One of a kind, p.8
One of a Kind, page 8
Whatever depression had made Ivo look cast-down and thoughtful had clearly passed, because he gave me a big grin and bounced on his toes for a moment. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Worth a shot though, isn’t it?’
‘Look, poor Fred’s frying in there.’ I pointed at the back of the car. ‘Let’s go home and wait for Ginny to get us the results. Then we can return Fred to his people, that’s the really important thing, and – well, you can take it from there, can’t you?’
Ivo opened the car windows, but didn’t start the engine. The thoughtfulness was back. ‘Shall I cook dinner tonight, then?’ he asked, as though we’d been discussing food for the previous ten minutes. ‘I can check in the freezer, there’s probably some duck or something.’
The conversational ground had shifted so fast that, even knowing Ivo as I did, I found it hard to rebalance myself. ‘Er,’ I said, adjusting from thinking about the future of Fred to thinking about meals. ‘That sounds nice, thank you.’
‘Well, you are staying. I only really cook when I have guests.’ He started the car and we circumnavigated the geese, who were wandering across the tarmac, with caution.
‘Do your parents fly in food parcels the rest of the time?’ I sounded a little more acerbic than I’d meant to, and saw Ivo flick me a look.
‘I eat a lot of sandwiches,’ he said, almost apologetic. ‘Cooking for one, well, seems a bit of a waste of time. D’you find that? Or do you cook for your housemates as well?’
‘No, I… look, can we go back a couple of conversational steps, please, Ivo? Fred. We return him, and then what are you going to do?’
‘Ask questions. Mr Williams either took Fred with or without permission, and either of those possibilities will mean something. And if Fred was actually his, which, given his pocket location is a distinct probability, then maybe someone can tell us what on Earth he was doing in Yorkshire.’ Ivo negotiated the roundabout and we slid down onto the bypass in a haze of conversational acceleration.
‘What if it turns out that Mr Williams was a hermit, with no friends, no colleagues, who bred red squirrels in his shed in his spare time, what then? What if there’s no one to ask?’
‘You said you have to be licensed to keep them? The squirrels?’
‘Yes, but he might not have had a licence. It’s possible Mr Williams got hold of one some other way, for some reason. Red squirrels are hardly up there with Golden Retrievers as suitable pets.’
There was a pause. I didn’t want to see disappointment on Ivo’s face so I kept my eyes averted, looking out of the window at the clouding landscape, where another savage band of rain was heading in to sweep holidaymakers into town from the beaches. He seemed so set on this being a mystery that would be easy to solve, like a TV programme. All the clues, neatly laid out for us to track back to the point of origin, where a moustache-twirling bad guy would tell us all his plans just before the fortuitously called police swept in to arrest them and tell us how great we were. Perhaps that was what his bedtime reading had prompted him to think – that life had a narrative. He didn’t seem to have considered the general messiness of life, or the random behaviour of humans.
I just wanted to get Fred home.
A thought struck me. ‘Oh God. What if he really was an illegal squirrel breeder, working on his own out of his garden shed? What if there’s a whole shed full of squirrels somewhere, and he’s dead and nobody is looking after them?’
‘Is that likely? Someone would have to know, surely? An entire shed of squeak and rattle, the neighbours are going to wonder.’ Ivo put his foot down and the car overtook a Kia full of disappointed shrimping nets, sending road spray over the windows.
‘It’s illegal. He’s hardly going to ask people round to admire his pets, is he?’ I had horrible visions of a bunch of red squirrels, unfed and unwatered in the heat of a smelly locked shed and it made me fidget in my seat, and gave me a burning feeling of urgency deep in my chest.
‘So we have to identify Fred’s place of origin and get there before they realise that nobody is around to feed them?’ He gave me a quick, almost amused, look. ‘Good. I’m glad you’re fully on board, even if it does mean you’re going to be worrying about the poor fluffy creatures.’
I stared out again at the acres of hillside, fields of ripening barley bending soggily under the weight of the rain. ‘Yes. But then, he must have had other people who knew what he was up to. What would he tell everyone he was doing in his shed for hours? And if he’s been supplying squirrels to other people – I mean, who?’ I shook my head. ‘None of this makes any sense at all, to be honest, Ivo.’
