Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

MISSING DOG.

CHOCOLATE LAB.

RAN AWAY IN DENTON PARK AUGUST 2ND.

VERY FRIENDLY. ANSWERS TO LIZZIE.

PLEASE HELP US FIND HER.

£50 REWARD.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Cooper had told Alec what she’d found in the kitchen. A minute later and he’d seen it for himself. Then, shouting from the base of the stairs, ‘Mrs Elton? Are you OK?’, no answer had come.

A few minutes later, looking around the lounge, finding nothing, they went up regardless.

The light, it spilled through the dark hallway of the landing.

They found a door, slightly ajar.

This door was an oak-wood door. This place had been a nursery, once, though not for decades. A tree was carved into the wood, its surface painted a mottled, flaking blue. The paint had not been right for a door like this. In the dark places of the hall, damp ran riot across the walls.

The door was slightly open.

Their feet made the floorboards creak; of course they did.

A fly buzzed past them.

And they could see Louise Elton right on the other side, crying at her desk, shaking.

Before her on the table, there were dozens of photographs, black and blue and green, all catching the red sun.

‘Mrs Elton, are you—’

She wheeled round, mouth agape. She tried covering the photos, snatching them up in her shaking hands, suddenly aware of where she was, of who she was with.

Alec pushed the door fully open. She turned back to the desk.

‘They keep sending them,’ she croaked. She dropped the pictures down as if her soul had left her body. She kept holding on to an envelope, her blue nails curled around it.

The images were of animals, of wooden boxes, of a shore, of an island far away.

‘We keep finding them, we—’

‘Mrs—’

‘They know,’ she just whispered, shaking her head.

‘Pick up the phone.’

‘Just talk to me.’

‘Listen.’

‘Please.’

‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The water buckets were almost full to the brim from the storm two nights earlier. Hay floated in the muck. Nearby, outside one of the stable doors, bales of haylage had been bound in plastic. One was half torn open, most likely unused for weeks.

Cooper felt strange being out here alone. A car was coming, at least. The silence was easing.

The stables were capable of holding at least twenty animals. The only boarding place for miles apparently, but there had been only six occupants. Whoever had taken these horses had taken all they could. The old quarters were full of grime, some faeces, too. Most likely they had only been mucked out a couple of weeks before. There had been no grand erasure of evidence, no attempt to hide how they had lived, at least so much as Cooper could see.

‘Hi!’

She turned. Kate, the mousey vet from the surgery, had arrived, her rusty green car parked just beyond Alec’s own.

Alec had remained back in the house with two other officers, searching the building while Cooper looked over the grounds. They hadn’t been able to get much more out of Mrs Elton; she had refused to say anything else until her husband came home. The man appeared to have fled the premises sometime during their interview. His tractor lay abandoned in the fields, red and vast against the hill. His car was gone from the driveway. Attempts to reach him by phone had failed.

‘I’m glad you called,’ Kate said. ‘I wanted to help yesterday but—’

‘Just need some background,’ Cooper said, turning to lean over one of the stable doors. ‘You were the one who sedated these horses?’

‘Yep.’ Kate nodded, awkward, sharp. ‘These and a few others. Mostly those closest to town, those who might have problems with the fireworks.’

‘What’s your opinion of the Eltons?’

‘As in . . .?’

‘Were they good owners? Good people?’

‘They were OK,’ Kate said. ‘Left some problems untreated, but . . . what business doesn’t?’

‘What kind of problems?’

Cooper knew her manner was somehow upsetting the other vet, but knowing this didn’t change her actions. She’d once thought her speech compulsive, unhinged from social conventions. She’d thought that other people – like her family, like her schoolfriends – simply didn’t understand her. But the older she got, the more Cooper felt that the opposite might be true. That there was some secret for knowing how to act that she’d never learnt. Sometimes she had no idea how to imitate, and the vague instinct to do so just seemed to push her further and further away into her own head.

So she’d asked Kate what kind of problems the Eltons might have left untreated.

‘Possibly some signs of lameness. A few of their horses were shifting their weight, the older ones, mostly. The Eltons started avoiding contact as soon as I pushed the issue. They probably couldn’t afford any treatment or surgery.’

‘But they could afford sedatives?’

Kate shrugged.

Cooper disappeared into one of the stable bays.

‘You have any suspects yet?’ Kate’s voice grew slightly high. Cooper didn’t answer, and so she went on. ‘Hopefully you’ll have time to enjoy the town once you’re done, anyway. Let me know if you want any recommendations or anything.’

The tentative pleas for warmth made Cooper feel bad. She tried to focus on the task.

‘Help me lift this.’

They moved a wooden crate from the corner of one of the unused bays.

‘What are you looking for?’ the vet asked.

‘Photographs,’ Cooper said.

The first image had been sent in the summer, just a few months past if the Eltons were to be believed. Louise claimed to have found the photograph in one of the empty stable bays, lying flat against the dark.

It had shown a wooden box in the woods.

The couple hadn’t thought anything of it.

More and more photos had arrived over time. And then there would be no thinking of anything else.

Images of their students riding through the fields, taken from far away.

Images of mutilated animals, of pets long missing.

They had been blackmailed, Louise Elton claimed. They’d done none of this.

Alec held the evidence of it in his gloved hands, cut-up newspaper print pasted to old white paper.

The threat was simple, the same words Louise had uttered