Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

his way, blocks his path up the stairs.

Simon shoves him to try and get past, causing Alec to bash his elbow on the bannister rail. Alec winces, turns, and stops him, the two pushing against each other.

The boy gives way. The father slams him into the wall, his son’s head hitting the mirror behind him, cracking it in turn, but not shattering it.

Simon is frozen against that glass, and Alec, stiff, steps back, releasing him.

‘I’m . . .’ Alec starts. ‘Just . . . just book the test. Just—’

The second shot is of Alec walking past a camera by a lake.

The third is of him talking.

‘They were only animals,’ Alec whispers, his eyes wet.

‘How will you help me?’ the voice asks.

‘Do you understand what you’ve done? You’ll spend your life in prison – you can’t throw it away,’ Alec says. ‘I won’t leave you,’ he says.

‘You left Mum. You left me.’

There is silence.

Alec tries to smile, and he does not know why. He still carries a blade within his right hand, limp, forgotten.

‘The others did this to you. They made you do it,’ he says.

The voice makes a noise, as though it is trying to speak, but has no idea what to say.

Alec shushes it.

The son walks into the camera shot.

He hugs his father, crying, convulsing. The father hugs him all the tighter.

‘It’s OK,’ he says.

It’s OK.

Simon holds his father, gently takes the knife from his father’s hand, and cuts his throat.

EPILOGUE

As I passed by the old infirmary,

I saw my sweetheart there,

All stretched out on a table,

So pale, so cold, so fair.

Let her go, let her go, God bless her,

Wherever she may be.

There’ll never be another like her.

There’ll never be another for me.

Sixteen coal-black horses,

All hitched to a rubber-tyred hack,

Carried seven girls to the graveyard,

And only six of them are coming back.

‘Those Gambler’s Blues’

(Songwriter unknown)

1.

‘Why are we here?’ her therapist asked.

There was no clock in the small, fluorescent-lit white room.

Cooper had forgotten to bring her watch that day. She didn’t know why, and wondered, if she told the therapist, whether the woman might then ascribe some meaning to it. Some twist of fate, on today of all days. She felt naked without it, kept looking down for the time, for an end.

She kept gripping at her wrist.

The hum of the air conditioner continued as the therapist wrote in her notebook.

Cooper drank some water from her bottle. ‘We pieced it together, from the tape. We found notes in the boy’s bag. He’d left the Grace account unlocked. He—’

‘The son was Grace?’

Cooper did not move her head. ‘Yes. Rebecca, before him. She . . .’

The sun kept on shining outside.

Cooper had been back for almost a year now.

One night a few weeks ago, Cooper had gone online and pretended to be someone else. She had found a photo of a stranger and had talked to other strangers in turn. Had shared fictional stories of abuse and trauma she’d never experienced.

She had not talked to many people after that. She had not answered her sister’s calls. She had not been on the internet since.

2.

The therapist watched Cooper talk, watched her eyes flicker, occasionally darting towards the ceiling lights.

‘Can we – I’m sorry . . .’ Her patient hesitated. ‘I—’

‘What?’ She waited, and Cooper said nothing, just looked down at her own lap. ‘It’s OK . . . What do you want?’

‘It feels brighter in here. Can we—’

The therapist rose from her seat and turned the dial on the light switch. It was darker now, but for slivers of red sun through the window.

‘Is that better, Cooper?’

She did not nod, did not say yes or no.

‘You were telling me about the children.’

‘Simon wasn’t a child,’ Cooper spat. ‘We all acted like we were looking for a boy, but he was eighteen. A man.’

Outside, cars moved along the street. People went about their days, did their shopping, headed back from work.

She scratched at her arm.

‘He thought he loved her. She thought she loved him. And – and that was the start of it, wasn’t it? The start of everything.’

There were stories we told ourselves, more than we told other people.

Rebecca had, with Simon’s encouragement, started giving her mother more and more of her medication. Warfarin, typically used to help manage blood-clotting disorders in humans, could also be used to murder rats. Administered gradually – in addition to the normal amount prescribed by the doctor – they had tried to rescue Rebecca from her life of humiliation and pain. They tried to make Grace sick and weak enough to leave her girl alone.

Cooper turned away from the window’s light. Her voice was flat as she told their story, at least at first.

‘Alec wasn’t a careful man. So he didn’t think other people cared either. He’d bring his work home and leave it on the table, on his desk, in his room. He thought – he thought his son didn’t read any of it, didn’t notice any of it, didn’t take an interest in who he was, laid out in plain sight. So when Alec took home evidence of what had happened on the island . . . the fire . . . the poisonings . . . photographs . . . reports . . . it’s how Simon learnt of it all. It was how hate became more than hate.’

She dug her nails into the skin of her arm.

‘From the messages we found on the phone by the lake, it . . . it made Simon feel special to know the things he knew. The kids, the—’ She paused. ‘They felt important, knowing about the infection. Knowing what people could do.’

She rolled her sleeves down, playing with the fabric.

‘One day Grace died. No physical trauma was found on the body, beyond its deterioration in the lake. Whether it was a function of the gradual dose, whether it was something the kids meant to do, I don’t know. The thinking is, her husband pulled his daughter out of school to cover it up. Albert Cole didn’t seem to have known about any boyfriend. He might even have thought what happened to his wife