One of a Kind, page 2
‘So, hang on. You’re telling me that there was a body found, up here in the middle of nowhere, and he had a red squirrel in his pocket? An animal that is not found anywhere even close to here? And – in his pocket? Reds are really shy, there’s no way he was carrying one around in his pocket, not without it going ballistic and escaping!’
Ivo took my shoulders and pulled me around to face him. The spark was back in his eyes now, his face, sculpted like a stonemason’s best example of his art, was almost rippling with the constant emotional feed. ‘That’s why I’m here. It’s weird, you agree? Why was he here? I’ve seen the body, he wasn’t dressed for hiking – besides, the attending doctor reckoned he died about midnight – and he definitely wasn’t dressed for walking in the dark.’
I sighed again. ‘That’s the police’s job, Ivo. You know that. Nothing to do with us. You go back and put the story on the website, I – well, I guess you’ve got me here to pick up the squirrel? Is it still about?’
Ivo looked over towards the white tent, bulging and wobbling, like a tiny windbreak on a gale-ridden beach. ‘They’re just waiting for the van to come and take him away.’
‘And the squirrel?’
He shrugged. ‘They think it climbed into his trouser pocket once he was dead. Hiding, or something.’
I gaped at him. ‘But, where from? Like I said, no—’
‘Red squirrels for miles, I know. I did listen, Cress.’ He shook my shoulders lightly and I was sure I heard my brain clattering around inside my skull. ‘But I’ve just got a feeling that there’s something not right.’
‘Apart from there being a dead body and a squirrel, which isn’t exactly normal.’ His enthusiasm would have been infectious, if I weren’t already so full of infection that it was leaking out of my nose.
‘Yeah.’ He almost breathed it. ‘So. You in?’
His hair caught the wind and blew out behind him and made him look like a photo shoot for a retro magazine. Ivo. My friend. The only reason I went along with half of his schemes was to keep him from making a complete tit of himself.
‘All right,’ I coughed now. ‘I’m in. What do you want me to do?’
‘Have you got those cages still, in the back of your car?’
As a wildlife rescue person, all I’d had to do was turn up in the police tent, in my uniform, carrying one of the small-animal cages, and they’d looked at me with relief.
‘You here for the squirrel?’
It briefly crossed my mind to say, ‘No, I’m here for you; here, climb into this really tiny little cage,’ but I didn’t feel it would be a good way for me to establish my credentials, so I didn’t. I just nodded.
‘Okay. Where’s it gone? Tom?’
Tom, who was in a uniform that looked as though he’d put it on very hastily in the middle of the night, and who was looking about as cheerful as someone called upon to wrangle a squirrel on not enough sleep, pointed. ‘We stuck it in that box.’
I tried not to look at the plastic sheeted shape on the ground, from which a pair of scuffed and dirty trainers were poking. I’d worked with the police before – normally it was ferrets that needed removing when poachers got caught – but I’d never been this close to a dead human body before.
At least they’d had the sense to cover the cardboard box. Someone had flung their jacket over the top, and I hoped that the squirrel hadn’t climbed into an armhole or something.
Carefully and gently I removed the jacket. The squirrel was a tiny ball of red fluff huddled deeply into one corner of the box, nose tucked in so far that only half of one tufted ear was visible. I held the travel box down in front of it. The squirrel didn’t move.
Obedient to my training, I gave it a quick visual once over. There were no wet streaks in the fur that would indicate bleeding. No limbs held at odd angles, no shivering or other indicators of pain. It was small, and round and much redder than even the most auburn of the greys, most definitely a red squirrel. Uninjured, apparently, and not sick or starved – what the hell was it doing here?
Prepared to initiate emergency measures should it panic, I touched it, very gently with the tip of my finger. A head emerged and a beady eye rolled upward, then, in a flash of auburn, the little creature had fled into my nicely enclosed, dark and safe-looking transport box and I closed the door behind it with relief.
‘You don’t need it?’ I asked the two sleepy looking detectives in the tent with the body. ‘For evidence, or anything?’
