fourteen
Ramon worked every day in the police station for the rest of the week.
Early each morning, he’d drive to the stables, exercise, feed and water Estel, then walk down the mountain to work.
In the evening after work, he’d change out of his uniform at the station, and walk back up to repeat the process again.
Ernest said the horse was recovering well, and would be ready to start riding again in a week or so.
The truth was they could have floated him back to the police stables already, but Ramon resisted, preferring to pay Carme for the rent of a box, and keeping Estel there.
He claimed he didn’t want to risk Estel having a relapse by changing environments.
The truth was he wanted an excuse to come by the stables twice a day on the off-chance David might turn up.
If Carme knew that was the case, she said nothing, greeting him matter-of-factly when they saw each other, and letting him get on with looking after his horse, and come and go as he pleased.
Ramon didn’t dare return to the space above the tack room, from where David’s presence had long faded, he supposed.
And it would be awkward explaining to Carme what need he had to go up there, should she see him.
But, in the evening after exercising Estel, and then feeding and watering the gelding, he’d slip through the hole in the fence at the back of the stables, and take the path down to the pond in the old La Foixarda quarry.
There, among the flitting nightingales and bats, he’d sit on the bank and stare into the dark water for a while, imagining David returning, coming to find him.
He knew that wasn’t about to happen, but he could dream, couldn’t he?
Driving home afterwards, he would be despondent and morose.
Then he would eat a lonely meal in front of the TV and go to bed alone.
And beside his bed, folded neatly on a chair, was a dark gray pair of track pants and a white tee-shirt.
Ramon hadn’t washed them for fear of Davey’s scent, the last trace he had of his, being lost forever.
Every evening before he got into bed, he would kneel and lower his face to the clothes, hoping to revive some earthier vestige of his lover through the faint odor that remained, that sweet smell of grass, and whatever else Davey’s ether contained.
Or was he just imagining it? Five days had gone by, and David’s presence in the garments could be nothing more than a memory.
Still, it was enough, so that when he closed his eyes, his Davey, blue-briefs Davey, was the final image he conjured before sleep claimed his tortured mind.
The only hope he kept alive was over an action of which he wasn’t at all proud.
The morning after finding the picture frame, he took it to a colleague in Forensics for fingerprinting.
He had to register it to an open case to do that, so as not to prompt questions.
Submitting it as part of a local burglary case, he planned to delete it later, and thus avoid arousing suspicions.
It was added to the local work flow, where it crawled along at a snail’s pace among many other pieces of evidence to be processed for a mass of different cases.
Finally, on Friday, the results came back.
There were four sets of prints: his own, and three others.
Two of those showed a clear thumb and first and second fingers, and another, just a scuffed middle finger print.
The last set of prints was the most numerous, as of someone who’d handled the frame fairly often.
His plan then was to run all four sets of prints through the Interpol database.
What he hadn’t allowed himself to wonder until that point was what he would do if he found something.
David had something to hide: he’d left his life working at La Foixarda, a job he’d clearly loved, to avoid giving out his true details.
What would Ramon do if he found him implicated in a crime?
He told himself that he’d do his duty as a police officer and turn David over to the law.
But he couldn’t believe the man he’d met, the concerned animal lover who’d helped him nurse Estel, could be involved in anything illegal.
He simply refused to believe it. The David or Davey he knew was not that sort of person.
Or had Davey just made Ramon think that?
Finally Ramon couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He stored the print files on his own personal drive, deleting them from the burglary investigation.
He had no right or desire to track David like that, did he?
As a police officer, he should run those prints through and find out what David was hiding.
But as Ramon, an individual, it was a horrible way to track down a guy he was obsessed with.
He would never forgive himself. David would never forgive him.
The young Englishman and he could never have a proper relationship with a secret as huge as that between them.
Though he shouldn’t even be contemplating having a relationship with a criminal in the first place.
But he couldn’t believe that David was one.
A crook. It just wasn’t in his nature, was it?
Everything he knew about the man up until that point, and all of his senses, were screaming at him that the man was innocent.
He had done no wrong. So then why was he running from the law and hiding his identity?
On Friday afternoon, Jaume came into the station after his shift to invite him to go out for a few beers with some of their colleagues. Having patrolled together, stirrup to stirrup, for the better part of three years, passing a week without seeing each other felt like a marriage separation.
“Come on, baby,” Jaume teased, sitting on the edge of his desk, “we need to work this out. We can’t go on not seeing each other like this.”
“It’s you who’s off prowling with other boys,” Ramon growled, extending the joke. “Show me you’re serious about getting back together, and I’ll check my diary.”
They agreed to meet at Palau de la Birra, an elegant but tatty Modernista premises, which had been turned into an upmarket drinking hole on Balmes Street.
It was a favorite haunt for many of the Catalan Police Force, both mounted and otherwise.
So after work, Ramon legged it up Montju?c faster than usual, exercised Estel, fed and watered him, and then, leaving his car at the stable, called a taxi to take him to the bar.
He hadn’t planned to go out that night, so the clothes he’d brought with him to change into at the station were decent but not flash.
While walking and seeing to Estel, he tried not to get them dirty as he had no time to go home and change.
