Page 20 of His Worst Crime

Up above the tack room, everything was as they’d left it. The bed was made but rumpled from where minutes ago they’d been writhing on it. His shoes and dress pants lay crumpled on the floor, while his shirt and socks were slung over a chair along with David’s towel. The photo lay face down on the table beside his bed. He looked around for paper to leave a note and, after rummaging through the contents of the desk, found a feed brochure with plenty of open space to write on—the photo of a ranch showing lots of blue sky—and a pen.

Then he was unsure what to write: a declaration of something, a light jokey message, or something in between? In the end he just wrote “Call me. Ramon” and his private number. He placed it on the bedside table underneath the photo, which he righted. As an afterthought, he picked up the photo and examined it, front and back. No details he hadn’t seen on the front jumped out. It was a beach scene but difficult to see where. The frame was plastic and mass-produced. No clues there either. He popped the back off. Written in pencil in a careful hand on the back of the photo was: “Simon, Owen & Davey, Seaton Carew, July 25th, 2013″. He snapped a photo on his phone, then removed the photo, turned it over and took a careful shot of the family group. After that, he returned the photo and put the frame back together, placing it upright on the feed brochure. Why had he done that? He didn’t know. He shouldn’t have, but it was done.

Then he put on his shoes—he’d left the boots at the bottom of the ladder—gathered up his clothes in a bundle, and left. Sitting in his car in the yard, wearing David’s clothes, enveloped in David’s—Davey’s?—slight musk (a hint of salt, his natural sweat, and something like grass or hay, maybe?), he didn’t want to leave. But what to do? He couldn’t just hang around here waiting for him to come back. Estel was fine and well looked after. The horse didn’t need him until it was time to walk him again. And tomorrow he had to be at the station bright and early, and in uniform. He needed to prepare for his working week. He took a final searching look around the yard in case David should suddenly appear, then turned the key in the ignition and drove out of the yard.

twelve

Monday morning rolled around and Ramon drove in to the police station. The Catalan Police Force’s Mounted Unit was based next to the Park de la Ciutadella in a faded salmon-colored building that had been built to show off Barcelona’s state-of-the-art industrial machinery in the World’s Fair held all the way back in 1888. Compared to the city’s Modernista architecture, the building was quite nondescript. Go through the gates and you came into a large courtyard with the stables on one side and the administration block, a modern, mirrored construction, on the other. As he entered, Ramon looked longingly toward the stables, but he had no horse. Jaume had been paired temporarily with another patrol partner. So, in the offices, his sergeant showed him the desk that would be his for the next few weeks until he could get back on a horse. While most of the working patrols hot-desked a couple of central desks, this one was off to the side and almost never used. The computer was last century, dusty, and a layer of files and papers littered its surface.

Ramon spent the first half-hour of his new role sorting and filing all the paperwork on the desk that should have been put away a long time ago, and throwing out the old newspapers. Then once he turned on the computer, he found it was waiting for an update and couldn’t be used. He called IT, and while the young computer technician was fussing and rebooting the computer to make it usable, he thought about David.

It had been bizarre. The guy had started off so surly, bordering on unfriendly. Sure, he was shy, but there had been something else, definitely a spark right from the first. Of that Ramon was sure. The tension between them had been growing. The way they had connected, it had seemed inevitable. He knew they both wanted it. So why had Davey—he’d started calling him that in his head—just vanished like he had? All yesterday evening Ramon had been impulsively checking his phone, hoping for a text or phone call. It had been the first thing he’d done when he awoke this morning. But nothing. He’d go back to the stables this evening, and turn the place upside down until he found him. Perhaps he could pressure Carme into giving him his number? Could he claim it was due diligence? No, she wouldn’t do that. And he wouldn’t ask for it. He wasn’t a stalker… was he?

No, Davey had been into him as well! He’d kissed him, Davey had kissed him back, he’d licked his whole body, had Davey moaning for it. He’d had Davey’s hard dick right there in his face for God’s sake, smelling the pungent odor of his groin! He’d felt the heat from his balls, been about to lick his cock, take it in his mouth, suck it and give the boy more pleasure than he suspected he’d ever had in his entire life. If it hadn’t been for Carme and Àgata coming back when they had. The guy had wanted to have sex with him, he knew that. He’d been keen, so why had he just disappeared, done that vanishing act? Was it just cold feet? It was bizarre. What was going on?

The computer guy was looking at him blankly. The guy was slim, with mousy shoulder-length hair and John-Lennon-type glasses. Like Àgata’s. Were they coming back into fashion?

“What?”

“I said you need to put in a password for your account, containing upper and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters.”

“Right.”

He leaned over the keyword. There was a time when he would have found that boyish look of the computer guy’s quite irresistible. Strange, it didn’t do it for him now. Davey was much more rounded, small and muscular. God he had a hot body! The image of him laying back on his bed in those blue briefs, his hard boner packing them out… it was making him horny again.

He typed in “Davey+Blu3+Bri3fs”, and then again in the box below.

“Right, you all set up, good to go,” the IT guy said, standing up.