‘Probably not.’ Ivo overtook another car. The Volvo buzzed along, windows dappled with raindrops and, in any other circumstances, I would have enjoyed the journey, having Ivo to myself in the cosy confines of the car. ‘But there’s just something,’ he said. ‘I can feel it. Even if we bring in a ring of illegal squirrel breeders, hey, that would be a result, wouldn’t it?’
I couldn’t think of a reply that wouldn’t puncture his Scooby-Doo-esque good nature. Nor did I really want to. Although I didn’t, for one second, believe that a dead man with a squirrel was the ringleader of an international racket of any kind, I couldn’t bring myself to wipe that expression of anticipatory glee from Ivo’s face.
He was happy. He was investigating, which, he seemed to believe, was his job. There were many, many faults in this line of thinking, which I could have pointed out. But to utter any of them would be to take the shine off Ivo’s day; it would remove his focus and leave him flapping around, adrenaline-fuelled but no longer with any point. And I really didn’t want to do that. Okay, I may have to inconvenience myself for a few days, following him about so we could track ‘clues’, but this investigation would run its course and peter to an end of shrugging and, perhaps, a shed full of illegal squirrels. Ivo would count anything a result, and all I had to do was hang onto him to make sure he didn’t enthuse himself to death or get so carried away that he’d be arrested for interfering with a police investigation.
Yes. That was why I was here, sitting in the front of the Volvo, with Fred scraping the bars of his cage behind me like a prisoner intent on attention, watching the grey band of rain sweeping across from the hills to envelope the vale in squally splatters. To keep Ivo out of trouble.
Not at all because I was enjoying, in a somewhat masochistic way, having Ivo to myself.
‘So, yes, duck,’ Ivo said suddenly, as though that conversation hadn’t been roundly supplanted. ‘I do a very good plum sauce, you know. Unless you’d rather get a takeaway?’
Conversational ballet, that’s what it was. There may be many intricate moves, but the dancer always returns to the resting position, and clearly, tonight’s dinner was Ivo’s ‘resting position’ for now.
‘No, duck sounds great. I’ll give you a hand and you can show me how you make your plum sauce.’
There was a moment’s silence. The car began to swish as the rain settled on the road surface.
‘Actually, I feel I may rather have talked up the sauce,’ Ivo said at last. ‘It’s basically jam with a splash of balsamic.’ He flashed me a grin, one eyebrow raised. ‘And there goes my secret recipe. I may have to kill you now.’
‘Don’t.’ The image of the body lying, feet protruding from under the flimsy police cover, was still with me. A glimmer of an image of Ivo standing above it wielding a weapon flickered in the back of my brain for an instant, then degraded and fluttered off with other unworthy thoughts. ‘This week’s already had too much “dead” in it. And anyway, you wouldn’t,’ I said, half to myself.
He was looking at me, I could tell, even though I was still keeping my eyes on the view beyond the windscreen, where rain hissed as though a pantomime villain had just come on stage. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
Did he suspect any of the things that had gone through my mind? I turned to look at him, but he was staring out at the road in front, his expression neutral. A few stray hairs caught wispily in his almost invisible blond stubble and dragged along his cheek. Long eyelashes, very visible at this angle, shaded his eyes. He was almost impossibly beautiful, and almost impossible at everything else.
‘You’re an absolute bugger, Ivo,’ I said, equally softly. ‘Completely impossible.’
‘Yes, yes I am, aren’t I?’ he replied, pushing his hair away from his face with a wrist, and grinning happily. ‘Shockingly dreadful. Don’t know why anyone puts up with me.’ Another quick, sideways look. ‘Don’t know why you put up with me.’
‘Because you’re doing the driving; this is all your idea. And you’ve promised me duck in plum sauce.’
‘Oh yes. Suppose I have. Glad you have designs on my culinary abilities.’ Another cheery grin. ‘Because I haven’t got any others.’
‘Apart from the drawing, the French speaking and the country dancing,’ I said, without thinking.
‘Ah. You remembered that.’
