Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

Alec’s wife had fallen to cancer just a few years before. There was still some of her stuff here, even though she’d never lived in this place – a box in the attic, some medications long past their use-by date, no doubt caught up in their move or else returned to the widower. Even older still, they found anti-depressants, they found some weight-loss supplements. Only a few of the supplements had ever been taken.

Cooper drank some more water, reading about what a man had lost.

The quiet life he’d had with his son. No others, beyond his brief and lonely messages to women on the internet, beyond his closing of accounts.

She had asked him once, driving over to the Eltons’ stables, why he’d come to this town.

She closed her eyes, sitting on Alec’s sofa in the dark of late afternoon. For a few moments she rested.

Cooper woke up, her phone vibrating on the table.

It was dawn outside.

She picked it up; there had been five missed calls.

She didn’t know what was wrong with her lately.

It was strange, wasn’t it?

The streets . . . the beachfront . . . even the people.

It had started to feel, somehow, like she’d always known them.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Everyone remembers their first decapitation.

It had been a mouse trap. Cooper had been eleven. The snap of the metal mechanism had broken the animal’s neck, a little blood trickling along the wood towards the grey carpet below.

Her mother had set these traps after a post-Christmas infestation and warfarin poison had failed to produce results.

Cooper had found it. She had been allowed to bury it in the back garden. Alone, she had ended up accidentally touching the neck, the wound. Bloody fluid had come out from the nose. It wasn’t even alive and it had changed. She looked at it for a while, out in the dusk light. She had then taken a knife from the garage, wanting to see the spine below.

She’d think about that, in the years to come. She’d just been a kid.

She’d just said she wanted to help.

And she had, but that hadn’t stopped her. She’d been curious. She’d—

Get Well Soon.

She had a card in her bag for Alec, one she’d never give him.

No message inside, no words, no signs.

Get Well Soon.

Day Twenty-Five

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

They were in the sea. There they had drifted.

Things came to light.

The sky was clear at last. The sun rose, the horizon empty but for the distant wrecks of abandoned and burned-out oil rigs, the white blades of ageing wind farms dancing like synchronized swimmers in the cold air, the island further still.

Cooper was not alone.

The sand on the beach was coarse, littered with vast strings of seaweed weeping like fingers from the dark sea. A crab moved along rocks out on the bank. If she went close to it, it might disappear beneath the surface. No one might ever see it again. A small group of gulls crowded together on the sea-wall, leaping into the air and diving, not progressing much beyond.

There was a stiff cold breeze. The sea swelled and retreated, the tides moving in and out.

‘How many?’ Cooper asked. It was 7.15 a.m. She wore her green coat, a larger, thicker one she’d bought for these colder days. She had a splitting headache, a reusable cup of coffee in her left hand.

‘A dog walker found the first one,’ the inspector said.

No one ever seemed to call him ‘Harry’. Cooper had tried for a little while, and he hadn’t seemed to like it.

‘The inspector’ it was.

His black trouser legs were flecked with sand. Cooper wore her boots.

Salt drifted into their throats.

‘It was around an hour or two ago. Dog had a collar on, one of those glow-in-the-dark ones. Ran right up to it, green halo all spinning. It must have looked strange.’

‘The dog or the walker?’

‘What?’ He looked at her.

‘What looked strange?’

He did not answer. He just shook his head and kept walking. Eventually, he said, ‘Two.’ There were two that they knew of.

They continued their walk along the shore. She could not see any bodies, not yet.

‘They smell,’ he told her. ‘It wasn’t like I thought they’d smell.’

They had been in the water for weeks, moving back and forth with the tides, their bulk and their legs splayed out as if they were flying. Their skin had been pecked by fish beneath the waves, by birds once they had made their journey back to their home shore.

‘There,’ he said.

She squatted down on her ankles next to one of them, a vast curve of hooves with no head or tail. Just flesh, bloated, decomposing, pale, bitten, mutilated in a frenzy, the skin separating in places from the body like a piece of clothing that did not fit. The other body had not been cut beyond its lack of skull and tail, its fleshy long neck extending to nothing.

Later that day, out in the large animal shed in which she had once dissected sixteen heads, Cooper would confirm it.

These two strange bodies, these blood-drawn leviathans from beneath the waves, were two of the animals whose heads had once been buried on Well Farm. Three more bodies emerged in the days to come. No others ever did.

You can do anything if you decide something isn’t human.

They floated forever in the dark waters, their flesh becoming food.

The food becoming life.

The life becoming death.

Hours passed and a van drove onto the beach. They loaded up the bodies.

A man stared, a few hundred yards away.

Legs eleven, the bingo cried.

‘He’s stable, now.’

‘What?’ Cooper turned. ‘Who?’

‘Alec – he’s been up for hours. Seems to be doing better.’ The inspector hesitated. ‘You want to go talk to him, don’t you?’

She watched as the van pulled away. She didn’t say anything.

‘They questioned him this morning,’ he said. ‘Asking all kinds of questions about his bins. About how he treated his boy.’ He turned to her. ‘If you have any kind of sway . . .’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know . . .’

Still, she said nothing.

‘He’ll be grieving, soon. We all know it.’