Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

She finished the bottle and watched some television.

She got ready to sleep. Her flat was small, unshared, fashionable, a studio space with unpainted walls and, once upon a time, multicoloured fairy lights above the fireplace. She hadn’t switched them on since she’d come back, not once. She wondered if she might take them down, but she didn’t do that, either.

She brushed her teeth, put on her pyjamas.

She switched on her sleep music and turned from side to side as the minutes passed.

5.

Cooper woke up. It was early light and she was splayed across the sheets uncomfortably, the duvet half on the floor. Her pyjamas were twisted round. Her neck and shoulders were hurting.

Her phone was ringing.

She pulled herself up, wiping sleep from her eyes. She blinked and reached for her phone in the semi-darkness, almost knocking over her glass of water as she did so.

‘Ye—’ She cleared her throat. ‘Yes?’

There was another assignment for her at last. They put her through to the officer in question.

She thought of all the therapist had said to her.

What was the worst thing they had ever done?

Alec had told her about his wife, his boy.

She thought then about her own answer.

She’d keyed someone’s car. She’d seen the owner kick his dog, and so she keyed his car. She’d been thirteen.

The only problem was, it wasn’t his car. She’d got it wrong.

She would smile whenever she thought of it. It was silly, but she would smile at who she’d been, who she still was.

For a brief moment, she wondered if she should put the phone down. If she should end the call, and go to her mother’s like she’d planned.

She should go.

She hadn’t seen her family for months.

All of this – everything she had done, everything that had happened to her in that strange place – she’d told them none of it.

She’d told no one but that woman.

She should have a sign by the door, she knew. Like the one in the hotel.

NO BEING AFRAID.

NO HATE.

NO ALEC.

NO HORSES.

NONE OF IT.

She could write these things. She had a permanent marker, somewhere, but sticky tape, that’d be a problem. She—

The voice on the other end of the phone asked if she was there.

Cooper?

Cooper?

She had killed someone.

She had killed a boy. Not a man. A boy.

When she thought of Alec, when she tried to remember, she thought of the crescent smile of the lake. How he’d stood there in that dim video, how he’d walked towards the water, towards Rebecca, towards his son.

Cooper would go back there one day, before her own end. Her hair would be dark grey. A dog would walk at her side. She’d return to where she’d first taken a life. She’d walk the empty town, walk the abandoned streets one final time.

She’d go back.

She’d stand by that lake. Thinking of all the things she did not know. Wondering if anyone else had been there that night. Dead fears and old doubts would never stop blooming. She would carry them with her, and they would infect her, again and again, until she could not sleep at night, until all she could see were figures in the dark, haunting her dreams.

She’d imagine Alec by her side, asking another stupid question, interrupting another idea, smiling at her with his silly smile. She’d imagine others all around, the ghosts of a hundred cases wondering why she was still here, and they were not.

This was the life that waited for her if she said yes. If she did not go home. If she did not tell herself she could be happy, that she could be more than a function, that she could still change.

She didn’t want to be afraid.

People lived on, they passed themselves on, the good and the bad.

Alec – all that he was, all that he had become – lived in her mind.

He had thought he had loved her, she knew.

And he had thought he had loved his son, too.

What was the secret of life, the answer to the question of happiness?

It was simple, Cooper knew. It was a trick.

It was never having to ask the question at all.

She held the phone to her ear and spoke.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my friends G. C. Baccaris, Jose Borromeo, Sarah Longthorne, Anna Wharton, Patrick Weekes, Valerie Price, Gary Kings, and my classmates at UEA for your invaluable feedback and suggestions. Thank you to Claire McGowan, Doug Johnstone, and TLC for your insightful comments on early draft material. Thank you to Dr Harriet Brooks Brownlie for your incredibly useful and in-depth guidance on veterinary pathology, and also Graham Bartlett for your expert fact-checking of the book’s police procedural elements. Thank you to Giles Foden – your early support of the novel, and suggestion that it be called Sixteen Horses, shaped its future course.

Thank you to my agent Sam Copeland. My life changed when I sent through a (coincidentally) 16,000-word sample to your inbox; without your feedback and guidance over the last two years, I might have joined the horses and lost my head. Thank you also to Peter Straus, Stephen Edwards, Sam Coates, Tristan Kendrick, Katharina Volckmer, Natasia Patel, Honor Spreckley, Madeleine Dunnigan, my adaptation agent Michelle Kroes, Arian Akbar, and everyone else at RCW and CAA for all you have done for Sixteen Horses.

Thank you to my editor Maria Rejt for your incisive, thoughtful and caring edits – for helping to create not only a better book, but a better writer as well. I would also like to thank the rest of my UK editorial team – Josie Humber, Sarah Arratoon, Rosie Wilson, Alice Gray, Samantha Fletcher, Claire Gatzen, James Annal – and my US editorial team, including my editor Zachary Wagman, former editor Noah Eaker, Lauren Bittrich, Maxine Charles, Katherine Turro, Lisa Davis, Jonathan Bush, Marlena Bittner, Samantha Zukergood, James Sinclair and Jason Reigal, for all your hard work in getting Sixteen Horses into readers’ hands.

Thank you to my parents, Tricia and Glenn, and my sister, Amy, for