They looked at one another and I could feel the sarcasm building. ‘Well, we don’t reckon the squirrel did him in,’ said one.
‘But if you could hold onto it until we need it for questioning,’ said the other. ‘We need to know what it might have seen.’
I sighed. ‘Right. I’ll take him back with me then.’
Then, moving carefully so as not to tread on the body, I carried the little box outside, where the sun was now shining blindingly across the top of the moor and highlighting the white-painted trig point like a pimple on a rolling purple buttock.
Ivo was vibrating with anticipation. As soon as he saw me emerge from the tent, he held up both arms in a Victory gesture and shook his fists at the sky.
‘No good pretending to be macho now, Ivo. I know you, remember?’
‘Shut up. I’m happy.’ He bent his head to look through the wire of the cage door. ‘Is it in there?’
There was still some left-over sarcasm boiling inside me, clearly, because I managed to snort. ‘No. I left it in the tent. These things are the new “must have” accessory, didn’t you get the memo?’
‘Shut up. Right. What do we do now?’
‘I get this poor creature to somewhere more secure and then go back to bed.’ I started clumping my way back along the peaty track, trying to forget the covered body I was leaving behind, and that the decorative Ivo was wriggling his way out of a hot coat at my side.
‘Great, great. The police don’t know who he was; did they say that to you? No idea. No identification.’
I held the little box higher and peered inside. The squirrel had taken itself into the darkest recesses and was nothing but a bright eye of suspicion and a curled tail. ‘What were they expecting, a driving licence?’
‘Of the bloke, not the squirrel.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
Ivo grabbed the arm not holding the squirrel box and pulled me to a standstill. ‘Have you no intellectual curiosity at all?’ he asked, tugging me around until I faced him.
I sighed again. Deep, steadying breaths seemed to be a feature of any conversation with Ivo. ‘Right now I am wondering whether I’ll get home before my paracetamol wears off, why you came up here before dawn in such unsuitable clothing, what to do with this poor animal when I get back seeing as I’m not supposed to go into work because I am ill, and whether my housemates have left enough hot water for me to have a nice warm bath as soon as I get in. Is that enough for you?’
He let go of me and dropped his face into his hands. ‘God, yes, I’m sorry, Cress. Not your problem. A mystery body on the moor with a squirrel in his pocket. It’s more an intellectual exercise than a story, isn’t it?’
I felt a momentary pang of shame for upsetting him and patted his shoulder. ‘It’s fine. I’ll go home, make this chap comfortable in the emergency housing in the shed and go back to bed for the rest of the week. I might see you next weekend? Isn’t Jamie having a party that we’re invited to in Doncaster?’
Jamie was another university friend. He’d gone into the civil service but we still spoke to him.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Ivo sounded tired. ‘I just thought – no, you’re right. Course. I’m just getting carried away again.’
But then I looked at the box in my hand. ‘Ivo,’ I said, steadily. ‘Look.’
The squirrel had uncurled. It sniffed its way up to the wire door and poked a nose through the narrow gap, then splayed itself across the wiring, giving us a lovely view of a fluffy white stomach. Tiny paws gripped the wire.
‘Probably hungry,’ Ivo remarked, after a quick glance. ‘God knows I am. Might try to catch a fry up before I head back.’
‘No, you don’t understand.’ I was still keeping my voice level. ‘This is a red squirrel. Noted for their aloof behaviour and shyness. They don’t approach humans, they hide away, that’s why we have such trouble keeping track of the populations and their spread or decline; they’re really hard to count.’
Ivo looked down at the cage. The squirrel was snuffling its way around the entire hinge side of the door, seemingly unconcerned about our conversation. ‘There’s one,’ he said. ‘Definitely one. Not making it difficult at all.’
I could feel the fizzling coil of query deep in my stomach, like a fuse burning through. ‘You still don’t get it. The only reason for a squirrel – a red squirrel – to behave like this, would be if it had been hand-reared. Or, at least, kept domestically. And that’s illegal, you can’t keep them as pets, can’t keep them at all unless you’re properly licensed.’
