One of a Kind, page 9
I smacked my hand against the tree, wanting to punish myself for the thoughts. Why did I do this to myself? Why couldn’t I get caught up in the enthusiasm that he had for this case without looking for some hidden darkness? After all, here I was, spending time punishing myself in an enjoyable way with a man I had fallen for practically on the first day of university. He wanted me around. And yet, here was me, being the ‘yes, but…’ girl, when I should let go, enjoy the moment, and stop trying to find ulterior motives in everything.
I knew Ivo. Knew how his flyaway attention span could so easily get caught up in things that were less than savoury and how hard it was for him to extricate himself. Ivo was the kind of person who would take something offered at a party to avoid giving offence and then find himself trying to hide stolen goods in his house while the police battered the door down and big men with dogs and minders climbed out of the upstairs windows.
But, as he said, it had only been the once and he’d got off with a warning. Ivo’s general ineptitude and his ability to dig himself a very big hole armed only with good nature and a desperation to be liked had been visible to the judge. Having an incredibly fortunate background and parents in the public eye had, admittedly, pushed it further into their line of sight, of course.
Water dripped dismally off the overhanging leaves and I gave myself a talking to. I was flailing and I knew it. Caution was practically my middle name, a dislike for not knowing what came next, a desire to have every eventuality mapped out and accounted for. Spontaneity was just a collection of vowels as far as I was concerned – I didn’t understand it. Which put Ivo at the opposite end of the behaviour see-saw to me, and I didn’t understand him either.
I didn’t truly think he was hiding Mr Williams’ driving licence. On the one hand, it just wasn’t Ivo, but on the other hand, what was Ivo? He was my friend, but that was where any certainties ended.
I was trying as hard as I could not to think what I really felt. Just because I really like him doesn’t stop him being a bad guy, it just stops me seeing that he might be. Just because I want him to be more to me than a friend doesn’t mean he wants the same or is doing anything other than using me as cover. I could get really, really hurt and yet, here I am.
The feeling made me colder than the rain, which had percolated down through the trees now and was dropping occasional icy fingers down my collar. To distract myself, I started walking along between the trees, parallel to the trackway, dodging whippy branches and hitting my hand against scabby trunks. Don’t think, act.
I’d walked back to where the body had been found now, and peered out at the site from between the trees. Rain spiralled the surfaces of the puddles. It was getting harder and more persistent, so I huddled back into the woods again, coiling back deeper into cover and catching my foot on something that crunched slightly as I went.
I bent down to see what it was, scrabbling with my fingers until fragments of wire and wood came to light, covered with a blown scatter of last autumn’s leaves, which were scudding around in the wind. It was nothing much, a splintering of plywood and metal; it could have been an old piece of fencing, discarded when the new one was replaced. But there was something about the angle of the wood, the gauzy metal sheet, that was familiar. I stirred my hand through the leaves and came up with more bits, flat panels torn where the screws had given way, metal catches flapping uselessly with nothing to attach to.
I knew what this was. We used them ourselves at the wildlife unit, for transporting sick or injured animals to the vet or from the place they were captured to our holding pens. I had one right now, back in the stable entranceway. It was a small-animal transport cage. Smashed and ruined, but, presumably, how Fred had been moved from place to place. Mr Williams could have had him in this in the B&B and nobody would have known. If he’d thrown his jacket over the box it would have looked like a bag or any other luggage; all the sides were solid wood with only the front having a tight metal panel, and even that had the mesh so closely woven that first sight wouldn’t have shown a squirrel.
This was a clue! Suddenly as overjoyed as though I’d solved an entire murder mystery, I scrabbled about until I had collected as many of the pieces of cage as I could find. The top, with its handle, was intact but the rest was smashed and broken. All the bits were mostly in the same place, with a few pieces swept against tree trunks or concealed by leaves, and I cuddled the splintered wood and loose hinges to me under my jacket against the rain, then headed back to the car.