“Thanks, man, you’re a hero,” Ramon said, leaning in toward the screen. He had the Interpol app up and loading even before the IT guy had left.

He first tried the obvious: “David Cooke”, “David Cook”, “Owen Cooke”, “Owen Cook”, “Simon Cooke”, “Simon Cook”, and every permutation of those names and initials that he could. Then he typed “Seaton Carew” in the map app and found it was a beach in the northeast of England. He went back to the Interpol app, and tried “Seaton Carew”, “Hartlepool”, “County Durham”, “York”, and “Yorkshire”. The cases ran into the thousands. He tried them in combination with the above names, and zero cases returned. Closing down the Interpol app, he tried various social media platforms, inputting the same terms and combinations of them. The results again ran into thousands, and scrolling down through them he could find nothing related to his Davey. What he did find was that Seaton Carew seemed to be a popular beach to take horses to exercise. So then he tried searching stables within a fifty-mile radius of the beach. Now he had a list of over thirty. Better, but scrolling down through them, again no single place stuck out as possibly having any connection to the names “David”, “Davey”, “Simon”, “Cook”, or “Cooke”.

Over an hour had now gone by and his desk work was becoming pressing. Santi Gasol, his supervisor, would have him for toast if he didn’t come up with something productive over the course of the morning. Reluctantly, he closed down the Interpol app and got on with his regular work. For the rest of the day, he worked conscientiously if with a mounting frustration. The tasks he had been set were those that none of the regular desk-bound officers cared to do, which had been pushed into the “to do later” list, until a fresh pair of hands like Ramon’s were available to carry them out. So he spent a few hours revising supermarket price lists, as a temporary asset to a case that was trying to determine if a couple of supermarket chains were engaging in price-fixing. Then he was put on call-line duty, phoning members of the public who had volunteered information on phone thefts and other petty crime, checking their stories and details in case any future inquiries were needed.

By the end of the day, he was exhausted, and thoroughly fed up with being cooped up in the stuffy space of the office. Somebody, get him a horse and get him back out on patrol, please! So, after changing out of his uniform at the station, he decided to walk up to Montjuïc, retracing his and Jaume’s route of several days before, the morning that Estel had cut his foot, along Passeig de Colom and up Avinguda del Paral·lel. The evening streets were bustling with people, the bars along Nou de la Rambla already thriving with people though it was barely six o’clock. He walked quickly, glad to be outside. Though it was quite a long way on foot, he was keen to see Davey again. This time, rather than doing secret Internet searches, he’d simply ask him about his background. The guy was obviously shy and didn’t like to talk about himself, so he’d have to coax it out of him. And he didn’t seem to have or care for much of an Internet presence, that was it. Unlike Jaume, he’d never seen him with a phone in his hand. Perhaps they could pause the sex for a while and get to know each other a bit. That would be best. Carme was always saying that guys jumped into bed together before even knowing each other’s names. She was right. There was something—a particular quality—about Davey that deeply attracted Ramon. It wasn’t just sex; he was like an old soul. The times they had just been together in the box, looking after Estel, few words had been needed. They’d understood each other, and could just be in silence together, without having to speak.

Walking up through Poble Sec, the climb got steeper and Ramon began to puff. The exercise felt good, exhilarating to stretch his legs after sitting all day in front of that dusty computer screen. Why had all of Ramon’s searches on Davey drawn a blank? Of course, his was a common name, so that made it harder to search. But still, there should have been something, a Facebook or Instagram account, something. Would he be using a false name, and if so, why?

Everything he knew about Davey—David, he corrected himself. He should stop thinking of him as Davey until the guy had let him know whether he even liked that shortening of his name. Everything he knew about David prompted him to trust him. But was he being blinded by his passion, his lust?

Coming in view of the stables gave him pause. What would Davey—David—be doing? Feeding the horses? Maybe still exercising that filly of his, Boira? Or lying on his cot in his room, just in those blue briefs, hard and thinking of Ramon? Yeah, get real. They just had an “almost” moment that didn’t go anywhere. He wasn’t going to jump into sex with him again; he’d already firmly decided that. Pull the other one—it plays the disco version of La cucaracha.

The stables seemed deserted in the early evening. The overhead fluoros were on, so the whole complex glowed like a UFO in the twilight. He met Maria coming along one of the rows of boxes.

“Hi, Ramon, how’s things? You here to see Estel?”

“Hi, Maria. Yes, is Carme around?”

Maria nodded toward the end of the row. “In her office.”

“Thanks.”

He wanted to ask about David, though didn’t dare, so he just turned and walked along to Carme’s office. But all his senses were alert in case the English boy appeared unexpectedly from out of a doorway or one of the boxes. But no such luck, and there were no sounds of anyone working elsewhere in the stables, either. He plodded along to Carme’s office, where he found her cursing over a pile of paperwork.

“If I’d known taking over as director of this place meant I’d never get to spend any more time with the horses, I wouldn’t have bothered with those damn exams!”

Like any public post in Catalonia, taking on the job of stable director had involved studying for and passing complex, boring exams on every detail related to being a government official, and very little to do with looking after horses, which were her passion.