twenty-six
The village of Ravenscragg was another couple of miles down the same narrow lane, which skirted around the base of the looming crag above.
It consisted of barely half a dozen houses, one of which was the pub, The Raven’s Roost. Ramon parked in the tiny square out front.
It was an old Tudor building with a low doorway they had to stoop to enter.
Inside, copper pots, rusty scythes, and sheaves of wild grasses hung from ancient rafters.
There were only a few patrons, even though it was nearly midday.
As they entered, Ramon looked around for any representative from the police, but could see no one who fit the description.
This was where they’d arranged to meet, as odd as it had seemed to him to meet another police force in the pub.
But maybe that’s the way they did things around here.
They approached the bar, where a stout homely woman beamed at them and asked:
“Morning, gentlemen. What’ll it be?”
“Just a cola for me,” Ramon said. I’m driving.”
“I’m happy to drive,” Jaume shot at him, but then the range of British craft ales on tap caught his eye.
“We’re on duty,” Ramon warned.
“Sure, a… just a lemonade, thanks,” Jaume grumbled.
“To what do we owe the pleasure of entertaining two foreign policemen in our little neck of the woods,” the barmaid asked, curling a stray lock of her red-golden hair behind one ear and smiling at Jaume.
“Is it that obvious?” Jaume asked, smiling.
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” she laughed, immediately blushing across her pale, freckled face. “Though come back wearing your uniforms next time and I’ll let you drink on the house.”
Jaume grinned back.
“Jaume, we’re on duty,” Ramon warned.
“Spoilsport,” the barmaid shot at him, smiling wickedly. “And here I was thinking I could convince you lot to give us a Full Monty for charity.”
“So we’re here about the—“
“The stud break-in?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Is it such common knowledge?”
“Last census, this village mustered eighty-seven souls, many of them out-of-towners. The attack on Simon Howard, and Davey’s scarpering was the biggest event this village has seen since the millennium bug.
I wish I could tell you that I’m our burg’s Sherlock Holmes, but I’m afraid it isn’t rocket science. ”
“Well, yeah, you’re right. Do you know where we can find Owen?”
She nodded towards a window nook not far from the door, where a slumped figure was staring at an almost-empty pint on the table before him.
“Take him a pint of his regular, and it might help unseal his lips.”
“Which is?”
“Here, Raven’s Doom,” she said, already pouring the pint. “Just don’t let on I said anything, and….” She leaned forward, so that her face hovered just a few inches from Ramon’s and Jaume’s. “Be gentle on him. He hates himself enough as it is.”
“Thanks. Oh, and we were supposed to meet a police liaison officer here, from the North Yorkshire Police? An officer Beaton?”
“Oh, Clive? He’ll be along eventually. He isn’t the most punctual of souls. But he likes to stop in here for the odd cheeky half at midday.”
As they carried their drinks across to Owen’s table, Jaume murmured at Ramon, “Remember that name, Raven’s Doom. I want to try that as soon as we’re off duty.”
Ramon just shook his head, instead trying to work out what approach to take with Davey’s brother. Owen looked up as they approached the table.
“Excuse me,” Ramon said. “The barmaid told me that Raven’s Doom is your brew? She poured me this one by mistake.”
Owen nodded at them.
“Thanks, mate.”
If he thought it was odd that the barmaid would pour a beer instead of a Coke by mistake, he said nothing, just finishing off his old pint and pulling the fresh one toward him.
“You coppers? Spanish coppers? Look, I told the last lot, I’ve got no idea where Davey nor Ned are.”
Although there was a visible family resemblance, Owen was taller and slimmer than Davey. His nose was more prominent, and his blond hair, which he wore down around his shoulders, was straighter.
“We’re from the Mounted Unit of the Catalan Police,” Ramon said. How did everyone here know they were police? Was it that obvious? It wasn’t as if they were even in uniform. “We’re—“
“So this is about Davey? Listen, I told you guys, I’ve got no idea where he is, and I had nothing to do—“
“Just listen,” Ramon interrupted. “Davey’s been in an accident. He’s in hospital in Barcelona… in a coma.”
