Chapter 2
At least the house was quiet when I got back. I shared the little cottage with two others, my friend Lilith and her partner Dix, who were, as I should have been on this Monday morning, at work. I parked the Land Rover in the resulting big space right outside and relaxed. I’d just got to make the squirrel safe and happy in the temporary quarters of the garden shed and I could collapse back into my bed and wallow away another day feeling sorry for myself.
The house was mine. Bought with an inheritance unexpectedly bequeathed while prices had been spiralling, it was slightly too small for three people. I needed the extra money to cover the bills, so I’d invited Lilith and Dix, whose landlord had decided he wanted to reclaim their flat, to share. It mostly worked, although the bathroom could be a bone of contention. Owning the house meant that I could afford my job, which paid so little as to almost constitute a hobby. But it was secure – chiefly because nobody else wanted a job where you were on call almost continually, for pocket money – and it involved being useful.
As I got out of the Land Rover and opened the back door, I had a resurgence of the passing irritation that had been haunting me through the night. Annoyed with the sticky back-door handle, the lack of space, my lack of funds, in the darkness of the night I had admitted to myself that I wanted an actual career, where I could be responsible for more than a recalcitrant printer and in charge of more than a Land Rover full of smelly cages. I wished I could go out and confidently talk myself into a job where I had a degree of control and could make decisions, something where I could have real results, other than a couple more badgers alive in the wild and an owl removed from danger. They were good things, obviously. But transient. Impermanent. Some of the badgers were being ‘saved’ on an almost nightly basis. A tiny, deeply buried part of my soul wanted to shout about what we did, educate people, change behaviour. But it was only sometimes. I knew I wouldn’t be any good in jobs like that. I was born to quietly rescue animals, to keep my head down. Why risk what I had, when what I had was enough? Besides, those jobs I sometimes saw advertised, with pressure and management responsibilities, never had any element of wildlife care in them. They were made of paperwork and forms and telling people what to do and, while I would gladly lose the scraping and shovelling element of my job, the animals were what kept me going.
I gave myself a small shake. It was the fever talking, that was all, making me feel weak and maudlin. I wasn’t cut out for moving and shaking, I was one of nature’s backroom girls, quietly and confidently saving nature, one irritable hedgehog at a time. I only needed to get my temperature down and I could go back to serving animal-kind and I’d lose this small, itchy feeling in the back of my head that I could be doing more.
This feebleness was the only reason that I could possibly find for having gone along with Ivo’s ‘let’s do some detective work’. He’d got me at a vulnerable moment, I thought, sliding the squirrel’s cage out of the back of the Land Rover, and I really ought to know better. My main focus here was getting this squirrel back to where he belonged, wherever that might be.
In my hand the cage rocked again as the squirrel swung from the top by needle-clawed paws, and I held the cage up to eye level and squinted inside. A button-bright eye, tilted at an angle from a furry body suspended from the roof, looked back. A tufted ear twitched and then a scuffle of paws sent the squirrel dancing back across the cage to peer at me from the wire door.
It wasn’t afraid. In fact, it seemed to rather like my company, thrusting a little nose towards the bars as though in search of a treat. Cautiously I raised a finger. When the squirrel didn’t cower back into the dark of the straw bed, I stroked the tip of the furry nose and watched the huge cape of a tail curl up and flick in pleasure.
‘You’ve been hand-reared, haven’t you?’ I asked it, pointlessly.
The shiny brown conker of an eye raked me for any hint of a snack, found me wanting, and the squirrel bounced back to begin another swinging session around the rest of the cage.
The little creature was restless, lively and in excellent health. It was hard to imagine it remaining quiet and docile for long enough to be handled, let alone put in a pocket. And yet, very obviously, that was exactly what the man had done, although, of course, he couldn’t have anticipated ending up dead, even though, dressed as he had been, it had always been a possibility. The local mountain rescue had fetched people down off the hills many a time, occasionally as corpses, when they’d misread the soft swell of the heather-covered hills as benign, a sunny day as steady weather and flip flops and shorts as excellent wear for a day’s walking across exposed moorland. A broken leg, a night in sub-zero temperatures, and a sad end was almost inevitable.
