Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

anything. He just saw a stolen investigation.

He just walked on towards the horror, glad to be out at last.

Glad to be breathing fresh air, glad to be using his limbs.

Glad to see the looks on all their faces, the disgust, the horror that he’d deigned to return to his old life without permission.

He would be who he’d been again.

He would help.

He would mean something.

There had been something in the grass and snow, near the base of the metal. Something red.

Cooper had knelt down and parted it, taking forceps from her coat.

She’d found a human nail.

Alec approached, Cooper already saying something to him, but he couldn’t understand, he couldn’t hear her, he couldn’t hear anyone.

Blackened, weeks old, its rot had been slowed by the cold.

Upon the closest spear, a finger had been placed. A hole incised in its centre, just before the bend. Enough to prevent it falling.

It hung, human flesh. It had been amputated with a knife, sawing through bone.

There was nothing else. No letter. No note. No photo.

Just this.

The final bloom.

DNA testing would confirm that both the finger and the fallen nail belonged to Simon Nichols.

Twenty Years Ago

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

London

How do you know if you love someone?

It is 16 June.

An off-duty police officer meets his future wife.

He stands at the edge of the South Bank with his jacket over his arm, his feet squeezed tight by his new trainers. At long last, the sweat on the back of his neck is beginning to fade. He stares out at London.

The low sun ripples its light through the thin trees of the riverbank, mingling with the breeze. People huddle on green and patchy grass by the sides of buildings. They clink glasses. They hold wrinkled hands and hot dogs on benches that bear the names of memorialized and anonymous dead. These benches are curved to stop the homeless sleeping. The Thames spits itself out into the distant sea.

In ten minutes, he will walk along and say, ‘Angela?’ to a woman whose name is something else.

She will apologize for not being Angela. ‘Met online?’ she will ask, and the police officer will nod, sheepishly. She will wish him luck. She will go for a coffee with a friend.

He will remain in the area for an hour, alone, wishing he had put on sunblock.

By the time he will finally think of leaving, the woman mistaken for Angela will walk past him once more, and – surprised at his persistence – will ask if he is OK.

He will lie and say that he is.

She will ask his name. ‘Alec,’ he will say.

‘Elizabeth,’ she will answer in turn.

They will have their first date two weeks later.

In three months, he will ask her this question.

How do you know if you love someone?

They will move in together, shortly after. They will start a life.

It is 4 November.

Alec meets Elizabeth’s parents for the first time. She cooks spaghetti sauce with bacon lardons. Within two years, she will become pescatarian. Within five, she will become vegan. Within eight, she will have given it all up again, living life in a cloud.

The parents come to their flat, a small place in Tottenham Hale. Throughout the meal, Elizabeth repeatedly stresses how sorry she is that the place is so messy. It is, as far as Alec can tell, immaculate. He was the one who cleaned it. She does not chastise him about it, then or after.

Before he goes home, Elizabeth’s father will remark that Alec is ‘better than the last one’. He will do this when he thinks neither his daughter nor Alec can hear. He will talk about their age difference – she is twenty-five, Alec is twenty. He will resist his wife’s protestations that the man seems nice. He will say they don’t have to pretend this is permanent. Their daughter’s new boyfriend doesn’t even have a degree. How much does the man even earn? He knows his—

Elizabeth will walk into the hall.

They will all pretend nothing had happened.

The past infects them.

And that night, as they lie in bed together, Alec will talk about his own parents for the first time.

He will talk about the scars on his back, and how he got them.

He will do all this to try and make Elizabeth feel better.

It is 8 June. It is almost their anniversary.

He looks on her phone while she showers.

He unlocks it with her PIN. He has seen her enter it a dozen times.

She had been a mystery to him, lately.

He finds a message. She had sent it to her ex.

It is a photo of her, almost naked.

He puts the phone back down.

When she is out of the shower and in her pyjamas, they watch television. She goes to make herself a drink. ‘You want one?’

When she is in the middle of pouring it, he appears in the kitchen doorway, and tells her he thinks she has a problem with alcohol.

She is surprised.

He tells her that he’d like her to pour the drink down the sink.

She tells him to fuck off.

As she passes him, he grabs the drink from her, spilling some over the glass’s edge, and throws it in the sink, shards flying across the metal.

He never mentions having seen the message or the photo, not then, not ever. The ashes of his own faithfulness give him a strange and secret comfort. He had been better than her.

She never confesses.

He never finds anything like it again.

It is 5 January.

Elizabeth asks Alec what he thinks of having children.

When they’d pass babies in prams, or little children being lifted up by their parents, swung along in smiles, he’d smile too, sometimes.

At Christmas, when a boy had pointed at Alec’s reindeer jumper – at the giant cotton red nose stuck to its surface – Alec told Elizabeth about it, all those hours later.

She asks again now, sitting at night in their lounge.

‘We could call her Angela, if she’s a girl.’

He smiles at this, but his smile is