Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

‘Are you religious? Do you believe in anything?’

  The driver shrugged.

  Everything was silent now.

  The sound of screams had ended.

  Day Two

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next morning, Alec hit a pedestrian with water from a puddle.

  Technically speaking it was an illegal act, worthy of a thousand-pound fine and three points on his licence. He grimaced. He’d let himself off. The jogger was on his side of the road. He shouldn’t have been running away from the direction of oncoming traffic, especially considering how dark it was.

  Alec hadn’t even seen the man.

  He slowed down a hundred yards away and briefly considered honking his horn in apology, but this might seem like taunting, so he didn’t. He just sped up again, off to the farm.

  He’d awoken to emails containing files and witness statements from all the horse owners, compiled from phone calls at the station and a couple of in-person interviews.

  It was a varied group. Three of the horses had been owned directly by the local riding school and livery; four more by a former town councillor, Joanne Marsh; most of the rest by farmers and local kids. Two of the horse owners they had not yet traced, no identification chips being present in their animals’ necks.

  One of the owners had a criminal record: Michael Stafford, forty-three, lived by the sea. He had used his horse for work, driving kids up and down along the shore in his carriage. Alec looked at the file.

  Aggravated assault. Possession with intent to supply. All when Michael had been a younger man. But mistakes were like arrows fired through time. They kept going, on and on, unable to find a target, unable to stop.

  Two other names stood out on the list: the stable owners Charles and Louise Elton, the only joint owners of horses and therefore a ready-made fit for the mysterious couple spotted by the hermit on Well Farm. Judging by their age, however, it felt difficult to imagine the pair hacking off skulls.

  George would look into what he could; today, he was needed on other cases.

  Alec would follow up the rest.

  He had a couple of hours before he was due at the crime scene. He planned to talk with the farmer again. Among the horse owners, several had not only heard of Albert Cole, but spoke of a troubled past. There were rumours about his wife Grace and why she had left him; his daughter Rebecca had been pulled out of school around the same time.

  Alec wanted to speak to the girl, too. He’d tried to do so the day before – she’d been the first person to find the animals, after all. But her father was protective, evasive, kept claiming that she was busy with her work or that she had some urgent chore to perform at the farm. Alec did not know what was or was not urgent in a place like this.

  He thought of the stag heads on the wall of the pub.

  He kept driving. He kept his eyes on the road. The specialist would know more. He knew so little.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The teenager angled away from the rising sun. Her whole face convulsed, forcing a sneeze out onto the damp mossy rock beside her. In the early light, droplets dribbled down into the miscoloured marsh below. The void behind her nose ached.

  She was alone.

  Sat here as she was, hunched up on as natural a throne as anyone might ever find, Rebecca didn’t need to hold her hands before her face. She didn’t need politeness. To sneeze and not care, that was freedom.

  Far off, the tents had survived the storm. Even now, one of the policemen was over there, Mr Nichols. He’d arrived at first light, just like the day before. He’d spoken to her, her father at her side.

  How did you find the horses? Why were you out so early?

  Why did you touch one?

  Did you see or hear anything strange?

  Do you know why someone would want to do this?

  She was walking the dog, she’d had problems sleeping.

  She wasn’t sure what she was looking at.

  No, apart from the sight itself.

  No.

  She looked out at the lonely lights of nearby farms, far enough away that they seemed like campfires now.

  Something moved beneath her dangling feet.

  There was no sound but the cricking of crickets, of tree leaves rippling like rain.

  She peered down. Her heart beat a little faster. Just a little. It was like music switching on by itself. Like a voice mumbling in another room.

  The thing below her feet . . . it was coiled, thin, flat . . .

  The hair of horses, the clotted pile of tails from two fields over . . . for a moment, it looked just like them.

  It tilted. It was breathing, pulsing. She pulled her legs up instantly, bracing with her hands on the rock side. She blinked, the thing in shadow. She shone her phone’s torch down, and it stared back, unmoving now.

  It was only a snake.

  Black ran like pixels along its body, all mingled with leathered grey. A single V crowned its face.

  The adder had risen at the fast movement of her feet, letting out a sharp hiss. The camera light still shone down upon it in the dark. She stared at the snake, and the snake stared back.

  The sky grew brighter until at long last the girl sneezed again. The adder reared its head back, baring its fangs in response to her sudden noise. She wondered what it would feel like to be bitten.

  She got up, dusted her jeans, and looked down to see the snake had vanished.

  It felt like a dream. It felt like she was living in a dream.

  And a car was pulling up, slowing down on its route from town.

  Rebecca didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of her dad’s friends, few as they were. It wasn’t more police. It wasn’t anyone she knew.

  The noise frightened her, somehow.

  She clambered along from her perch. Later, when the police had gone, her father would have to come out here to kill that thing. There were sheep nearby.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Cooper accelerated. She always accelerated on big verses, ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’ ringing out from the speakers and from her own lips.

  The roads were empty and long. Little broke the world but itself, the edges of the forest, the car.