But for all its tame and human-friendly behaviour, this little creature wouldn’t have hung around for long without a cage. And how did you even get it in a pocket in the first place? I mentally ran through the agitations of trying to get this quicksilver-fast creature in a position to thrust it into the depths of fabric without having it shoot up your arm or run downwards.
I mean, maybe if the dead guy had been a magician? Making a squirrel appear? And the squirrel was trained?
No. That was Ivo rubbing off on me again. I half-smiled to myself at how horrified he would be if he knew the effect he sometimes had on me, shook my head and opened the shed, which was currently empty. Normally there was at least one hedgehog and a pigeon in there, handed over to me by members of the public, often when the creatures had been going about their perfectly lawful business. ‘He was in the road, miss’, ‘I reckon it’s got a broken wing, love’, and I’d keep them until they’d eaten and drunk something and the person who’d given them to me was a safe distance away, and then just let them go in the garden, whereupon the pigeon would fly off and the hedgehog would burble its way into the undergrowth with, no doubt, muttered imprecations in hedgehog-ese about bloody humans.
I put the squirrel, cage and all, into one of the big rodent cages. It had a proper covered section for sleeping and a water bottle, and I scattered a handful of pine nuts across the floor, then opened the door to the travel cage to let the squirrel bounce out and immediately swing up onto the side to stare at me again.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘Name’s Frank, ma’am,’ came an exaggeratedly American drawl from over my shoulder. And then, in more normal, and far more Yorkshire tones, ‘What on Earth are you doing with that?’
‘Hi, Lil,’ I said, without turning round. ‘I thought you’d gone to work.’
‘Popped home to pick up my sandwiches and check on you.’ She swung on the shed door for a second, suspended by fingertips and reminding me slightly of the squirrel, only less cute and wearing overalls. ‘You were so quiet when we got up, we thought you’d died.’
‘I had a call out.’ I pointed to the squirrel, spasmodically flitting around the bigger cage.
‘I see that.’ She came in closer and peered. The squirrel paused in its frenzied examination to peer back. ‘Never seen one like that before. Tufty ears and all.’
‘It’s a red squirrel.’
‘Oh, aye.’ She continued to squint.
‘They aren’t local.’ I couldn’t help myself. ‘Nearest colony is on the border with Cumbria, as far as I know, or Scotland. Oh, and there are some way down south too.’
‘So what’s this little chap doing here?’ She made a chirruping noise and the squirrel cocked its head. ‘Cute. Seems quite tame.’
‘Could be an infill population.’ I kept my eye on Lilith. While not malicious, she had a very rural Yorkshire approach to some wildlife and couldn’t see why some sections might need rescuing, as opposed to shooting. With squirrels she could go either way, depending on whether she’d been out tree planting recently.
‘Of one?’ She turned big eyes on me and her torn dungaree pocket flapped.
I looked at the squirrel again. It seemed relaxed and unafraid, but somewhere a colony was missing one of their number. Another squirrel may be missing a mate. I needed to get him home, wherever that may be. ‘There may be others out there.’
‘The cold seems better.’ Lil lost interest in the animal and exited the shed to stand in the sunlight. ‘You’re not sniffing as much.’
‘Just have to make sure it doesn’t turn into a chest infection,’ I replied, almost automatically, whereupon she raised her eyebrows at me and headed off to where her bike was leaning against the back wall.
‘I’ll go and report to Dix that you’re not lying cold and stiff in your room then, shall I?’ She waved the retrieved sandwiches in my direction, slotted a foot into a pedal and, without a backwards look, pushed off down the alleyway out to the road beyond.
I tidied up, cleaned out and disinfected the travel cage and hung it up to dry, thinking that, while it might be nice to have the house to myself, really it was quite nice to have people checking up on me and making sure that I hadn’t died in the night. And, although meeting Dix in the kitchen in the small hours could be slightly disconcerting, it was often pleasant to have someone to talk to as you made a cup of tea when you’d returned from a badger-rescuing mission.