“Oh shit!” The defensiveness Owen had shown up until that point seemed to crumble. “What happened? Is he OK?”
“He was hitchhiking. He’d accepted a ride in a lorry which turned over. He’s stable, but it’s too soon to say…”
“Oh no…” Owen leaned both elbows on the table, his beer forgotten, and put his head in his hands. “Not little Davey, poor kid.”
Ramon allowed him a moment, before saying, “When he comes to, he’ll be charged for the assault and battery that occurred here at Ravenscragg Stud.”
“No, no, you’ve got the wrong bloke. Davey wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Who is the right bloke we should get then?” Jaume asked aggressively.
“Oh no, you’re not taking me down that path. What would I know about that?”
Instead of answering him, Ramon prompted, “So you’d testify that he wasn’t the violent intruder that—?”
But Owen immediately sensed the direction of his questioning.
“No, no way, I’ve got nothing to add I didn’t tell the police before. You’d—“
“Come on, he’s your brother. Surely you can vouch whether he has the character to commit a violent crime?”
But Jaume broke in over Ramon, almost spitting in his forcefulness, his English becoming even more broken as he eyeballed Owen aggressively:
“It like this: your brother, he a criminal, guilty of smashing an old man, no? He attack your father, we know. We have the fingerprints on the iron bar. I going to send him to prison for years and years! What you think of that?”
“No! No!” Owen protested.
“Yes! Yes!” Jaume barked. “Straight from the hospital into the prison, and I going to throw away the effing key!”
Jaume’s words seemed to afflict Owen almost physically. Ramon had the sense just to keep quiet then, letting Jaume play the bad cop.
“No!” Owen said tersely in a low voice. He kept his gaze down, staring at his beer, but didn’t reach for it.
“What is it, violent, no violent?” Jaume snapped like a Dobermann. “Your brother does attempted murder his father or no?”
“No.” Owen repeated, surly.
“So, tell us what happened,” Ramon said quietly. “Why were his fingerprints on that bar?”
It concerned him that they were here, interrogating Owen in a pub, when they didn’t even have official jurisdiction to be here, or even to make inquiries in the UK.
Where was Beaton? He was tempted to pull out his phone to start recording, but he didn’t want to interrupt Owen, or spook him.
Owen kept his head down, staring at the beer in front of him, but not saying anything.
“When Davey comes out of his coma, he’s going into prison,” Ramon said harshly, not quite trusting his voice to get the words out. “Is that what you want?”
Owen shook his head, still refusing to look at them, but he said:
“Tell me about Davey, please.”
Ramon and Jaume exchanged a look.
He was working at a stables in Barcelona,“ Ramon said. “A friend of mine owns them, in fact. I met him….”
Owen looked up quickly at him. “Yeah, how was he?”
“He’s gifted with horses. He treated my gelding, Estel, after he’d gone lame and got infected with Cellulitis.”
“Yeah, he knows his stuff,” Owen said. “Should be studying to be a vet. He’s got what it takes.”
“Instead he going to prison,” Jaume broke in, “for a crime he not do.”
Owen looked at him, and then down at his beer.
“He didn’t do it, did he?” Ramon asked.
Owen sighed.
“Davey wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
I was going to do it alone. But Dad woke up and surprised me.
I only meant to give him a tap to the head, but he went down like he was dead.
And Davey was there in the doorway just as Dad went down.
So he saw Davey plain as day. I was wearing a balaclava and gloves, though Dad still suspected it was me.
That’s what he claimed later, anyway. But Davey wasn’t wearing gloves.
He grabbed the bar off me and threw it out into the paddock.
And then he just panicked, grabbed a pack, stuffed some clothes into it, his passport, and left.
I told him not to, it’d make him look guilty as hell, but he wouldn’t listen.
So, I kept going with my plan. Dad had changed the combination though, and I couldn’t get into the safe.
