My grief is like the ocean, dark and overwhelming. Its crashing waves engulf me, the darkness unfolds me. Strangling my veins. My thoughts are cobwebbed and suffocating my brain, drowning out my memories of you. But now those same waves have returned, their powerful white horses dragging her with them. If I hadn’t been a victim of the sea, I would have believed the facade. The ocean is powerful, with enough force to destroy and rival the land, as well as a loved one and their family. But then again, the most innocent of faces are always the wildest. You know that.

Death is never ending and ever present in my line of work as well as in my life, somehow painfully ironic. After being a detective for over sixteen years, just before you were born, and seeing everything there is to see, I never realised how much this present case would affect me.  The pain I’d buried with you, is now being exhumed.

Every day, month and year I strive to find missing children, or their killers. To ensure I can secure justice for those families, as I supposedly received. One thing I can never fix is the heartbreak and destruction left behind. How can I ever fill the hole in the parents’ hearts that is the shape of the child they have lost? No matter how much evidence, support and guidance I can offer, the puzzle of their heart will forever be incomplete. This is what I struggle with the most. No one thinks it’ll happen to them, every parent protects their child from this but sometimes, it’s not enough. Everyone sees the endless news reports, the appeals, the missing posters, the devastated parents, as they hold on to every hope of finding them. But no one thinks that that could have been their child. No one wants to accept this happens, but I have to. I’m one of them.

Pictures are all I have of you now, as well as the memories that will live on in my heart. But some pictures are too heart-breaking to look at: your ‘Missing’ pictures, the photograph that was meant to be proud and centre on the mantelpiece, of you in your ‘big girl’ school uniform with your blonde locks in pigtails that I had perfected for you that morning. Your innocence shines out of you as you grin cheekily. It’s a painful reminder that I’ll never see a graduation photo, or even your children. The other photograph of you with your floppy summer beach hat falling off your head as you giggled hysterically as we played on the beach – the beach you were found on only months later. Or even the first photograph we ever received of you, your tiny fragile body represented through a grainy image. I love that your beauty and our memories can live on forever with me, but the photos also hurt the most. They battle as comforters and tormentors both, as I think of all the memories that we could have made, that have been taken away from us forever left by the ocean. I’ll never see you grow up and leave school, or be able to walk you down the aisle, or even as much as speak to you again. You’ll forever be that missing shell from the shore that was taken and crushed by the dark cruel waves.

You will never know how much you were wanted, your mother and I were desperate to have a child, but couldn’t. The desperation nearly led us to breaking point, until we adopted you. You filled the missing piece in our hearts and completed our beautiful family. We vowed to protect you and we adored our gorgeous blue-eyed baby, but all too soon you were cruelly snatched out of our hands.

No one understands this pain until they have experienced it. The ‘Missing’ photographs just spark a brief flash of sympathy and act as a reminder of keeping your loved ones close to the public, but never truly come close to representing the emotional turmoil and life-destroying feelings behind it. Life beamed in all its energy from those photographs of you on the beach and death has removed all that vitality and potential, never to be seen again. After all of my experience both professionally and emotionally, I always keep in mind that a body isn’t just another case, it’s another life taken, another family broken apart another life I get to know, even after death. In some ways, this person does live on, at least for me. The crime scene is a parting message.

Now as I am tasked with unravelling the last few days of this girl, I keep in mind the justice I was served. But some days I am less at peace, like her family. Will what I do for her and my daughter ever be enough? Some days I have faith in the law and that the person that took you away had things taken away too. Some days I believe I can restore and heal fractured wounds, but I can never fill that missing piece.

The way she smiles up, with gleaming bright eyes and an honest wide grin through the picture, reminds me of an older version of you. She pulls you in and I can feel her gaze penetrate my mind and my thoughts, her energy seeps through the photos as I feel my blood surge through my veins. The photograph has captured her in a carefree happy moment, very similar to the one of you on the beach, and has frozen her memory there forever.

Her bloodied corpse now, bears no resemblance to this once beautiful girl. One very similar to how you would have appeared now. Her long silky golden hair no longer cascades down her slender back to her waist but now looks like broken straw cropped to just above her bruised cold neck. Her family say her hair was part of her personality and had always set her apart from everyone else. Her flowing mane added a halo- like glow around her striking features and fair freckled skin. Now her smile has vanished, her fair skin ice cold and stiff to touch and pale blue in colour. Her long athletic limbs are no longer fuelled with life and her red lips that once framed her sparkling smile are burst and frozen closed forever, harbouring the secrets of her mysterious death and final days.

As I scramble to piece this case together, I look at our last piece of evidence, the letters. As I slice the crimson red envelope open, the deathly white paper slides out and the words spill out onto my hands.

“Dearest Ava,

I don’t know why it had to end like this. I never wanted to lose you or give you up. Today will be your sixteenth Birthday, and I still can’t believe my beautiful blue- eyed baby is now turning into a woman. I never intended to let you go, but I was only sixteen. I am desperate to see you, or even just receive a letter to see how you are doing? I have tried for many years to get in contact with you, but my letters were just returned. Please find in this envelope a birthday card for every year I wrote to you. I know I may be too late, but please know I will love you unconditionally and I truly believe we have the strongest bond any two human beings can have. After all you are the only person that knows my heartbeat from the inside.

I wish you all the happiness and joy in the world and hope you to hear from you soon,

Your loving mother, Anne xx”

As I read, another piece of the jigsaw appears – an image of your tiny monochrome body in your first ever picture. It flutters slowly to the sand and blows on the calm breeze to the sea.