Chapter 3
Ivo handed me the scrap of paper bearing the pencil sketch of the dead man and we headed off to Helmsley.
‘Where did you get this from?’
He barely even looked away from the glimmering grey road. ‘Well, I did it, of course.’
‘But it’s good! At least,’ I amended, hurriedly, ‘I never saw the man, not properly, only his shoes, so I’m assuming this is accurate.’ The sketch was, strangely, very lifelike. The face of a man stared out at me, wide-eyed and worn; his chin was stubbled and his hair raggedly cut. ‘I didn’t know you could draw, properly.’
I did know that Ivo painted, in his spare time, huge canvases, covered in swirling shapes. He used bright, primary colours and his pictures were meant to represent emotions or dreamscapes, nebulous things. They all looked a little bit like pictures Arthur Rackham might have painted as a four-year-old with a raging temperature.
‘Of course I can draw,’ Ivo said, casually, as though anyone could afford the time and frames to produce things that were bigger than my entire living room. ‘I had the upbringing of an eighteenth-century miss. I can sing and perform country dancing, paint, sketch – I could probably play the spinet if I knew what one was. I’m practically the missing Bront? sister.’
I thought of my school days. The memory came with the smell of damp, shouting and overcrowded classrooms with boys who threw chairs. Country dancing had not featured. But at least I knew what a spinet was.
‘Right.’ He swung the car into the last available parking space – because of course there would be parking when Ivo needed it – and looked at me. ‘Let’s do this thing. I’ll talk, you hold the sketch and look winsome. You do winsome so well and I’ve never really got the hang. Come on.’
I sighed and reminded myself that I was here to ensure that Ivo kept his feet on the ground and the rest of him on the right side of the law.‘All right. But I’m too bunged up for winsome. Can I do world-weary instead?’
‘If you must.’ He locked the car and we started down the road. ‘You can be the Lewis to my Morse. BBs first. We can try the campsites afterwards if we have to.’
‘Not the hotels?’ I looked longingly at the exclusive hotel in front of us. It had a pool and a steam room and the menu hanging outside covered nearly all of one window. It looked like the sort of place that would serve wonderful coffee with those little crisp biscuits, and have plump armchairs, and I already wanted to sit down.
‘They don’t print out receipts on little bits of paper, they email them to you,’ Ivo said, vaguely. ‘Besides, ￡75 for one night? That is not hotel prices, at least, not around here.’ Then he rang the bell of the crooked little house overlooking the stream, which had a ‘Vacancies’ sign in the window.
The lady who ran the BB didn’t recognise the sketch and hadn’t had anyone check out the previous day. Neither had the next three places we tried, but in a back street, with a view of nothing more than the vet’s surgery and an old coal yard, we found someone who did.
‘Mr Williams, that looks like,’ the slightly grubby gentleman said, adjusting his trousers. ‘He left us yesterday. Why?’ He peered at us through smeary spectacles. ‘What’s he done?’
The smell of sausages was wafting down the hallway to greet us like an enthusiastic spaniel.
‘Nothing,’ I leaped in before Ivo could say, ‘He died.’ This man looked as though he may try to charge extra for pre-decease. ‘We just need to find out who he is. When did he arrive?’
‘Day before. Only booked for one night. Told him he was lucky to get in, this time of year. We’re usually full.’ The man looked over his shoulder at the hallway of the guest house, as though the immense quantity of clients was about to come seeping after him.
‘So it was a short-notice booking?’ Ivo’s eyes were gleaming. I had to elbow him before he ruined our professional air by jiggling from foot to foot.
The man scratched his chin. ‘Yep. Last week.’
‘Did he – did he bring any pets with him?’ I asked.
‘Pets? Oh no, we won’t be having animals in here. They mess the place up,’ said the grubby man, as though his establishment was scoured on a daily basis, a belief that was belied by the grimy windows and worn hall carpet.
I had a sudden vision of that little squirrel, currently bouncing around in my shed, but previously travelling in a pocket. It would have been noticeable in a BB bedroom, surely? Bits on the carpet, chewed curtains, strange noises.
‘You’re sure? No pets at all?’
The bleary face of the BB owner came close as he peered at me again. ‘Told you,’ he said, giving off a whiff of fried food and old cigarettes. ‘No pets. Not much luggage neither, just a bag thing and his jacket. He said he’d come on the bus and couldn’t carry much. We don’t allow pets; the wife don’t hold with the cleaning. Besides, she’s got a cat, big fluffy thing it is, and it has the run of the place so we can’t be having dogs and things. He might get scared, apparently, don’t know why, thing’d bloody terrify an Alsatian.’
