Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

WE KNOW.

The demand, from whoever had sent all this, was unclear.

Alec’s own demand was not.

If the husband did not present himself for an interview at the police station by the next morning, they would find him and they would arrest him.

To that, Louise did not even look up.

The police took all the images and letters they could locate.

They left her home alone, a horse mat beneath her cup, a horse painting on the wall, a horse statue by the clock.

She was supposed to talk it over.

She had no one to talk to, no one at all.

The clock ticked on the red-brick mantelpiece. A fly buzzed through the kitchen. All the visitors began to leave. It was a place of children, not a place for men.

As they moved through the stables and the grounds, Kate and Cooper talked about their careers. Cooper tried to smile more, tried to force ease.

‘I had this idea,’ Kate said. ‘I was going to change it all. Everything I saw during uni – the animals who didn’t need to be put down, the money that could be saved if owners knew how to do some things themselves, when to call us, when not to call us . . . I pitched it, in my interview. I was going to do animal management classes for the community. We’d all be working together.’

Even if life was harder than she thought it would be, she’d tried to make a difference in her own way.

People weren’t bad. No one was bad, not really.

They could be taught. They could be made better.

But there was no time, no funding. Her bosses kept saying ‘no’.

‘I’ve got to get back to the practice,’ Kate said, removing her phone from her jeans pocket. ‘Got consults at 2 p.m.’

‘And you’ll have a look at your supplies?’ Cooper asked. ‘See if any fetotomy wires are missing, ask around about them?’

Kate nodded, as nervous, as smiley as ever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Cooper opened the car window to let some air in. Alec shut it using his own controls just a few seconds later, then apologized – he just didn’t like the window being open.

He didn’t want to get sick from all the fumes. ‘It’s not safe with other vehicles around, you know. People have them open and—’

They didn’t pass another moving car the entire drive.

They drove towards the water.

Several of the torture photographs found at the Eltons’ property had shown a stretch of sea, a small row of crumbling homes visible on the shoreline through the edges of the trees. Alec and Cooper spent their lunch hour driving along the coast, trying to find this place.

‘There are twelve distinct animals in the images,’ Cooper said quietly. She felt a little car-sick, looking through the photos on her screen. ‘Six cats, four dogs. I can’t identify the other two animals, not in the condition they were left.’

Alec nodded.

There were teenagers in the photographs, too. Other officers had been assigned to match and trace each of the kids in case they’d seen or noticed anything those weeks prior.

‘We should find out if they know Rebecca Cole,’ Alec suggested. ‘They’re about the right age. And, she was the one who found the heads. Kids talk.’

Their planning eventually fell into silence.

Whatever warmth there had been between them in the morning had chilled at the sight on Louise’s desk. Cooper did not even feel smug about her lead any more. There was no victory to be had.

There was an awful potential, lurking in every case, every investigation. Some answers could not survive being found. Even if converted into words, even if the perpetrator stood in front of you and told you honestly all they knew, all they had done and thought they had meant – some actions could never be understood, not truly. Not unless you were capable of doing them too.

Gravity pulled Cooper a little in her seat as Alec took some corners a little fast, a little haphazardly. He was not a careful man, not when he had somewhere to be, not when he thought he was right. It only made her car sickness worse.

Half an hour down the coast, islands visible on the horizon, they finally arrived at the location shown in the photos.

‘Whoever left these must have known we’d find this place. Must have wanted us to come here.’ Alec stopped the car.

Beyond the car, the outgoing tides barely touched the wrecked homes in the water. They had begun to fall apart already, the sea having reached them some weeks ago.

There was no reason for most people to drive this route, so far off the main road as it was. Further yet, the track rose and rose, elevating to small cliffs full of green.

‘There’s a path into the trees. Fits the photo’s angle.’

So they went towards it.

Alec wondered, briefly, if they should have brought other officers, but Cooper was already ahead. She looked at everything, everything in the world. She tried to imagine what it was like to do a thing like this.

They followed invisible footsteps.

There stood twelve wooden crates, some of them open, some nailed shut.

They stood like doorways, displayed at different angles, fallen.

What Alec thought were children’s toys, balls, rattles, they lay all around.

The earth – woodchipped and moist and vast and small all the same – crawled with an invisible world of insects, flickering like static in the soil.

There was a smell of distant smoke. They’d never find its source.

They opened the box.

‘What—’

Cooper didn’t answer.

‘What is that – what—’

The smell from beneath reached Alec’s nose.

Alec could not breathe.

They stood in the open air, in the middle of beautiful woods so far from any inhabited place, and he could not breathe. He covered his nose and mouth, he staggered up and away.

His head rolled back as he moved, looking around at all the leafless trees, how the sky pierced through their thin branches.

Even with the mutilation of the horses, their burial, the eyes in the soil, there was something