Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  The heads were now laid on chrome tables beneath white fluorescent lights, all spaced out in a five-five-six configuration. A trolley held the tails.

  The vets took their gloves off and washed their hands. They had cups of tea on the threshold, out in the gentle breeze – the old greying director of the vet practice, Frank, and a younger mousey vet named Kate. No others had stayed late to help her.

  ‘I like your mug.’ Cooper smiled.

  ‘Oh!’ Kate looked down at it and then up. Her mug read I’m not sheepish about doing a good job. ‘My friend gave it to me.’ Her cheeks went a little red. ‘It’s just a bit of fun.’

  ‘My best mug was Crazy for Ewe. E – W – E.’ Cooper shrugged. ‘From an ex.’

  ‘How’d you let him get away?’

  Cooper smiled again but did not answer, and in the silence she asked about her temporary colleagues.

  Kate was a relatively recent graduate – two years in practice now. She’d made this surgery her home base during her extra-mural studies; she’d lived nearby as a kid, before her parents had moved away.

  Frank had been at the practice for years. He co-owned it and did a lot of the large animal work himself. He’d worked in France and Belgium for a while, as a younger man. He talked about that quite a bit.

  ‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘How’d you get into your line of work?’

  Cooper tried to smile. ‘It’s not that interesting a story, really.’

  ‘Try us,’ Kate said.

  ‘Watched too much TV,’ Frank added with a smile.

  Steam rose from Cooper’s teacup, bleeding into the air before the yellow floor.

  ‘It’s a living.’

  They talked about the things they had seen.

  They told her of the worst.

  The history of their community’s infections.

  BSE, three decades ago.

  Foot and Mouth, closer now.

  ‘Three farms were culled, movement restrictions placed on the rest.’ Frank grimaced. ‘They got compensation, but . . . some of those cattle, the bloodlines went back decades. How do you make up for all that breeding? I was around during the outbreak, the first time, I mean – when was that? 2000? 2001? You should have seen what it did to this place.’ He put the kettle on again, pausing. ‘You been into town much yet?’

  ‘I stayed here last night,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Then you have seen. All we had left was farming, after the fish and the oil and the tourists left. It was all we had. Those farms . . . you think those horses are bad, imagine standing in the middle of dozens dead, a hundred. Imagine watching them all burn, a grown man breaking down in tears right next to you. All that pain.’

  ‘There was a human death, too,’ Kate said.

  ‘One of the farmers offed himself,’ Frank said. ‘Shotgun to the mouth. Contagion hit him twice. First 2001, then last year. And there was the business off the coast . . .’

  ‘What business?’

  ‘There was a fire at a farm, an island a couple of miles out. No one knew them, not properly, but there were rumours . . . Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe the farmer started it himself. Hard to know the truth of it, though. Hard to know the truth of any of this.’ He shook his head. ‘These are bad times, Miss Allen. Bad times.’

  He poured more tea into his cup, offering none for anyone else.

  ‘What about the Cole farm?’ Cooper glanced at the clock. She needed to get started.

  ‘What about it?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Where were they in all this? I saw mainly sheep when I was out there, just wondered if they used to keep any other animals.’

  ‘As far as I know, yes, just sheep,’ Frank scoffed. ‘And I wouldn’t call it a farm, not a proper one, anyway.’ He seemed annoyed.

  ‘You had trouble with them before?’

  ‘Not trouble exactly,’ he said. ‘Not with their livestock, at least. The truth of it is, the man owes us thousands.’

  As they spoke, the horse heads watched through the open shutter. The rainwater had spiked their forelocks, their hair in peaks.

  Their eyes just stared ahead.

  The other vets went home before 10 p.m. Cooper remained, the shed now sealed.

  She wiped her eyes clean of sleep.

  The overhead lights were in the wrong places for her work. The shed was fluorescent and cold. They’d brought in lamps to help her see better, though there were not enough. She had to unplug them and replug them as she moved along.

  She began her work.

  It started with cleaning, enough to expose likely evidence without destroying it, which was always a losing battle, especially with bodies buried and left to the elements. It was a trade-off, like most things.

  She looked at each of the horse heads in turn to see whether there were any inconsistencies in their degradation, any differences. This might not mean much, ultimately – water may have leaked through in different amounts and locations throughout the various tents – but the process itself was like solving a puzzle.

  You didn’t know what was or wasn’t relevant until you had more of the picture. Neither could you make assumptions. Evidence could lie.

  She’d strung the police photos above each head.

  One taken when they were mostly buried, back when they were dry and fresh.

  One from the morning, taken when she’d first seen them, still unexcavated.

  One from when they had been dug up, but still not moved from the scene. Alec had already numbered each of the horses, so Cooper numbered the photos accordingly.

  The lack of waterlogging was reasonably consistent with what she would expect – the heads had not been there long enough to take on much water. Only one of them was worse than the others. The photographs helped explain the abnormality. This particular specimen had been placed to the side of a small mound, that was all. Water had doubtless pooled on the uneven ground.