Buying the cottage, from an unexpected inheritance from a grandmother that I had never met – although of course I’d known of her existence, I knew my mother had had a mother at some point, she hadn’t burst onto the world in a ray of miraculous light – had been sensible. A tiny part of me had wanted to use the money to travel and have adventures, but that part had been wrestled to the ground by the matter-of-fact part. I needed a roof over my head that wasn’t subject to the whims of a landlord. I couldn’t afford rising rents on a fixed salary. So I bought a two-bedroomed terraced cottage and rented the spare room to Lilith, and Dix. The pair of them were chaotic, noisy, wretchedly unpunctual and random in their habits, but they paid regularly and weren’t above sharing a takeaway with me.
What with the satisfactory decanting of the squirrel, the sunlight, the fact that Lilith had thought to come and check up on me and being already up, dressed, plus the residual buzz from being needed by Ivo, I decided not to go straight back to bed. Instead, I went indoors and tidied up the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and was just contemplating putting my sheets into the washing machine when a figure appeared outside the back door, vibrating with excitement in a shirt in a particularly violent shade of electric blue.
‘You’re up! Good.’
Ivo swung through the door and into the kitchen, all loose limbs and blithe good nature as though he simply couldn’t contemplate anyone telling him to go away.
‘You weren’t wearing that this morning,’ I observed mildly, stopping mid-cleaning to watch him scan the kitchen for anything edible that someone may unwisely have left lying around. The man was as lean as a python, but would eat absolutely anything that hadn’t been licked by someone else. Sometimes he would eat things that had been licked by someone else.
‘Need to look smart,’ he replied, hurling himself onto a chair when there was clearly nothing to eat anywhere. ‘We’re off to chat to BB owners, remember?’
‘What, now?’ I was halfway through wiping down the worktop, and stopped, hands on hips like an accusatory mother-in-law. ‘Ivo…’
He looked at me steadily. ‘Dead bodies don’t wait, Cress.’
‘Yes, yes they do! Of course they do, what else are they going to do, run away? The clue is in the word dead!’
‘I mean’ – he hunched himself forward over his elbows – ‘the mystery of the dead body won’t wait. I want to steal a march on the police, basically. To them, this is just an accident in the dark and they’ll check the details in case anyone’s reported a missing person and do his fingerprints when… well, when they get round to it, but they aren’t going to investigate. Their only goal is to inform next of kin and get the bloke decently buried.’ Now he turned his face up to meet my eye. ‘Don’t you want to know? For the sake of the squirrel, if nothing else?’ he finished, triumphantly, as though putting down the final card in a poker hand that he knew was going to sweep the board. ‘You can’t let that squirrel stay a mystery, can you, Cress?’ His eyes glittered; he knew he had me on the animal welfare thing. ‘Can you?’
I stared at him and felt that familiar twinge in my chest. How could he look at me and not know? Then the equally familiar rebound of relief that he didn’t and couldn’t know how I felt about him. He was my friend. That was fine. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Yep. Deadly, if you pardon the pun.’ He reached out and caught my hand. His fingers were warm, his gaze was steady and – well, it was Ivo. ‘Come with me, Cress. Help me.’
We stayed there for a second, locked in a scene from a 1950s kitchen sink drama, this beautiful man with his eclectic clothing choices, his monied background and his ambition, and me, whose only similarity with him was my slightly odd trousers.
‘Don’t you want to know, Cress?’ he almost breathed, the words subsumed under the birdsong from the garden.
This was unfair. If I had ever suspected Ivo of duplicity, I would have thought he was using me; that he knew about the self-inflicted tearing of my feelings when I was around him and was manipulating me for his own ends. Whenever I wondered about him, on dark, lonely nights, I’d sometimes remember that crystal edge of danger that came with thoughts of Ivo, the feeling that he teetered on a knife blade of – something. I would push away the memory I had of once catching him palming tablets. He’d smiled his most charming smile and whirled along with the rest of us to the exam halls, and I’d buried the whole thing under better memories. But, every so often, when he sparkled and glamoured and entertained, I wondered.
