The Waiting Man

( I have rewritten and added to chapter 1 so im posting this now, chapter 2 will be up in the next few hours !)

Chapter 1

Cooly the water washed over his toes, the icy cold numbing his feet. He watched the people laugh in the water, the sun blaring down on their bare backs. He buried his feet deeper into the ground letting the wet sand shift and slide beneath his toes.

The beach filled and the water was over his ankles now, slowly edging towards his body. He straightened his legs, allowing the water to seep into his jeans, glueing them to his legs. Slowly his brain wandered into the dark crevices in which he hid things.

As the noise died on the beach, he was left in deathly silence, alone with a dying sunset. The water methodically rolled up and down his body. He felt dead to the world but with no reason why. He'd spent the whole day sitting, thinking, but what had made him. In the twilight he could see the scattered debris of the days activity on the beach, packets floating in the air like phantoms, the odd forgotten towel and derelict sand castle littered the once immaculate sand. He held on to this thought as his last, but why and why couldn't he move. Panic was setting in, but still the water slapped against his chin, relentless. He remembered. He opened is mouth to scream but the water flooded in and all that could be heard was as soft gargling. The clammy hands grasped onto his body. The sand sucked him in and he was gone.

Slowly the water washed over the sand in the calm peace of a summers night.

***
Somewhere in the cloak of darkness he smiled, the mechanisms clicking through his head, calculating, waiting...

***
DI Rob Jones sat at his desk, staring blankly at the bright screen of his computer. His hand searched for his coffee in the darkness. He lifted it up to touch his lips but instantly spat it out again, cold. He could have sworn he made it 10 minutes ago. His watch read 4:30am. How could 2 hours feel like 10 minutes... The sun would start to rise in an hour and he needed to make some progress before then. Every night he would come and sit, working on the case no one else thought was important, but he knew better. Every night he would run through theories and test them. He wrote everything down on the file on the computer. The blank screen stared back at him like an old nemesis.

Slowly the top of the sun drifted above the trees. He watched through the window as the orange glow illuminated the white office, giving the sense it was burning. The birds began to chirp, their shrill voices breaking through the wall of silence. Rob disliked the day, its business, its noise, it's people, rushing around like there is no tomorrow. Whereas in the darkness there was nothing, no distractions. He liked the peace of the night it comforted him but soon his silent sanctuary would be disrupted so he saved the file, however pointless, and got to work on the less personal cases