Fleet ‘Time will tell’

He paused, scratched his head with his pen, as if to recall something he had forgotten 

‘…and,’ he stuttered,‘something has turned up at the church, over the last few months, we’ve had reports of moving lights at night. Youths probably, come down from the caravan park, drinking, playing ghosts, larking around.’

She turned fully and looked him directly in the face. 

‘He is young, almost too young to keep the law, never mind enforce it,’ she thought to herself

‘Is there a connection? Between that and…,’ 

She paused, hesitated, sighing at the release of the stress over the past hours- not least from the interviews and cameras that had poked her privacy, as well as asking her the same questions about what she had discovered until there were no more answers any different than the one she repeatedly gave.

‘You know the smuggling history along this coastline, the shipwrecks, the beach and the flooded church…’

Her voice trailed off. The mystery of it all sounded too real, too familiar somehow, almost like a predictable television after nine show.

‘ I don’t know. But we do have a missing person, an abandoned car, and a wreck of bones dragged from who knows where,’ he paused himself, then added,‘and when.’

Behind them, the waves had lessened in their intensity, the roar and rage of the shingle had shifted to a hiss and rattle. The crowd of people had thinned. The tideline was mostly of broken wood, seaweed and fragments of casings, caskets and long thin bends of binding metal.Twisted and rusted they pointed, wildly, madly, at shattered bottles, brown glass and thin arms of a myriad of twigs and branches that had piled in heaps from the retreating tide.

‘How do you trace a missing person who you know has abandoned his life, his time, and probably drowned in the sea?’ He asked.

‘Time will tell,’ she mumbled almost to herself.

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