One of a Kind

Chapter 1

The man lay on his back, eyes wide to the sky, as though death had taken him by surprise and the afterlife was proving something of a disappointment. Nearby, the trees that lined the path shivered their leaves as the last breeze of spring ran through on its way to summer, but nothing else moved. The darkness was blanket-thick, air chilly and still, and beginning to be filled by the smell of death.

Deep in the recess of the man’s pocket something twitched, terrified, in the corpse-silence.

This was not proving to be a good day for anyone concerned.

The phone rang and woke me. ‘Hello?’

‘Cress? Is that you? You sound weird.’

I sighed. This level of enthusiasm was too much when my head was pounding and my pillow was covered with what could have been a modern art installation: tissues both used and unused, old Vicks inhalers and a couple of gel cool pads. ‘What is it, Ivo?’

‘Are you at work?’

I sniffed outrageously and hauled my aching body upright in the bed. ‘No. I’m ill. I’m wallowing in my sick bed.’ Then, more curiously, ‘Why?’

There was a rustling noise, as though Ivo were moving, and then his voice again but quieter, almost a whisper. ‘I’m on a job and I need you in a professional capacity.’

I would have laughed but I didn’t have sufficient snot-free lung space. ‘Don’t be bloody daft. I work in a wildlife sanctuary and you’re a reporter. There is absolutely no point of contact, unless you need to know whether a grown man can actually have his arm broken by a swan. I keep telling you, just stay a respectful distance away and you’ll be fine.’

There was a pause and I could hear voices in the background. Ivo was, presumably, listening too, because he’d gone very quiet. Then he was back. ‘No. No, this is something else, Cress.’ His voice was urgent, fast and excited, which was typical Ivo. His default position was just above the surface of the planet, full of potential energy, like an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. ‘And I really need you.’

There was a pause. I felt the tug that was our friendship trying to pull me out of bed to go to him, but then the equal and opposite drag of feeling wretched and wanting my bed. ‘I’m ill!’ I pleaded again, wafting some vapour rub under my nose to keep my passages open for long enough to be comprehensible. ‘I’ve got this stonker of a cold that’s been going round and I’ve had to phone in sick for the week.’

‘Good. Means you’re available for me,’ he replied.

‘I’m not “available”, I’m in bed. Poorly,’ I added, and then went into a round of coughing, just to prove my point.

‘But you wouldn’t want an animal to suffer, would you?’ There was a sweetness in his tone that said he knew this would be the way to get to me. ‘A poor, fluffy creature that’s all alone?’

I narrowed my eyes, although he couldn’t see so I didn’t know why I was bothering. ‘Is it injured?’

‘I don’t know. Probably. If it means you’ll come I’ll poke it with my biro.’

‘Ivo!’

‘Joke! Of course I wouldn’t. You know me, Cress.’

Ivo and I had met at university, eight years ago. Although we’d grown up geographically in the same area, when it came to social circles we’d been a universe apart so we’d never met beforehand and during our time at Cambridge we’d orbited one another at varying distances. However, since we’d left, he always seemed to be not far away, a satellite in velvet bell-bottom jeans and embroidered waistcoat. A bit like having the 1970s on speed dial.

So I did know Ivo. And I knew he was as capable of hurting an animal as I was of dancing the can-can right now. He was, in fact, the person least capable of any injurious activity in a five-hundred-kilometre radius. Impetuous, yes, Ivo tended to act first and think far too deeply about his actions afterwards, but he couldn’t deliberately have caused pain, particularly not to an animal. People called him ‘wet’ or ‘bonkers’, and I knew him to be neither of those things; he just wasn’t your typical macho Yorkshireman. The flared velvet trousers and rainbow-coloured cravats were just one of the giveaways. My feelings for Ivo were as complicated as his fashion choices: fondness and exasperation layered over something hotter and deeper. Feelings I denied and concealed as hard as I could.

‘All right, all right. To save a poor fluffy creature from your wicked machinations, I’ll come.’ Then, after a moment’s thought, ‘It’s not dangerous, is it?’

