Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  The soft tissue had started falling away.

  Days after the car crash, the boy had been alive.

  Alec would ask to see the finger, back at the station before nightfall.

  He asked to hold his only son.

  They told him, again and again, that he could not.

  That maybe he needed to take some time.

  That he’d been through a lot.

  Go home, they told him, again and again.

  The mess with the hospital – the discharge – that could all be sorted out.

  He needed to get better for his son, they told him.

  But Alec – Alec had no idea what that meant, now.

  No idea at all.

  A patrol car, driven by a man Alec had never met, brought him to his house.

  The neighbours had Christmas lights up all around.

  He went inside the cold, empty building and took his phone out.

  He read the messages of the morning, sent and received within the cab on the way to Well Farm, now held within his shaking hands.

  [09:18] Grace: Do you miss your son?

  [09:32] Alec: How do you know I have a son?

  [09:41] Grace: We’re friends.

  [09:42] Alec: You’re friends with my son?

  [09:51] Alec: Grace?

  [09:53] Grace: Lol no. WE’RE friends. I can see your contacts.

  [09:54] Grace: Are you going to keep me on here?

  [10:01] Alec: I don’t miss him. He lives with me.

  [10:02] Grace: Message me whenever you want.

  [10:02] Grace: I’m by myself a lot.

  [10:04] Grace: What’s it like there, anyway?

  [10:14] Grace: Raining probably.

  [10:16] Alec: It snowed.

  [10:16] Alec: But the sun is slowing.

  [10:17] Alec: Sorry, meant shining, autocorrect.

  [10:19] Grace: Take a photo.

  There was a knock on his front door. The bell hadn’t been fixed, not for a while.

  Alec realized, then, that he’d been crying. He didn’t know for how long he’d been doing it.

  Alec wiped his cheeks and got up.

  It was snowing, still.

  The snow would be gone by midnight. It never lasted.

  He pulled the door open.

  It was her.

  It was Cooper.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She hesitated, looking past him into the house beyond. There was a smell of meat, like pasta and Bolognese, though she would not find any evidence of cooking while she was there.

  He hadn’t switched any lights on, even though night had now fallen.

  ‘I was – I was worried about you. I wanted to see how you were doing.’

  He stared at her. He seemed shorter, somehow, standing in that doorway. When they’d met, he’d been tall and stocky. He’d seemed strong, handsome even, his jaw full of stubble and his restless eyes full of questions.

  Those first days, he’d soon shown her part of who he was: he’d shown her nervousness, anxiety, a concern over his position, a wish to do right. All these weeks later, the end of the year soon to be upon them, he displayed none of that – all the good and all the bad gone, as if it had never been.

  He was just empty now.

  He turned and walked back into his home, leaving the door wide open.

  Cooper followed, clicking on the light.

  She removed her coat, holding it over her arm. She unwound her grey scarf, long and wide. ‘Shoes on or off?’

  Alec didn’t answer. He’d disappeared into the kitchen.

  A kettle boiled, somewhere beyond.

  She took her shoes off and lingered by the sofa, not quite sure whether to sit or stand, follow or wait.

  She waited, standing.

  Eventually, she heard a croak. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Coffee,’ she said. ‘I can make it, if you—’

  ‘No milk, no sugar?’

  ‘Black is fine.’

  Time passed.

  He brought the coffees through one at a time, his own with milk and two sugars.

  She looked around.

  ‘You’ve got a, er . . .’ She frowned, smiling just a little, trying to make herself comfortable, not knowing what to say. A lovely home. She’d been here a dozen times without Alec’s permission and still she had no idea how to describe it. ‘I don’t know how people compliment houses. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  They fell silent, drinking their hot drinks. Outside, snowfall started to pick up in the night, more and more falling through the air, drifting in vast plump flakes.

  ‘You all . . .’ he said, staring at his cup. ‘You let my son die.’

  He shook his head.

  She said nothing for a moment, her face frozen, her eyes wide.

  The snow continued to fall, accumulating on the grass, on the windowsill outside. Colours flashed on and off in the dark, Christmas tree lights in the garden opposite.

  ‘I’ve been doing everything I can, I—’

  ‘Then it wasn’t enough.’

  The family photograph appeared to have been moved from its original place in the kitchen. It now sat on the mantelpiece.

  Alec had a thick beard in that photo, not just the stubble he had now.

  Simon had been a little boy.

  His wife beside them both, her arm around her husband, his arm around her in turn. Both of them smiling.

  ‘Everything you’ve done . . .’ Alec said. ‘It wasn’t enough.’

  Cooper put her cup down.

  ‘Why did you make me coffee, if you feel that way?’

  ‘It’s . . .’ He scratched his eye. ‘It’s what I do.’

  ‘What you do? I don’t understand.’

  ‘When people come round . . .’ His hand was shaking, the cup spilling liquid splashes on his trousers, on the fabric. He didn’t seem to notice. Suddenly, his expression changed. ‘Please—’ he pleaded.

  ‘Alec?’ She got up.