When he walked into the bar, Jaume was already there, standing in a circle of colleagues at the back, where they’d commandeered a chest-high table to lean around.
All had beers before them. It looked like it was going to be one of those nights.
He greeted everyone, a couple of whom he knew.
There were the two colleagues Jaume was currently patrolling with, Ignasi and Marta, and two others.
The first two were both in their thirties.
Marta was slightly younger than Ignasi, but had a tough, heavyset demeanor that let you know she was not to be messed with.
As a woman in a male-dominated force, she was used to having to defend her turf.
But she had a wicked, scathing sense of humor, while swearing she could drink any man on the force under the table.
Ignasi was taller and quite thin, more relaxed and amiable, often happy to let Marta take the lead in difficult situations, playing the nice cop to her hard-as-nails act.
They both had partners off the force, who seemed fine with their professional Laurel-and-Hardy duo.
The other two cops Ramon didn’t know, but Jaume introduced them as Dani and Pere.
They were both younger, bearded, in their late twenties, and had been on the beat for less than five years.
They told him they had come through training school together, and had Ignasi as their mentor during their first year on the force.
Mentally, he was already confusing them until he reminded himself before he forgot their names that Dani was brown-haired and Pere, dark.
Ramon grabbed a beer, and settled in for what promised to be a hard night of beer and banter. He hoped that at some point they’d eat. While not a total lightweight where drinking was concerned, he would need a decent meal at some point if he was going to do this.
“So what’s it like to be back on the desk?” Jaume jibed him.
“Yeah, lovely,” Ramon growled. “We’re trawling through lists and lists of prices for that supermarket duopoly case. Give me the street any day.”
“Can I ask you guys a question?” Dani put in. “How did you guys get into the mounted unit?”
It was a question that soon had them all recounting their different histories, the why of their decision to choose the police as a career and the mounted unit in particular.
In most cases, like Ramon, it was because they’d loved riding as a kid, and this was one of the few career choices where you could get decently paid and still work with horses, though Marta’s story was a little different.
She’d started off in a tougher unit, focussing on drugs and street crime.
Then an injury had forced her to step back and reappraise.
And yes, like the others she’d grown up around horses, so she had the experience to apply to the mounted unit.
“I wouldn’t go back there now,” she mused. “The fight against drugs is getting more and more like a war zone every day. The weapons we’re taking off those guys nowadays, it’s scary.”
Marta wasn’t one to be easily scared. Ramon was quite content in the mounted unit: working with horses, patrolling parks and festivals for the most part. It was an easy gig. If only he could get back there, away from the desk where he was trapped.
“How’s Estel?” Jaume asked.
“He’s much better, thanks,” Ramon said. “The vet said he should be ready to try riding again next week. Hopefully in a few weeks we’ll be back on the beat together.”
“I’m missing you, partner,” Jaume said, raising his glass. They clinked beers.
“Aw, are they going to kiss?” Marta quipped.
Everyone laughed. Ramon frowned as he felt himself flush, but he smiled and took it. Police banter could be rough, but at least these guys accepted him as a gay man working shoulder to shoulder with them. He’d take a bit of ribbing for the side.
“Speaking of kissing, I was wondering why you hadn’t brought Estel back to our stables,” Jaume asked. “Anything to do with that cute bit of stable lad you were stuck on?”
“Hardly!” Ramon scoffed. “I just didn’t want to move Estel too early, risk a relapse. Next week I’ll bring him back. Besides, that stable boy’s gone.”
“Yeah? How so?”
Ramon shrugged.
“No idea. He was only ever just passing through. Gone home maybe.”
Jaume said nothing, but his raised eyebrow as he went in for another pull on his beer told them he found something slightly strange. Ramon looked for some topic to change the conversation.
“So… the Police Games… Any takers?”
That got a snort from Jaume. Every year their unit fielded some horse-and-rider entrants in dressage and jumping events at the European Police and Fire Games held every two years.
He and Jaume had gone in for it their first year working together.
Their boss, Santi Gasol, had recommended it as a team-building exercise.
It wasn’t the sort of riding that either Ramon or Jaume enjoyed, but they grudgingly signed up, finishing somewhere down the bottom of the competition table in their events.
Rather than putting his horse through complicated jumping and dressage maneuvers, Ramon preferred a hard, sweaty gallop over the sands of the Delta de l’Ebre, close to where he had his farm.
The experience had in fact worked in cementing their friendship, bonding through a shared hatred of dressage, so the question of whether or not they’d sign up each year had become a sort of codified running joke between them.
“We were thinking of doing it,” Pere offered, glancing at Dani. “I used to be pretty good at dressage events when I was a kid. You guys have done it, haven’t you? Any pointers?”
Ramon and Jaume looked at each other and then away, desperate to keep from bursting out laughing and spraying beer over the table.
“Yeah, we were…” Jaume tried, keeping a straight face.
“You guys should do it,” Marta cut in. “It’s a really good team-building experience. You’d like it.”
“Yeah? Cool,” Dani said. “There we go, Pere. Let’s sign up.”
Ramon and Jaume left to get more beers, so as not to break out laughing at the table.