‘Oh, all right,’ I said, finally. ‘As long as it’s nothing illegal.’ Then, with the desire to test that memory, I added softly, ‘I know you, Ivo, remember?’
‘That was years ago,’ he said airily. ‘Besides, I got off with a warning.’
I turned my back on him and finished wiping down the worktop. He’d shown no guilt, no hint that there might be something to hide. His memory had gone to an incident of confused mistaken identity and youthful desire to please from our first student year. You got off, I thought, narrowing my eyes in a look that ought to have scorched any germs off the wood grain, because your mum is a high-court judge and your dad is a journalist for the Guardian. But I didn’t say it, of course. Ivo accepted his background just as he accepted the background of all his friends, as something that couldn’t be helped, like an elderly spaniel or a leaky roof, and if you never spoke about it, things would be all right.
‘So,’ he carried on, stretching out his legs and putting his feet up on one of the other chairs, ‘I’ve got a list of all the BBs in Helmsley and a quick sketch of the poor dead bloke in question. It shouldn’t take us that long.’
‘What makes you think he was staying in Helmsley?’ I asked. I couldn’t help myself. I was getting involved, even though I didn’t want to be.
‘No car. At least, no car the police could find. None of the local taxis did a run up out onto the moor last night. I asked them.’ Ivo raised his chin. It made the sun shadow his cheekbones. ‘So he walked. And in those shoes he didn’t walk far, not at that time of night.’
‘He was wearing trainers,’ I observed mildly.
‘Cheap trainers,’ Ivo corrected me. ‘I had chance for a proper look while the police were faffing about getting the body tent up. Cheap trainers with worn soles and a hole in. He wasn’t hiking in from Thirsk in trainers like that. Besides, he wasn’t dressed for walking, jeans and a plastic jacket thing, he wasn’t meaning to go far. And he’d checked out of wherever he was staying, so how was he going to get anywhere in the middle of the night?’
‘You looked at the body? Ivo…’
‘Of course I looked at the body! I’m a journalist! The police knew I’d look at the body or they wouldn’t have left me there with it – I think they subconsciously want me to investigate because then they won’t have to bother.’ He folded his arms at me. ‘They’ve got bigger things on their plate,’ he said. ‘Ru’s been on overtime for weeks. Drugs, you know, the usual.’
He didn’t even flicker as he said it. Not so much as a raised eyebrow gave away any feelings about drugs, their inadvisability or the problems that could arise. I shoved that memory of those tablets back down again. I could have been mistaken; it could have been paracetamol.
Couldn’t it?
He stood up now, scuffing the chair noisily back on the stone floor that was the kitchen’s best feature. ‘So, if we want to find out who he was and what he was doing up there with your squirrel in his pocket, it’s going to be down to us. Was he meeting someone who was going to drive him somewhere? If so, why haven’t they turned up? Or was he going to walk back to Helmsley and get the first bus out in the morning, and why would anyone sit about all night waiting for a bus with a squirrel in their pocket?’
I put a hand to my forehead. My head had begun to ache. ‘All right, all right. I’ll come with you round Helmsley, if only to stop you tormenting the local hoteliers with your endless list of questions,’ I said. ‘Someone has to keep you out of mischief. Besides, if we find out where he came from we can get the squirrel home, the poor little thing.’
He rounded the table and gave me a sudden hug. ‘That’s my Cress,’ he said, joyfully. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me do this on my own! Justice for squirrels! Come on, I’ve got the car outside.’
As I locked up the house I felt the memory of that hug all along my body. The smooth coolness of that dreadful shirt and the snaggy pull of the velvet trousers, the brief pressure of his arms as he’d embraced me.
Everything in me wanted to lock myself inside the house. Apart from the fact that we were probably going to interfere with the police investigations, that I felt dreadful, that I’d rung in sick from work and therefore shouldn’t be doing more than a little light shopping – this was Ivo.
My friend. That was enough.