  ‘Please – let me help,’ he whispered, the cup falling from his hand. ‘Please—’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  Cooper was going to go to sleep on the sofa, then she’d head back in the morning. She refused to leave Alec alone in this state.

  ‘We can talk about the case,’ she’d told him, not intending to talk about it at all.

  He took the other sofa, the stairs still too much for him.

  ‘I used to have trouble sleeping,’ he said.

  He almost smiled, but the moment faded quickly.

  She left and went to find him a blanket. She passed a shadow on the wall, where once a mirror had been broken.

  She went up stairs once muddied by a stranger.

  When she came back, he was changing into a T-shirt from the wash-basket. His back was covered in old scars, too old to have been caused by the crash, by any of this.

  ‘You don’t have to stay,’ he said. ‘I’ll be – I’ll be OK.’

  She sat on her own sofa, still dressed.

  He sat on his own.

  ‘I asked you once – I asked you the worst thing you’d ever done,’ he said.

  ‘You did.’

  He lay down to sleep. He didn’t say anything more, not until they’d been there for a while.

  She lay down, too.

  He looked so small, so feeble.

  ‘I do need your help,’ Cooper said, quiet, watching how Alec’s eyes couldn’t keep still, even as he looked at nothing. ‘Of course I need your help. Of course I’ll involve you, you just . . . you just needed to get better. And now . . . and now you’re better, aren’t you?’ He turned away as she spoke, and her voice grew gentler. ‘We’ll find him – we’ll find who did this, we’ll find your boy . . . everything’s going to be OK.’

  He did not answer this, did not turn back to her.

  She went to switch off the lamp on the small table nearby.

  Time passed before he spoke again.

 
‘It was what I did to her . . .’ he said, barely more than a murmur. ‘Elizabeth . . .’

  No other words came, not really. At one point, she thought she heard him saying something about Christmas, but there was only silence after that, and she decided she might have dreamt it.

  The night passed.

  In the morning, Alec asked questions about the island. About anthrax. About the crumbling buildings, the fires that had raged there, the pit, and the father who had done all those terrible things. He asked, not once acknowledging he’d lied to her about his prior knowledge, not once apologising. And Cooper let him ramble. He needed connections, he needed hope. He looked into other outbreaks, about how the government had tested weapons against sheep on distant shores, and how they had failed to clean up the work of all their bombs. What if this too had been a test? What if it wasn’t just incompetence and neglect? What if they were being lied to?

  He’d ask these things, in the days to come. He’d wonder about these other fathers who had died in their farms, whose children had lived on forever changed.

  For now, sitting at his dining table over breakfast, he just asked about the first.

  ‘Did it happen to him, too?’

  Cooper didn’t understand. ‘Did what—’

  ‘I mean . . . what if he was targeted, too? What if whoever’s doing this to me did it to him and his family?’

  ‘There’s no evidence anyone else was involved. No one has even—’

  ‘His daughter survived,’ Alec went on. ‘We should go and speak to her.’

  ‘She can’t speak.’

  ‘Can’t, or won’t?’ Alec finished his coffee and shook his head. ‘It’s a lead, isn’t it? Maybe her parents knew Grace . . . maybe they met her, or, I don’t know . . .’

  She hesitated. She tried to show him pity. ‘We’ll look at it . . . it’s worth thinking about. And just . . . don’t worry, OK? We’ve got plenty to look at. You’ll get sick of being in the car with me, by the time this is over.’

  He smiled weakly. He went to put his coat on.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ Cooper said, and Alec nodded.

  In the car, he kept talking about it, kept repeating himself.

  Some force in the world had taken notice of him, had ruined his family like it had ruined so many others. It was not his fault.

  None of this was his fault. Everyone would see.

  Cooper said nothing for a while, as she turned down the drive.

  ‘I don’t think you’re viewing it all the right—’

  ‘The right what?’ Alec scowled.

  ‘What happened on the island . . . what that man did to his own children, to his wife . . . I know you think you’re like him, but you’re not.’ Cooper paused, trying to find the right words. ‘He destroyed everything. We know he did it, we know he meant to do it. We know he’s dead. There’s no culprit there, nothing to uncover, at least not that I can see. If you’re looking for something to blame . . . it’s just his mind. It’s just what happens to people, I don’t—’

  ‘What happens to people?’

  ‘Whatever changes us,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Evil, you mean.’

  ‘Call it what you want.’

  There were things people owed to each other.

  The days passed, and she tried to help him.

  She tried to help a man who had never helped himself.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Alec was not officially reinstated, nor was he reimbursed for his time beyond sick pay; all he did from then on he did as a private individual, even with the inspector’s reluctant blessing. No one seemed to have the heart to stop him any more. The department itself was continuing its dissolution; after their temporary reinforcements had left, after the dead, there were now only four officers on duty for the entire forgotten coast.

  Harry told Alec, before he left the station that first day, that George’s widow was asking to see him, if he was up to it.