‘You just will not let that drop, will you! One time. One time I get involved with an international venomous reptile dealer!’ He sounded half amused and half exasperated, which didn’t seem fair. It hadn’t been me trapped in a flat in Leeds by a cobra in the heating vents. ‘And no. This time it’s nothing like that.’

I felt my shoulders drop with relief. ‘What is it, then?’

‘What’s what?’

‘The animal, Ivo,’ I said, patiently, sticking my foot out from under the covers to stir through the discarded clothing on the floor of my bedroom. Fortunately it was my work uniform; I’d come home from the rescue centre two days ago feeling so wretched that I’d torn it off and fallen into bed and I hadn’t got dressed since. I’d been flopping from bed to bathroom and kitchen wrapped in a fleecy blanket, and my housemates had taken one look at me and gone away for the weekend.

‘I want to surprise you,’ Ivo said. ‘Look, you know that bridleway above Helmsley that runs out onto the moor?’

I propped one bleary eye open for long enough to focus on my underwear. ‘Yes.’ Bending down made my nose run, so I had to crouch while keeping my head perfectly still to pick up my knickers.

‘We’re about half a mile out along the track past the trig point.’

‘We?’ I tucked the phone under my chin to pull clothes on, but this made my nose stream again, so I had to take it out and hold it up.

‘Oh. Yes, the police are here as well,’ he said, and hung up on me, leaving me wedging tissue up my nose in order to put a jumper over my head without leaving little wet trails down it.

I stared at the phone. ‘You absolute bugger, Ivo.’

This wasn’t totally new. The first time he’d called me in a professional capacity it had been the escaped and hidden cobra, and there had been several incidents since. Once, when he’d dashed over to report on a woman who had found a tropical spider in some bananas she’d been unpacking at the supermarket. The spider had re-emerged when they’d been looking at the bananas in question and I’d had to go over to capture it. It had been holding Ivo at bay in the supermarket’s disabled toilet, where he had been standing on the seat whilst the arachnid waddled sleepily across the tiled floor. Then there had been the time he’d been trampled by a herd of deer – yes, Ivo and wildlife were an accident actually happening.

The exasperation had won out, emotionally, on that occasion.

With this in mind, I hurried myself into an assortment of clothing, my wildlife rescue centre sweatshirt and a pair of fleece trousers, work boots and my beanie hat with the centre’s logo on, and, pausing only to grab a fistful of tissues, I dashed off to Ivo before he could meet his end at the paws of something hopefully about as menacing as the average earthworm.

It wasn’t a long drive before I was out on the stretch of moor that Ivo had described, while the sun was still stretching its morning light across the tops of the trees and lightly touching the tips of the high hills. I hadn’t even thought to look at the clock when he’d rung me, and it was evidently very early.

I left the car on the road and, hunching my shoulders against the cold shivers, I set out along the path towards the trig point. In the distance I could see a group of people, presumably Ivo was among them, a small tent, with tape delineating an area just off the track and flapping in the morning breeze. I couldn’t work up any curiosity. I could barely work up the energy to trudge down the path. Bloody Ivo. Bloody, bloody Ivo.

The track was peaty and held the mark of every hoof from the horses that were regularly exercised up here and tyre marks from the quad bikes of the farmers who rode across to check the sheep. I had to tread carefully to avoid plunging into dank puddles, but as I was wearing my work boots, which Ivo described as ‘a cross between Doc Marten and SS Officer’, I wasn’t too worried. Besides, I had a headache and my nose was still running and I was concentrating more on blasting Ivo for raising me from my sick bed as soon as I saw him than I was on the state of my footwear or the ground beneath.

I was also concerned for the safety of any animal involved in the activity going on in the area. Why was there a tent? I was pretty sure they weren’t providing accommodation for wildlife now.

I reached the blue police incident tape and stopped. Beside the track the little white tent bulged with activity, like a seaside changing cubicle, and then Ivo popped out of one side with his blond hair awry and his face alight with excitement.

