One of a Kind, page 5
Unless you are me, I thought. ‘I’m only here so we can get our squirrel home where he belongs. He’s tame, someone must be missing him.’
‘We really need to find out where he came from.’
‘Squirrel or man?’ I asked, tidying a pile of damp tea towels away into the washing machine.
‘I thought man might be easier, unless you can interrogate the squirrel. See if he talks with a cockney accent, knows about jellied eels, that kind of thing.’
‘No red squirrels in London—oh!’ I slammed the washing machine door and stood up, struck with a sudden thought. ‘But we just might be able to do better than that.’
I pulled my phone from my pocket. ‘You have a secret squirrel identifier on your phone?’ Ivo sounded perplexed. ‘This is getting away from me now.’
‘Don’t be daft. What I do have is a friend in a lab.’
‘Bobbing around in a jar of formaldehyde, knowing you,’ Ivo muttered. ‘Where does this lab friend come in?’
I was scrolling through my contacts list hoping that he’d remember me. Danny had been the guy I’d met on the squirrel course. While I had been sent as the only person from our centre available for travel, he’d been there as a specialist and we’d spent a wonderful weekend in Brighton before deciding that we’d never work as a couple. ‘I’m not sure. But it’s worth asking, because if he can’t help, he might know someone who can. I told you before, squirrel groups can become isolated and inbred so the bloodline is strengthened by bringing in breeding stock from distant groups?’
‘You did.’
‘Well, someone has to check squirrel origins. For that, Danny is your man. So there must be a DNA database somewhere. We just might be able to ask Danny to persuade someone to find out where Fred originates from, which would at least give us a starting point for finding out how to get him home.’
Ivo stared at me for a moment and then whirled me into a frenzied waltz that swept all loose material from the surfaces and included it in our cyclone of movement. Magazines flipped and flew, bits of paper typhooned to the floor, a pair of socks that had been hanging on the Aga rail spiralled to the tiles and even a chair was forced to slide out of our way.
‘Cress, you’re a frigging genius!’ Ivo sang as we Strictly’d our way around the kitchen. ‘Find out where the squirrel came from, and we’re practically home and dry!’
Enjoyable though it might be, I had to stop him when my hip slammed against the table and I groaned. ‘It might not tell us anything,’ I said, pulling him to a standstill. ‘It may not even be relevant. But it would be something. I need to talk to Danny.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘Long ago.’ I went back to scrolling and found Danny’s contact details.
‘Likely to rekindle?’ Ivo had let me go now my hands were full of phone again.
‘No.’ I pressed the button to dial. ‘He’s rather fonder of virtual sex than the real thing, unfortunately. Plus, he lives about two hundred miles away. Nice guy, not for me.’ He’s not you. I sat hard on the words to stop them blurting out. My masochistic tendencies to stick around a man who had no interest in me other than as a friend was my own problem. At the other end, the phone started to ring. ‘But I’m hoping he’s still got fond enough memories of me to—oh, hi, Danny? It’s Cressida…’
While I spoke to Danny, who did remember me, which I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered about or not, Ivo paced and listened. He always behaved as though he couldn’t listen efficiently if he wasn’t on the move, and gave the impression that he’d be walking away during any conversation, if the people he was conversing with couldn’t keep up. He seemed worried; there were tense frown lines creasing his forehead and those blue eyes were scrunched up as if he were trying to see his own eyelashes.
When I hung up on Danny, Ivo leaped in front of me. ‘Sounds like he knows a man.’
‘Well, he’s going to text me the details of someone we could send a sample to. Someone at the University of York who owes him a “favour” apparently. I’d have more faith if he didn’t keep saying it like a gangster who’d kneecap anyone who didn’t do as he said. But,’ I sighed, ‘that’s Danny. Wants to be Danny Dyer, in real life is more Danny de Vito.’
‘You really have to “know people” in the squirrel world?’ Ivo stared.
‘It’s more the scientific world. We want results fast, which means pulling strings.’
‘Ah. Puppet squirrel world,’ Ivo said, and grinned.
