Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Trace quantities of spores had been found in the detective’s hallway, on unwashed and muddy clothes sitting in a basket from the day he’d first visited Well Farm. These were then incinerated, the carpet stripped off the floors, and the whole place thoroughly cleaned after the initial search. Several of Alec’s neighbours had needed to move out of their homes temporarily. They were all checked for symptoms.

The authorities concluded that the fingerprints on the crow-letter wrappings were most likely lifts from elsewhere rather than actual proof of Alec’s involvement in all this. But everything else was inconclusive, wherever they went.

On Alec’s dining room table, a piece of paper had been found on its own, flotsam from another time, another life.

A phone number in his own handwriting.

They rang it and rang it, and no one ever answered.

But it had been answered once – more than once – by another.

In Simon Nichols’s mobile phone records, sent through from his network, they’d found evidence of over two hundred calls to and from the number over the last four months.

Whoever the number had belonged to, they had phoned Alec’s son a few minutes after the crash.

There had been no activity since.

Alec had, for some reason, ordered an emergency locksmith the day after the horses were found. Officers had already interviewed the man. This was how Cooper followed most of the case, reading the notes of others.

The locksmith told them about his client. Alec had thought someone might have broken into his house, though there had been no signs of forced entry, nothing but dried muddy footprints on the stairs. But when the locksmith had examined the scene himself, he’d barely been able to make the prints out. And there had been mud on Alec’s own shoes; the guy had been leaving trails of it along the floor.

‘He seemed like he hadn’t slept in a while.’

‘What do you mean?’ the interviewer had asked.

‘He was fidgety. Had bags under his eyes, half-drunk cups of coffee all around his desk. Kept pacing, looking out of the window. You get people who need our services . . . careless people who lose their keys down drains . . . women running away from cruel exes . . . And you get people who call us out for, you know, different reasons.’

He’d paused, then, taking a drink of his lemonade.

‘You get people who don’t feel safe. Who’ve probably never felt safe a day in their lives.’

He’d put his can down, playing with the ring pull.

‘And he was a policeman, you know? If he doesn’t . . . who does?’

There was something wrong with the colours in his back garden, too – Cooper was aware this most likely had little to do with anything, but she kept thinking about it all the same. Many of the gardens all around had a similar issue. A grass that was slightly too green. Winter blue flowers grown red, rare scrub and weed that had not developed in this part of the world for decades. She sent illicit samples to a botanist friend, but he did not answer her, and by the time she would push, all investigations – and their lives as they had lived them – would be over.

Nevertheless, even if nothing was ever found, something about these colours upset Cooper. Something about them always would.

In the garden bins, they’d found the usual rubbish. Alec and his son had seemed to subsist off ready meals and takeaways, mostly Chinese and pizza. He’d put a lot of cans and bottles in the main black bin instead of the recycling collection.

Beneath it all, there were glass mirror shards. Some of them had Alec’s blood on them, dried. Based on the evidence, and the shadow in Alec’s hallway, right at the base of the stairs, it was determined that at some point prior to the horses being found, a person-length mirror frame had been smashed. Evidence of recent scarring on his right hand suggested that Alec had fractured it a second time, intentionally or otherwise, with his own fist.

On his computer, passworded with the name ‘Julia’ – itself bizarre, considering no one in his life appeared to be called that – they found no evidence of wrongdoing and no explanation for the mirror. There were a few online dating profiles, a few messages sent and received, but each exchange appeared to have petered out within a few days of implementation. The descriptions Alec had posted of himself had evolved over time. He had become less and less. Where once on his dating profile he’d identified Italian food and long walks as interests, had gone into great detail about films and television series he liked (claiming he was not much of a reader), on the final profile he’d just said he was a police officer, that he was a father, that he was looking for someone nice. Many of the women he had talked to had lived miles away. Most of them were a certain type – lean, dark-haired, in colourful clothes.

All the botanist would find, when the time came to look at the samples of Alec’s garden flowers, was a harmless mutation, passed down along the years.

In the home itself there were none.

Cooper would walk through Alec’s home, sometimes. She would sit on his sofa, pour water from his tap in the sink, boil his kettle.

She’d read folders about his life.

His father – a wife-beater – now lived in a care home six hours away, paid for by the sale of his home and some of Alec’s own salary. There was no record of Alec ever visiting.

There had been a short career in a detective fast-track programme before funding was cut, most positions gone. It had taken Alec a few more years after that to get back into CID.

Arrests, but no major rogues’ gallery, no one who they could find who might have some grievance against Alec in particular.

No link between Ilmarsh, between Kate Babbit or Charles Elton or Albert Cole, beyond the fact of