  She was going to be forty minutes late to the crime scene and she’d slept terribly, the bed of her shitty hotel room seemingly made of granite. She had stayed out too late, probably, and had been up too late when she’d got back. But she’d felt better this morning, waking to the sight of waves, of their brief almost-blue in the fresh sunlight. What was it they’d said? Try to be positive?

  She swigged black coffee from her flask. She sang about winning, about love, about a war.

  It was the only CD in the hire car, forgotten by some previous driver. Her phone signal was poor, and the radio, the radio was just full of static out here. And this, it was the kind of song that made you push your foot down on the accelerator. The kind of sound that woke you up.

  She made up five minutes in the end. Just thirty-five minutes late now, not the forty she would have been. Yay.

  A police car was parked by the side of the road, thirty feet or so from a farmhouse, and there was an open gate nearby, tyre tracks running into the fields.

  Cooper parked further down. She got out and hurried to the boot after taking a final slurp of caffeine. She stuffed her dead phone into her jeans pocket. She opened her boot bag and hopped as she made the change from driving shoes to waterproof overalls and boots. She grabbed her kit last of all. Her lenses, tissue-sampling pots, forceps, flea brush, needles and syringes, biopsy punch, a packet of mints, and scalpels. She almost always carried a scalpel, or a pathology knife, if the mood struck. You never knew when you might need one.

  Sixteen horses dead, their heads and tails severed from their bodies, each buried with a single eye facing the sun.

  They’d sent her all they’d found.

  She slammed the boot shut.

  Over near the farmhouse, she saw a police officer scratching at his arm, his sleeve rolled up. There was a red r
ash along it.

  Cooper walked on.

  She’d once seen a sergeant put his fingers into a bullet hole in a sheep’s skull, no gloves. They had stopped on an unrelated call about poaching. The accused man had just stood idly by, nodding as the sergeant suggested that the sheep’s wound might have been caused by a bird or something. A bird who could somehow peck through living bone, apparently.

  She crossed the bank, the hum of flies and crickets all about her. Everywhere was saturated with the rain of the night before, and she could only thank God there did not seem to have been much flooding. She let out a sigh of relief when she saw the white arc of tents in the distance, waving like the sails of a ship. The bodies had been covered.

  Her boots squelched slightly, sinking in the mud, the noise of the insects ever louder. She swatted midges away from her face.

  She thought about the photos she had seen.

  The eyes in the soil. The rat-king of tails in the dark.

  There was something different about a horse, wasn’t there?

  Cooper had gone on about it once, sitting in a bar with some colleagues after a long day. How when people crashed a car, they said ‘I crashed’ or ‘I got hit’, not ‘my car crashed, my car got hit’. They extended their concept of selfhood to their vehicle. If they thought about it, they’d see it’s just the same with a horse and a rider.

  She blinked, listening to the sounds of the reeds as her boots clipped through them. She briefly thought someone was looking at her, but there was no one.

  The crime scene had been staged in a ritualistic manner, the heads placed carefully on their sides so that one eye was exposed to the sky. The tails were left in a pile nearby. It was theatrical and showy. It was intended to cause fear and anger and outrage. This much the photographs had suggested. She’d need to look at the scene to know more.

  Dying places produced desperate people. Desperate people were not, as a rule, careful or subtle in their actions.

  She did not imagine the case would be difficult.

  Nearer the tents, around twenty feet away, a police officer had stooped down, examining something on the ground.

  The man was tall and stocky, his face full of cowboy stubble. Whatever he was looking at, it had his full attention. Cooper was just a few paces away when he looked up.

  His expression changed immediately.

  ‘I’m Dr Allen,’ she said. She always led with the ‘doctor’. It had weight where weight was needed.

  He didn’t say anything. He looked like she’d just stepped on his shoe.

  Something felt odd to her too. ‘Have we met?’ she asked. ‘You seem familiar.’

  ‘No,’ the man said, blinking. His face grew calmer. ‘I’m sorry – no, I don’t think we have.’ He scratched his neck before suddenly trying to smile, extending his hand. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Alec Nichols – nice to meet you.’

  His handshake was firm, but she was ready for that, and gripped back firmer. His eyes were shot red. He was clearly a strong man, but he didn’t exactly look well.

  She looked down past him.

  There was a crow on the ground. It had dried blood speckled across its body. Most likely something had mauled it.

  ‘Sorry if I’m a little out of it,’ he began, and then hesitated, wiping his eyes. ‘I was out all night on a job . . . didn’t get much sleep . . .’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  She looked back down at the bird, and so did Alec.

  ‘Not sure if it’s relevant, but it wasn’t here yesterday.’ He paused. ‘I was the one who found the horses. Well, after Mr Cole and his daughter, of course.’ He paused again. She looked up at him. He was a hard one to read. He seemed nervous, almost, at first. But that wasn’t it at all, was it?

  Cooper bent down and picked up the crow in her gloved hands, holding it at a distance. She tried not to grip it too tight, lest she hurt it.

