EMOTICON

; )

Chapter I. Emoticon

Cwmbran, South Wales. Dead of night. Sunday morning, June 21^st, 2009. Dan's phone buzzed, he put down his glass of whisky, picked up the phone. It was from Matthew, his sister Gwen's husband. He hadn't seen them in over two years. He read the text message:

51 34 70 N 1 34 21 74 W. b there b4 sunrise. ; )

He keyed the co-ordinates into Google Maps, noted the destination, cocked an eyebrow and looked at his watch. He then pressed 'get directions'...estimated travel time...1 hour 35 minutes. Sunrise was 4.46, he would make it if he left immediately.

Private investigator Dan Jones deliberately kept the van below the speed limit as he drove east through the dark along the Second Severn Crossing on the M4 motorway, aware of the speed cameras tracking his passage and wary of the zealousness of Welsh traffic cops. As soon as he reached the English side of the bridge he gunned the engine, accelerated and banged the music up. He was listening to the album Sandinista by the Clash. 'Somebody got Murdered' boomed out of the speakers.

Forty five minutes later his GPS system issued instructions of an impending manouvre “In a quarter of a mile...”, he obeyed and turned off the M4 at junction 15 and was soon headed north up the A419... Twenty five minutes later a disembodied female voice intoned “You have reached your destination”, He pulled into the designated disabled carpark, yanked up the handbrake, slid to a halt, unbuckled, grabbed his rucksack, scrambled out of the van. Pulled out his torch.

His phone buzzed, another text from Matthew:

follow the sign. b quick. u don't want to miss it. ; )

A National Trust wooden sign displaying an image of the White Horse of Uffington pointed him to a footpath, he followed it. Ten minutes later he was standing on the chalk eye of the White Horse. Below him stretched a vast plain, dark grey and still in the early morning gloaming. Immediately north, half a mile distant, he noticed a dim flashing amber glow in one of the wheat fields. Another text...

follow the light. ; )

He pointed his torch and looked for a way down the steep incline. Fifteen minutes later, breathing heavily now, Dan Jones came to a halt and looked down the torch beam to the remains of a dead young woman's prostrate body.

The sun was now rising so he switched off the torch, waited, looked, tried to calm his laboured breathing and his thudding heart. The torch had wavered in his unsteady hand, throwing misleading hues and shadows across the scene, but as the sun crept above the distant tree line to the northeast, shadows began to sharpen, details emerged, colours crystallised.

Even though she had been horribly disfigured Dan recognised with growing horror that the dead woman was his sister Gwen. Despite his utter shock, his forensic training started recording the scene in his mind.

She was lying face up. He noted her red hair and pretty, freckled face. Her left eyelid appeared to have been surgically removed, as had her two lips, like a wink and a smile he realized. Both her ears had been sliced off to the scalp with a precision instrument. Her ponytail had been snipped off and placed next to her right thigh. Dan thought there was something disconcertingly comical about the way her limbs were positioned, she looked like a big X, as if she were midway through a star jump or a snow angel. Pale green T shirt, light blue denim skirt, mid-green tights, red Doc Marten boots. There was a faint smell of smoke.

As the sun rose higher Dan Jones raised his horrified, tearful analytical gaze from his dead sister to look around him. He was in a huge wheat field gently undulating to the horizon in the golden morning-whispered breeze. He and the dead woman were at the centre of a 30 metre wide circle of perfectly flattened wheat stalks. As he looked around the surrounding wall of standing wheat it appeared that only one person had entered the crop circle and that was he himself.

In the growing light Dan looked back to the mutilated torso at his feet and his eyes slid to the mobile phone in his dead sister's left hand. As he did so it buzzed. He stooped and gently removed it from her cold white rigid fingers. The phone was unlocked. Text message. He opened it. There was no indication as to who had sent it, it read:

follow the darkness ; )

He scrolled up, read the last three sent messages, they were all addressed to himself, he was holding Matthew's phone.

In Dan's head Joe Strummer was singing:

Somebody got murdered,

Somebody, dead forever.

To the north-east black smoke was rising, partly obscuring the risen sun. A single bead of cold sweat ran down Dan Jones' spine as around him the air shimmered in the warming midsummer, wheat-misted dawn. He started running towards the black smoke.