Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

But it wasn’t.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Kate’s voice. She couldn’t stop hoping she was OK, that they were all OK.

Cooper had been given the all-clear in the early hours.

The night had felt like a dream, somehow. Like all the parts of her mind had splintered off into the waking world.

The authorities had put her up in this room, twenty miles from Ilmarsh itself, and had told her little else.

This room in which they’d put her – it was full of mahogany bookcases, but for the bed in its centre, its impossibly white, now-ruffled sheets. She was staying in what had once been an old mansion. It was mostly used for conferences, now. The authorities had set this building up as a base of operations, an area for the press in halls on the lower floor, beds for officials to stay in on the floors above.

There were leather chairs in shadowed recesses. There were books on the shelves that could be read by anyone, that never were.

There were bright yellow curtains. It was a terrible colour scheme. Cooper thought it looked like something her sister might have come up with.

These curtains reminded her of something else, too, but what, she could not remember.

A knock came.

When Cooper was twenty, she’d tried to die. She’d climbed onto some distant train tracks. No one had been at that station so far from any city. The vet practice where she’d been completing her extramural studies had been perfectly pleasant to her. Hardly allowing her to do a thing other than watch, of course, but their lack of petty power displays or absurd neglect made them nicer than many of the other places she’d been. On her way to her temporary accommodation, the sun was still, warm, visible – it didn’t hurt her to stare right at it. She stared long enough that all sound seemed to leave the entire world.

She’d stopped right at the cusp of a railway bridge. The country fields beyond – the rolling pastures and oaks older than her parents, the distant cottages and the air so free of smog and smoke – she saw them all.

She went down the steps and slid off the platform with slow, calm movements, her mind relaxed in the same way a hot bath might have calmed her body. The loose grit of the platform dug into her palms as she pushed herself off it. Her palms were softer back then.

She walked down the track towards the sun and the hills, wondering.

She passed by people who looked at her briefly from their old homes with purple doors. She felt her legs tremble.

No train ever came. The government had decommissioned this railway line sixteen weeks before.

She never did anything like this again. She’d tried never to think about that strange hour. She hadn’t even been unhappy. She hadn’t had a right to feel like that, to become untethered from her walk home, from her plan for her life, from life and normal living.

What bad things had ever happened to her, to justify a stupid, selfish act like that? She rewrote it in her mind when she could – that she knew the railway line had been decommissioned, that she’d just been going for a pleasant, sunny walk in her sunny new career.

She’d left the railway track before it was dark. She overslept that night.

When at Christmas Cooper’s sister talked about a suicide at her secondary school – a boy who’d gone into the sea, who’d never come back, who they thought might just have been dragged out into the great nothing after biting off more than he could chew – Cooper left the room and went to have another nap.

That was all she could do with most of the problems in her life, other than shouting, or breaking up, or seeking a solution – any solution – no matter it be good or bad, no matter the cost to her or those she cared about. Certainty mattered more than goodness.

It was all she could do in the end: crave the certainty of sleep.

The morning after she and Alec had discovered the crates in the woods, it was cold, or maybe it was just the hotel room.

The stranger who had knocked, who came to speak with Cooper, was just a man, no mask, no protective gear. He had serious eyes and slow, shifting movements. He wore a white shirt and red tie. It took him a few moments to smile, a practised smile, and it rarely left him after that. He held a small folder of A4 pages in his hand.

‘You’re awake,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

That whole morning, Cooper did not ask for their names.

They did not offer them.

They’d passed police officers on the way down and across the hall, she and the man in the red tie with the fake smile. He’d asked if she’d wanted water. She’d said yes.

‘I can’t live without it,’ she added, and then, after a pause: ‘Because it’s water, and—’

‘What?’

She had immediate regrets. ‘Nothing.’

She was nervous, tired.

The man opened a door for her. He left to fetch her drink.

It was quieter in here, at least.

An old man and a middle-aged woman waited for her within.

This new room was like the one she had woken up in, in its colours at least. The same yellow curtains. The same dark polished wooden shelves. This had been a lounge, once.

The old man sat across the chamber with a cup of tea. His face was pitted by acne scars, his suit pinstripe black on grey. His hands were upturned, his fingers criss-crossed as if they were about to initiate prayer. His eyes were vacant. He rarely looked at Cooper. He said nothing the whole time they were there.

The woman, however – she stared right at her. The stranger’s cheek was caught on the edge of a twitch, a slight tremor in her hand as she scratched her ear. She was in her forties, fifties,