If this really was something to do with why Fred was here, then Ivo couldn’t have had anything to do with it. The thought made my heart lift. Because if he had, he would have removed this. My hands shook slightly on the steering wheel and I had a moment of knowing what Ivo had meant when he said he just knew things were important. Somehow I just knew this cage was important, it meant that Fred hadn’t been trouser-transported around the place, and that meant he’d been brought here on purpose. It meant that Mr Thixendale had mistaken it for a bag – its size and narrow dimensions could have been mistaken for a small satchel, particularly if it were covered. Which meant no bag that Ivo could have furtively searched.
My hands were still shaking. Ivo couldn’t have anything to do with this. For the first time in two days, my breath came more easily, and it wasn’t because the cold was finally leaving my respiratory system, it was a weight lifting from my chest and heart.
That cage was broken and casually slung into the woods. The litter pickers would have found it if it had been there all along, nobody would leave a scatter of metal just off the path, where animals could be injured by it. I found it, so it all made it more likely that Ivo had found the receipt, on this otherwise immaculately litter-free bridleway. He may even have seen the cage, but mistaken it, as I had at first, for bits of fencing. Only because I’d known what I was looking at had I picked it up. The weight lifted further, freed my neck and then my head, and I found I was sitting up straighter, breathing more deeply and handling the car like a Formula 1 ace along the narrow lanes back to the gatehouse.
Not Ivo. He was just caught up in this, the same as I was.
I pulled the car into its usual space and got out, clutching the wooden splinters and protruding screws to my chest, ignoring the scratches and snags in the same way as I would ignore the nips and claws of a small animal. Ivo was still in the kitchen; I’d not been gone as long as I thought. All that skulking about in the woods and second-guessing Ivo had made time slow down uncomfortably, but here in the real world it was still music and cooking smells and an unreasonable amount of blue smoke.
‘Is something meant to be burning?’ I asked, coming through the door into the living room, where Ivo was piling old newspapers up on the floor.
‘Burning?’ He looked up at me and I felt that flash in my heart for a second. I was halfway in love with this man. ‘Oh, shit!’
He abandoned the newspaper pile, which promptly toppled, and ran into the kitchen, where he swore in a continuous stream of consciousness while, from the sound of it, running water into a pan that had become far too hot and was spitting and letting steam join the smoke.
An alarm went off in the porch, and Ivo ran through, grabbed a newspaper and began flapping it in the direction of the shrill noise, while water ran in the kitchen and splattered from the sink onto the floor.
I couldn’t help but grin and continue clasping the bolts and splinters. Ivo was back to being my lanky, blond-haired friend. That shadow of suspicion had faded, although it was rapidly being replaced by a degree of unexpected annoyance at his inability to concentrate on cooking to the extent of burning a pan.
‘What happened?’ I asked, when he finally stopped flapping, sorted out the spilled water, and came to sit down, ignoring the re-scattered papers on the carpet.
‘I was heating the sauce, then I thought about what you said about clearing out the porch, so I moved some of these papers out from the bench. Then I started reading as I was tidying and’ – he spread his hands in apology – ‘I forgot the sauce.’
‘Is it ruined?’
‘I can make more. Why on Earth are you sitting as though you’re expecting your appendix to burst?’
I frowned, then realised that I was leaning over my knees, still embracing the tatty pile of screws and broken wood. ‘I found this. Up in the wood near where the body was, just off the track.’
His eyes flickered from my lumpy bundle to my face, and then back again. He didn’t speak.
‘It’s an animal transport cage, one of the small ones. It means that Fred was carried up there, then something happened, I don’t know, maybe our man dropped the cage and it broke and Fred got out and he had to get him back again and he slipped and fell?’ I rattled to the end of my conclusions. Ivo was still looking at me. His continued stillness made me nervous. Wasn’t I meant to find this? All the doubts came flooding back and I felt them settle on the back of my neck.
‘You went up there just now?’ His voice was toneless. Very level. ‘Without saying?’
