Page 7 of His Worst Crime

The other two shrugged, each in their own way suddenly tongue-tied. They set off together, Carme in the middle, the two men flanking her.

Ramon tried to follow the flow of Carme’s conversation while they walked, mainly staring ahead or occasionally turning to Carme when he replied, but all his peripheral attention was focussed on the young man slouching along on her other side, the blond English guy who had treated his horse. The effect had been almost immediate. He didn’t believe in love at first sight, but… What was this? Lust, he supposed. Though it didn’t feel like that.

He’d seen him when they’d first turned into the stable yard, which, being sited in the lee of the old La Foixarda Quarry, caught the shade for most of the morning. This guy had been slouching out from the direction of the boxes, and the first thing Ramon had noticed about him was his walk. He loped along fluidly, almost like a dog or fox, sliding along parallel to the ground. There’d been a moment when he’d seen them and stopped dead. And the way he’d stared at them for a long moment, like a fox caught in a car’s headlamps, it was as if some deep understanding had passed between them. In that instant, the morning sunlight, filtering through the trees on the ridge behind, had struck him full on, turning his mop of fine blond hair into a blazing beacon of burnished gold. And Ramon had been entranced.

Aged about twenty-five, he was shortish, trim but muscular, and dressed just in rubber boots, dirty red track pants and a faded blue tee. To Ramon, though, he looked simply stunning. Angelic was the word that came to mind unbidden.

Then he’d turned and walked away, perhaps to go looking for Carme. And yet she had already seen them from the near exercise yard, where she was supervising a special-needs class with the stable’s ponies. After a quick word with the teacher, Carme had come strolling across a minute or so later.

When she called out for David and he didn’t reappear, Ramon had offered to go looking for him. He knew his way around these stables, having been here many times. He found the boy in the tack room, cleaning harness with his earphones in. As they confronted each other, David reacting again like a startled wild animal, Ramon had experienced that same shocking jolt he had felt earlier, leaving him nearly speechless. There had been a moment, as David stepped toward him, when he had thought they might be going to embrace… or kiss even? Of course it couldn’t have happened: he was a uniformed police officer. On duty. Whatever their fantasies, people who tried to kiss policemen usually got arrested. But in that instant he’d forgotten all about where he was, or the fact that he was wearing a uniform. The boy’s eyes were a deep blue flecked with amber. They had stared at each other for a long moment before Ramon realized with another jolt that he was blocking the doorway, and stepped aside.

When Estel had rammed them in the box, his first instinct had been to protect the younger man, and it was with embarrassment that he found his arm had gone around him instinctively. But some of that feeling had been mutual, hadn’t it? For a second he’d felt almost like a chemical charge coursing from David’s body to his own. Again, it was a thing he’d simply felt, for the boy was surly and seemed intent on not responding to him. But that was an effect the uniform brought out in some people, even those who didn’t have anything to hide. Some folk were just wary of the law.

Of course Jaume had clocked what was affecting Ramon nearly from the outset. They’d been partners long enough for him to recognize Ramon’s type, and to know when something like that was “interfering” with his judgment. He found it hilarious, of course, and wouldn’t stop with the sly comments. His screaming out in front of the poor lad—in his terrible broken English, to boot—had been the last straw. So Ramon was glad when he finally got onto Eben with a wink in his direction and rode off back to the station.

Carme and the boy were both looking at him.

“What?”

“I asked you if you wanted to sit inside or outside? You were miles away.”

“Oh, outside, no? On the terrace. It’s a nice day, not too hot yet.”

The restaurant faced the stables’ riding yard, which was one of its biggest attractions. If you were lucky, there’d be horses working out or a riding class going on in front of you while you ate, which is what made the restaurant popular. One of Barcelona’s best-kept secrets, in the very heart of the city, La Foixarda made you feel you’d landed in a tiny forgotten corner of countryside barely a mile from Plaça Catalunya.

They sat down at a table that was separated from the riding yard by just a raggedy hedge and a wire fence. David immediately turned his attention out to the yard, where the class was just winding down. The stable’s six ponies stood there patiently as the children learned to unbridle and unsaddle them, then to brush them down and give them a feed.

“Where are you from, David?” Ramon asked.

“England.”

“Yes, I know. What part I mean?”

“North. Small town.”

Even to get those monosyllabic replies, Ramon felt like he was pulling teeth. To describe David as surly was an understatement. But he persisted:

“So did you grow up with horses, like on a farm?”

“Yeah.”

“Or a stables?”

“Farm. Stud farm.”

“What was it, a family business, maybe?”

“No.”

A pretty boy he might be, but he earned zero points in the sociability stakes. Thankfully, just then the waitress came to deliver their menus and take their drinks order. Ramon sighed and asked for a sparkling mineral water. He wouldn’t insist. The guy clearly had no interest in being reciprocal, whatever “chemical energy” Ramon had read into their interactions. Besides, while in uniform, he was still officially working and couldn’t be coming on to every cute but surly stablehand he chanced across. He turned his attention to Carme, asking her how things were going at the stables.

They had known each other since they were teenagers, having gone to the same high school and met at the school’s riding club. At fourteen, they had officially started “going out together”, and kept that status for a couple of years, though it had quickly evolved into a tight platonic friendship. At no point had Ramon needed to confess he was gay to Carme, but she’d seemed to “get it” without him saying anything. While they had been an official “thing”, they had kissed a few times and tried experimentally putting their arms around each other, but they had both quickly realized that the other wasn’t that keen to go further. Being a couple at that age had acted more as a smoke screen to parents and other friends than anything else. When Ramon at fifteen had fooled around for the first time with another boy after his woodwork class, Carme was the friend he eventually told, and she would confide her crushes on other girls to him but without ever quite going to the extreme of declaring herself gay. For most of their high school years they both kind of floated along on the delusion that they were bisexual and “open” as a couple, without doing much together that was actually heterosexual.

After high school, Ramon had gone on to university, pursuing studies to join the police, while Carme’s love for horses took her straight into a stable job after school. But they’d stayed close friends, perhaps united by their equine passion, whereas other childhood friends might have drifted apart more quickly as they followed their separate lives. Carme now lived with her partner, Àgata, and had recently passed her government exams to become the stables’ official director, since it was council-owned, though she’d been practically running it for years.

The waitress came to take their orders. Ramon and David both decided on the steak and chips—a bit unimaginative, maybe, but it was good here—and Carme asked for the fish of the day, which was oven-baked cod, or bacallà a la llauna. As David looked up briefly to give his order to the waitress, Ramon found himself studying him again. David’s eyes met his, and again, there was that brief flare of something, and then he looked away. The boy was hiding something. Ramon’s police instincts immediately sat forward. For the rest of the lunch, Carme and he talked about different matters—the stables, Àgata’s new job which was stressing her out, his partner Jaume’s son’s christening, a new brother to Clara—while David stared at his plate, chewing away. To be fair, the guy barely spoke any Catalan or Spanish, so it was hard for him to join in the conversation—Carme and he naturally slipped into Catalan when they were talking together—but the few times they switched into English to include him, his answers remained monosyllabic. By the time they got to the end of the meal, strained silences were starting to appear.

Finally, David stood up, waving off the offer of dessert.