I had no idea how everyone he knew hadn’t already slapped him.
‘I’m going to make sure Fred is all right out there in the stables,’ I said, giving Ivo side-eye, which didn’t discourage him at all. ‘That poor creature has been through a lot in the last day or so, he could be in shock.’
Fred did not appear to be in any kind of shock. He heard us coming and clung to the bars at the front of the cage for a second before whisking away to bounce off the rest of the walls. He and Ivo had a lot in common, I thought, holding out a hazelnut and having it swept from my fingers by a tiny clawed hand. Intelligent bright eyes scanned my face for a second, then, with a press of fur, Fred was gone again, to eat his prize in the dark depths of the housing section, from where I could see his tail curled up over his back. A contained package of energy, like an elastic band wound up and waiting for a single touch to unleash potential. Or snap and take your eye out, in Ivo’s case.
‘Is he all right?’ I’d made Ivo stand at the door, so as not to upset the squirrel any more than was necessary. ‘Confessed to the vile killing of Mr Williams, strangled with his tail or something?’
I turned. Ivo was silhouetted in the doorway to the old building, where a wide door led to the cobbled passageway that linked all the loose boxes. Everything was panelled in mahogany, the rails that gave the horses a view from their stables were polished brass, and the floors were immaculately swept. The National Trust ownership only covered the house and grounds, but this place was still kept as though the general public might pop round for a look. Hell, it was kept as though the king might be round any moment.
‘Who does all the stable work?’ I asked idly, ignoring his wilful whimsy. ‘I’m guessing you don’t get up at six to muck out.’
Even though we’d known each other for so long, had been in and out of one another’s houses since we’d become friends and had spent far too many university nights drunk together at various parties, I didn’t know that much about Ivo’s life. He had a way of talking for hours and sounding as though he was giving you the secrets of his universe, until you woke up and realised that you still had no real idea what he thought about anything, or, indeed, if he thought at all.
I had, during some of my darker, most lonely, moments, wondered whether he was keeping things hidden on purpose.
‘There are – girls.’ He waved a hand. ‘Lovely, lovely girls. Oh, and some lovely boys too. But mostly girls. Nothing to do with me, it’s all parental, I just live here. The aged Ps are usually in town, they’ve got a little place over there’ – another wave – ‘for holidays.’
‘Town’ must be London. I really couldn’t see Ivo’s parents, whom I’d met once or twice, as people who’d be happy with a small North Yorkshire market town where asking for daikon would get you narrowed eye looks of deep suspicion and possibly followed home by people throwing stones.
Fred swung back to the front of the cage and tipped his head to one side to look at me again out of those shining brown eyes. His fur was red silk in the sun that came through the barred windows and his tail twitched interrogatively.
‘No, no more nuts, sorry,’ I said, putting my finger to the bars and hoping he wasn’t a biter. But then, would a man have put a squirrel with a biting habit in his trouser pocket? Seriously?
A narrow head, rounder than that of a grey squirrel, rubbed against my fingertip for a second, as though to reassure himself. Then, with another tilted-head look, he was gone, tail whisking a dismissive farewell, back to the nest box.
‘He’s really, really tame,’ I said, going back to Ivo, who was still picturesquely outlined in the doorway. ‘I mean, ridiculously. I still think he was hand-reared.’
‘And that’s illegal, you said?’ Ivo moved to let me pass him out into the stable yard. Everywhere smelled of horses and saddle soap.
‘Yep, unless you’re properly licensed. Those guys’ – I jerked my thumb over my shoulder to indicate Fred and his ilk – ‘they’re protected up the wazoo. We’re probably breaking umpteen laws by having him here, except that I’ve got exemption because of being wildlife rescue and everything.’
I sounded slightly smug and I knew it. Wildlife rescue was important. It was a real thing. I just had to keep telling myself that.
‘You’ – Ivo coiled an arm around my shoulders – ‘are a valuable person to know, Cress.’
I leaned, for one second, into the embrace. ‘I have… certain skills,’ I said.
‘So why do you have a degree in History, from Cambridge no less, but your skill set is British wildlife and its protection?’