Oh God, was he about to confess something? ‘I was just… wondering,’ I said, slightly pathetically. ‘If there was anything that might have been… missed.’
‘But we could have gone together.’ He sounded flat. ‘Scoped the place out and looked for things. You didn’t tell me you thought there might be something else.’
‘I didn’t know.’ A sharp edge dug into my stomach. I wriggled and a screw fell to the floor, its silver brightness shining like a fallen sun amid the newsprint and dust. ‘I only went on the off chance. Looking for stuff.’
Ivo’s gaze fell away from my face and he sat on the floor by the newspaper pile. ‘But without me.’ His eyes seemed to move over ancient headlines. ‘You didn’t tell me where you were going, and you went for another look – without me.’ His mouth twisted. ‘You thought this case might be something to do with me?’ He reached out and began folding the edge of the nearest paper, pleating it into a fan of print. ‘You don’t trust me and so you went up there without saying in case there was something incriminating.’
A flat statement. And honestly, nothing I could deny, so I sat, silent, with several of the sharper pieces of wood digging into my ribs. My heart was digging into them from the inside too, seeing the closed-off expression on his face.
He bent forwards, rubbing his hands over his face. ‘Oh, Cressida,’ was all he said, as his cheeks moved and reshaped under his fingers. ‘Were you going to destroy it, or confront me with it?’
I still didn’t speak.
Ivo took a deep breath and held out a hand. ‘Can I see?’ he asked, his voice still strange, even and lacking his usual exuberance. ‘The cage?’
I unbundled my front and let the random collection fall to the floor in a shower of pieces. ‘That’s all I could find.’ My voice didn’t sound normal either. It was much smaller than usual, which wasn’t surprising because I’d had to force the words out down a throat that felt as though I’d swallowed a mousetrap. ‘I was really looking for the driving licence.’
Ivo looked down at the ramshackle bits and pieces. I saw his eyes flicker, taking in the catch, the screws, the bolts and the smashed wood, but he didn’t really seem to be processing any of it. It was almost as though he was using the time to think of something to say. My heart began to beat faster, until I could feel it in my ears.
Please don’t have anything to do with this. Please.
Eventually, and still looking at the floor, he spoke. ‘Cress, do you trust me?’
I had no idea what to say to that. Part of me wanted to scream, ‘I’d trust you to the end of the Earth, you mad, unpredictable fool!’ but that would make me sound like the female lead in a 1950s film. Another part of me wanted to say, ‘I like you a lot, but your behaviour is sometimes that of a person whose moral compass seems to have been assembled in a magnet factory.’ But the hurt in his voice meant I had to say something.
‘You were so sure there was something going on,’ I said in a tiny voice, keeping my eyes on him. ‘The driving licence that nobody has found, where is it? And you’re sometimes just so…’ I whirled one hand in a wordless indication. ‘There’s that book I saw beside your bed, about committing the perfect crime. You could be mixed up in all sorts. I wouldn’t know.’
He stood up suddenly and walked over to the window. The rose knocked to come in again as another violent squall blew through. The windows boomed and rattled in the rapid gale and, for a moment, they were the only noise in here, apart from my heartbeat, which was trying to drown out the wind.
‘You thought I’d searched the body and taken the driving licence, what, and the receipt?’
My silence must have indicated that this was precisely what I had thought.
‘And you went up there to try to find it, so that I would be exonerated? Or to prove something to yourself?’ Ivo sighed. ‘Oh, Cressida. Do you really think I’d involve you if I were caught up in something shady?’ Ivo asked at last. ‘I mean, seriously?’
I didn’t say anything again. It was beginning to dawn on me that, if Ivo really had got himself involved in anything illegal, then the last thing he’d want to do would be to bring someone else in. He could have pretended to investigate by himself and he wouldn’t have had any inconvenient questions to answer, or someone berating him for burning the plum sauce. He could have sat in here, in his gentleman’s smoking club of a living room, in his Dorian Grey outfits, and nobody would be any the wiser.
