One of a Kind, page 6
He wasn’t looking at me. The table stood in a patch of shadow that made his luminescent shirt look a more normal colour, took the shine from his hair and made the curve of his shoulders look depressed. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered.
‘It’s fine. Ivo, I wouldn’t have come if I thought it would cause anything other than Lilith taking over my half of the fridge and possibly using some of the special coffee I’ve got hidden away behind the mugs.’ I picked the cushions up off the floor and noticed the rug was some intricate weave and probably worth more than my house.
He bounced back. Ivo always did. ‘Just checking. Didn’t want our peregrinations to cause you problems.’ Even from the dark corner, where he was sifting through the postal pile like a man panning for gold, I could see the twinkle back in his eye. ‘That’s good. That’s good,’ he repeated, seizing the entire heap of envelopes, coloured leaflets and bits of card and sweeping the lot into a handy bin. ‘Really need to tidy up in here.’
‘Might be an idea.’ I eyed those askew books meaningfully and he shuffled over to push them back into line.
‘Danusha comes twice a week,’ he said, apologetically. ‘To stop everything descending into chaos. Mother insists,’ he added, mutinously. ‘They own the place after all, so they’re entitled to not have it fall into ruins around me because I can’t… focus. Apparently.’
‘I’m here so we can find out about Fred, and what he was doing in a dead man’s pocket,’ I reminded him. ‘Not buying the place.’
‘Yes. Yes!’ Ivo leaped into animated life again, as though his thoughts had come back from whatever family-related journey they’d been on and were being forced to the matter at hand. ‘I was going to give Rufus a bell, wasn’t I?’
He groped through the various pockets in his clothes. The shirt had big, gappy pockets and the trousers looked as though they’d been created for a seventies music revivalist to trek through the Badlands. They had pockets everywhere. At last he produced his phone and I left him to it.
I went back out to the stables, and stood and watched Fred fling himself at the front of his enclosure in the hope of some more nuts for a moment.
Practicality helped, having something else to think about other than the terror of revealing more than I wanted to to Ivo. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked him, although why I thought interrogating a squirrel was a good idea, I wasn’t sure. ‘You must be missing your people, or whoever reared you. Or your squirrel friends. You’ve not been out in the wild, have you? You’re way too tame.’
Fred, of course, gave nothing away, other than a desire for more hazelnuts and a possible yearning to be stroked. He was as flickery and fast as a speeded-up film, constantly in motion, apart from moments of brief, intense attention, and reminded me of Ivo.
I had to stop this. I blew my nose sturdily and shook my shoulders, and reminded myself yet again that Ivo had the concentration span of a goldfish, the general temperament of a slightly worried reptile and the flightiness of the average kestrel. In short, he was not a man you had a relationship with, except possibly a very short and incredibly tempestuous one. He was likeable, yes, he was attractive too, but could anyone really want a man whose brain seemed to resemble a flicker book?
I shook my head again. No. Ivo was fun, and my friend, and I had to stop this. I was dangerously close to becoming obsessed.
Then he wandered back into the stable yard, all tousled hair and weird clothing like a slightly less confused David Bowie without the make-up, and I had to give myself another stern inner talking to.
‘The man’s name was Williams,’ Ivo was saying into his phone. ‘He was staying at Bay View B&B, so you might want to pop round there and take a squizz at the register for an address… Oh. Okay.’ He looked across at me and made a comedy ‘resigned’ face. ‘Well, that’s… no. No, of course, you never told me that. Never a word of insider information has passed your lips. Okay, well, later then.’ He pulled the phone away from his ear, disconnected the call and performed a series of ballet leaps across the cobbled yard, which brought him up against me.
‘They’ve what appears to be two rival drug gangs kicking off and our man has had to take a back seat,’ he said, slightly out of breath. ‘They’re rushed off their feet so Ru was very interested that we’d already got a name.’ He grinned at me, smugly. ‘I told him where to go to check for an address, always assuming that Mr Williams didn’t give a fake one to our fragrantly lovely Mr Thixendale.’