‘Hi, Cress!’

I shook my head. ‘This had better be good,’ I said, hoarsely. ‘I’m not well.’

‘Yeah, you look rubbish. Have you got make-up on? Your eyes…’

Well, at least he’d noticed. ‘No. I just haven’t slept properly for three nights. Why am I here? I can’t see any animals in obvious distress.’ I dug my hands into my pockets and hunched my shoulders a bit more. Even though the sun was climbing high into the June sky, my cold-ridden body was feeling the last of the night’s chill in every fibre.

‘There’s a body.’ Ivo pointed with an elbow. He, too, had his hands in his pockets. Although he wasn’t wearing a sturdy double-knit work jumper, today he was positively channelling the seventies in an embroidered coat with a manky-looking fur trim. With his classically handsome face, his tousled blond hair and his long legs, he looked ever so slightly like ‘Acid Trip Ken’. The Barbie movie missed a trick, I thought, fever-ridden. ‘In there.’

‘A body?’ That knocked my temperature down a few degrees. He hadn’t mentioned that on the phone. ‘A human one?’

‘Well, yes, but it’s all right, he only died last night so he’s not too smelly or anything. They think it was an accident. Fell and banged his head, it looks like.’

I sighed. ‘Well, I didn’t trip him up. So, again, why am I here? Where’s the animal? Unless you are about to conduct a Hercule Poirot-style accusation, with all the suspects being accused in turn, and they’re all in there…’ I looked at the tent. ‘And I’m here to referee.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘I told you, you’re here in a professional capacity.’

The sun shone a particularly well-aimed beam that struck me full in the face and made me squint and wince in equal measure. My hair was unwashed and on end, my skin prickled with the sweat of several sleepless nights and, in short, I was not feeling up to Ivo’s twenty-questions conversational technique. ‘Just tell me,’ I sighed.

Ivo’s eyes twinkled. He was enjoying this. I wished he’d tell me what was such fun about being up at the spark of dawn in the middle of nowhere with – his words percolated through the fug in my head – a dead body in the vicinity, and what it had to do with wildlife rescue, and, more importantly, me. But his wiggling eyebrows and manic grin were indicative of a story. And one thing I knew about Ivo and stories was, he liked to take his time.

‘Come over here.’ One hand came out of his pocket and took my elbow to tug me further down the path. Behind his shoulder the tent bulged again.

‘Are there people in there or is the body dirigible?’ I asked, curiosity getting the better of the sniffing.

‘Oh, the police are still here,’ Ivo said, vaguely.

‘And letting you trample over their investigation?’

We sat on a convenient rock that jutted from the moorland like a broken rib. Birds scattered skywards as Ivo pushed me gently down. ‘Rufus gave me a call over. I don’t think it’s really an investigation, more of a puzzle. I’m staying out of the way. Mostly.’

Rufus was a police sergeant. We weren’t supposed to know, but he was Ivo’s contact with the police, feeding him information about various crimes and incidents in time for them to get onto the local daily news site. He was also, incidentally, Ivo’s brother, so the secret was fairly open.

‘Mostly,’ I repeated.

‘They’re having a quick poke around but it’s not looking suspicious. Bloke falls over, cracks head, dies, is found by someone walking their dog. Only, not a dog walker in this case,’ he added quickly. ‘Horse rider.’

‘I don’t need to know the details, Ivo, I just need to know why I’m here.’ I rubbed a hand through my hair. It was plaited into scouring pad texture at the back of my head where I’d tossed and turned on the pillow. A tiny waving corner of my vanity protested that I ought to have had a wash and tidy-up before I came out, but Ivo had seen me in worse states. I was also wondering a little about him noticing that I looked rubbish. Ivo rarely said anything about my appearance, which was just another nail that kept the lid on my secret crush on him. Not one ‘you look nice’ or ‘cute boots’, and yet he could tell me that I looked awful. Yep. That was our relationship in a nutshell.