  She went through the tails. It was not possible to definitively match most of them without DNA testing, but for three or four where the hair colour was unique and similar enough between tail and head to support an educated guess.

  As she moved from horse to horse, she followed an identical procedure, logging the results on her tablet then backing them up. She looked, first of all, for signs of trauma or disease that might lead to potentially distracting lesions on the skin.

  There was some bruising on a few of the necks, very light.

  A few nicks in the skin, probably made with a knife. For the most part, these were only found on the larger horses.

  There was scuffing above some of the eyes, suggesting they had been dragged across a hard surface.

  The majority of the damage had come after death, beyond the severing of the heads themselves.

  Next, as best as she was able, Cooper completed identification.

  Strangers became individuals. There were chips in most of their necks.

  She could access identity and owner via these microchips and cross-reference them with the vet practice’s intranet, detailing age and treatment history. They had given her a temporary login.

  For almost all the horses, the only reported problems in the past year had been various degrees of lameness, and that was to be expected – not because there had been an absence of other conditions, but because few other problems would affect the primary value of the horse for most people: their ability to ride it.

  Only two horses were unknown and, chipless, unclaimed by any owner. The only way to determine their age was via their teeth. Both of them had Galvayne’s groove, an indentation on horse incisors that was found to appear shortly after a horse turns ten, and extends with age, only to disappear as they grow older. It ran halfway down for one, slightly less for the other. Based on the condition of the other teeth and the head itself, she’d place the first around seventeen to nineteen years old, the other perhaps early to mid-twenties. An old girl for a horse. The thought came, strange and discarded. There was no way of knowing the sex.

&nbs
p; She cleaned herself up at the sink in the corner. Her throat was dry, even a little sore, but she didn’t want to call it a night yet.

  She looked at each stump with a black-rimmed loupe, its high-power glass lens magnifying the flesh below, its ridges and its furrows. She shone light at the dead. Each decapitated stump bore signatures, both in the flesh and in the bone. The deaths had begun with the slitting of the necks, ventral soft tissues cut smoothly in a curve. The skin, the trachea, the major blood vessels were all severed in two. In some cases the bone and cartilage itself had been nicked in the same motion, but whatever blade had done this could not contest against the skeleton beneath. In most, decapitation had occurred through the vertebrae.

  There were abrasion ridges in the dirty white bones. The bone cut ends were slightly charred, the soft tissues dorsal and lateral to the vertebrae frayed and singed. She found small wire fragments when she looked at a few of them, confirming her initial hypothesis that the heads might have been sawn off. But she doubted, based on the thread and the presence of knife cuts above, that all this had been accomplished with a power tool. It almost looked like what you’d see with a fetotomy wire, or something like it, at least. Old-school vets used to use – and sometimes still did use – this kind of wire to dismember dead calves within the birth canal, hacking off heads and limbs so they could be safely removed from their mothers. Nowadays such wires were also utilized for dehorning, or sometimes to amputate cow toes.

  The overall effect and cleanness of the decapitation varied across the sixteen. The killers had, perhaps, became more and more practised as they went along, or more and more frantic.

  Or one had known what they were doing, and the other had not.

  A knife to slit the throat of a standing, partially sedated horse.

  The animal’s legs slowly crumple.

  It bleeds, barely able to breathe, until it falls to the floor.

  A wire to remove the head as it dies. A knife in case it is needed.

  She’d read the witness statement.

  They – they were crying. One of them was crying, the hermit had said.

  Cooper made a note to look for abuse cases in the area. Whether there had been any spikes in missing or mistreated animals.

  She went on.

  Cooper began to skin them. It was harder than with some other species; some you could cut into the skin and pull the face right off. With horse heads, the skin stuck closer to the skull bones beneath. You had to remove it in patches, in fragments, though she tried to do as much in one go as she could. She worked on the best-preserved specimens first, double-checking her initial work as she went. She was curious to see if there were any puncture marks where a needle might have entered the skin, particularly on the neck – perhaps focal pooling of blood at the site. She knew some of them had been given sedatives by the vets themselves; but what of the others?

  She laid the pieces of skin on boards, marking where she found lesions and abrasions that might turn out to be significant at a later point. She labelled each with a paper note; she took photographs – hair side and underside – from different angles; she logged them on her tablet.

  Autolysis was underway. The digestion of the self had begun.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When Alec had first moved to Ilmarsh, he had seen his neighbours only briefly. It had surprised him, how much these people kept to themselves, how few said ‘hello’ as he passed them by.

  He could only imagine what went on behind the curtains and blinds of each adjoining home. They stood in a curve all around, a crescent grin of bricks and electricity. One light was red, another blue, another almost white. It was just the curtain fabric that made them so.

  He began to unzip his coat as he approached his house. It was going to be warm tomorrow, he’d heard. Almost twenty degrees Celsius, somehow, anyhow. It terrified him. George had been going on about trying to have a barbecue if he could, a final fire for dark November.