‘But why would he give a fake address?’ I leaned against the warm stone of the wall. The smell of horse had seeped into the mortar and the sun was squeezing it back out, so the whole place smelled as though a troop of phantom cavalry had just ridden through.
Ivo sighed. ‘Ah, no reason. No reason at all. A night in a seedy B&B is hardly something you need to hide from your relatives, so the police will be able to head to Fist City and find his next of kin. They owe us, big time.’
‘They didn’t know where to start. We only did because you found that receipt for the B&B.’
The smug grin was getting out of hand now. ‘I know. I am a genius.’
‘You’re a something, certainly,’ I muttered.
Ivo jiggled on the spot. ‘So, our man from somewhere that sounds like a fist can be safely left to the police, to deal with the informing relatives thing. You and I are left with the large question mark of a squirrel and how to return him to his proper home. Right?’
‘Pretty much, Hercule. I’m guessing the police won’t tell us the address to give us a heads-up on poor Fred’s point of origin.’ The warmth and certainty of the stone behind me was comfortingly solid in comparison to Ivo’s constant movement. ‘Though I suppose that depends on whether Fred was actually his, or whether he stole him from someone who reared him.’ I sighed. This was too complicated when all I really wanted to do was stand here, washed by the sun’s warmth, and admire Ivo from a distance. Quite a large distance, if he was going to keep jittering like that.
A breeze ran through the rose bushes and arrived with us, smelling delicious. For some reason it made me shiver.
‘I suppose so,’ Ivo said slowly. ‘Are we dealing with squirrel smuggling or squirrel theft? Although, I am reaching the conclusion, heavily influenced by my need to get this story up online, that there’s not a lot of difference when it comes to it – the squirrel is illegal.’
I shrugged.
‘But why?’ He was almost wailing now. ‘The market for second-hand squirrels must be infinitely small and not really a crime that ought to be committed by someone who wears really tatty trainers and a jacket, which, I have to say, was committing fashion crime in its own right.’
‘Well I don’t know, do I? I work for a wildlife rescue unit, not Interpol. My exposure to crime is almost entirely through episodes of Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christie. You’re the crime guy.’
Ivo stood still for a second, waiting for his brain to catch up, and then he was pacing again, small circles. He started talking too, a continuous stream of consciousness that I had to work hard to keep up with. ‘Ok. Okay, maybe… maybe our man was here to hand over the squirrel to someone… they… there was an accident, our man fell and hit his head before they could meet up. There’s no signs of a fight, no injuries on our man apart from the obvious one and besides, once he was dead what was to stop someone just taking the squirrel off him? Small, largely harmless rodent, what’s it going to do, karate chop them to the ground? Unless… unless they didn’t know the squirrel was there, in which case why the hell was the squirrel there? And in his pocket?’ He suddenly stopped, turned and looked at me with ferocious eyes. ‘Secret squirrel?’
‘Shut up.’
‘No trade in squirrel smuggling… ok, maybe forget the squirrel. Meeting someone to… to… but what? Exchange something? Get information? But in that case, why the hell take a squirrel?’
‘I think you might need to calm down, Ivo,’ I said, now a little worried by the frenzied thought processes.
‘The police don’t seem particularly bothered about the squirrel angle.’ Ivo came and stood right in front of me again. I imagined I could smell hot velvet and combusting brain cells.
‘Sounds as though they’re busy with other things though.’ I nodded at his phone, which was causing his shirt pocket to gape. ‘It’s just an accident.’
‘We could be ahead of the curve here.’ He sounded worryingly calm now. When Ivo was calm, you waited for the explosion; he was the human version of Yellowstone – there was an awful lot of activity under the surface and sooner or later it would break through and ruin your holiday. ‘While the police are tearing about the county in their big boots on drug raids, we could solve this. We could break this case, Cress.’ His expression had become radiant; there was practically a religious experience going on under that loose shirt. ‘We really could,’ he whispered. ‘I could get a job on The Times.’
