six
It was Saturday lunchtime. Ramon wanted to be here.
It was his goddaughter’s birthday, of course he wanted to be here.
He had organized the clown, for God’s sake.
He took a pull of his beer and watched the kids throwing themselves around the bouncy castle set up in Jaume’s backyard.
Maya passed by, carrying a potato salad in her hands.
“Don’t think that your godfatherly duties stop at just keeping an eye on them,” she warned in passing. “Soon as you finish that beer, you’re up as games master until the clown gets here.”
“I’ll make sure it lasts then,” he called back, rattling the almost empty can.
But she was already gone, her short buxom figure fussing over the long table that had been set up in the garden, so packed with food there was barely room, for the eleven—no, twelve—plates set up around it.
“Twelve?” he called out. “Isn’t that symbolic of something? Who else is coming?”
Because Maya normally laid the plates five a side and one on the end for big events like this: Jaume and Maya, himself and Clara, Maya’s brother Joan, his wife Elena and their two kids, and Jaume’s sister Paula, her partner Enric, and their son.
But today she’d laid an extra plate at the end of the table.
“When twelve people sit down to dine, two will marry!” she called back.
He finished his beer and grabbed another from the ice bin on the veranda, before walking across to join Maya at the table so they wouldn’t have to shout. He tended to drink a little too much at these events, the stress of being the perfect gay policeman among all these heterosexual couples.
“You’re all married though,” he countered.
Then the penny dropped. Oh no, she hadn’t done it again!
The last time Maya had attempted to matchmake him had been a disaster.
Like many straight people, she seemed to think that the fact he had “gay” in common with another human being meant they’d make a perfect match.
“Please, don’t do it,” he pleaded.
“He’s nice. Just get to know him,” she returned. “He hasn’t been in Barcelona long and doesn’t know many people. At least be pleasant. You can do that, can’t you?”
Ramon groaned inside, but to her he just said:
“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.”
“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.”
He found the hole in the wire easily and slipped through.