Bishop....... Written by Vic Davey

 Detective Inspector Frank Bishop knelt on the cold, hard earth, leaned forward and peered into the darkness of the abyss which dropped away below him. There was disappointment that he couldn't see the broken, twisted body lying at the bottom, but no guilt for what he'd done, the death he'd caused.

He got up and leaned against his car as a gust of wind caught his raincoat and set it flapping like the wings of a Swan taking off. He smiled to himself, sometimes justice was worth all the pain in achieving it. 

He got into his car and sat there for a moment, tracing his thoughts back over the last year or more. Was it that long ago when the first child went missing? When he was assigned the case? When the search began?

 He remembered them all....two eleven year olds and two young teens, their lives hardly begun, their futures' snatched away from them. He thought about the hours and hours of deeply emotional interviews, the parents and families, schoolteachers.....everyone whose lives had been touched by these youngsters. And the searches......streets, houses, alleyways, gardens.....

He thought about the days, weeks, months of painstaking trawl of their Social Media accounts, searching, constantly searching for that one shred of information, that one message which looked out of place. Tracking, identifying and interviewing each and every contact....

It got to him eventually, the stress, the seemingly hopeless search, the dead ends and then the dead bodies turning up.....

PTSD they called it, work related stress, put on extended leave. But he couldn't leave it, made too many promises to too many parents. Obsessed. He had already copied the case files and sent them to his own email address. Completely illegal of course, but he didn't care. On his own, he believed he could achieve more than a team of people. 

He worked during the day, rested some at night, with a little help from his prescribed meds and a rather good Single Malt he treated himself to. 

A week into his search, he found it. A single thread linking all their accounts and, via false i.ds and a maze of fake accounts, he found it, a Tiktok, seemingly innocent, but underneath, manned by a predator, posing as another teenager, to groom the innocent.....

Bishop set up his own fake account, and, appearing as a twelve year old boy, over the course of a couple of weeks, was able to convince the Groomer he was genuine.

 They chatted about football, new online games, music, everything young kids liked to chat about. 

And then the meeting. Luring him into the open. How ridiculously easy it was and how surprised the Groomer was when Bishop plunged the hypodermic into his neck, then half carried him like a drunk person to his car for the short journey to the ravine ......and then dropping him... watching his body twist and turn in the air as it struck the rocks and ledges until it disappeared into the gloom.......

It would be found, weeks later by hikers and eventually identified and linked to the kids via DNA. For some of the parents, a kind of closure..... 

 For Bishop, an early Medical retirement and, once a year, on the same day each year, he returns to the ravine, kneels and looks over the edge.......