Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  Alec took a moment to move, but when he did, he scooped his son up off the floor onto his feet, and told the seven-year-old to tidy his things away.

  He went back to the hall and took off his coat while his wife served dinner at the table. There was still snow on his sleeves; it had probably fallen on Elizabeth when he’d grabbed her.

  He was tired. He rubbed his eyes, a headache brewing at his temples.

  He wondered if—

  Alec stopped. He needed to stop.

  Standing outside his house, his clothes still crusted with horse-mud, there was no fire inside, no music playing, no warm kitchen.

  It was empty. It was a different building, in a different place, in a different time. Though Simon was still with him, he was out camping with a friend tonight. The boy was eighteen now, bigger every day. He was almost ready to leave school, and it had been years since he’d hung his toys across the seats. He went swimming in the sea, despite Alec’s protestations about safety, about tides. He spent most of his time at home reading. He played games on screens. He sat with Alec a lot of nights, and neither of them said a thing, neither one knowing what they wanted the future to be. He’d come up with all sorts of jobs. Police officer, briefly, surprisingly. Doctor. A vet, maybe, if he couldn’t get the grades to be a doctor. Alec didn’t know if one path was harder than the other, but it had to be, hadn’t it? It had to be more difficult to save the life of a human than a dog.

  And Alec had tried to explain the potential problems his boy might face with university applications – that from his brief searches, so many difficult futures lay ahead, but still, Simon didn’t know.

  It was strange, what we asked of eighteen-year-olds.

  The sky was dark now. The sun had set on the horses. Caught in an early November battle between autumn and winter, the next couple of days were supposed to be getting warmer and warmer.

  It was hard to imagine after the rain of today. It was hard to imagine the weather at any time, these days.

  He opened his door.

  He flicked on the light and pulled off his dirty boots. He threw them back into the porch and locked it shut. The house was cold inside. The heating had been off.

  He was smeared with mud and half-dried splashes of marsh water, all six feet of him. His black trousers and jacket stank. The muck had even seeped into the white shirt beneath. He had thrown his coat on when the rain had started in earnest, but maybe he should have left it off. Maybe he should have let the sky rinse him clean.

  Alec undressed right down to his baggy boxers. He looked in the hallway mirror, cracked, damaged.

  He needed to throw it out. Get something new.

  But it felt like bad luck to let it shatter. And it still worked, sort of. He could still see his reflection. There was dirt across his dark stubble, even a hint of blood on his cheek. He must have scratched himself.

  He blinked, his head hurting a little. He was dehydrated, too.

  He went over to the kitchen.

  Normally, the television would be blaring from the lounge at this time.

  Alec sighed. He paced to the kitchen, put the kettle on, grabbed all his muddy clothes and threw them into the washing machine. He went to the shower and remained there for ten minutes, heat searing against skin and muscle. He’d had long baths as a teenager. It had given him space where he’d had no space.

  He thought about how this investigation would go.

  As much as the scene had distressed him, it had fascinated him, too. They’d have their four days to look into all this – the inspector wasn’t one to waste money – but there would be a deterioration, wouldn’t there? As fresh bad news replaced the old, as the week brought new horrors here and far away, people would soon care less than they did now. He expected to have the initial statements and records of each of the horse owners by the morning; the department was keen on the insurance angle, and even if that turned out to be a blind alley, the questions they were asking as a result might benefit them. Whoever they were, these people knew about horses; they knew where they were kept and how to handle them and how to kill them.

  An owner was not out of the question.

  Alec tried to stop thinking about it. He knew he shouldn’t bring work home with him.

  They’d protected the crime scene as best they could.

  He hoped the rain wouldn’t wash it all away.

  He turned the shower off.

  He dried off with a towel he should have cleaned weeks ago, musty with constant use. When he was done he got dressed, went downstairs, and realized that he’d now have to boil the kettle a second time. He wondered why he’d bothered putting it on before.

  He flicked it on again with a sigh. Water began to churn.

  As he waited for the boil, he stared at the photo next to the calendar. It had been taken back when Simon was six, when Alec had had a thicker beard, not just stubble.

  Elizabeth stood beside them both, arm round Alec, Alec’s arm round her. She was smiling, he was smiling. Her blonde hair was cut short, and his dark hair was longer at the time; he’d been going through a phase. A phase before the arguments. A phase before all that had happened to them, all they had learnt about each other, all they had done to themselves in the learning.

  Now his hair was short and scruffy.

  Alec wondered why he was thinking about her so much today. Was it because Simon wasn’t here? Was it the day Alec had been through? Being with the farmer and that family, that empty place out in the fields?

  He’d walked past this picture a hundred times and had not felt like this. He didn’t know what had got into him.

  The kettle continued to boil.

  He left it, moving swiftly to the bin. It needed emptying. Why hadn’t he emptied it already?

  He grabbed the black plastic rubbish bag in his fist and stormed out into the night, eager to keep busy.

  He thought about his day again, about the farmer, about the hermit. He’d made the man smile. He felt good about this. He’d seemed so sad.