Then I got rid of the gloves and balaclava as I’d planned… ”
“How?”
“I dumped them in a tub of oil out in the shed, weighted down with a stone. Then I rang the ambulance and the police, and played stupid. No one accused me. Dad was unconscious. They took him to hospital. Once I was alone, I fished out the gloves and balaclava and burnt them in the incinerator. And that was that. But when Dad got back from hospital, he still knew. He told me he didn’t want to ever see my face on the farm again.
“Davey was never really a suspect, but because he scarpered, it made him look guilty as hell. And when they found the bar with his fingerprints on it, he became a ‘person of interest’ in the case. So I just kept my mouth shut, thought if he’d got safe away in Europe, there was no need for me to go around confessing. ”
“You’d let your own brother go to jail for your crime?”
“No, he was free. He’d escaped to Europe.”
“He wasn’t free. He was running from the law.”
“Freer than I am here. Everyone thinks I’m guilty of beating up our Dad.”
“You are.”
Owen said nothing for a while, almost as if he’d convinced himself that he had nothing to do with the crime, and was about to protest his innocence, despite having just confessed. But finally he nodded.
Then a figure darkened the pub’s low doorway, and a uniformed policeman entered. The woman at the bar nodded him over to their table.
Constable Clive Beaton was a portly gray-whiskered man with a red face.
“Ah, I see you’ve met one of our local characters,” he said in a marked Scottish accent, as soon as the introductions were over.
Ramon nodded. “He’s just confessed to the crime out at Ravenscragg Stud,” Ramon said.
Constable Beaton puffed out a huge breath. “Finally, Owen! How long has it taken us to get here, eh?”
Owen said nothing, continuing to stare at his beer with a fixed intensity..
“Finish it,” Constable Beaton said. “There’ll be none of that where you’re going for a while.”
Owen scowled, but shook his head. Instead he pushed the untouched pint of Raven’s Doom across to Jaume. “Here, you are,” he said. “Try it. It’s our local ale, the best in the UK.”
“OK, Owen, let’s go,” Beaton said. “We’ll go over all of that down the station, and get it on paper. And we’ll get you a lawyer. No one you can call to post bail?”
“Only Dad,” Owen said with a sarcastic smirk.
“Well, we’ll see what we can do,” Beaton mused as he ferried Owen out of the pub, one hand on his shoulder.
After they had left, Jaume and Ramon looked at each other.
“So are we finally off duty?” Jaume asked.
At Ramon’s nod, Jaume reached for the pint.
As they were boarding for the flight back, filing to their seats, Ramon came across a pale but sober Simon Howard buckled into a preferential-class seat at the front of the plane.
Compared to the last time they had seen him, he looked surprisingly well groomed, his graying hair combed over with product, wearing a white-and-beige check business shirt and brown corduroy chinos. They shook hands.
“See you when we land. We’ll give you a lift to the hospital.”
The older Howard just nodded brusquely, before turning his head to stare out of the window. Ramon and Jaume continued on toward their seats in the economy section.
“Feels like your theory has legs,” Jaume commented, buckling himself into his own seat, after stashing a bag of Cornish pasties he’d bought at the airport into his seat pocket.
“What theory?”
“That your stable boy’s one hundred percent innocent.”
Ramon puffed. “Parents always think that… but this time he was right.”
“So, will Owen stick to his confession?”
“Beaton just texted me that he now has it all on record.”
“Didn’t waste time.” Jaume picked out and began eating a chicken korma-flavored Cornish pastry. “With a subject like Owen, you’d want to be fast. I’d never be sure if he was going to change his mind, recant his testimony. So, what’s our agenda—from the airport to the hospital?”
Ramon nodded, but didn’t trust himself to speak.
They’d achieved their goal, Davey was off the hook.
But things now suddenly felt horrifyingly real, terrifying even.
He could no longer keep his thoughts from the English patient lying in Intensive Care at Vall d’Hebron Hospital.
He stared out the window, willing the flight to take off.