Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

and placed her gloved hands into the hair pile.

She felt along for a bony stump. She found it and pulled one tail up and away from the others.

‘The cut’s similar to the heads. A sawing motion, back and forth.’

She felt along the hair of the tail, holding her breath as she did so. It was coarse, and towards the top there were clumps of more bloody discharge and soft once-liquid faecal matter. Diarrhoea, perhaps? It was difficult to say.

Looking around, not all the horse tails had the same signs as this one. The blood was slightly older here, suggesting that the tails had not dried together, but separately.

‘They were probably killed in different locations,’ she said. ‘Rather than at the same time.’

‘We’ve got nine confirmed owners accounting for fourteen of the horses,’ Alec said. ‘The last two horses have no microchips, though, and no one’s claimed them.’ Alec’s torch shone down upon the tails and around.

‘When were they called in?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When did the owners notice they were gone?’

Alec grimaced. ‘Some of them didn’t, not until we told them . . . most, early yesterday morning. Soon after I saw the heads for myself.’

Cooper looked over the tail for a moment longer before putting it down.

‘You think you’ll find something?’ Alec asked. ‘At the lab, I mean . . .’

‘The only way not to find something is not to look.’

The morning progressed. Cooper went into each of the other tents and performed similar examinations with similar results. There was no evidence any of the eyes had been pecked. They hadn’t been out there for more than a few hours before their discovery, and it had still been night, then, if the farm’s testimony was to be believed.

Before they left, Alec asked her if the horses had been alive when it all happened.

‘What do you mean?’

He asked her if their heads had been taken after death or during.

If they’d felt pain.

Cooper said she didn’t know.

But that wasn’t true.

There were traces of tyre tracks through the field from the road. Alec showed her photos. A large van. They didn’t know the make or model, not yet.

‘CCTV?’

He shook his head.

Further on, within sight of the horses, there lay a small stone ruin. Their witness had slept there, had reported seeing two people burying the heads, one of them crying. The land was littered with these lost structures.

Standing there in the clear light of day, they had an uninterrupted view of the rest. Of the silhouettes of abandoned tractors and cars. Green, seething, desolate. Sheep cried somewhere behind them, bleating for food.

The sun had come out a little more. The air started to get warmer.

‘You know . . .’

‘What?’ He turned his head to her.

‘You asked me if I’d seen anything like this before.’ She hesitated. Sheep grazed in the field over the road, one of them staring at her. She turned ahead. ‘There was this man once . . . it was a big case down south. It started in Croydon but spread all around the M25.’

Animals bleated. An unseen dog barked far away.

‘This man . . .’ Cooper continued. ‘He’d lure cats away from their homes, he’d bludgeon them, he’d cut them and he’d leave them on owners’ cars and in their front gardens, all laid out to see. The tails, the limbs, the heads, all spaced out.’

‘That’s horrible,’ Alec said, his lip twisted.

Cooper nodded. ‘The investigators thought it wasn’t about the animal. It was about the owner discovering it. It was about the absolute power the killer had in that moment, the triumph over the owner’s relationship with something they loved. It was thought that he waited around to watch the owners wake up and go outside. It was about the finding, not about the dead.’

Alec sighed. The farmhouse was in sight.

‘Who did it?’ he asked.

‘It’s too early to say.’

‘The cats, I mean. Who killed the cats?’

Cooper was silent for a moment.

‘Did you catch him?’

‘The police closed the investigation. They decided that it was just foxes. That all the clean cuts, all the staging, all the arranging of limbs about car roofs, even the flesh found in plastic knotted bags . . . all of it was just a coincidence.’

‘How many were killed?’

‘Four hundred,’ Cooper said. ‘There were four hundred cats.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Cooper ate her lunch near her car, sitting by the side of the road. Beef coated in a thin anonymous red sauce, the bread white and tasteless.

Meat – mourning the meat of another.

She smiled to herself, faintly. Then she grimaced as she swallowed another bite, before downing some coffee from her flask, still hot from a few hours ago.

There were thin fences all around her. Holes in everything. The subsidies, they were mostly gone now. She wondered how much of a loss Well Farm had made these past few years. If they had thought of selling up, if there had even been anyone out there willing to buy. Parts of the world grew worthless, abandoned. Here this father and daughter continued on, alone.

The mother had fled. The girl had been pulled out of school around the same time, taught only by her father. Alec had told Cooper all about it.

They’d had a look in the house, the different officers, nosing around where they could. The mother had taken warfarin for a clotting disorder, GRACE COLE on the label.

Elsewhere, clothes, jewellery, all left behind. Recent letters still sent here in her name, unanswered. This Grace had wanted absolutely nothing to do with her own flesh and blood. She had abandoned them a year ago. No contact since.

The sun fell through the sky.

Cooper finished her sandwich and stood up, stretching. The heads were almost all loaded up.

Soon, dissection would begin.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Later that day, Michael Stafford sat up in bed and stared out of his window. The carriage driver had told the police all he knew. But they kept asking him questions all the same. They wanted to know where he lived. What he’d been doing. Why was he being treated like this?

There were no bingo calls that morning, no snatches of music through