  She felt along the keel of its body, gently examining its ruined wings and legs.

  Wordlessly, it opened and closed its beak.

  The crow had ventral swelling and was in considerable pain. It was emaciated and utterly infested with parasites, as she’d expected.

  It was going to die. Even if they nursed it back to stability, it wouldn’t last more than a week in the wild.

  Holding its midsection with one hand, she snapped its neck with the other. She placed it down to the ground and looked back at Alec. He blinked, clearly a little surprised, but remained silent.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the tents, large buckets and troughs had been placed where the water had collected and dripped through. Torches punctuated the gloom. Thin lights had been set up along the ground. Coloured string had been tied to pegs, marking the boundaries of each point of interest.

  Alec assured her that the scene was already fully photographed. Cooper took a few of her own regardless. From afar, on approach, up close. Proper photographic documentation was essential for any criminal proceedings that might follow, even with animals – especially with animals.

  Only images sold the potential for pain, for the discovery of malice.

  Cooper’s life had been an education in this, in more, but the world had a way of surprising you.

  The horse heads had been buried on their side. For each, the soil had been manipulated to cover everything but the region around the one open eye.

  There were five in this tent, the heads all arranged a few feet from each other.

  Cooper knelt down, her knees digging into the soil as she reached into her bag. She found her brush. She chose the nearest head and began her work.

  She scraped some of the soil away from the horse’s eye, careful to look for anything caught within, gentle in her movements. She found nothing at first. After scraping a little more, she found another layer of soil, impacted below.

  The killer had secured the horses in the ground by digging holes, dropping the heads within these holes, caking soil around the flesh, then spreading loose dirt to help the skin blend in with the surrounding earth.

  The purpose was to delay them being found, but not indefinitely. To make the realization itself a moment of power.

  She kept going. Next, she looked at the site of decapitation. She had to move carefully, gently displacing foreign matter from the base of the stump while trying not to affect the tissue below.

  ‘This one was beheaded with something sharp,’ Cooper said. ‘But . . .’ She hesitated. ‘It took multiple cuts. Possibly with different tools.’

  ‘Slashes?’ Alec croaked. Something seemed wrong with his voice.

  ‘More like some of the head was sawn off,’ she said, looking back at the horse. ‘We’ll know more when we get to the lab.’

  The horse appeared to have been a healthy weight before death, based on the amount of fat around the crest of its neck, at least. She felt its skin, cold and almost limp.

  Around its nose, there were traces of dried blood. Rigor mortis was fading and the eyes were cloudy, more than Cooper would expect for November deaths. Decomposition was proceeding unusually rapidly, but at least there was not much insect activity. There were more things in the air outside than in the dead.

  She pulled the horse’s mouth open a little, the weight heavy against her hands. A small section of tongue poked through the teeth. She checked the gums. The mucous membranes were pale on both sides. She palpated the submandibular lymph nodes, but these were unremarkable.

  She rose to her feet.

  ‘Where are the tails?’

  They went through to the second tent.

  Alec kept looking at her as they walked, shifting his torch each time he turned. A tell-tale wobble of the light.

  He seemed uneasy in her presence. He acted like he was responsible for every piece of contamination.

  ‘I picked one of them up,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know what it was at the time.’ He shuddered. Moments passed, and then, suddenly, his voice slightly higher, he asked her if she’d ever seen anything like this
before.

  ‘Mutilations, sure,’ Cooper replied, stepping over the string boundary around the tails. They were located in the corner of another head-circle, away from the others, like the tip of a Q.

  She knelt down and placed her gloved hands into the hair pile.

  She felt along for a bony stump. She found it and pulled one tail up and away from the others.

  ‘The cut’s similar to the heads. A sawing motion, back and forth.’

  She felt along the hair of the tail, holding her breath as she did so. It was coarse, and towards the top there were clumps of more bloody discharge and soft once-liquid faecal matter. Diarrhoea, perhaps? It was difficult to say.

  Looking around, not all the horse tails had the same signs as this one. The blood was slightly older here, suggesting that the tails had not dried together, but separately.

  ‘They were probably killed in different locations,’ she said. ‘Rather than at the same time.’

  ‘We’ve got nine confirmed owners accounting for fourteen of the horses,’ Alec said. ‘The last two horses have no microchips, though, and no one’s claimed them.’ Alec’s torch shone down upon the tails and around.

  ‘When were they called in?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When did the owners notice they were gone?’

  Alec grimaced. ‘Some of them didn’t, not until we told them . . . most, early yesterday morning. Soon after I saw the heads for myself.’

  Cooper looked over the tail for a moment longer before putting it down.

  ‘You think you’ll find something?’ Alec asked. ‘At the lab, I mean . . .’

  ‘The only way not to find something is not to look.’

  The morning progressed. Cooper went into each of the other tents and performed similar examinations with similar results. There was no evidence any of the eyes had been pecked. They hadn’t been out there for more than a few hours before their discovery, and it had still been night, then, if the farm’s testimony was to be believed.