‘Thanks, Mr Thixendale.’ Ivo was practically on tiptoes now with eagerness. ‘This Mr Williams. Did he check in properly? Show you ID and everything?’
The man laughed a raspy laugh that’s smoked since it was ten. ‘Yep, driving licence. We does things by the board here, cos we gets inspected. And he checked out proper, like I said. Had to, we had a booking for the room from lunchtime today.’
Ivo glanced at me. ‘Do you know where he came from? You took his address?’
‘Course I did.’ A sudden bout of coughing broke the man’s face into a portrait of wrinkle, stubble and grey eyebrows. ‘There’s rules y’know. Came from somewhere southern, made me think of fists, can’t remember now. Not allowed to tell you, in any case. Data protection,’ he finished, looking satisfied, as though he feared we may have been sent to check up on GDPR breaches, even though Ivo had shown his NUJ card as our introduction. ‘Anyway, got to get the dinner on and make sure that bloody cat isn’t in the pantry again.’ And he closed the door.
Ivo turned to me with a grin so wide his cheeks were under his ears. ‘Told you,’ he said. ‘Williams. Okay, now we’ve got something to go on.’
I frowned. ‘Odd, though. Sounds like he didn’t have the squirrel with him here?’
‘No pets,’ Ivo said, complacently.
‘It has to have come from somewhere.’ I wiped my nose, which had started running again. ‘He must have brought it with him. But if he’d had it in his room here, it would have left, well, a bit of a mess. They don’t exactly lie in their basket on command.’
‘Maybe it did.’ Ivo nodded towards the now closed door that separated us from the seedy hallway and smell of sausages. ‘D’you think he would have noticed?’
‘He said the room was re-let almost immediately. If there’d been a mess left, I reckon Mr Thixendale wouldn’t be above trying to make us liable for a bill for extra cleaning.’ I bit the side of a nail. ‘No. He can’t have had the squirrel while he was here.’
‘He had a bag. And a jacket. Could the squirrel have been in one of those? Or, maybe he was up on the moor to get the squirrel?’ Ivo was clearly stuck in ‘question’ mode. ‘Is there a national squirrel-smuggling racket going down?’
‘Squirrels’ teeth go through anything; you can’t just put them in a bag.’ I chewed the nail a bit more and stared at the peeling paint of Mr Thixendale’s front window. ‘I presume that the police haven’t found his bag, because they don’t have his driving licence, otherwise they’d know who he was.’ I chewed a bit more until Ivo gently pushed my hand away from my mouth and took hold of it to lead me along the road. ‘And there’s no such thing as squirrel smuggling; what would be the point? Oh!’ I remembered something, the course that Ivo had mentioned that I’d been sent on a couple of summers ago. ‘But there is an exchange programme.’
Ivo stopped walking, but kept hold of my hand. Behind us, the church bell tolled the hour, long and plaintive into the summer sky, sending a cloud of rooks wheeling and cawing above us. In other circumstances I would have enjoyed this moment. ‘What, like a student transfer? We send ours over there and they come back able to swear fluently in a different language and leaving a trail of broken foreign hearts in their wake?’
I stared at him.
‘What? My school used to send us to the Dordogne for six weeks every summer. It’s where I learned to dance, eat escargot properly and say “bof” in a suitably insouciant manner.’
Now I rolled my eyes. ‘I don’t think there’s much call for squirrels gaining fluency in another language and an ability to eat snails without recoiling,’ I said, acidly.
‘Well, what then?’ Ivo had raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t seen him this fascinated in ages. The case of the squirrel had clearly engaged him completely and I hated to admit it but it was very nice to see his brain doing something other than working out how many times he could mention garden shed security in one week’s online column. The ghastly blue shirt twinkled in the sunlight in a distracting way.
‘Isolated animal communities can become inbred if they don’t have access to new bloodlines,’ I said, trying to remember the lectures. It hadn’t been particularly relevant to me then, and during the course I’d got involved with Danny, the guy leading it, who’d turned out to like porn more than real women and squirrels more than either, so I hadn’t been in the best frame of mind to concentrate. ‘So places with lots of squirrels do an exchange.’
He grabbed me suddenly, letting go of my fingers to put his hands on my shoulders. ‘Cress! You mean, there’s an illegal squirrel swap going on? Our man was smuggling squirrels?’
Even though the sun was warm, Ivo’s hands were warmer. I felt the weight of his touch in every bone and bit my lip. ‘No point. There’s loads of perfectly legal squirrel movements every year. Where would the benefit be?’