  The moon was thinning. The night was getting worse. He opened the wet lid of the wheelie bin, pushed the sack down, and began to drag the bin along the garden, wet uncut grass bleeding into his shoes.

  Tree leaves shook about him, the wind picking up a little. The garden fence swayed. He opened the gate and pulled the bin through to the alley. Ilmarsh was a town of alleys, even its streets, even its main roads. So much was so narrow, so restrictive. The suburbs had more grazing room, granted, though Alec still felt it out here. A cloying kind of emptiness, south of the centre, right on the edge of the fields.

  This area had been bog-land, once. A house extension three streets over had unearthed some old coins with faded faces, a few broken shards of Norse pottery. There had been a story about it in the local paper last year, before the paper had shut for good. This whole area, the marshes and wetlands that had given the town its name, it had been a place for those exiled from other places.

  The country had needed more fish. It had needed homes for the fishermen, so they’d reclaimed the wetlands and drained the last remnants of all those who had lived and died among the reeds.

  Then they found oil, out in the sea.

  In this rain Alec could barely see a thing and his T-shirt was getting soaked, sticking to his body. But he dragged the rubbish along all the same, downpour be damned.

  After fifteen feet, he turned around.

  It was nothing. There was nothing there.

  The alley was empty. Of course it was empty.

  On his way back in, he slammed the door so hard that the frame shook.

  He walked through the kitchen, eyes catching on the stupid, repeatedly boiled kettle for the third time.

  His phone vibrated against his keys, further along the counter.

  Pint. At the Stag.

  It was a message from George.

  He always sent him these messages when the others were going to the pub. Well, maybe not always, but enough that they’d mounted up on his
phone. Alec used to make excuses about why he couldn’t go, about casework and his son, about needing to be at home.

  He didn’t know what was wrong with him.

  He didn’t want to feel like this.

  It takes four years to know a place, someone had told him once. Alec didn’t feel even halfway there. He thought about the advice for a moment and got annoyed at it. Why were four years good for anything? Four years went by just like that. Four years were nothing.

  He missed her. After all that he had done, and all she had done to him, he missed her.

  He changed his shirt and put his coat on.

  He thought of a world where she was still alive, a world where he was not alone. He went out into the night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The tents shook in the storm, barely holding up against the onslaught of rain. Already water leaked into them, coalescing near the head of a young mare, a chestnut-coloured horse who had been called Sally. She had been her owner’s best friend.

  It was hard to see any of this. There were no street lights, not this far from town.

  If you stood in those fields that night, you would not have been able to see anyone, even if they were standing right next to you.

  Even if they were looking right at you.

  You wouldn’t see their grey-hooded gas mask.

  You wouldn’t see their tight rubber gloves.

  It is a beautiful thing to be seen.

  Stars, dead for millennia, kept faith.

  They walked out into the night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There were stag heads mounted on every wall.

  ‘Do . . .’ Alec paused. ‘Do you think people like me?’

  George stared for a moment. Suddenly, his tired face broke into a mass of wrinkles, his chapped lips curling into a great big smile. ‘Do people like you? Jesus . . .’ He shook his head and drank some more of his pint. ‘Where’d that come from?’

  A baseball-capped twenty-something sat at the slot machine. He sniffed and scratched his neck. A middle-aged stranger talked quietly on his phone with his wife. He’d been denied disability allowance. It was going to be OK, though. They’d make it work. They’d find a way. A few tables away, five balding men huddled in the corner, laughing uproariously at some shared joke about Argentina. Old couples lined the brick wall like waxworks. The pub was surprisingly full, given the weather.

  Alec hesitated, a little defensive. ‘People don’t talk to me the same way they talk to you. That’s all.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘People here. I don’t know.’

  ‘And in what way do they talk to you?’

  ‘They’re . . . quiet. They stare a lot, they don’t care if I notice, they just stare at me. They don’t seem to want to know me or want me to be around. I don’t know if it’s my job or the way I talk or . . .’

  ‘Why do you care if people like you?’

  ‘Because . . . I don’t know.’ Alec screwed up his face. ‘That’s what we’re supposed to want, right?’

  George laughed and finished his drink, calling over for another one. ‘Not enough time in life to worry about anything like that. You need some perspective, that’s all.’

  ‘I just don’t like to be judged.’

  They talked about the case for a while, about the witness, about the possible involvement of two people. Eventually the conversation turned to their boss.

  More officers had left the department a few weeks earlier – Alec had barely known them, but to George they had been old friends, old partners all.

  ‘Harry did what he had to do, didn’t he?’

  George shook his head. ‘No one has to do a thing they don’t want to do.’

  ‘They’ll be OK.’

  ‘Will we be OK, when they kick us out?’

  Alec shook his head, putting his glass down on the table. ‘They can’t.’

  ‘Why can’t they?’

  ‘We barely have anyone left – how could—’

  ‘We barely had anyone before,’ said George.

  ‘I didn’t come here to be . . .’

