A Fastidious Night

CHAPTER ONE
After a while the torch beams of the other searchers turned into distant flashes of light and the voices became an occasional call carried on the wind and not definitely identifiable as animal, let alone human. Inspector Wicks looked up from the boggy ground in front of his feet as the moon came out from behind a black scurrying cloud.
   "Hot diggity daffodil!" His boot slipped sideways pitching him forwards.  Not only did he now have wet knees and a wet sock but he had managed to hit the only rock between here and Sheffield and he struggled to his feet ruefully rubbing his sore neck.  He was dog-tired.  What a night, what a really fastidious night, one which had actually started well, on his settee with a takeaway and a can of lager in front of the TV and should have ended a couple of hours later in bed with a large tot of his favourite single malt on the bedside table. Instead here he was tramping a particularly inhospitable part of the moor, looking for a lost kid called Cecile whose most recent school photo had covered the front pages of all the papers for the last two days. He groaned; damn this job; damn Crimewatch; damn the busybody public with their farfetched anonymous tip-offs. If only he was in bed, if only he was half on the sidewalk, half off, if only he was anywhere else.

Another thick curtain of cloud was drawn across the leering face of the moon, accompanied by a high-pitched whistle. Was that the signal? Had something been found? He struggled to avoid imagining what that something might be, instead his mind produced a sudden image of the diminutive timid bunny that had stalked his night hours in childhood, he squashed that thought too, a childish terror but not one to conjure up in the present circumstances.  He deliberately formed an image of his own small son fast asleep in that terraced house in South London, under the blue dolphin duvet cover that …… blue, something had been blue.  He swung back the torch beam, retracing the path it had taken, a child’s blue belt buckle.  Probably been there for weeks, blown away on a summer picnic.  It looked new.  Reluctantly but methodically he directed his torch over a 6 metre circle surrounding the blue belt buckle. This time white, the white curve of a small bent leg, a tangle of arms, neck twisted sideways, life-sized but not life-like, surely an abandoned doll, let fall and forgotten at the day’s end: and beside the doll, incongruously, partially obscuring its face, an all too real-looking icicle. 

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