Fleet ‘The Key.’

The helicopter flew low, hovering above the breaking tide. The ship was a bleached skeleton of former seaworthiness. Fragments of sail and broken masts, collapsed and shattered, lay at broken angles and forgotten shapes, upon the seaweed and barnacle encrusted former deck.

The press had long since left. Leaving a sense of puzzlement and cheapness amongst the temporary beach combers. They grouped and haggled along the retreating tide, looking for meaning and hidden discoveries in the centuries old flotsam and jetsam that bobbed and begged with the incoming waves. 

The ship was not large, but looked more so as it lay like a collapsed and  broken dragon across the raised pebble beach.

Cassie and her owner stood over the abandoned clothes, heads down pawing and shuffling sand, still wondering at what had happened, she spoke again to the bewildered officer, himself looking as if he alone had survived the storm.

‘Is that it? They take their pictures, broadcast their videos and leave us here, abandoned? What about the missing man? His car?’

She shook her head, as if shaking it for answers thinking alone couldn’t find.

‘No ma’am, it’ll be an ongoing investigation now: missing person or suspected suicide. We just don’t know.’

He paused and looked at Cassie digging and sniffing around and under the clothes, growling in low murmurs of canine dissatisfaction.

‘We can’t trace the car to an owner apart from it was hired from AVIS and never returned. The key belongs to the church, although the warden has what he thought was the only one- the original from 1772. The village family emblem, shaped like a ‘Y’ and the date are inscribed on each side.The key left in the car is the same key, but without the rust and dents of age. 

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