Page 11 of His Worst Crime

“Of course. Aren’t I always?”

She just cocked an eyebrow at him.

And he did make the effort. Maya made sure they were sitting side by side, Ramon on the end of the table and Santi to his right, ensuring they could talk privately if they wanted. He was a nice enough guy, a few years younger than Ramon, blond, with muscles in all the right places, and a friendly smile. An accountant, he’d just transferred from Madrid to Maya’s Barcelona office. They spent a quarter hour comparing Madrid and Barcelona as a place to live, another quarter hour on Barcelona’s nighttime gay offerings, though since Ramon hadn’t been out on the scene in almost a decade, his knowledge was a little rusty. Then for twenty minutes, they compared their gym routines, all of which took them to the end of the first course. As they were carrying the dirty plates out, Maya whispered to him:

“See? You guys are getting on like a house on fire!”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that they’d now both exhausted their common store of neutral, inoffensive chitchat, and the conversational pauses were starting to drag into silences.

“Why do people say that? Why is a blazing inferno supposed to be a positive metaphor?”

“Well, you know,” she winked as she handed him a stack of clean plates. “Getting bigger quickly, lots of heat.”

“Maya, your mind is always in the gutter!”

“What do you expect, married to Jaume!”

“Wait, you take the plates,” he said as he saw she was attempting to manhandle the huge terracotta dish out of the oven. “I’ll take that. Go ahead and clear a space on the table.”

He followed her outside, carrying the dish of steaming chicken portions cooked in a sauce of prunes and pine nuts.

And that was the end of their brief conversation about Maya’s matchmaking success—or lack of. During the second course, Santi managed to ask him the inevitable, dreaded question: what it was like to be a gay policeman. He found himself coming out with glib platitudes almost on autopilot, while another part of his brain was wondering how Estel was doing. Naturally thinking of the horse meant thinking of that surly stablehand. Needled by Carme’s challenge, he’d done a desultory check on the name “David Cooke”, but as he suspected, it was a common name and he could be any one of thousands on several databases, if that was even his real name. His police training suggested the boy was hiding something, yet his personal instinct told him to trust him.

He realized the table had gone quiet and people were gazing at him expectantly.

“Jaume says your horse got injured,” Jaume’s sister Paula repeated. “Is he OK?”

“I… think so,” Ramon said. “I’ll be checking on him after lunch.”

“And checking up on that young English stable boy into the bargain,” Jaume chuckled.

There was a surge of laughter, and as Ramon protested that that wasn’t the case, telling Jaume in no uncertain terms to pull his head in, he found his gaze locked with Santi’s. Embarrassed, they both looked away.

“It isn’t like that,” he muttered, partly to the table and partly to Santi.

But the damage had been done. For the rest of the meal Santi turned to his other side and began chatting with Maya’s sister-in-law Elena about rental prices in Barcelona. She was a real estate agent and they quickly made arrangements for her to show him some listings in the coming week. Ramon felt bad, though he had done nothing wrong. It was Jaume who should be feeling guilty, though he knew he wouldn’t. And Ramon was thinking about that damn stable boy, however much he tried to keep his thoughts on his horse.

The lunch drew to a close. They released the kids from the table to go back to playing on the bouncy castle, the clown texted to say he was held up by traffic and would be twenty minutes late, and Ramon helped Maya stack and carry the dirty plates back to the kitchen.

“We need to get all the lunch stuff cleared away,” Maya said matter-of-factly, rinsing plates under the tap and stacking them. “The other kids will start arriving any minute. I told parents four o’clock.”

“The clown’s supposed to be performing at five,” Ramon said. “Hey, sorry about that, about Santi. Jaume’s…”

“Got a big mouth, yeah,” she said. “I know my own husband. So who’s this stable boy?”

“It is totally not a thing. He’s just some English kid Carme’s got working for her. He helped dress Estel’s wound, that’s all. Jaume’s inventing stories for his own entertainment.”

“Yeah?” She paused what she was doing, giving him a look.

“Can we stop this? No, nothing. It isn’t anything. Zero. Zilch.”

And at that she laughed.

“Hmm, me thinks the boy doth protest too much,” she said in her perfect English, though until that point they’d been speaking Catalan.

“OK, I’m out of here. I’m going to check on Estel,” Ramon huffed.

“You can’t. You have to stay until the clown gets here. Because if he’s bad it’s on your head.”