‘What are you looking for?’ the vet asked.
‘Photographs,’ Cooper said.
The first image had been sent in the summer, just a few months past if the Eltons were to be believed. Louise claimed to have found the photograph in one of the empty stable bays, lying flat against the dark.
It had shown a wooden box in the woods.
The couple hadn’t thought anything of it.
More and more photos had arrived over time. And then there would be no thinking of anything else.
Images of their students riding through the fields, taken from far away.
Images of mutilated animals, of pets long missing.
They had been blackmailed, Louise Elton claimed. They’d done none of this.
Alec held the evidence of it in his gloved hands, cut-up newspaper print pasted to old white paper.
The threat was simple, the same words Louise had uttered after their confrontation.
WE KNOW.
The demand, from whoever had sent all this, was unclear.
Alec’s own demand was not.
If the husband did not present himself for an interview at the police station by the next morning, they would find him and they would arrest him.
To that, Louise did not even look up.
The police took all the images and letters they could locate.
They left her home alone, a horse mat beneath her cup, a horse painting on the wall, a horse statue by the clock.
She was supposed to talk it over.
She had no one to talk to, no one at all.
The clock ticked on the red-brick mantelpiece. A fly buzzed through the kitchen. All the visitors began to leave. It was a place of children, not a place for men.
As they moved through the stables and the grounds, Kate and Cooper talked about their careers. Cooper tried to smile more, tried to force ease.
‘I had this idea,’ Kate said. ‘I was going to change it all. Everything I saw during uni – the animals who didn’t need to be put down, the money that could be saved if owners knew how to do some things themselves, when to call us, when not to call us . . . I pitched it, in my interview. I was going to do animal management classes for the community. We’d all be working together.’
Even if life was harder than she thought it would be, she’d tried to make a difference in her own way.
People weren’t bad. No one was bad, not really.
They could be taught. They could be made better.
But there was no time, no funding. Her bosses kept saying ‘no’.
‘I’ve got to get back to the practice,’ Kate said, removing her phone from her jeans pocket. ‘Got consults at 2 p.m.’
‘And you’ll have a look at your supplies?’ Cooper asked. ‘See if any fetotomy wires are missing, ask around about them?’
Kate nodded, as nervous, as smiley as ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Cooper opened the car window to let some air in. Alec shut it using his own controls just a few seconds later, then apologized – he just didn’t like the window being open.
He didn’t want to get sick from all the fumes. ‘It’s not safe with other vehicles around, you know. People have them open and—’
They didn’t pass another moving car the entire drive.
They drove towards the water.
Several of the torture photographs found at the Eltons’ property had shown a stretch of sea, a small row of crumbling homes visible on the shoreline through the edges of the trees. Alec and Cooper spent their lunch hour driving along the coast, trying to find this place.
‘There are twelve distinct animals in the images,’ Cooper said quietly. She felt a little car-sick, looking through the photos on her screen. ‘Six cats, four dogs. I can’t identify the other two animals, not in the condition they were left.’
Alec nodded.
There were teenagers in the photographs, too. Other officers had been assigned to match and trace each of the kids in case they’d seen or noticed anything those weeks prior.
‘We should find out if they know Rebecca Cole,’ Alec suggested. ‘They’re about the right age. And, she was the one who found the heads. Kids talk.’
Their planning eventually fell into silence.
Whatever warmth there had been between them in the morning had chilled at the sight on Louise’s desk. Cooper did not even feel smug about her lead any more. There was no victory to be had.
There was an awful potential, lurking in every case, every investigation. Some answers could not survive being found. Even if converted into words, even if the perpetrator stood in front of you and told you honestly all they knew, all they had done and thought they had meant – some actions could never be understood, not truly. Not unless you were capable of doing them too.
Gravity pulled Cooper a little in her seat as Alec took some corners a little fast, a little haphazardly. He was not a careful man, not when he had somewhere to be, not when he thought he was right. It only made her car sickness worse.
Half an hour down the coast, islands visible on the horizon, they finally arrived at the location shown in the photos.
‘Whoever left these must have known we’d find this place. Must have wanted us to come here.’ Alec stopped the car.
Beyond the car, the outgoing tides barely touched the wrecked homes in the water. They had begun to fall apart already, the sea having reached them some weeks ago.
There was no reason for most people to drive this route, so far off the main road as it was. Further yet, the track rose and rose, elevating to small cliffs full of green.
‘There’s a path into the trees. Fits the photo’s angle.’
So they went towards it.
Alec wondered, briefly, if they should have brought other officers, but Cooper was already ahead. She looked at everything, everything in the world. She tried to imagine what it was like to do a thing like this.
They followed invisible footsteps.
There stood twelve wooden crates, some of them open, some nailed shut.
They stood like doorways, displayed at different angles, fallen.
What Alec thought were children’s toys, balls, rattles, they lay all around.