Ivo dropped his hands and the gleam was back in his eyes. ‘So, we have a man, with no identification, dead on the moor in the middle of the night, with an illegal tame squirrel?’ He bent lower and his hair brushed against me. I ignored the goosepimples this raised and concentrated on the squirrel. ‘And you’re not even a bit curious?’
‘It’s edging towards Scooby-Doo territory,’ I said, simultaneously annoyed at his persistence and caught in the backwash of his enthusiastic excitement. This might not be a mystery, but it was rather enjoyable to see Ivo treating it as though it were.
‘I suppose he could have been – what? Taking his squirrel for a walk?’ The sound of a vehicle on the road beyond made us both look up. ‘It’s the body wagon,’ Ivo carried on. ‘Come to take the poor bloke away.’
I stood up. I didn’t particularly want to see the removal of the corpse; it had been bad enough making its acquaintance under the circumstances as it was. ‘I’ll take this chap home then,’ I said, watching the squirrel’s continuing antics. He, or she, didn’t seem in the least fazed by being in a cage with the enormous faces of two humans staring through the bars, and was now scuttering through the straw bedding. ‘And go back to bed,’ I added, to drop a little more guilt on Ivo for dragging me out, even though I had to admit that a lovely early morning on the moors with the sun and Ivo hadn’t been the chore I was making it out to be, and the presence of the squirrel had added a piquant touch.
‘I have to go and put this up on the online page.’ Ivo curled his lip. He pined for the days when reporters had to dash to the nearest payphone to call in a story, and had always longed to be able to say, ‘Hold the front page!’ With online editions updated hourly, and only the best stories making the weekly print edition, this was unlikely to happen and he clearly felt it in every centimetre of his patchwork-and-velvet coated heart. ‘And you really don’t think there’s anything weird about it?’
I took the cage in my arms, unwilling to risk swinging the squirrel too much. ‘Oddest thing is him having the squirrel in his pocket, to be honest. I mean, you couldn’t carry it any distance like that, it would just climb out and run away.’
‘Trust you to be practical.’ Ivo led the way out along the path, where we passed four burly men in black carrying what was obviously a collapsible stretcher and a body bag. We all smiled early-morning smiles built of too much tea and not enough patience at one another as we jostled through. ‘You’re always so practical, Cress. Can’t you just admit, this once, to a tiny tingle of curiosity about what the hell was going on up here last night?’
I thought for a moment. Practical? Was that how Ivo saw me? I felt a momentary stab of disappointment that he couldn’t see me as something a little more… anything but practical. Although, compared to Ivo, I was as sensible as lace-up brogues and as down to earth as a lawn mower, so it wasn’t a ridiculous description, but, just for once, couldn’t he see me as what my mother would have called a flibbertigibbet?
‘Maybe,’ was all I said.
‘Ru said he wouldn’t put this out on the police Twitter until I’d had chance to update our site,’ Ivo said, conversationally.
‘That’s nice of him.’
‘Yes. They’re going to do fingerprints to try to identify our body.’
‘Oh. Good.’ I really didn’t want to think about the body any more. I wanted to go home and back to bed.
In my hand the box twitched as the squirrel moved from side to side.
‘And I thought I might beat them to it by going round the B&Bs.’
‘What on Earth for?’ We reached our cars, my poor battered old Land Rover and Ivo’s totally out-of-character Volvo V90. His was electric though, so not quite so out of character as all that.
‘I’ve just got a feeling. Reporter’s intuition.’ There was a suppressed excitement about Ivo again now, as though, under that 1970s fashion-victim exterior lay steel-tipped ammunition. His gaze was focussed and that slight tension that made him stand straighter felt just a wee bit dangerous. ‘Plus something else.’
‘Tell me,’ I said as sternly as I could.
He wiggled his eyebrows at me and his precarious piercing fell out. ‘Well. When I got here and the police were all “what the hell is he doing with a squirrel in his pocket” and everything, I had a quick squizz along the track where they found the body. And I found… this.’
I bent down and picked up the eyebrow ring, handed it to him, and looked at what he was holding out. A piece of paper. A printout of a receipt, on cheap paper in faded blue ink.