‘I had to know,’ I said finally, when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to speak again until I did. ‘You’re odd, Ivo. You say it yourself. You could have anything going on in your head and I’m not sure that even a professional mind-reader could have any idea what it was.’
He turned around. The light of the window behind him made it difficult to judge his expression because most of him was in shadow, with the rose banging frantically just behind his left shoulder as though the ghost of Gertrude Jekyll wanted a word. ‘I don’t have the driving licence, and I never touched the body. The book is a novel,’ he said. ‘It’s rubbish, by the way. And I have ADHD. I thought you knew.’
‘I thought that was for kids,’ I said, feeling my brain expanding with the possibilities.
‘You don’t get better.’ Ivo still sounded strange. ‘I was diagnosed at eight, spent most of my adolescence medicated. Now I dip in and out of the tablets, depending on whether I need to be – normal, for want of a better word. I thought with you…’ He stopped again.
ADHD. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Of course. Of course. My mind felt like a giant Jenga as the thoughts, memories and probabilities slotted in. The randomness, the scattered behaviour. The occasional intensity. I should have seen it before – only I’d been too busy putting it down to drugs and a highly indulged upbringing. Those tablets I’d seen him take, the ones we’d never spoken about – not something illegal, to keep him awake or to sharpen his wits, but actual medication. Of course. The relief was so total it almost felt solid.
‘Oh, Ivo,’ I said, and I stood up now too. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘It’s not something to be sorry about. It’s just a thing about me. Like having blue eyes and a patch under my nose where I just can’t grow a moustache.’ He was still speaking as though he were disappointed in the world. ‘I thought, with you, I didn’t need to pretend.’ He carried on talking, his face still shadowed by the outdoors. ‘I thought you didn’t care about the… about my eccentricities, shall we say? I really thought you liked me as I am.’
‘I do.’ I took a step towards him. ‘I really, really do.’ Oh no. No, Cressida, stop now before you… ‘I liked you from the first time I saw you, pulling that stupid suitcase on wheels into our student flat, doing your Sebastian Flyte thing with that rubber duck of yours.’
Ivo coughed. ‘You remember Donny the Duck? Wow.’
‘Of course I do. I remember just about everything you’ve ever done, every expression that’s ever crossed your stupid face, every daft comment and every weird outfit.’ Too late now to start pulling punches. Everything was coming out and I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. ‘And I kept hoping you’d ask me out or want to hang out with me as more than part of the group, but you always went out with girls who were seven feet tall and looked like they should be on the cover of Vogue, and whose parents had the chalet in Switzerland next to where you skied.’ I took a deep breath and tried to regain some composure. ‘Or something like that.’
Too much, Cressida. But at least I managed to keep it all in the past tense, when every atom has been screaming to get into the present. This doesn’t make me so vulnerable; there’s nothing to fear in the past tense.
‘But they were only…’ He shook his head and the collar of today’s absurd shirt flopped. ‘No. No they weren’t. And you could have asked me out, you know. Twenty-first-century, female-centric society, finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist and all that. Ah, well. We missed our chance there, didn’t we? Those tempus have well and truly fugit. But I’ve been wondering about that driver’s licence myself – where is it?’
There was a sensation in the middle of my spine, as though I were melting. The slow drip, drip of the loss of the tension that I carried in my shoulders whenever I was with Ivo; the horrible feeling that he might, at any time, explode into song lyrics or start clearing out a drawer while we were supposed to be revising, or helping with something, or that he might shut himself into his flat for a week and only emerge when tempted out with treats, like a rescue dog in a new home. It wasn’t drugs and I hadn’t imagined it. Ivo was just – well, being Ivo. But he was right. We’d missed our chance. Our time had been back then, when we were young and life could be stitched together from casual sex, late-night parties and frantic weekend revision sessions. Now we were grown-ups – no more Donny Duck, no more spontaneous relationships. That was then and this was… safer.
