Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

on November seventh, most likely during or shortly after the town’s Bonfire Night celebrations. We appeal for information from anyone who may have noticed anything unusual that evening, particularly those in the vicinity of the Lynndale area.’

The room was quiet but for the snapping of cameras, the scratching of pens.

‘A town-wide quarantine was established until we were able to determine there was no further risk to public health. We have now made this determination as a result of the government’s diligent and swift clean-up operation. As of tomorrow, beyond certain locations, people may now come and go freely from the area. We do, however, ask that the public remain vigilant.’

Details appeared on the screen behind him.

‘Thank you. We’ll take two or three questions.’

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The murder of a place, of the two thousand souls within, went on.

Orders of horse chocolates, fireworks, food syringes for use in contagion-themed cocktails, came in the weeks before Christmas. The county lines started once more, children spilling out of the arcades with fresh narcotics. People were walking down the seafront again. Couples from distant places sat on benches in their coats, wondering at the sea, at what had happened here. More and more ash began to cover the streets.

One day, someone realized the street-cleaning crews were no longer coming in, a mix-up over their contract supplier, but there was more to it than that. There was somehow more waste even though fewer people went outside. Half-drunk cans and bottles stood like little funeral stones, as if whoever had been doing the drinking had just vanished into thin air.

One day, a smoker slumped against a doorway in the market, cross-legged, his sleeping bag wedged behind him. The neon signs had been switched off. The seagulls had scavenged the last of the day’s discarded chips.

The joint hung firm, clenched in his split lips, his eyes shut, and he’d had to click the lighter a few times to feel it go, to smell it.

He inhaled.

The spice was like a car crash, like a hug.

It was like home.

They found new cleaning contractors but the change stuck. Abandoned poisons spread, half drunk, half smoked, half felt.

On Well Farm itself, there was vandalism. People broke in and stole things belonging to the Coles. Items of Grace’s make-up. Rebecca’s photos. The father’s tools. Someone wore the girl’s clothes.

The boy was forgotten in the public horror.

The police kept looking.

Or at least they said they were. But who was left to look?

The extra support officers had dwindled after the quarantine. The volunteer searches had faded out.

This was not a little boy or girl. This was not someone with a history of vulnerability, though they stressed that Alec’s son had most likely been injured, that he’d need help.

All this had done was make people think he was dead.

Sympathy passed like a fever. Christmas came closer and closer.

Cooper had gone on the walks when she could, even so.

She had gone to the volunteer centre, she had signed herself up, she had walked through marshland and scrub.

So much of the land seemed tainted, so many homes and farms now abandoned or lost.

She kept coming back to the letter. She had a photocopy with her most of the time, folded in her pocket.

There was anger in me once. I dreamt at times of being better. We killed to help and in helping I tasted something in me.

The claim to have a moral motive was key to this, somehow, Cooper knew, regardless of whether that claim was sincere. ‘Anger’ had led to wanting to be ‘better’, to ‘helping’, but an awakening had apparently changed everything. His actions had led to him ‘tasting something’ within himself – if this person was indeed a ‘him’, but this seemed right in her mind, somehow, and she wondered why it was so. Whether ‘killed’ referred to the slaying of the dogs and cats in the crates, or the horses, or even humans, could not for now be known.

Then there was the fact that the killer had taken a risk in placing these letters back on the island, a second ritual to mirror the burial of the horse heads.

An attempt at communication: to Cooper through the use of birds, to Alec through the presence of his fingerprints.

I have burned fires. I am awake and no one saw me and no one will. These things I did I did and no one knew until I let them.

These lines were easier to understand and typical of such letters. The boasting, self-important ego of a psychopath was recognizable anywhere.

The reference to fire was the main detail of interest – there had been few arson incidents in recent years, and the letter’s discovery next to the burned-out buildings of the island had seemed conclusive enough. But Ada and her department were sure the father had acted alone in setting his fires, and with all the bodies of the family accounted for, there had been no evidence of an extra party.

Ada answered her calls less and less frequently now. Her email replies had grown more and more delayed.

Cooper wondered if she was letting this woman down. She took a breath. She read the letter again, resolving not to email more thoughts until she received a response.

I have held the dancing plague.

She looked up dancing plagues. Most incidents happened throughout Europe from the 1300s onwards. Groups of people would dance spontaneously, usually starting with a single individual, stretching out to hundreds as more and more people joined, dancing until they dropped down dead from exhaustion.

I blossom, now.

The smile is yours.

You could have saved him.

The last time Simon had gone to school had been 6 November – the day before the town’s Bonfire Night. Since then, not a single soul in Ilmarsh could remember seeing him.

He was eighteen, almost out of school. He had a poor attendance record.

In his room, they’d find posters, schoolwork, notes on history.

His laptop was gone. No evidence he’d returned after the crash, and there would have been evidence, wouldn’t there? There would have