Contributed by Douglas Noble on 08/01/08

Wind chill. Water like grey glass. The sullen caws of gulls whirling overhead. Kelso hated bodies at the beach. Especially in winter.

There was the usual din that accompanied a corpse. The forensics and the photographers. The gawpers and the gazers. Kelso pushed past the men waiting impatiently with a stretcher and walked toward the scene. Barton greeted him. Kelso grunted in return.

“What have we got?” he asked, more out of force of habit than need to know. He could see what they had, sprawled out on the sand. Skin a pale exclamation in the shivering morning light.

“Little girl, sir.”

“Oh?”

“Dead, sir. Bludgeoned. Call came in at… at six am. Early morning dog walker found the body. Got quite a shock.”

“Six am? Bloody hell. Remind me never to get a dog.”

Kelso trudged over to where the body lay and took a look. The photographer was taking pictures as he walked up, but he stopped after a little and walked off by himself, leaving Kelso alone with the body of the girl. He made a note of the angles of her limbs, of the points where her skin had split and where it had started to bruise. The gulls had been at her eyes and the broken bridge of her nose. Her hair wasn’t wet. He took out his notebook and wrote something down.

“It’s a lonely spot, sir.” Barton was hovering behind him, trying to see what he was writing. Standing off balance, trying to see past Kelso’s shoulder.

“Life’s lonely, Barton.” Kelso turned and started to walk along the beach, with Barton moving along after him. The sand was littered with the things that the sea had left behind. Old bits of rope. Plastic bottles. The things that no-one minded losing. Without a breeze, the wind had nothing to say about it.

“What’s that?” Kelso pointed.

It was a doll, placidly lying on its back as though it had been set out to sunbathe. Wrong time of year for that though. Granules of sand peppered the plastic of its hard skin. Kelso tilted his head and looked at it. Something was off, somewhere. It was almost as though it had been placed deliberately. Laid down on the sand to wait for something, or to watch over something, like a marker, or a buoy.

Maybe it was the way that it lay. Kelso couldn’t help but wonder if this was what they had expected – this calm, peaceful pose. Nothing like the body he had been avoiding looking at. The sea hissed a sour note, waves fizzing out in desperate bubbling.

Barton bent down and reached for the doll.

“Don’t touch that.”

“I thought it might be important,” said Barton, “Maybe she’d dropped it before she died.”

“It is important, but she didn’t drop it.”

Gently, Kelso turned the doll over with his foot. The back of its head was encrusted with sand and blood. The synthetic strands of yellow hair pierced the darkening matter and tangled, forming new alphabets of hurt in letters of brightest yellow.

“That’s the murder weapon.” Beside him, Barton stared down at the doll, his eyes wide and watery in the morning chill. Kelso turned away and started back toward his car and to the road.