Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

least not that I can see. If you’re looking for something to blame . . . it’s just his mind. It’s just what happens to people, I don’t—’

‘What happens to people?’

‘Whatever changes us,’ Cooper said.

‘Evil, you mean.’

‘Call it what you want.’

There were things people owed to each other.

The days passed, and she tried to help him.

She tried to help a man who had never helped himself.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Alec was not officially reinstated, nor was he reimbursed for his time beyond sick pay; all he did from then on he did as a private individual, even with the inspector’s reluctant blessing. No one seemed to have the heart to stop him any more. The department itself was continuing its dissolution; after their temporary reinforcements had left, after the dead, there were now only four officers on duty for the entire forgotten coast.

Harry told Alec, before he left the station that first day, that George’s widow was asking to see him, if he was up to it.

As for things with Cooper, they had changed for the better. Though there were still things she hid from Alec, though she was still evasive about her employers, she took him with her on her rides. The role reversal was strange. He was jealous, he supposed, and he’d never wanted to be jealous. He’d never thought of himself that way. He wanted to be someone who did a good job, that was all.

Her main focus appeared to be a camcorder, now, and so it was his, too.

‘One of the horse owners saw Rebecca Cole being filmed on a horse-carriage ride.’

‘Which owner?’ Alec had taken a sip of his water.

‘Michael Stafford. The coach—’

‘I know who he is. You don’t have to explain everything.’

Alec had then asked Cooper if she’d been aware of his record. Of the man’s former crimes.

She’d not said much to that. Her look told Alec that she didn’t much care, either way.

He didn’t mind. He was just glad to be out of those hospital halls, that artificial light, that strange beeping.

No one understood, but the work helped him.

It had always helped him, with everything. He’d try to keep going, not think of anything he’d done or would do.

He’d just think of the mystery. Of all the people who must be out there, waiting to be caught. He imagined rituals, robes. He imagined a network of adversaries, blackmailed or otherwise, an evil pressganged from all this history, all this soil and flesh. He imagined it, witnessing nothing with his own eyes.

Ilmarsh gave Alec this nothing. Its seas were empty, its streets deserted. So many had left since the quarantine, even if there were no official figures to mark it – the homes were just abandoned. A slow exodus had become a calm before a storm. It had become a rapture.

Who could tell them if they’d seen Grace, if they’d seen a camera man, if they’d seen anything at all?

There were so few left – even some of the horse owners had fled, terrified of potential retribution.

One night they’d gone to see a former councillor, a would-be member of parliament that George had interviewed before his death.

Posters stood behind glass. Many of them showed a bright-eyed woman with dyed, dirty-blonde hair, a red jacket and a wooden sign in her hand, the kind you’d find in a front garden announcing a house sale. They showed the woman shaking hands, standing next to government ministers, slogans from her failed election, her last campaign. JO MARSH. JOANNE MARSH. MARSH. Whatever testing demanded. Headlines on papers. Flyers. Promises to remain.

The former politician lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, a long road in the woods leading only to her home and the trees beyond. To take the horses, a van had needed to drive around the building itself and back the same way.

They had gone to ask the politician about the camera man, if she’d seen anyone strange those past months, if she recognized their photographs of Grace.

There had been wine bottles on the counters, old unwashed glasses on the table.

‘I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything. It’s not my fault—’

These things people said. They spoke to her for a while. They exhausted one of their final leads. They said goodbye.

Alec sent another message to Grace, out in the night near the car.

He made sure Cooper did not see. They drove home without speaking. She dropped him off, and words kept spilling round his head, as he walked up his drive, to a door he’d once found open, to stairs he’d once found muddied, to a place that had once been a refuge.

Whatever changes us.

He closed the door. He drank his own wine in his own kitchen until he couldn’t feel a thing. He went to sleep.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

The police wanted to conduct a search of his house.

Frank walked the pier.

The blackened wooden boards ran one hundred feet out into the sea, the legs of the pier still holding up, even after all this time. Even after fire, even after abandonment. There was a sign telling people not to go out here, there were alleged plans to demolish or redevelop the site, but nothing had happened for a decade, now. So children still went out, sometimes. So Frank went.

The pier had ended with Frank’s childhood, somehow. He hadn’t even been in Ilmarsh when the fire had blazed. His mum had sent him to live with relatives for a while, passed around from home to home. When he’d come back, sometimes he’d sit in the vet practice, waiting for his parents to be done. They’d both worked as vets. It was hard to meet people outside the profession. His parents had not been married. She had been the head nurse at the practice. His father’s wife had worked elsewhere. Everyone knew. Kenneth and Jennifer. He had been well liked. The nurse had been feared, frequently jealous of others who had joined the practice, the young in particular. It was the way of his industry,