‘Of course I did. You were busily comparing your achievements to Regency ladies, I think, and that somewhat sticks in the memory.’
‘I lied about the country dancing.’
‘I’m sure Jane Austen will get over the disappointment.’ I met his eye and suddenly we were both laughing at the ridiculousness of the conversation. Ivo didn’t do ordinary conversation. I’d never really heard him small-talking his way around a room; he would normally insert a chat-jemmy into any discussions about the weather or house prices by asking if anyone knew the best way to split willow to make hurdles or something equally random. You didn’t chat with Ivo, you embarked on a convoluted word-rollercoaster and you hung on to see how much made sense.
If you got off at the end with your hat still in place, you counted it a success.
6
Back at the gatehouse, I decanted Fred from his travelling cage. He swung his way out and into the larger one, pausing only to hang briefly on the front bars and eyeball me with a stare like a newly uncased conker. His ears twitched so that the tufts of hair that sprouted from the top of each one waggled and he seemed most perplexed.
‘Were you hoping we were taking you home?’ I asked softly to the intense gaze. ‘Sorry. We will, as soon as we find out where you’re from.’
Another moment of reflected light and then the little squirrel bounced away again, flashing his white stomach in the glimmer of sunshine that saw fit to creep through the barred glass of the stable windows. I sighed and went to head back indoors, walking past Ivo’s car parked neatly on its grassy spot alongside the bridleway, when I had a thought.
Ivo had found that hotel receipt up on the path where the man had died. But he wouldn’t have had the time or opportunity to search for anything else. He said that the litter pickers had been there the day before, so, as he’d proved, anything left there was a result of that lone walker coming along in the dead of night. Did I really believe that?
I stopped dead, one hand on the still-warm car bonnet. Yes. I believed Ivo had found the receipt, of course I did. But he hadn’t found the driving licence, which might still be up there, somewhere, hidden amongst bracken and fern. Or in Ivo’s pocket, being kept from the police for his own reasons?
The kitchen window had been thrown open, and from inside I could hear Ivo singing along with the radio and the sounds of cupboards opening and closing as he, presumably, gathered the ingredients for his plum sauce. He seemed happy and relaxed, or as relaxed as Ivo ever was, and his relaxation would have put fully wound elastic bands to shame.
Did I really think Ivo had anything to do with the death of a man on a lonely footpath in the dark?
Then I thought of the path as I knew it. Rarely travelled, except by the horse riders and gamekeepers, and the occasional walker. Maybe that driving licence was still up there? If it was – it would put my mind at rest that this was nothing to do with Ivo, and maybe I could find it. I was, after all, far more used to combing through undergrowth than most people. An injured small creature will burrow itself in to feel safe, and there’s nothing like a fingertip search through vegetation on the hunt for an injured fox cub – all the while waiting to have those very fingertips bitten off by a fear-crazed creature – for teaching you how it’s done.
I tried to keep away the thoughts that Ivo might have already found that licence. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. After all, why would he have kept it, rather than handing it over to the police now we already knew the man’s identity? It was only his utter, unwavering focus on there being something to investigate that made me think otherwise, after all.
Plus, there was that book beside his bed.
‘Ivo?’ I shouted in through the open window. ‘Can I borrow the car for a bit?’
The singing stopped, although the radio continued to play, echoing off the high ceiling so that it appeared Harry Styles was serenading from inside a bucket. ‘The car? Yeah, course you can.’
‘Where are the keys?’
There was a moment of frantic-sounding activity, lots of movement of stuff and the clatter of bowls, then a fistful of keys appeared on the window ledge. ‘Don’t be too long, Cress, I need serious sous-chef-ing in here if I’m not going to go mad and produce sweet-and-sour doorhandles.’
‘I won’t. I’ve just got to… pick up a few bits.’
Ivo’s face appeared behind the keys, hair dishevelled and his frothy collar jutting at odd angles. ‘Have fun.’ He grinned and then bobbed back to whatever he was doing.