  He reached his front door.

  It hung loose, already open.

  Someone was inside.

  He thought Simon was already home – he assumed the muddy footprints on the stairs belonged to his boy, that his son had forgotten to shut the door, that maybe he’d just got home himself.

  The possibility of anything else would not occur to Alec for one minute and forty-three seconds.

  He locked the front door behind him and went to the kitchen to make some coffee.

  He shouted into the hallway, asking if Simon would like anything.

  Nothing.

  Alec heard a key turning in the front door as the rumbling of the kettle came to an end, soft steam clouds moistening the blue ceramic wall tiles.

  He came out to find Simon coming in, his backpack already dropping to the hallway floor, his brown hair speckled with rain. People had said they looked alike, but all Alec could see was the ghost of his wife. Her bright eyes, her nose – her features were all different in the eighteen-year-old, but still, all were there if you knew what to look for.

  ‘You got mud all over the stairs,’ Alec said, frowning.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you came in before – you left the door open, you—’

  ‘I just got back,’ Simon said.

  ‘You were home,’ Alec repeated.

  ‘What?’ His son seemed confused.

  ‘The mud.’ Alec felt incredibly angry all of a sudden, and tried to hide it.

  Again, Simon seemed confused, even more so as his eyes lit upon the dark stairs. ‘That wasn’t me. I just got back.’

  The footprints were still wet. They led above. No second set led down.

  The father told his son to wait there.

  He searched each and every room, his frame trembling, his eyes blinking. He found no one and nothing. The footprints ended on the landing after doubling round slightly near the light-switch – maybe the intruder had realized they were making things muddy? Beyond the dirt, all lay apparently undisturbed, no lights on, nothing missing, no windows left ajar.

  When he came downstairs, his heart beating fast, he found Simon watching television.

  ‘You weren’t home, then? That wasn’t you on the stairs?’

  His son shook his head, not turning round.

  ‘You’d tell me if you were lying?’

  ‘You saw me come in,’ the boy said. ‘I don’t know what you want from me.’

  Alec shook as he boiled the kettle again. Something in him felt like it was ending, like it was breaking. He’d left notes in his home, photos from the scene, from others, too. He’d left his laptop. He didn’t know if someone had been on it, if they could have accessed the files within.

  He saw more and more as he walked through the house.

  He saw all he’d left for anyone to see.

  Half-filled reports from the station.

  The note on the table, the phone number of the farm’s absent mother scrawled down upon it. He still had to phone her.

  He wondered what Simon would say if he saw it. If Alec had written the name Grace next to the digits, which, thank God, he had not. Would a woman’s name make his son think his father was dating again? How would that make the boy feel, if that were true?

  In the kitchen that photo still stood, right next to the calendar.

  His boy, twelve years ago, only six. His wife.

  Love was terrifying. What you lost to other people. What parts they held of you, and you of—

  He’d – he’d had this thought before. Lately. He didn’t know when.

  He felt like he was losing his mind.

  He sat at his computer in the almost-dark, waiting for a locksmith to come. He didn’t know if it was too much, even as he tried to put these events out of his head, to live in wilful ignorance of all that might have happened, all that still could.

  He took the hallway mirror down, its surface cracked. That, at least, had been his fault. He’d kept meaning to do something about it.

  He wrapped each fragment in old ne
wspaper so they could hurt no one. He put them in the rubbish bin out back, but he was careless in the final moments of the task. He cut one of his knuckles as he pushed the glass down.

  He went back inside.

  There was just a shadow on the wall where the frame had once stood.

  He looked up a number on the internet.

  He wanted to find out what it could mean, even if it was crazy, even if it turned out to be useless.

  He tried to find the meaning of sixteen.

  One Month Ago

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Miles on from the bay, where the sea had begun to take the coastline, there were a few rows of abandoned bungalows.

  Sea water seethed around them. Their floors were flooded.

  No one came here.

  Up the bank, the forest watched.

  A car drove along the road.

  Inside the car there were a few tins of pet food. There were some packets of crisps, supermarket own-brand, inexpensive. There was sticky tape, duct tape too. There was a phone with a scratched screen. There were keys.

  The car stopped in the middle of that road, the engine running for a little while, nothing happening. Then the ignition died. A wave hit one of the homes, the structure’s walls strangely pastel-coloured.

  The car door opened.

  The driver walked towards a clearing further inland, past the edge of the tall trees on the other side of the road.

  In the clearing, there were twelve wooden crates. All of the crates had originally been laid out on their sides. They had stood – and some of them still stood – like miniature doorways. Two of them, far away from the others, were sealed, nailed shut, two large rocks resting on each.

  The sun and the shadows danced their rays and reflections across time.

  The driver opened tins of food and emptied them into each of the open boxes.

  Then the driver sat back down and stared. The driver waited.

  After an hour, the driver took out a book and began to read.