  As for things with Cooper, they had changed for the better. Though there were still things she hid from Alec, though she was still evasive about her employers, she took him with her on her rides. The role reversal was strange. He was jealous, he supposed, and he’d never wanted to be jealous. He’d never thought of himself that way. He wanted to be someone who did a good job, that was all.

  Her main focus appeared to be a camcorder, now, and so it was his, too.

  ‘One of the horse owners saw Rebecca Cole being filmed on a horse-carriage ride.’

  ‘Which owner?’ Alec had taken a sip of his water.

  ‘Michael Stafford. The coach—’

  ‘I know who he is. You don’t have to explain everything.’

  Alec had then asked Cooper if she’d been aware of his record. Of the man’s former crimes.

  She’d not said much to that. Her look told Alec that she didn’t much care, either way.

  He didn’t mind. He was just glad to be out of those hospital halls, that artificial light, that strange beeping.

  No one understood, but the work helped him.

  It had always helped him, with everything. He’d try to keep going, not think of anything he’d done or would do.

  He’d just think of the mystery. Of all the people who must be out there, waiting to be caught. He imagined rituals, robes. He imagined a network of adversaries, blackmailed or otherwise, an evil pressganged from all this history, all this soil and flesh. He imagined it, witnessing nothing with his own eyes.

  Ilmarsh gave Alec this nothing. Its seas were empty, its streets deserted. So many had left since the quarantine, even if there were no official figures to mark it – the homes were just abandoned. A slow exodus had become a calm before a storm. It had become a rapture.

  Who could tell them if they’d seen Grace, if they’d seen a camera man, if they’d seen anything at all?

  There were so few left – even some of the horse owners had fled, terrified of potential retribution.

  One night they’d gone to see a former councillor, a would-be member of parliament that George had interviewed before his death.

  Posters stood behind glass. Many of them showed a bright-eyed woman with dyed, dirty-blonde hair, a red jacket and a wooden sign in her hand, the kind you’d find in a front garden announcing a house sale. They showed the woman shaking hands, standing next to government ministers, slogans from her failed election, her last campaign. JO MARSH. JOANNE MARSH. MARSH. Whatever testing demanded. Headlines on papers. Flyers. Promises to remain.

  The former politician lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, a long road in the woods leading only to her home and the trees beyond. To take the horses, a van had needed to drive around the building itself and back the same way.

  They had gone to ask the politician about the camera man, if she’d seen anyone strange those past months, if she recognized their photographs of Grace.

  There had been wine bottles on the counters, old unwashed glasses on the table.

  ‘I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything. It’s not my fault—’

  These things people said. They spoke to her for a while. They exhausted one of their final leads. They said goodbye.

  Alec sent another message to Grace, out in the night near the car.

  He made sure Cooper did not see. They drove home without speaking. She dropped him off, and words kept spilling round his head, as he walked up his drive, to a door he’d once found open, to stairs he’d once found muddied, to a place that had once been a refuge.

  Whatever changes us.

  He closed the door. He drank his own wine in his own kitchen until he couldn’t feel a thing. He went to sleep.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  The police wanted to conduct a search of his house.

  Frank walked the pier.

  The blackened wooden boards ran one hundred feet out into the sea, the legs of the pier still holding up, even after all this time. Even after fire, even after abandonment. There was a sign telling people not to go out here, there were a
lleged plans to demolish or redevelop the site, but nothing had happened for a decade, now. So children still went out, sometimes. So Frank went.

  The pier had ended with Frank’s childhood, somehow. He hadn’t even been in Ilmarsh when the fire had blazed. His mum had sent him to live with relatives for a while, passed around from home to home. When he’d come back, sometimes he’d sit in the vet practice, waiting for his parents to be done. They’d both worked as vets. It was hard to meet people outside the profession. His parents had not been married. She had been the head nurse at the practice. His father’s wife had worked elsewhere. Everyone knew. Kenneth and Jennifer. He had been well liked. The nurse had been feared, frequently jealous of others who had joined the practice, the young in particular. It was the way of his industry, of all such industries.

  All they had left him – their only boy who had survived birth – all that was gone, now.

  Frank had put his vet practice up for sale. Perhaps a corporate would come in and rescue them. Perhaps no one would. He’d changed the name before he’d done so, hoping against hope that the bad press might be harder to find.

  All these people they’d let down.

  He’d come out here a few times with Kate in her early days, seeing how quiet she was, seeing how little she’d integrated with the others – others who had never come back to work, others who had betrayed him, when only the dead had remained loyal.

  They’d come out here and they’d bought chips by the sea.

  Day Thirty-Five

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Rebecca watched television, mostly, during her time in the hospital. She’d wanted her phone, but no one could find it and – unused to making demands of adults – she had not asked again. Who would she have messaged, anyway?

  Who was left?

  Investigators had come and gone. At first they’d asked about her father, who was dead, which was strange and which she tried not to think about. She knew she’d have weeks, months, years enough to remember him, whether she wanted to or not. They said awful things about him, implied them, anyway, and while she had not liked her father, he had loved her.