The earth – woodchipped and moist and vast and small all the same – crawled with an invisible world of insects, flickering like static in the soil.
There was a smell of distant smoke. They’d never find its source.
They opened the box.
‘What—’
Cooper didn’t answer.
‘What is that – what—’
The smell from beneath reached Alec’s nose.
Alec could not breathe.
They stood in the open air, in the middle of beautiful woods so far from any inhabited place, and he could not breathe. He covered his nose and mouth, he staggered up and away.
His head rolled back as he moved, looking around at all the leafless trees, how the sky pierced through their thin branches.
Even with the mutilation of the horses, their burial, the eyes in the soil, there was something beautiful there. Something that could inspire awe, even as Alec imagined the pain of those creatures, even as he feared the reason why.
The crates . . . what had been left here . . . what had been done to those poor animals . . . all of them drugged, all of them poisoned and trapped until their deaths . . .
There was nothing beautiful here.
Nothing of ritual or symbolism, either. Nothing that made Alec run to research numbers and esoteric systems of meaning. Nothing that kept him up at night, theorizing as to the motivation of those who had committed such an act.
In those boxes, in those woods, Alec saw nothing that invited wonder.
He saw pain and suffering prolonged.
Regardless of law or definition, he saw murder at last.
Spread across the empty crates, freshly painted to the touch, he saw letters on their sides. He moved them, rotating them into position. Cooper called out for him to
stop, for him to stop touching it all, but he couldn’t. He had to know.
He saw the letters, red against the wood.
W
A
T
C
H
they said.
Watch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
They left before evening came, heading back to their car by the shore.
‘I’m not sure this was about insurance,’ Alec said.
The sun was low above the distant islands. Nearby, water lapped around the edge of the abandoned homes.
‘Were they watching us today?’ Alec leant against the car’s bonnet. Cooper sat beside him, coffee thermos in hand. ‘What was it you said about the Croydon cat killer? How all those animals were found chopped up, mutilated . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘You said it was all about the moment of discovery. The moment of seeing the owners’ faces, of knowing how they felt . . .’
‘That’s what some thought, anyway.’ Cooper finished her coffee. ‘We don’t know for sure. Maybe it was foxes after all, like the police said.’
‘Maybe foxes put them in the crates, too,’ Alec said, shaking his head. ‘Maybe they took the photographs.’
‘They’re pretty wily.’
‘They have sex outside my house every other night.’ He sniffed. ‘They make the most awful – awful—’
His nose wrinkled, and he caught himself, stifling a sneeze. ‘Bless you,’ Cooper said.
‘Have you come across many other cases like these?’
‘Foxes having sex, or, taking photographs?’
‘Serial animal abuse.’ His tone was serious, and Cooper stiffened a little.
‘Well, there’s Macdonald’s triad,’ she said. ‘You know that one?’
His expression was blank. He shook his head.
In the weeks to come, he would think of this – that he didn’t know the name. That she’d even asked him, a police officer, a detective. What had she thought of him to ask?
He found himself disarmed, asking question upon question to quell the feeling.
He listened to her talk. He’d learn later that Cooper had gained a master’s degree in Forensic Science a few years after qualifying as a vet. She’d put in the time. Her choices, whatever they had been, had let her rise so far.
Alec leant against the car and listened to Cooper talk about the conditions needed to create a predator.
Abuse.
Arson, vandalism.
Cruelty to animals.
‘But all these theories, they’re based on trusting the words of the killers themselves – people who are often trying to get sympathy for appeals or stays of execution . . . Blaming childhood like newspapers blame video games.’ Cooper shrugged. ‘Maybe psychopaths have no idea why they do what they do.’
Alec nodded, getting up from the car, wincing as he did so. He seemed like he might be about to speak, but he didn’t.
A boat moved across the waters, the sea almost red in the evening light.
They came back to animals before the end.
‘Some think it might be practice. That dangerous men might be too afraid or constrained by social norms to progress to killing human beings immediately. That it’s not about the animal at all.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I think cruel people rarely need a reason to be cruel, but . . . I don’t know. There’s certainly a lower risk factor to hurting animals. Maximum penalties are only a few months, and often, even in major abuse cases, courts are loath to ban people from keeping pets forever. There isn’t much justice when it comes to animals, not if they don’t walk and talk. And little of the kind of notoriety these people seek as a result.’
‘So you don’t think it’s like . . .’ Alec hesitated.
‘I don’t think what?’
‘Inevitable, that one thing would lead to another.’
Cooper raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re not being clear.’
‘That someone who hurt animals would hurt people.’
‘Nothing’s inevitable,’ Cooper said.
They arranged for the corpses from the crates to be transported to the vet practice for further analysis.
