“Everyone I spoke to, on that side of the [police] fence, believe she was murdered,” says Ford. “Which fascinated me, because I didn’t expect that an overwhelming number of people would come to me and say, ‘We think she was involved with somebody dodgy.’ And I couldn’t see that she would kill herself.
“I struggled with that for a long time because it just didn’t seem like her. So I was trying to explore the three main theories – that she had cut her foot off and done a runner and escaped; the other theory that kept coming to me was she’s involved with some dodgy people and they’ve killed her; and then, of course, the third theory was simply that she’d gone over [notorious suicide spot] the Gap.”
Colin Friels plays the invented character of “dodgy” associate George.
To do this, Ford and Miller turned Caddick (played by Kate Atkinson) into her own unreliable narrator. As she says in the opener, “If you believe that story [referring to the three theories], you will believe anything. Then again, I found most people will believe anything. That’s how I got rich in the first place.”
Says Ford: “She seemed like the perfect person to do [an unreliable narration] with because if she’s going to be telling you the story, then you can bet that the story’s going to have whole bits of it that aren’t true, because that’s what she was.”
The next thing was to invent someone who could be the mysterious “dodgy” type Caddick could have become…
