. This bollocking would write itself. Five weeks! If they’d only kept their pants on for five more weeks, they wouldn’t have broken the law. Of all the pointless cases …
    And then she saw the two of them, nervously holding hands in reception, Jack in a tweed jacket that looked older than Rowena, although she was the one with a protective arm across his chest. The bollocking disappeared like words being erased from a screen. Love; as rare as a comet, and just as unmistakable. Jocelyn Knight could recognise love when she saw it, in other people at least.
    ‘You tell me why he should have to stand trial when there’s actual rapists out there getting away with it?’ said Rowena.
    ‘A guilty plea gets you a shorter sentence,’ said Jocelyn. ‘You could serve as little as a year.’ Jack flinched and Rowena put her head in her hands. Jocelyn softened her tone. ‘The sooner you change your plea, the sooner you’ll be back together.’
    When Jack was inside, he and Jocelyn wrote to each other, largely about the books they were reading. She introduced him to Michael Chabon and he persuaded her to finally give Wilkie Collins a go. Jack never told Jocelyn what he was going through in prison and it was not in her nature to ask. She never visited; those orders were too precious for Jack to waste on anyone but Rowena.
    He served just over a year. Six weeks after his release, he and Rowena married. Jocelyn and her then pupil, a bright spark called Sharon Bishop, were the only witnesses at the wedding. It was a fond but formal sort of friendship. They saw each other perhaps once a year or so, always as a threesome. Jocelyn found that she had more in common with Rowena, still a teenager, than she did with many of her peers; she was serious about music and serious about Jack, but everything else was at the mercy of her tinderbox-dry humour. The three met at recitals at the Wigmore Hall every winter, or new plays at the Donmar.