Before they parted ways, Alec asked about the coincidence of two people having such broken personalities that they’d want to hurt animals, that they would collaborate on a crime like this. He suggested one of them might have been led into it all . . . the hermit had mentioned crying, after all. Maybe there were even more than two people involved, maybe—
‘You look tired,’ Cooper said, smiling, and something about the smile made Alec blush, before suddenly looking at his watch.
‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘I’m supposed to pick up my son soon. Can I drop you back?’
‘I thought everyone drove in places like these.’
‘He still hasn’t passed his test.’ The way Alec said it made him look annoyed.
‘It took me four times to pass mine.’ Cooper shrugged, opening the car door. ‘I’m sure he’ll get there.’
Waiting for the crate corpses to be brought to the vet practice, Cooper headed back to her hotel for a quick nap. She wasn’t as bad as Alec, but she was surprised how much the day had taken out of her, how her hands shook, ever so slightly.
She thought about it all as she went up the steps.
The photos from the stables. The crates in the woods. Victims within and without.
Louise Elton, buried in debt and silence.
Albert Cole, a farmer who had wanted a new life, who had come so far to live so alone, who had lost everyone but his daughter Rebecca, and how long would she even stay? A year or two? Who knew?
And Alec . . . Alec who’d nearly had a panic attack at the uncovering of the crates. Alec, who kept looking to her for answers.
Four days, they’d said.
Four days to solve this case, and two were almost over.
There would be no other help, no second chances.
Alec had gone to pick up his son after they’d taken the bodies to the vet.
He kept saying he was sorry for how he’d acted, he—
She’d told him she’d see him in the morning. She’d try to be on time for breakfast.
He’d looked like shit, a pale sheen of sweat visible upon his neck as he went. Cooper imagined she also looked terrible. She didn’t even bother to turn on the lights as she shut her hotel room door, as she stripped off her clothes and collapsed into bed.
She set an alarm for an hour’s time.
She did not dream.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Down the hallway at Ilmarsh Vet Surgery, there were consultation rooms with old computers, scales outside for weighing animals. An office and a kitchen lay beyond. They still had a few old Halloween decorations up, some witch and broomstick fairy lights, a pumpkin leaning out the top of one of the bins. Papers sat on desks, forms, files, printers.
A vet sat there alone, coffee steaming in her mug.
Crazy for Ewe, Kate had written on a blank white mug in permanent marker.
A week ago, she had given one of the horses an apple. He was called Bruce. He had been showing signs of pain as he walked, avoiding the use of one leg – favouring, vets called it. It was all Kate could think about as she drank her coffee, as she tried to calm down. The way he’d come bobbing over, friendly, affectionate.
She thought about the sound of his scream.
In the mid-afternoon, a child came into the practice with a bleeding cat in a plastic bag. It was his pet. He’d remained home, sick from school, and had heard the screech of tyres and brakes outside. He’d walked all the way here with the eleven-year-old black tabby, barely breathing, barely struggling.
She stabilized it, but only first aid was free.
More would cost money. More always cost money.
The end was not inevitable, not even now, not with her help. She could save it, if they could only get consent. If the owners only did w
hat was right.
And that was the problem, the conundrum at the heart of her profession. How to save the animal from the owner.
Four consults, one outcall to the stables with Cooper, and two surgeries.
That was Kate’s day. It ended in a slow ride to the tower she called home. She was tired, already on the cusp of lost consciousness.
The lobby of Kate’s building had an old discarded fridge in the corner that had been there for three months, a distant mould within now spread to the facade. The old elevator was a pull-shut, pull-open, old-fashioned machine you wouldn’t trust to keep you alive. It had a sign saying it was out of order, defaced with graffiti, boxes of anonymous building supplies making up the remainder of its freight. The lobby smelt faintly of urine, though it had been cleaned a week ago. Kate knew it had, she’d seen the man with his mop.
She walked up the stairs of the converted hotel, more graffiti smeared along its walls, some of it bright and beautiful, some of it just initials, manifested for the sake of it. A couple sat and kissed near the sixth-floor doors, the boyfriend’s face wet with tears. Kate tried not to look, and they did not look back at her, but something about the encounter made her want to cry too.
She found her door, painted blue for some reason. She turned her key in the lock and jiggled it so that it would turn. She pushed it open.
She went inside and clicked the light switch on. She walked past plastic-wrapped cat food tins, past the climbing tower, the scratching post she had not yet taken to the dump. She opened her fridge, took out some leftover soup, and heated it up in the microwave. She poured a glass of water to drink with it. She sat and she ate on a small table by the window, looking out onto the small fields, the tyre place below, the light fading.
When she was done, she drank more water, went to her bedroom – the only other room – and took off her clothes, put on her pyjamas. It was humid, hot. There were mountains of clothes in need of cleaning, toiletries spread across every surface. A book she had meant to read, that she had bought months ago, abandoned by her bedside table, the bookmark – bought for the same optimistic purpose – still held between pages six and seven.
Sixteen Horses Page 10