As though he wasn’t thinking about anything other than fluffy rodents, Ivo pulled me in closer so he could look into my face. ‘Cherchez la profit,’ he said, quietly.
‘All that time on the Dordogne wasn’t wasted then,’ I said, quietly but slightly tartly. ‘You’re still fluent.’
‘Very funny.’ Another squeeze and he released me so we could walk. ‘So. No money in squirrels, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Nope. None at all.’ It was just Ivo, I told myself sternly. This was how he behaved with everyone; a casual physical touch here and there, as though he suspected that the rest of the world wasn’t real, and needed to reassure himself of its existence. I sneezed violently.
‘You’re really not well, are you?’ Suddenly concerned, Ivo was bending to look into my face, which probably wasn’t wise given the velocity of my sneezes.
‘No,’ I agreed sadly.
‘Look, why not come back to my place for a couple of days? I can tuck you up on the sofa there, with… blankets and things, and you’ll be handy when I need to throw theories at you. I’d give you the spare room but it’s still full of piano – I really must get rid of that enormous bugger but it’s Dad’s and he does play every now and then, but I can’t unfold the futon with it there. I’ve got loads of whisky and lemon to pour down you, if that helps.’
I thought of my bed. The sheets needed changing and it was in the front bedroom, noisily placed on a busy street where having the windows open filled the room with traffic fumes and the tinny rattle of shopping trolleys. Then I thought of Ivo’s careless affection, the light in his eyes at the thought that this may turn into a ‘real case’. Also, just a little, of his house, which was a gatehouse cottage in the grounds of a large stately home that had belonged to a relative before death duties and the National Trust had come calling. The cottage had its own gardens, which meant it was largely silent, unless someone rode along the track that led through the middle of it, when it echoed to the unseen hooves, like a haunting. The thought of being looked after, even if by Ivo, for a day or so, was immensely tempting too. It shouldn’t be. He was my friend and I didn’t dare admit to anything else for fear of ruining this wonderful, casual acceptance of one another that we had. I liked Ivo more than he liked me, that was all there was to it, and it was my problem, not his.
‘I’ll need to pack a bag,’ I said. ‘And leave a note for Lilith and Dix, so they don’t think I’ve been carted off into sex slavery.’
‘Tell them you’re with me. They’ll know you’re safe.’ We’d reached the car now and he unlocked it and began to slide into the driving seat.
I hesitated for a moment. Was this really such a good idea? ‘I’d need to bring the squirrel. I can’t leave him to Lilith to look after, you know she’s a bit scatterbrained when it comes to remembering to feed animals.’
‘Fine. It’s Exhibit A anyway, I’d like to keep an eye on it.’
‘Why? What do you think he’s going to do, write a confession note?’
‘Just… might be better to have it with us. In case. It can go in the stable, all the horses are out for the summer.’
‘Okay,’ I said weakly, still, after all this time of knowing him, stunned by the casual way he came out with things like this.
‘We can stock up on all your medicines while we’re at your place. Apart from whisky I’m not sure I’ve got much in the cupboard.’
I settled myself in the passenger seat and tried not to look sideways at him as we pulled away. Did my uncertainty show? We’d never spoken about those tablets; I wasn’t even sure if he knew that I’d seen him and I didn’t want to mention it – I hated to even think because I was afraid of what he might tell me. He purported to hate drugs of any kind, but there was a sparkling energy about him at times and a randomness that made me wonder if he might protest a little too vociferously. His scattered focus could narrow under the microscope of his interest at the speed of thought and absorb him as though the rest of the world had ceased to exist. It made him fun, lively, haphazard and arbitrary. Added to that was the fact that family money meant he could afford to be careless and carefree. The sum total was Ivo, an alluring companion with the potential of a tonne of unexploded gelignite.
I looked at him as he drove. His handsome profile was what had originally caught my attention and then we’d become friends and I’d stopped holding my breath every time I saw him, unless it was to worry about him falling over railings or dropping something priceless. But sometimes I’d catch sight of him out of the corner of my eye and wonder. How could someone so good looking, trailing disconsolate, soggy-tissued ex-girlfriends, still be single? He had the astonishing cheekbones of his aristocratic forebears and the intelligence of his somewhat more modern antecedents. He was, basically, God’s gift to women, if a slightly scatty one. I didn’t know what he thought of me.
Then I wondered again if it really was such a good idea to go and stay with him. But I’d agreed, and it did beat lying alone in my room listening to the world coming and going in the street beyond. And, I hated to admit it, I was beginning to be a little intrigued by the squirrel affair.