  ‘Be what?’

  ‘Pessimistic,’ Alec said, and George laughed.

  ‘You just spent ten minutes talking about how nobody likes you.’

  Alec frowned.

  ‘You’re going to come into work one day and kill us all, aren’t you?’

  ‘What the fuck kind of thing is that to say?’

  ‘You’re like a postman.’ George laughed again. ‘You’re like that guy . . . what was his name? Lived off the coast, didn’t he?’

  But Alec didn’t smile. ‘He wasn’t a postman. And that’s not funny. You shouldn’t—’

  George put his finger to his lips, looking around, mock shushing him. ‘No one’s listening. Don’t worry.’ He drank some of his drink, and his smile had changed, somehow.

  And they moved on to other topics.

  Old cases – cases like that – no one talked about them, but on nights like these.

  Nights where you forgot what you were supposed to be.

  Where you had nothing else to do.

  Where you wondered if people liked you.

  They came back to the question, before the end.

  Before George left, he decided to give his partner some advice after all.

  He decided to tell him the secret of all life.

  ‘Try to help others. Focus on the happiness of other people, not just your own. Not just on what you think is right and proper. That’ll stop all,’ he said, gesturing to Alec’s head, and then his own, ‘this.’

  Alec scoffed. ‘That’s selfish.’

  ‘How is it selfish? Why else did you become a police officer?’

  ‘If I try to get people to like me by helping them, then I’m just doing it to—’

  ‘No, no, no.’ George pulled on his coat. ‘You do it right? You won’t even care if people like you. It won’t be important to you. Their happiness will be yours.’ He looked down at the empty glasses on the table, their mouth-prints almost like lipstick. Alec remained where he was. ‘Just relax, OK?’

  ‘Because that’s always a helpful thing to say . . .’

  ‘Didn’t your dad teach you any of this stuff?’

  Alec didn’t answer this. He just looked at his drink.

  George sighed. ‘You be you, then.’

  ‘I will.’ Alec drank more of his drink, and his friend lingered. ‘I’ll just finish this,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll go.’

  George sighed.

  ‘I’ll be fine, really . . .’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘Goodnight, George.’

  After hesitating, the other man left, sighing again. Alec sat there for a while longer, staring at his drink before suddenly downing the rest and going to the bar for another.

  ‘Whisky, please,’ he said, leaning on the wood.

  The bartender nodded, a little bored, maybe. ‘Double or single, mate?’

  ‘Double.’ Alec waited for a moment as the bartender took the bottle and poured. He stared into the mirror ahead of him.

  He blinked, pained, and reached into his pocket for some paracetamol.

  He turned. He couldn’t bear sitting down, not now. He looked through the dirty window at the beer garden, the false bamboo fences adorned with fairy lights.

  He needed fresh air, even if it was raining.

  He needed to get out of here.

  He went outside, his passage marked by the jingle of doorbells. It took him a few moments, a few sips, to realize he wasn’t alone.

  The woman was leaning against one of the wooden posts at the edge of the garden, still protected from the downpour by the awning above. She wore a dark red sweater with black floral patterns like ink blots. Blue jeans ran into brown boots. She was staring intently at her phone. She hadn’t looked up. On the table near her was a small plastic folder full of paper, a notebook, and a drink on top to hold them down from the growing wind, a purple coat hanging from the back of a c
hair.

  Her dark hair was rain-speckled, partially illuminated by the glow. She was biting her lip a little, agitated, thinking about whatever was on the screen. And suddenly her mouth curled at whatever message she had been sent, and Alec smiled too, and the woman looked up to see him.

  Shit. Alec looked away, focusing on his drink.

  He went inside and paused. He looked back.

  He put his drink down on the table and left. He pulled on his coat as he went through the door.

  Alec took the long way back by the seafront. He’d had too much to drink, he knew. He needed to clear his head.

  The storm raged, but the amusement arcades were still open, even at ten o’clock in the evening, even on a night like this.

  A caravan shook near the waves further down, perched in a car park near a brick cafe.

  The lights were on, and a stranger stood outside, his hood up.

  The stranger looked at Alec, his face full of water, and Alec looked back, the same.

  They paused for a moment, thirty feet away from each other, the only sound the heavy rain hitting the roads, neon swaying through the drops. Static filled the world until there was no picture left.

  The man’s lips moved. Alec did not know what he was saying, or if he was talking to him. God help him, he did not care.

  Alec turned, angry, broken, making his way towards a house that was not a home, towards an empty, lonely bed.

  Tomorrow, he would go and dig up the horses. He’d meet the forensics expert, they’d find who did this, and the expert would leave and he would stay. His life – his shitty, broken husk of a life – would continue on.

  He’d do what he had to do until he could do nothing else.

  ‘She asked me a question, once.’

  The van slowed down for the turning.

  ‘She asked me if I knew what God wants.’

  The noise of rockets pulsed through the air.

  ‘What kind of a person asks a thing like that?’

  The driver did not answer.