Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

How many days did you really live enough to remember them?

Alec came back to the observation room. Cooper was still drawing with the girl. It had been forty minutes, now.

There were horses across the desk. Pictures of her thermos. Now pictures of each other.

Still they did not talk of anything.

What was she doing?

They didn’t have time for this.

‘Can I go in there?’ Alec asked.

The social worker told him it would not be a good idea. These things took time. ‘Your partner’s doing well.’

He waited for twenty minutes in a hard chair, watching through the one-way glass.

He’d forgotten his own laptop. He took out Cooper’s.

She’d let him use it briefly in the car, surprised that it didn’t make him motion-sick. So he used her password now.

He got it out, logged into his email, his notes.

He’d listed all the meanings he could find, just days ago.

Sixteen:

A unit of measurement. A square number, four times four. The base hexadecimal of all computing. The number of pawns on a chess board – for that matter, the precise number of pieces you start with in any game, elegant, mirrored.

The tarot card for the Tower.

Destruction. Revelation. Higher learning. Change.

The age of consent.

The number of completion.

Divisible by one, two, four, eight, and itself.

The number of waking hours in a day.

The date of the Boston Tea Party, the first Academy Awards, Marie Antoinette’s marriage, the day of her death, the number of her husband, XVI.

The atomic number for sulphur.

The age of Rebecca.

It meant everything and nothing.

He had images contained in the document. Photos of the heads. Of wooden crates amidst the trees. The Tower card, showing a collapse, two people throwing themselves from a building.

A finger. A nail.

For the horses themselves, there were other combinations:

Riding. Rescue. Racing. Work. Pet.

War. Pulling the chariot of the sun. Glue.

Hunting. Meat. Power. Friend.

Horse burial as a ritual could be found in a variety of cultures, symbols of Odin, of fertility, of wealth, of death.

In Shandong province, six hundred horses were discovered in a pit, centuries past their deaths.

In the Trojan war, a wooden gift had been given at a gate.

There had been a plague. The Greek forces had been lost at sea, sick, dying without hope of reclaiming lost Helen.

A deer, sacred to Artemis, had been slain.

The plague of the place was of their own making, a reward for all they were and all they had been. It drew attention to their crimes, serving justice, restorative and punitive.

To end it, the Greek forces had to provide a sacrifice of equal value to the dead deer.

The Greek king had to slit the throat of his daughter Iphigenia.

The war would end, years later, with men hiding within a horse.

The king would go back home, victorious.

He would kiss his wife and walk on purple sheets.

He would look on all he had done, and smile, victorious.

He would never wake.

The wife would kill him in his sleep.

Before Alec shut down the laptop, he went into Cooper’s own email using the same password. He wasn’t surprised when it worked.

He read all of the private correspondence he had time for.

He saw emails from her sister.

He saw emails arguing Alec’s innocence, reporting on the contents of his home. He saw emails requesting that he be allowed to re-join the investigation, attempts to argue against what someone called Ada Solarin thought to be Alec’s ‘instability’, his negligence, his incompetence.

He saw emails about bird necks.

He saw emails about his own fingerprints, found on plastic.

An obsession with a mirror.

He got up and put the laptop away in Cooper’s bag.

He went through to the hallway and opened the door.

‘Alec?’

He walked past Cooper and pulled one of the chairs from the opposite wall, placing it across from Niamh. The girl flinched at the noise of its metal legs dropping down onto the floor. She avoided eye contact with the both of them. Her drawing slowed and shifted.

‘Alec, we’re—’

He ignored Cooper. ‘Hey, Niamh. I’m a policeman. My name is Detective Sergeant Alec Nichols.’

The girl blinked as she drew.

‘We’re here to ask you a few questions about your family.’

‘This isn’t—’ Cooper turned, forehead creased. ‘Do you want to talk about this outside?’

‘No, no. In here is fine.’ He kept his eyes on the girl. ‘You see, Niamh, something happened to me, too. I got sick. Just like you got sick, just like your dad, your brother, just like everyone. We’ve all been through the same thing.’

Still, she did not look up. She kept drawing, faster now.

‘This isn’t appropriate,’ Cooper said. ‘There’s no sign she even knows anything about this.’ Still he did not move. ‘This – this isn’t fair, come on, Alec, we’re—’

‘You can leave if you want,’ he said, still not looking at her.

She did, after a pause.

It was just him and the girl, then.

‘And I survived, just like you did,’ he said. ‘I survived, but someone’s still missing. My son. My boy. He’s the same age your brother would have been, if he’d lived. And I – I need to know where he is. I need to know who’s doing this.’

She said nothing.

‘Did someone – did someone visit you all, before what happened? Did any of your animals get hurt, any letters in the post, any photos?’

There was noise in the hall.

‘Was anyone in your home who shouldn’t have been there?’ he asked.

Still she drew.

He reached across the table, hesitating before he did it.

He snatched the crayon from the little girl’s hand.

There was no resistance.

No response.

Her empty hand just hung loose in the air.

‘Why was your house set on fire?’

The door opened. Two care assistants walked in with Cooper, followed by the director.

‘Mr Nichols, you can’t be in—’

‘Detective Sergeant Nichols,’ Alec said.

‘I have to ask you to leave.’

He looked up at them. Cooper stood behind the others. He’d never seen her so angry. Had they watched him? Had they been out there?

‘Niamh, I—’

He turned. She had her crayons again.

She drew a wooden house.

She drew another, and another.

They took him from the room. He stared at her, as