I opened my mouth to say that, surely, he could ask his dad for an ‘in’ with the Guardian, where his father had been a lead journalist on the political pages for so long that he now got TV slots and was recognisable everywhere from BBC Breakfast news shows to Have I Got News for You.
But no. That wasn’t Ivo. He didn’t want to succeed simply through parentage, I knew that much from our many drunken talks in kitchens. He wanted to achieve on his own merit, which was laudable. It seemed rather cruel to point out that this Great Case that we were blowing wide open was hardly going to put him in line for a Pulitzer.
‘Tomorrow I can take a sample to our contact at the university,’ I said, to bring him back from his imaginary forays into the world of Proper Journalism. ‘Danny’s squaring it for us.’
Ivo was suddenly concentrating again. ‘And remind me again how we get this “sample”? Do we have to persuade the squirrel to spit in a tube or pull out his teeth or something?’
For someone with a very good degree, Ivo could be surprisingly obtuse sometimes. ‘No,’ I said, patiently. ‘A hair will do. I have to pull one out so it’s got a root, that’s all.’
As one, we looked at the stable again where Fred was bouncing off the bars with a pinging noise.
‘Do not ask me to hold him down.’ Ivo shuddered. ‘That squirrel makes me look laid back and relaxed.’
This was the first time I could remember Ivo raising his own energetic and twitchy nature, and I wanted so much to comment. To ask something, to get some clarity about what it was that made hanging around with him feel a little like sitting on something unexploded and ticking. But, by the time I’d organised my thought processes, he’d already headed off out of the yard again.
I gave Fred a stern stare. ‘Just be glad I haven’t got any tweezers on me,’ I said.
Fred bounced a bit more, unbothered. ‘Test away,’ he seemed to say. ‘I’m 98 per cent rubber ball and 2 per cent elastic, good luck.’
Possibly I hadn’t thought through the DNA testing mechanics. Ivo could have a point, I thought, and followed him into the house.
5
The weather broke overnight. I woke from my position on the very comfortable sofa to hear Ivo in the kitchen and rain gurgling from the gargoyled downspouts. The rose beyond the window now hung soggily, with dejected petals occasionally pattering against the glass like soaked fairies.
I’d actually had a decent night’s sleep for the first time in a while, and my head felt clearer. Clear enough at least for me to wonder what the hell I was doing, encouraging Ivo in this current journalistic endeavour.
‘Tea? Toast?’ He bounced into the room and twitched the duvet aside so he could sit at my feet, thrusting a plate and mug in my direction. ‘I hope you didn’t mind the sofa? My spare room is full of all the things I needed when I moved in and then discovered I didn’t need at all. And that piano. Anyone staying over sleeps on the sofa. Really ought to do something about that.’ He sighed.
‘Thank you. I – what on Earth is that?’
‘Smoking jacket. I think Mum said it used to belong to Oscar Wilde. Or Noël Coward. One of those guys anyway. She’s related, well, distantly. Not to both, only to one of them, but I can’t remember which.’ Ivo’s wiry frame was resplendent in a crimson velvet… thing that hung to his knees, knees that jutted out decked in far more prosaic cotton pyjama trousers. ‘I use it as a dressing gown.’
‘Of course you do,’ I said weakly. Outside, the rain blew and the windows rattled. Ivo was quiet for so long that I eventually looked away from my tea. ‘What?’
He shook his head. His hair swept the collar and I wondered how the velvet of the jacket and the velvet of the sofa didn’t bond together in some kind of huge Velcro mass and stop him moving. ‘Do you have issues with the way I live?’ he asked eventually, and, for him, quietly.
I frowned. ‘No. It’s just, all the antiques and lovely old furniture and everything. The way you treat history like it’s utilitarian.’
Ivo stretched his legs out and stroked the scarlet jacket as though it were a pet. ‘What is it for?’ he asked. ‘If not to be useful? You can only put so much stuff in museums. And things like, well, this jacket, the glassware, the books – they were made to be used, not kept in a cupboard somewhere and only looked at.’ Then bird-bright eyes tilted my way, his head angled so he could look at me from under his hair. ‘Or is it because I can afford to replace them?’
