Page 12 of His Worst Crime

“I have to check on my horse!”

“Do it later. Go and have a coffee with Santi and at least be a friend to him. And spend some time with your goddaughter. You’ve hardly seen her today. Now go, get out! I need to prepare the cake.”

It ended up being after seven when Ramon left the party and headed for the stables. The clown had been abysmal and knew it. The kids, by then a minor rat pack of ten or so with the afternoon arrival of the neighborhood kids, had swamped him. Ramon and Santi had been tasked with saving the poor guy from getting his costume ripped and his nose and wig pulled off. When paying him afterwards, Ramon had apologized, but the guy had just shrugged.

“They’re only kids. It’s in their DNA. And these gigs, at least they’re paying my uni fees.”

When he reached the stables, they were quiet, no sign either of Carme or David. The boxes were dim in the twilight, enwrapped in a deep purple gloom. He didn’t like the way his heart fell as, wandering around them, he failed to spy the blond English boy. He went toward the box where Estel was being kept, but in the dim light it was hard to see much. After searching back and forth for a light switch, he gave up—there must be a master switch somewhere, but he couldn’t find it. So, he went in search of a stablehand to help him, and found a young brown-haired woman he’d met a few times before, feeding a horse several boxes away. She seemed happy to work in the gloom.

“Hi, have you seen David about?”

She shook her head.

“Wasn’t around today. Lucky Carme was away, she’d be dead pissed.”

“Where would he be?”

She shrugged. “He’s staying in the watchman’s room at the moment, doesn’t have digs of his own. But I haven’t seen him all day.”

“Where’s that?”

“Above the tack room. Go in there, there’s like a ladder on one wall that takes you up there.”

“Thanks.”

Ramon walked along to the tack room. The strong smell of leather and horse sweat washed over him as he stepped through the open doorway. Inside, it was dark and silent, filled with the anonymous shapes and profiles of the hanging tack. He used his phone torch to find the light switch beside the door and turned it on, flooding everything in a bright fluorescent glare.

“David?”

Just silence. He called again and waited. No answer. Walking across to the ladder, a heavy wooden construction bolted to the wall, he stood before it. If David wasn’t answering, he either wasn’t in or didn’t want company. Going up there would be a form of trespassing. He shouldn’t. He climbed the ladder.

“David?”

The room was in deep gloom, the only light coming from a window facing out onto the exercise yards, and the reflected electric light coming up through the hatch he’d just climbed through. Against the wall opposite the window, there was a single bed, neatly made. Beside it, at the foot, next to a minuscule sink, sat a ragged, military-style backpack. On the tiny bedside table at the head was a book and a framed photograph. The rest of the room was filled with paraphernalia from the stables. There was a desk piled with papers and a few old newspapers, a chair on which some tee-shirts and a pair of denim jeans were neatly folded, and boxes and sacks of feed and other horse supplies. Ramon noted the contrast between the working confusion of the stables’ paraphernalia and the spartan neatness of anything that David seemed to have touched or organized.

Ramon sat down on the single bed. He imagined David lying here night after night, staring out at the square of sky over the stables as he waited for sleep to come. Then, on impulse, he leaned down and smelled the pillow. There was the faint scent of someone, perhaps David, or was he just imagining it? He shouldn’t be here. He was being creepy. He should go. But instead, he picked up the photo.

The frame was cheap and plastic, slightly scuffed, its “glass” just a sheet of clear plastic. Using the light from his torch, he studied the photo. Three people, showing their head and bare upper torsos. An older man standing behind two boys. One of the boys, the younger one, he recognized as David, about thirteen, fourteen years old? His eyes were clear and his blond hair, damp from swimming, stuck out wildly in every direction, and a beach towel hung around his neck. He looked happy—no, exhilarated—his smile broadly stretching across his face, a row of perfect white teeth visible.

The other boy, almost a man, about seventeen, eighteen. A total contrast. Clearly David’s brother, or possibly a cousin. But, although he shared David’s general features and handsomeness—the pointed chin, high cheek bones and ice-blue eyes—his face was more closed and cynical. He scowled at the camera, a sneer curling one lip, and he was turned slightly away from the other two, presenting his shoulder to his brother, his body facing out of the frame sideways. The man standing behind them had more in common with the older boy. He was fifty-ish, heavyset, and his face was reddish, perhaps from drinking, or maybe from working outdoors. He wore the same cynicism as his older son, his body slumping in a way that seemed emotional as much as physical, as if tired out by failure and the knocks that life had given him. But he had a hand on each boy’s shoulder, and the way it rested heavily yet casually suggested care and love.

Ramon studied the photo for a long time, memorizing the various details. Then he put it back, trying to place it exactly in the spot he’d found it. He picked up the book. It was a dog-eared paperback with some sort of science fiction scene on the cover: a youth dressed in a short white tunic, standing on a promontory, gazing out at a desert-like landscape, while overhead a huge moon or planet almost filled the green evening sky. Zelender’s Return it was called, by Z.R. Mignon. His place in the book was marked by a beer coaster from Cafè de l’Òpera.

Ramon put the book back, again taking care to return it to its original place, and stood up. David wasn’t here, but he hadn’t taken his stuff, so he had probably just gone out. Why would he do that without telling Carme though, and leaving her in the lurch with the work at the stables? This wasn’t his problem. Carme would deal with it. He went back down the ladder and out into the boxes. At the end of the row he saw the same stable hand coming toward him, her face just a pale oval in the dark.

“No luck. He must be out.”

“If he’s not in his room… there’s one other place I’ve seen him go.”

“Where?”

“Down the park next door. He loves that place.”

“But that’s municipal, isn’t it? It’s well after six. It’ll have shut.”

“Yeah, but there’s a hole in the fence behind the last row of boxes. I’ve seen him go in that way mostly.”

“OK, thanks. I’ll check down there.”