Ivo was looking at me carefully now. I wasn’t used to such intensity from him. Well, certainly not outside his areas of particular interest, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about being one of those.
‘Can I gently point out that your degree, a very, very good one too, is Philosophy, Politics and Economics? And that you work on a local newspaper covering stories about stolen bikes and criminal damage?’
With a twitch of a shrug Ivo was away again, twisting out into the sunshine like a trapped gale. ‘I like to confound explanation,’ he said. ‘Besides, PPE is a great degree to have if you want to go into politics.’
The thought of Ivo being a politician clanged in my head. Two things further apart I found it hard to imagine and I simply couldn’t reconcile the image of politics, with a lot of sitting down and big dinners, and Ivo and his perpetual motion and compressed energy. I laughed.
To my relief, he laughed too, and didn’t question me any further about my degree. It was odd, I thought, as we walked back down to the little gatehouse that was his home now, that we’d known each other for so long and this was the first time that questions like this were being asked. Almost as though we’d been happily friendly on a superficial level before, but something about this squirrel business was making other, deeper issues surface.
Maybe we were just growing up, I mused, following Ivo into the shadowed coolness of the house. It was situated on, or more exactly, over, a track that led up to the big house and had once been part of the carriageway, now disused. There hadn’t been much call for sweeping up to the gates in a coach drawn by sweating horses in the last hundred years or so, and the gatehouse now only heard the passage of local riders off for a canter in the parkland. The cottage arched over the track with two rooms on either side, necessitating either a marathon run up one staircase, across a landing and down the other or a quick, chilly trip outside when you wanted to go from the living room to the study. Ivo got around this by only using half the house on a daily basis. His bedroom lay in the room that straddled the gateway. He liked the echoes, apparently, but I couldn’t comment. I’d never been in there.
‘So, what’s next?’ I asked, then sneezed again. The cold medicine must be wearing off, but I wasn’t due another dose for a couple of hours. Bugger.
He looked at me appraisingly. ‘First, I make good on my promise to tuck you up on the sofa,’ he said, a wide-flung hand indicating the furniture in question. ‘Then, I’m probably going to think. I may throw questions your way though, so be prepared. Tea?’
I nodded and sat down on the blue velvet sofa. Despite its apparent modernity and trendiness of fabric, it was over a hundred years old. Ivo treated antiques as useful things rather than as ornaments, in an offhand way that made me feel simultaneously comfortable and slightly edgy. It was great that these things were being utilised rather than kept behind glass and admired, otherwise, what was the point of them? But, conversely, it was horrific to drop and break something to be casually then told that it was two hundred years old, or rather, it had been.
It made me very, very careful around things in Ivo’s place.
I blew my nose, copiously and saw him wince as he carried through two steaming mugs. ‘I’ve made you nettle tea,’ he said, handing me mine. ‘It’s good for colds.’
I pulled a face. ‘Can I not have good strong Yorkshire tea instead?’
‘Can you taste it anyway?’
‘No, but…’
‘Then you may as well have something that’s doing you good instead,’ he said, sternly for Ivo. ‘Since you could be drinking anything. Get that down you while I think.’
I sipped. He was right, basically all I could taste was ‘hot’ with a hint of sweetness from the spoonful of honey he’d stirred in. Apart from the fact that the tea was a pale greenish colour, I could have been drinking bathwater. Then I rested my head against the high sofa back and watched Ivo.
Ivo didn’t do anything sitting still. His brain only seemed to work when he was in motion. ‘How long for the DNA test to be done?’ he asked, then looked at me. ‘No, don’t answer, I’m not asking, I’m just thinking. DNA test, find out where – Fred, is it? Find out where he comes from. Might give us something to go on, because it’s all we’ve got.’
He twisted his lip and frowned, pacing between the large French windows that opened out onto the garden at the side of the house, and the sofa where I was languishing like a Victorian in the latter stages of consumption.
‘We know our dead man is called Williams,’ I threw in. ‘So there’s that.’