After yesterday’s interrogation about my relationship status, this was another of those in-depth questions that I wasn’t used to from Ivo. We’d always taken one another’s lives pretty much for granted. He didn’t comment on the smallness of my cottage or my limited wardrobe and I didn’t goggle at the fact he had fresh flowers in vases on every antique surface and used crockery older than my house. Anyway, now I knew the flowers were probably down to parental influence and the incredible ‘Danusha’, which took some of the shine off.
My answer should have been: ‘No, Ivo. It’s nothing to do with your lifestyle. It’s because I like you so terribly, so horribly, and I fear that you may be as careless with your relationships as you are with your things; that nothing is precious or worth caring for because it’s all so disposable and easily replaced. I couldn’t bear to be that disposable thing that’s nice to have in your life for a while and then discarded.’ That’s how I felt and what I thought. But we didn’t have that kind of relationship, and he would have laughed at my reasoning, brushed it away with a casual keep-nothing-for-best attitude and I would find myself spiralling down into love with this beautiful, random man.
Right now, it was only distance that kept me safe.
‘It just annoys me,’ I said. ‘To see such valuable things being treated as though they came from IKEA. I know what you’re like.’
Then I hunched my knees up to give him more sofa room and we ate toast and drank tea while the wind curled its way up the outside of the gatehouse like ivy, and tapped stems against the windows. The breeze howled down the track and boomed against the underside of the archway as though a thousand ghostly carriages were hurtling their way to the house, but in here it was domestic and comfortable and addictive.
‘Right,’ I said, drinking down the last of my tea and happily appreciating the fact that I’d been able to taste the toast. ‘Shall we head to the university then? To get our Fred tested?’
Ivo didn’t, as I’d expected, leap to his feet. He sat thoughtfully, chewing a sourdough crust and staring at a point in the middle of the room.
‘Ivo?’ I prompted.
He shook his head for a second. I didn’t know whether he was dismissing me or his thoughts, but then a beaming smile lit his face and he grinned at me. ‘Of course. Um, Cress…’
‘What?’ I asked cautiously, in case he was going to follow this up with something dreadful. With Ivo, you could never be quite certain of his conversational twists and turns.
‘If Fred – well, if he turns out to be from somewhere else, not around here I mean, somewhere geographically, would you want to take him back? And, if so, will you let me come with you?’
There was a small crease between his eyes, I noticed. The sort of crease normally seen in people who habitually wear glasses but have forgotten them; the kind of crease caused by squinting or frowning really hard. Ivo was worried. And Ivo was almost never worried, not on a micro scale. He worried on a planetary basis – about global warming, bee deaths, pollution of the seas and single-use plastics, but seeing him worried about something as small as a squirrel was certainly a first.
‘Of course I’ll take him back,’ I said. ‘Someone must be missing him if he’s been hand-reared. I suppose our Mr Williams could have been the one who reared him, but in any case there must be somewhere to take him back to, because he most certainly didn’t bring Fred up in his trouser pocket.’
‘And you’ll let me come?’
I sighed. ‘Yes, Ivo, if it’s that important to you. Why do you want to come anyway? A sudden urge to check out squirrel breeding programmes?’
Ivo jumped up, toast crumbs spraying across the rug. ‘Excellent! No, really brilliant, Cress. Fabulous. Road trip.’
‘He might turn out to have come from somewhere twenty miles down the road. Not much of a trip, more of a bus ride.’
‘I just feel…’ Ivo rubbed his hands up and down his jacketed arms and I winced for the aged velvet, hoping he didn’t still have butter or jam on his fingers. ‘Fred is central to all this.’
‘What’s “all this”?’ The duvet fell away as I stood up and revealed my nightshirt covered in a tiny puppy print. ‘We don’t even know if there’s anything dodgy going on.’