‘Okay.’ Ivo’s blue eyes were sparkling. ‘Well. Dead body reported, police attended, yada yada. Here he is, up on the moor, very early morning, not really dressed for hiking, but that’s not the point.’

I dropped my head into my hands. It felt like a concrete block. ‘What is the point, Ivo?’ I asked, wearily. ‘And could we get to it fairly swiftly. I want to go back to bed.’

‘Guess what they found in his pocket?’ Ivo grinned hugely, clearly very pleased with himself. ‘Go on. Guess.’

‘A rocket launcher.’

‘Nope.’

‘Four hundred million pounds in forged currency… I don’t know!’

Ivo looked at me steadily. ‘That’s a surprisingly specific amount, Cress.’

I sighed again. ‘Look. I’ve had to ring in sick to work and you know I hardly ever do that, so please, for all you hold dear, just tell me why I’m here so I can go back home.’

‘A squirrel.’

I dropped my head even further forward so that my forehead was resting on my knees. Obedient to gravity, my nose started to run again. ‘What?’

‘That’s what he had in his pocket. A squirrel.’

‘Maybe he was out here squirrel hunting? There’s a forest down there.’ I waved a hand behind me, without looking up. ‘And people eat squirrel. Some people do, anyway. Weird people.’ I raised my head and caught his eye. ‘You’d probably eat squirrel,’ I finished, pointedly.

‘It’s sustainable.’

‘Not right now it isn’t,’ I muttered darkly. ‘Nothing about this is sustainable.’

‘And it wasn’t just a squirrel, Cress.’ Ivo sounded really excited now. I hoped he wasn’t getting carried away. Ivo had dreams of being what he called a ‘proper investigative journalist’ and, as we lived somewhere where a bike being stolen from a shed made the headlines for three weeks running, things that needed proper investigative journalism were thin on the ground. Squirrel poaching was hardly the topic for the next conspiracy theory.

‘What, then?’ I asked, tiredly. ‘Two squirrels? A squirrel uprising? Are they banding together to take down their human overlords?’

Ivo looked at me solemnly. Without the usually present twinkle and effervescence, I could see the outline of the person he really was. Driven, conscientious. More than an Afghan coat and open-toed sandals. Ivo’s single-minded focus made him good at what he did. And a spectacularly irritating friend. ‘Red squirrel, Cress,’ he said.

I mopped my nose and rubbed the back of my hand across my aching forehead. ‘Don’t be silly. There aren’t any red squirrels for a hundred miles. The Cumbrian border would be the nearest colony – it’s probably just a brown-coated grey.’

Ivo jiggled closer. ‘How many hours have I spent listening to you lecture me on wildlife?’ he asked. ‘Roughly?’

‘I wasn’t lecturing. I was informing.’

‘You went on that course and then came back and told me all about it. And you think I can’t tell a red squirrel from a grey? Seriously?’ He put a hand on my forehead. ‘Wow. You’re hot. You’ve probably got a temperature.’

I leaned, for a second, into the cool of his palm, soothing my headache. He smelled, predictably, of incense and patchouli oil. Ivo didn’t do anything by halves. The velvet of his coat sleeve was soft against my skin and I closed my eyes for a moment before I jerked up and away. This was Ivo. I wasn’t going there. Leaps into the unknown were not my thing, I was all about the reliable and the dependable. Those two words could not be applied to Ivo in any way, and I’d take what I could get of his company without risking my neck, my affections and my clean driving licence. He was attractive, but with an edge that made me wonder if it was sometimes kept sharp with chemical help.

‘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 BBs.’

‘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!’

I drove away, leaving him with a promise that I’d come along with him when he ‘investigated’. I had to; Ivo could get himself into untold amounts of danger just reporting on an escaped bullock. He had ideas of in-depth reporting that would leave him halfway up a sixty-foot tree while the bullock in question prowled around below making threatening bellowing noises, so there was no way I could leave him looking into an unexplained squirrel. He’d probably end up in police custody and I’d have to bake a cake with a file in it or something.

Sometimes, being Ivo’s friend was worse than being his enemy. And a lot, lot harder.