17 June
One night accommodation, no breakfast. £75.
The rest of the receipt had been rendered illegible by damp and having been screwed up into a ball.
‘Ivo, that could be anyone’s! Loads of people go walking up and down here every day, anyone could have dropped that.’ I looked at the sad and tatty bit of paper. ‘Why do you think it’s relevant? It might not even be 17 June this year!’ I unlocked the Land Rover, although I didn’t know why I ever even bothered to lock it in the first place seeing as you could open the doors with a hefty thump on the roof and a kick.
Again that feeling that Ivo was a mass of repressed energy; he almost crackled. ‘Because yesterday’ – he leaned an arm against his car roof and his overly embellished shirt blew in the breeze, making him look like an illustration of anachronism in an edition of Vogue – ‘I was over here doing a quick piece on litter pickers. They did the whole of this stretch, Newgate bank to Cowhouse. Cleared it of everything. I interviewed them when they got to the car park and they were taking bag loads of stuff off to the recycling point – this path was as clean as a whistle last night. So the chances are’ – he held the tiny scrap of paper up and it fluttered like a flag of surrender – ‘this came from our man. It’s dry, it’s not been out here for long. And 17 June was yesterday, although you won’t know that as you’ve been wallowing about in your sick bed like a poorly hippo, so it must have been left after the clean-up, and they didn’t finish until six.’
I stared at him but he was avoiding my eye and fiddling with the crumpled paper, as though it held the secrets of the universe. ‘I have not been wallowing. And comparing me to a hippo is not the way to go about getting me to co-operate with your crazy schemes, you know.’
‘Sorry. You’re nothing like a hippo really,’ he said, vaguely. ‘But look,’ and now I was getting the fully focussed gaze again, as though he were trying to will me to understand. ‘This is important. It just is.’
‘Then you should show it to the police.’ I put the squirrel in the boot. It continued its unflustered examination of its cage with no notable signs of terror.
‘What, and give them a heads-up?’ Ivo widened his eyes in shock.
‘Please, Ivo, please tell me that you aren’t going to try to make a mystery out of this!’ I pointed to the tiny coil of paper still flapping between his fingers. ‘It could have blown here from the road. It could have been carried by one of the litter pickers who dropped it right at the end of the pick. It might have come out of the pocket of the horse rider who found the body. It could be—’
‘Yes, yes, all right, no need to labour the point.’
I opened my driver’s door and was about to get into the Land Rover, which smelled rather too much of fish to be comfortable, and I remembered that I still hadn’t given it a good fumigation after the rescue of a seagull that had got itself tangled in wire. Ivo put a hand on my arm to stop me. ‘But what if,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘What, if, Cress? Because, if it’s a receipt from last night, he stayed somewhere, he must have booked in, so someone must know who he is. And what about the squirrel? You can’t pretend that it’s normal to go about with a tree rodent that close to your bollocks.’
‘Maybe not,’ I conceded. ‘But it’s a police matter, none of our business.’
He waved dismissively. ‘Them? They’re just treating it as a bit of a bizarre accident. Bloke with a weird pet goes out for a midnight stroll and leaves his wallet and driving licence behind…’
‘And maybe that’s just what happened.’ My head was aching again and I wanted to climb back into my cool bed, where I could cough and sniffle into tissues and feel miserable without Ivo’s relentless attempts to invoke Miss Marple in me, masochistically enjoyable though they were.
There was a clonk from the boot as the squirrel rattled around in the little cage.
Ivo moved his hand onto my shoulder and pushed, until I had to turn around to look at him properly or risk a dislocation. ‘I know it’s not, Cress,’ he said, his voice hard with a quiet urgency. ‘I can feel it. Something really strange went on here last night, something that I need to…’ He stared off over my head in search of vocabulary, but all there was was the metallic blue of the sky and some swifts whistling low above us. ‘I know it,’ he repeated. Then his eyes came back down to mine and one eyebrow wiggled. ‘And, come on, you can’t let me go off investigating by myself. It will only end in trouble. Besides, all good detectives have a sidekick, and you’re mine!’
