Work Text:
Accounts According to Daisy
She never understood why her dad was always gone. She watched him leave the house as she was just being woken up for school. She watched him come home late in the evening, tired and tense as she got ready for bed. She’d even watched a dim orange glow from under her bedroom door flicker as faint mumbling could be heard from the living room.
She once tried to stay up as late as she could, not going to sleep until she would see the light go out. Though, before she knew it, she had fallen asleep by ten, never knowing when that light had finally been put out. She assumed it would have been on for hours more.
She even asked, one day, “Why are you always gone? I never get to see you. Play with me! Just for five minutes.” She even gave him a great smile and hug.
Her dad gave her a sad smile and gave her a hug, and in that moment, it felt like it lasted for an eternity. His long arms wrapping around her small body and his heartbeat silently thumping in her ear.
“I love you, Daisy,” he said in her ear, kissing her on top of her head. He left, again, after that. And, if she looked back to that day, she would remember seeing a tear fall from his eye as he left for work that day, not to come back until late that evening.
The cycle would repeat for years, and over those couple of years, she had grown fond of her mother more so than her father.
Her mum seemed to have everything balanced. She wouldn’t leave the house until a proper breakfast was fixed up and would be home when Daisy was dropped off. On occasion, she would volunteer for school activities.
When Daisy had finally gotten old enough when parents volunteering was lame, she saw less and less of both her mother and father and more of her granddad. She’d spend silent evenings finishing homework by herself and watching TV until bedtime. She’d practice clarinet in hopes of one day performing for her mum and dad. And when they finally came home, she’d be ready a hug and kiss on the head and a voice telling her how proud they were of her.
And then, something changed. Work schedules became more relaxed. Almost every night the whole family would enjoy a nice dinner and would play games and watch TV together. Weekends became family bonding time, taking walks and going on bike rides.
The audience seemed to give a grander applause after concerts and trips to get ice cream afterwards with her family became more regular. Even her dad would be there. He would smile and compliment her on everything she did. Even after getting a simple algebra problem right or getting an A on an essay.
In a year’s time, things would change, yet again.
Daisy changed.
She didn’t want her dad’s praise. She yearned for her mother’s love. The one person on earth who would understand everything she was going through. She didn’t want father-daughter bonding time. She wanted to know how to make more friends or how to paint her nails. She wanted to be like the other daughters who had mums who baked for them and planned all the play days.
But everything else changed too.
Daisy had become more independent, but it seemed that her parents had too. Over the years she noticed more petty bickering and late nights of muffled yelling while they thought Daisy was asleep. She noticed her dad staying at work for longer and her mother coming home with a great scowl or headache.
Concerts were deserted and family weekends became non-existent. She saw fewer smiles and heard less laughter. Sooner or later friendly dinner conversations became heated arguments Daisy would excuse herself from and movie nights went from mother-daughter time to no time at all.
Then the Gillespie case came along, making things a thousand times worse than before. She watched as her father beat himself to death over the case. She rarely saw him eat dinner or sleep. It was unhealthy, but he never said anything about it. He’d even go through the trouble on putting a false smile on every time he passed Daisy in the house. Her mother would tell her not to worry about it, but even she didn’t sound too confident with her own words.
Bickering late at night became even more common. She had overheard one of the conversations and it had something to do with hospitals and heart problems. Daisy didn’t want to hear it though, so instead, she popped on headphones and listened to music instead.
She watched as the once tidy house she lived in became littered with case folders and old dishes no one cared to clean. Even days when her parents weren’t supposed to be working, she’d watch as they’d leave the house for various reasons relating to the case they kept so secret.
Daisy had to research herself to learn anything about what her parents were working on. They wouldn’t say anything about it. She had learned about the two missing girls and she wondered what would happen if she went missing. Would the case always take priority over their daughter? Would they even notice?
She felt her own tolerance for everything decrease too. She had lashed out on her dad when he told her to clean her room and when her mum said everything was fine. Of course it wasn’t fine.
There was one day when she felt pity for them. When she felt pity for her dad. He had come home shaking, his whole body drained from colour. That day it was raining and it looked as though he’d sat in the rain all day. It was the one day she could truly see how tired he looked and how all of the stress had been eating away at what he once was.
