Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

‘By who?’ He stopped sorting.

‘The local police.’

‘What happened at the farm,’ the teenager said.

She didn’t nod, didn’t shake her head. She just waited.

‘Name?’

‘Cooper Allen.’

He handed her the keys. ‘Four days,’ he said.

It was already dark by the time she reached her hotel. Fairy lights dangled from the street lamps along the seafront, COATES INN painted in old letters upon the building’s side.

It was raining, but Cooper didn’t bother pulling up her hood for the short walk. She smoothed her dark hair as she went through the front door, a little fleck of moisture remaining on her fingers, staining the dirty glass as she pushed it.

Inside, the reception was shuttered.

A sign was taped to the wall. ANYONE FOUND TO BE DEALING DRUGS WILL BE REMOVED FROM THE PREMISES.

Fine. No drug dealing. OK.

A fish bowl bubbled in the yellow light. No one seemed to be around. A restaurant adjoined the main hall, but it was either under renovation or else abandoned, sofas piled up as if in the aftermath of some long-forgotten raid. Dirty mattresses leant against the back wall.

‘Can I help you?’

Cooper turned to see an old balding man. She gave her information and got her key. He wanted to photocopy her passport, but it wasn’t necessary, not if you were from the UK, and she had to argue with him about it, get the proof up on her phone.

‘Have you just been copying people’s passports this whole time?’

‘No,’ he mumbled, and seemed eager to go away.

Hm.

He left, and Cooper went to find her room. The elevator was one of those old pull-shut ones. There were warnings everywhere not to put too many people inside. Not that this was a problem. When she arrived at her floor, there were no signs of anyone else, but that was the twilight of any place like this, busy or not, an emptiness of strangers. The kind of solitude that bothered her more than being watched. She needed people, even if she didn’t need to talk to them.

She didn’t bother unpacking her clothes, having brought just enough for the four days for which she had been booked. She dumped her toiletries near the sink in the shower room. In her backpack she had a few bottles of water, a can of lemonade, some gum. She took off her purple coat, her green top, her blue jeans, her black watch with the red trim. She stepped through and tested the pressure. She left the door to the bedroom open a little as she washed.

She was done in five minutes. She found a hairdryer under the bed. She didn’t like how long her hair had grown, and hated it falling in front of her face. She only wore it loose if she felt some special occasion demanded it.

She’d had no real special occasions, at least recently.

She pulled on a red sweater and the same jeans she’d already been wearing.

She went to the window and parted the curtains. The world outside was all as it had been before.

The sea throbbed in the silence past the thin windows. If people grew noisy out there at night, she wouldn’t sleep through it. She remained there for a few moments, crossing her arms. She could see her own reflection in the night, like anyone looking out in the dark. It made everything more than it was. It seemed to infect her. Dark hair, dark eyes, almost sunken in the distortion.

She turned the main light off. She could see better. It was calmer now.

Out in the distant waters, there was a blinking. Flashing. A boat signalling, maybe. She didn’t know much about that kind of thing.

Mass horse mutilations, though – that was another matter entirely.

When he’d called her, the inspector had wanted to know if she’d seen anything like this before. If there was much precedent, if they were looking at the work of a madman or something else.

Revenge could be a motive, but from Cooper’s understanding, the horses had belonged to disparate owners without much of a sense of relationship or community.

Sometimes these kinds of killings were used as a smokescreen for other motives, staging crimes in such a way that the authorities would focus on their gruesome nature at the expense of more mundane possibilities.

‘Like what?’ the inspector had asked, his voice crackling in the bad signal.

Like insurance fraud.

It was an easier kind of madness, at least superficially. Throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties, a hundred horses had been killed across the USA, taking an eventual human murder, and so the involvement of the FBI, to bring the insurance scam to an end.

The inspector had said they’d look into Ilmarsh’s horse owners. He’d said the team was looking forward to working with her.

Alone now, watching the emptiness of this night and this sea, Cooper’s sickness began to ease once more.

She needed a drink. She needed to find something to eat. She took her key and left, locking the room behind her.

CHAPTER THREE

There had been only a few reports the day before. A car’s windows had been smashed near the market. A fight had broken out in a pub after closing time. There had been calls about shouts and crashes from a home with three young children and angry parents. When asked, they had said everything was fine.

The old hotels had been silent.

Homeless people were tidied away from the park and barred re-entry.

Trucks had arrived. Wooden pallets, laden with food and drink.

The town told this story to those who asked.

On the nearest Saturday to 5 November itself, the people of Ilmarsh would set off fireworks in King’s Park further down the shore, the whole beachfront buzzing with people, with sparklers, with glow-sticks. Every cafe and every shop and every pub would come alive once more. This year, 7 November.

It was Bonfire Night.

At 3.05 a.m., the owner of Well Farm had set out west in a van containing thirty sheep. The farmer would arrive at the livestock market shortly before six. He would not return