I picked up the keys. It was so typical of Ivo not to say ‘be careful with the car’, or anything else that indicated he cared at all about his belongings. He’d always had an open-handed attitude to his things, as though he didn’t care; it was part of the ‘antiques are to be used’ frame of mind. Although I had once seen him upset, when another friend had ‘borrowed’ some books and then lent them on in a chain, which meant Ivo never got to the bottom of who actually had possession, and had to relinquish them to the great unknown. He’d been quietly disappointed, a view of Ivo that had made him even more attractive to me. He hadn’t got angry, he hadn’t gone storming round to the first borrower demanding to know what right they thought they had to lend on things that weren’t theirs. He’d just sat on the edge of his bed, head in hands, staring at the gap on his bookshelf, saying ‘my grandfather gave me those books’ as though he couldn’t comprehend where they had gone.
That was Ivo. Thoughtlessly generous. Impulsive. Hopelessly attractive.
I drove the car up to where I’d parked yesterday, and walked out along the trackway. There were marks of booted feet in the new mud; the police had been back since it had rained, but the little tent was gone and there were no other signs to show that someone had met a sudden end amid the heather and boulders, until I stood right where the body had lain. There the undergrowth was crushed and trampled, but any blood had washed away in the rain showers and the sheer force of nature was returning the place to its innocence.
I lifted my head and looked outwards. The view was wonderful, the sky stretched like a canvas with far hills printed flatly upon it; one way the heaped rise of the Yorkshire Wolds looked green and smooth, the other way, the more wooded Howardian Hills, rugged and determined. Behind me, the woods sloped down to meet the rise of the moors. And in front of all, the blue-grey of the moorland in a foreground of sprouting heather bells and the green upthrusts of bog-myrtle and sedge. The track formed a peaty outline, curving across the moor, with the woods that edged it dropping away down the steep hillside. Nothing to see here, apart from a glorious view. Not something you would come to appreciate in the middle of the night. Even the wildlife would mostly be invisible, apart from a few owls and the odd stoat. Definitely no red squirrels.
I walked a little further down the path, avoiding the muddier spots, where puddles lurked dark and hidden under the roots of the bracken that grew alongside. Far off to my left, away towards where I knew Beverley and Hull lay beyond the swollen rise and fall of hills, clouds massed and a gauze of rain dragged along the edge of the view, coming this way.
I lowered my eyes, looking for that driving licence. Or – well, I didn’t know what. Anything. Anything odd, anything extra. The beaten down nature of the undergrowth did not exactly enthuse me with possibilities; it looked as though the police, despite my reservations, had given the area a pretty thorough check for anything dropped or discarded. There was nothing to see apart from peat that gave up its water-loading in a boot-squelch when stepped on, fingers of rock, a lot of view and even more sky. No small, plastic oblongs bearing a helpful picture, name and date of birth, no carefully typed confessions. Not so much as a bit of blown tissue bowling along over the hoof-marks.
Had Ivo really found that receipt just lying in the mud? And nothing else? It hadn’t, perhaps, been in the ‘bag’ we’d heard about from Mr Thixendale, and surreptitiously removed by Ivo to create a mystery, just for him to solve?
I tucked my hands in my pockets and shrugged my shoulders up against the bustling wind, which came in smelling of the distant sea. Rain was fringing its edges and the far hills were no longer visible behind an approaching shower, so I moved back, off the track and into the shelter of the overhanging trees. Tiny deer paths streaked through the wood, marking where the animals headed through cover and down the hillside, and I took one of these, treading carefully amid the upthrust roots and bramble snares until I was well under the branches of some spindly birches that cuddled up against conifer cover.
The rain had come in earnest now; it whispered and gossiped its way among the leaves down to earth, plashing and spattering onto the track but mostly missing me, huddled under my umbrella of branches. I leaned back against the trunk of a birch, rough with lichen and wind-scoured bark and pushed my hands further into my pockets. The occasional drop hit my head as the wind shoved body-sized gusts between the growth at me, and I moved further back to use the trunk for more cover.
Nothing here but wet. No evidence, no signs that anything had happened here, other than a casual passing of tourists and view-seekers, and I began to realise how stupid I felt. Almost as though I had to find something to give legitimacy to my coming up here in the first place. What on Earth had made me think that Ivo could have had anything to do with what had happened here, apart from his bedtime reading material?