That evening she had woken up to a loud thump. She stayed in her room silently, listening to the muffled voices of her parents. For once, her mum wasn’t yelling at her dad, and her dad wasn’t snapping back. No. This was a hundred times more painful than that.
What she heard was the sound of her dad sobbing and her mum trying to calm him. She heard the conversation of the dead girl’s body being found in a river that followed. She heard how it was rotted and how horribly it was treated. And then she heard, “and I could only think ‘what if it was Daisy’.”
She listened to the conversation that followed. How much her dad hated being away and how much her mum agreed. She wanted to run in her parent’s room and give them both a hug – but she didn’t. She stayed in bed, curled up under her blankets. She didn’t sleep for the rest of that night.
A year later and she had forgotten everything about the night she couldn’t sleep. All she could think about was how her father could ever do something like he did. He had an affair with some other woman. He’d failed the family he had spent all that time in for. The one he abandoned his own family for. Not only that, but he didn’t even tell her this. She had to learn it from the school gossip. She had to learn it from all the stares she got one day while walking in the hall and all the silent treatments she got from her friends.
A month flew by and her parents had set up for a divorce.
She hated her father and nothing he would do would ever make up for it.
When he was gone, she was glad. She and her mum got back to their normal lives. A couple months later, her mum had gotten a new boy friend, Dave. He was kind and was in the same workforce as her mum. She didn’t mind him. Never bothered him, though her mum became almost obsessed with Dave.
A few months passed and the talk of Sandbrook died down. All of the press must have been told to hush it up because nothing about it was ever in the papers. Town talk had gone back to it’s usual and life seemed to carry on. She hated her father less, but nothing he would do would ever make up for breaking the family Daisy had loved before.
She’d receive calls from her father that she wouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to hear the messages to know who it was, so she would just delete them. She almost answered one of them to tell him to stop calling and that she wasn’t interested in what he had to say, but the amount of unanswered calls became less and less.
But then they stopped.
For several months she had gotten no messages or calls, and quite frankly, it worried her. She became relieved when she had walked in on her mum talking to him on the phone. She sounded just as annoyed as if he were standing there in the kitchen beside her. Though, for a moment, she had almost thought she looked worried.
She then heard something about a Broadchurch come up. She later searched up Broadchurch on Google finding images of a seaside town. It was really, really small.
Weeks later, she searched the town again, this time multiple news articles popped up with her father’s name in them. He was the lead Detective Inspector of a murder case. She saw a picture come up along side it of a young boy, Danny Latimer, and his mum.
Interested, she kept tabs on the case, checking in every other day to see how the case progressed. The police allowed for very few details to be released, all until one evening on the news, she saw that they had arrested someone who was responsible for the death of Danny Latimer.
Weeks later, Daisy caught her mum talking on the phone about a trial. Days later, her mum had told her that her dad was coming back for the weekend. Her mum looked pissed because he wouldn’t say why.
Daisy was also pissed because she really didn’t want to talk to him. As if she would ever forget what he had done.
The evening they met up for dinner was as awkward as it could get. Her mum was right about her dad being fussy about the food. The evening only got worse after that. The one thing she didn’t want to talk about was the Gillespie case, yet, somehow it was mentioned.
She had hated that the stranger had mentioned Pippa. How he mentioned she was the same age as Daisy and how her father had failed them. Daisy already knew that her father had failed that family, and she didn’t need a constant reminder of that.
The rest of the evening was silent. Her dad left and that was that.
She then heard her mum talking to her father once more in the kitchen talking about the results of the trial.
She was shooed away minutes later, not hearing the verdict, so she decided to research for herself, searching for all of the updates on the Miller vs Crown trial. She scrolled through Olly Stevens’s twitter feed and searched through all of the most recent Echo articles.
And of course, the trusty internet didn’t give her the answers she wanted. Instead, it suggested other articles to search for, and, just when Daisy had gotten to the point of thinking she had seen everything about her dad, a new article had been posted only a day ago.
She clicked on the link, scrolling through, not believing what she saw.
The Truth Behind What Went Wrong During the Sandbrook Murders
Article by Olly Stevens
For a long time, the case of the Gillespie family has been sitting cold and without closure due to lack of time, resources, and ultimately, a mistake; a valuable piece of evidence was lost. For years, the Detective Inspector Alec Hardy had taken the fall for the evidence being stolen.