‘Yes. Gives the poor bloke a name at least, so we don’t keep calling him “the body”, which is just distasteful.’ Ivo finished another circuit of the living room and stopped, staring out into the garden with his back to me. Outside, a rose that was growing up and over the window in an almost unbearably attractive way blew in a breeze and tapped pink heads against the glass in a soft kiss of petals. Ivo sighed. ‘University of York, you said? Maybe we could get our squirrel sample over there today for them to start work on? What do you have to do, swab his cheeks? And I’m going to check with Rufus, in case they know more about our Mystery Man.’ He rattled the catch to the window as though checking it was still closed and the rose couldn’t get in and savage us. ‘He’s not allowed to tell me anything, obviously.’ He spun round now and his grin was wickedly manic. ‘But as we already have a name, he won’t have to keep it secret, and I might get something out of him.’
I sighed. It really was very pleasant being here. The sun filtering in through the roses, the polished and cared for antiques, the smell of the nettle tea that came and went as my nasal passages cleared – it was all contributing to relaxing some of the tension I found myself permanently holding. My shoulders began to slump and my uniform jumper snagged and caught against the velvet of the sofa back.
‘Are you all right, Cress?’ Ivo surprised me with the question. I’d probably been drifting off to sleep.
‘Mmm? Yes, why?’
Now it was Ivo’s turn to look surprised. ‘I just wondered. You don’t – I mean, obviously, we haven’t got that kind of relationship or anything and for all I know you’re… but I don’t know.’
‘Finish a sentence mate, please,’ I said tiredly. His habit of talking as though the other half of the conversation was being filled in ‘off-screen’ could be wearing when you weren’t feeling your sparkly best, and weren’t psychic.
He sat down beside me, moving a set of cushions aside and heaping them onto his lap in order to have room. ‘I’ve never said this before and I don’t know why, but you always seem a bit…’ He waggled a hand. ‘Worried when you’re with me. As though you’re looking over your shoulder all the time. So, are you all right? It’s not going to cause – problems for you, if you’re over here helping me find out about our friend Fred out there?’
He jerked a hand up, towards the stables, which were visible through the shimmering summer air as an eighteenth-century block on the horizon.
Define ‘problem’, I thought. Torturing myself with thoughts of what I wanted, but couldn’t have, and which teetered on the edge of not knowing whether I really did want, or whether it was the allure of Ivo, wasn’t a problem as such. More a psychological condition. ‘No. I’m officially off sick for a week,’ I said. ‘I told you that.’
‘Nobody else going to give you hell if you’re with me?’
‘No.’ I frowned. ‘Who else would worry?’
Ivo was up again, cushions bouncing to the floor as he moved across to one of the bookcases built in to the gatehouse wall. ‘I don’t know, do I? That’s why I’m asking.’ He tipped a couple of volumes, stared at their spines.
‘Only Lilith and Dix and I left them a note.’
‘Oh. All right. If you’re sure.’ He moved across to the small table, which looked as though it formed a receptacle for all the post that had ever come through the door, envelopes and brochures and leaflets tottered in an uneven pile across its highly polished surface. He left the books out of alignment on the shelf and I itched to go and push them back in, but this was his house. If he wanted to live as though he’d been burgled and was waiting for a police visit, that was up to him.
‘Ivo, are you asking if I’ve got a boyfriend who will object to me being here?’ It struck me suddenly, in a heart-pounding moment, that this could be the case. Seriously? Why the hell would Ivo be worried about that? Did he think I’d got a burly seven-footer lurking in the shrubbery to leap out and yell ‘Aha, I have you now!’ and pound Ivo into the sandy soil of the bridleway? He needn’t have been so concerned. The number of men willing to hang around waiting for me to be available between variable working hours and random wildlife call outs was currently nil. It would, perhaps, have been easier if there had been someone. I could have used their concern over my absence as an excuse for the nervous, edgy feeling that I had when alone with Ivo. If he even suspected how I felt… I felt my face heat up with advance embarrassment. ‘If you are, the answer is no. You already know my track record isn’t exactly stellar, and I am currently single, thank you very much for reminding me yet again about my general failure with the opposite sex.’
