Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

of the crates. Alec, who kept looking to her for answers.

Four days, they’d said.

Four days to solve this case, and two were almost over.

There would be no other help, no second chances.

Alec had gone to pick up his son after they’d taken the bodies to the vet.

He kept saying he was sorry for how he’d acted, he—

She’d told him she’d see him in the morning. She’d try to be on time for breakfast.

He’d looked like shit, a pale sheen of sweat visible upon his neck as he went. Cooper imagined she also looked terrible. She didn’t even bother to turn on the lights as she shut her hotel room door, as she stripped off her clothes and collapsed into bed.

She set an alarm for an hour’s time.

She did not dream.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Down the hallway at Ilmarsh Vet Surgery, there were consultation rooms with old computers, scales outside for weighing animals. An office and a kitchen lay beyond. They still had a few old Halloween decorations up, some witch and broomstick fairy lights, a pumpkin leaning out the top of one of the bins. Papers sat on desks, forms, files, printers.

A vet sat there alone, coffee steaming in her mug.

Crazy for Ewe, Kate had written on a blank white mug in permanent marker.

A week ago, she had given one of the horses an apple. He was called Bruce. He had been showing signs of pain as he walked, avoiding the use of one leg – favouring, vets called it. It was all Kate could think about as she drank her coffee, as she tried to calm down. The way he’d come bobbing over, friendly, affectionate.

She thought about the sound of his scream.

In the mid-afternoon, a child came into the practice with a bleeding cat in a plastic bag. It was his pet. He’d remained home, sick from school, and had heard the screech of tyres and brakes outside. He’d walked all the way here with the eleven-year-old black tabby, barely breathing, barely struggling.

She stabilized it, but only first aid was free.

More would cost money. More always cost money.

The end was not inevitable, not even now, not with her help. She could save it, if they could only get consent. If the owners only did what was right.

And that was the problem, the conundrum at the heart of her profession. How to save the animal from the owner.

Four consults, one outcall to the stables with Cooper, and two surgeries.

That was Kate’s day. It ended in a slow ride to the tower she called home. She was tired, already on the cusp of lost consciousness.

The lobby of Kate’s building had an old discarded fridge in the corner that had been there for three months, a distant mould within now spread to the facade. The old elevator was a pull-shut, pull-open, old-fashioned machine you wouldn’t trust to keep you alive. It had a sign saying it was out of order, defaced with graffiti, boxes of anonymous building supplies making up the remainder of its freight. The lobby smelt faintly of urine, though it had been cleaned a week ago. Kate knew it had, she’d seen the man with his mop.

She walked up the stairs of the converted hotel, more graffiti smeared along its walls, some of it bright and beautiful, some of it just initials, manifested for the sake of it. A couple sat and kissed near the sixth-floor doors, the boyfriend’s face wet with tears. Kate tried not to look, and they did not look back at her, but something about the encounter made her want to cry too.

She found her door, painted blue for some reason. She turned her key in the lock and jiggled it so that it would turn. She pushed it open.

She went inside and clicked the light switch on. She walked past plastic-wrapped cat food tins, past the climbing tower, the scratching post she had not yet taken to the dump. She opened her fridge, took out some leftover soup, and heated it up in the microwave. She poured a glass of water to drink with it. She sat and she ate on a small table by the window, looking out onto the small fields, the tyre place below, the light fading.

When she was done, she drank more water, went to her bedroom – the only other room – and took off her clothes, put on her pyjamas. It was humid, hot. There were mountains of clothes in need of cleaning, toiletries spread across every surface. A book she had meant to read, that she had bought months ago, abandoned by her bedside table, the bookmark – bought for the same optimistic purpose – still held between pages six and seven.

Kate thought of Cooper, of the way the other vet had looked at her. She opened the bedside drawer and removed some anaesthetic she had taken from the practice several months ago, pretending that the vial had broken. She injected the ketamine into herself.

That was a ritual, too.

She switched on the little television at the end of the bed.

She counted gently in her mind as she rolled back, wondering how long it would take until there was nothing.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

‘Once I caught a fish alive,’ she murmured, trying to get comfortable.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

‘Then I let it—’

Two Years Ago

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The first sick or abandoned lamb, the first creature to be rejected by its mother, he or she had it the hardest. The old stables on the Coles’ farm had eventually been repurposed for the storage of sick sheep. The owners used this space to keep animals isolated. They hand-reared them. Hours in between, left in the cold and in the dark with no noise but the distant bleats of the flock.

That first lamb, they’d often find it suckling the edges of the old fridge in the corner, cuddling round tools and abandoned troughs.

The first pet lamb rarely survived. The others, they had a