After working vigorously on the unfortunate murder of Danny Latimer, Detective Inspector Hardy agreed to sit down with us. He tells us that “[his] DS was taking the bagged evidence back to HQ” but had stopped along the way, leaving the evidence in her car.
“She was having an affair with one of the other DSes on the team” he tells us. “She’d thought she’d celebrate.” The car was later broken into with the evidence and multiple other valuables stolen. He explains that because it had happened under his watch, he felt responsible for what had happened and felt a duty to protect both the reputation and family members of the DS, though, asking us to keep the DS unnamed.
Daisy shook her head, unable to read the rest of the article. The DS didn’t have to remain unnamed because she already knew who the DS was. Daisy shut the computer off and stormed out of her room to confront her mum; the one person she believed wouldn’t abandon her like her father. The woman she loved because she was truthful and honest.
“What in the hell did I just read?” she asked.
Her mum sat on the sofa, her glasses sliding down her nose as she looked up from the crossword puzzle she was doing.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Of course I’m not bloody alright!” Daisy yelled. “You let me hate him! You let me believe that he abandoned me! You let me believe he was some selfish bastard that had an affair with another woman all those years ago, but in truth, it was you!” Her voice cracked and shook as tears streamed down her face.
Her mum stayed put where she was, then finally asked, “what are you talking about?”
And Daisy couldn’t believe it. “Fuck you,” she said, then stormed off to her room.
She could hear her mother following.
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that, Daisy,” said her mother furiously.
Daisy spun around in her room, staring at her mother. “Then you shouldn’t have lied to me about what happened!” She then quickly logged back on to her computer and showed her the article.
Her mother stood there in silence for a bit, but then sighed. “Daisy, I’m sorry.”
“No you bloody aren’t!” cried Daisy. “If you were sorry you would have told me earlier! You would have taken the blame!”
“I never told him to take the blame, Daisy. He choose to do that!”
“Did you even try to stop him, though?” she asked.
Her mum stayed silent.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Daisy-”
“Don’t!” Daisy yelled again, then calmed herself. “Get out of my room,” she eventually said. “I don’t want to see you.”
Her mother only nodded.
Daisy was left, yet again, alone.
She slammed her door shut and then plopped herself on her bed. She then curled up and cried. For years she hated everything about her father, and now she almost hated him more for letting her think that way.
She then scrolled through all of the messages he had sent. She had eventually gotten too lazy to go back and delete some of them, so she luckily had a couple messages saved.
“Hi. Yeah. Er – reached your voicemail – again. That’s alright. You’re probably just busy with schoolwork and clarinet lessons – are you still playing the clarinet? Haven’t gotten any invitations to concerts in a long time… um, but it’s alright. Call me when you get the chance, yeah? I love you.”
“Hi Daisy. It’s dad – well you probably already know that. It would be great to hear from you sometime. I really do miss you. Er, anyway, I hope you and your mum are doing fine. Please call back. It would be – er – it’d be good to know I’m not calling the wrong phone number. Uh, anyway. Talk to you soon, hopefully.”
“Hey, it’s me. Just checkin’ in with your voice mail – as usual. If you – er – if you get a chance, give me a call. It’s been a long time. I mean I know you’re busy with school and home… and all the things you do, but … I – er – I do think about you … every day. Sorry. Sorry. Not getting’ soppy. Sorry. Had my warnin’ on that. Um … we could do a video call, couldn’t we? I’d like that, you know. You could be my first video call – before you forget – er – forget what I look like . . . right. Well, that’s me. This is dad signin’ off. I love you, darlin’. Please give me a ring.”
Daisy cried even more after listening to the messages. All those time he had called she expected some long and soppy apology for what had happened. She had expected some sort of confession and after that a plea for her to visit. But all he ever wanted was to hear her voice. That’s all.
She thought of all the obvious things she should have seen. How he hadn’t said anything about having a girlfriend when her mum had gotten her own boyfriend only weeks later. How he refused to talk about the subject and never admitted he did it, other than when he had told the papers.
She should have seen it. But she didn’t.
Daisy sighed and closed her eyes. She was tired and wished that none of this would ever happen, and, maybe in her dreams, it might come true.