One of a Kind

Chapter 4

In the end I didn’t get to lie about on Ivo’s sofa. I hadn’t really expected that I would, appealing though the image may have been. By the time we’d settled the squirrel –

‘I think we should call him Fred.’

‘Fred? Oh, all right, we can’t keep calling him “the squirrel” I suppose.’

– into his cage in the stables, I felt much better anyway and less liable to languishing. Besides, Ivo’s enthusiasm was infectious, and he spread out his sketch of the mysterious ‘Mr Williams’ on the kitchen table with the air of one unfurling a treasure map.

‘I wonder where he travelled from,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Our man at the BB said he was southern. Do you think he looks southern, Cress?’

I was busy sorting out my herbal teas and cold revival kit on the worktop and glanced over my shoulder. ‘How exactly does one look “southern”? He looks like any other bloke to me. Just deader.’

‘You are cold and heartless, Cressida Tarbet, and lack any form of imagination.’ Ivo traced the sketch with a finger. ‘I just think he does.’

‘Not enough whippet and surly machismo to be northern, you mean?’

‘But how can we find out where in the South?’ He was frowning now, resting his chin in his hand and staring at the face looking up at us from the table. His expression was so concentrated that it looked as though he wished he could pull those lines from the sketch and directly into his brain. ‘Williams. He showed his ID so I guess we can assume that’s his real name.’ A sudden shake of the blond head and he was up and restlessly pacing. ‘Someone must be missing him. And he came from somewhere that reminded our man of a fist? Do they fight a lot, typically, down south?’

‘Why this, Ivo?’ I asked. ‘You’ve been involved with police stuff before; there were those farm break-ins last summer and the organised fly tipping – why do you feel you’ve got to start poking around in this case? Tell the police who he is, let them do their job, and we can just assist where needed, surely.’

Ivo stopped pacing, his back to the Aga. ‘I don’t know. There’s just something… plus, you know, he had a squirrel in his pocket.’ He caught my eye and waggled his eyebrows, which made his piercing struggle for purchase again. ‘So now I’ve got you to help too, and that’s never going to be a bad thing.’

Unless you are me, I thought. ‘I’m only here so we can get our squirrel home where he belongs. He’s tame, someone must be missing him.’

‘We really need to find out where he came from.’

‘Squirrel or man?’ I asked, tidying a pile of damp tea towels away into the washing machine.

‘I thought man might be easier, unless you can interrogate the squirrel. See if he talks with a cockney accent, knows about jellied eels, that kind of thing.’

‘No red squirrels in London—oh!’ I slammed the washing machine door and stood up, struck with a sudden thought. ‘But we just might be able to do better than that.’

I pulled my phone from my pocket. ‘You have a secret squirrel identifier on your phone?’ Ivo sounded perplexed. ‘This is getting away from me now.’

‘Don’t be daft. What I do have is a friend in a lab.’

‘Bobbing around in a jar of formaldehyde, knowing you,’ Ivo muttered. ‘Where does this lab friend come in?’

I was scrolling through my contacts list hoping that he’d remember me. Danny had been the guy I’d met on the squirrel course. While I had been sent as the only person from our centre available for travel, he’d been there as a specialist and we’d spent a wonderful weekend in Brighton before deciding that we’d never work as a couple. ‘I’m not sure. But it’s worth asking, because if he can’t help, he might know someone who can. I told you before, squirrel groups can become isolated and inbred so the bloodline is strengthened by bringing in breeding stock from distant groups?’

‘You did.’

‘Well, someone has to check squirrel origins. For that, Danny is your man. So there must be a DNA database somewhere. We just might be able to ask Danny to persuade someone to find out where Fred originates from, which would at least give us a starting point for finding out how to get him home.’

Ivo stared at me for a moment and then whirled me into a frenzied waltz that swept all loose material from the surfaces and included it in our cyclone of movement. Magazines flipped and flew, bits of paper typhooned to the floor, a pair of socks that had been hanging on the Aga rail spiralled to the tiles and even a chair was forced to slide out of our way.

‘Cress, you’re a frigging genius!’ Ivo sang as we Strictly’d our way around the kitchen. ‘Find out where the squirrel came from, and we’re practically home and dry!’

Enjoyable though it might be, I had to stop him when my hip slammed against the table and I groaned. ‘It might not tell us anything,’ I said, pulling him to a standstill. ‘It may not even be relevant. But it would be something. I need to talk to Danny.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Long ago.’ I went back to scrolling and found Danny’s contact details.

‘Likely to rekindle?’ Ivo had let me go now my hands were full of phone again.

‘No.’ I pressed the button to dial. ‘He’s rather fonder of virtual sex than the real thing, unfortunately. Plus, he lives about two hundred miles away. Nice guy, not for me.’ He’s not you. I sat hard on the words to stop them blurting out. My masochistic tendencies to stick around a man who had no interest in me other than as a friend was my own problem. At the other end, the phone started to ring. ‘But I’m hoping he’s still got fond enough memories of me to—oh, hi, Danny? It’s Cressida…’

While I spoke to Danny, who did remember me, which I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered about or not, Ivo paced and listened. He always behaved as though he couldn’t listen efficiently if he wasn’t on the move, and gave the impression that he’d be walking away during any conversation, if the people he was conversing with couldn’t keep up. He seemed worried; there were tense frown lines creasing his forehead and those blue eyes were scrunched up as if he were trying to see his own eyelashes.

When I hung up on Danny, Ivo leaped in front of me. ‘Sounds like he knows a man.’

‘Well, he’s going to text me the details of someone we could send a sample to. Someone at the University of York who owes him a “favour” apparently. I’d have more faith if he didn’t keep saying it like a gangster who’d kneecap anyone who didn’t do as he said. But,’ I sighed, ‘that’s Danny. Wants to be Danny Dyer, in real life is more Danny de Vito.’

‘You really have to “know people” in the squirrel world?’ Ivo stared.

‘It’s more the scientific world. We want results fast, which means pulling strings.’

‘Ah. Puppet squirrel world,’ Ivo said, and grinned.

I had no idea how everyone he knew hadn’t already slapped him.

‘I’m going to make sure Fred is all right out there in the stables,’ I said, giving Ivo side-eye, which didn’t discourage him at all. ‘That poor creature has been through a lot in the last day or so, he could be in shock.’

Fred did not appear to be in any kind of shock. He heard us coming and clung to the bars at the front of the cage for a second before whisking away to bounce off the rest of the walls. He and Ivo had a lot in common, I thought, holding out a hazelnut and having it swept from my fingers by a tiny clawed hand. Intelligent bright eyes scanned my face for a second, then, with a press of fur, Fred was gone again, to eat his prize in the dark depths of the housing section, from where I could see his tail curled up over his back. A contained package of energy, like an elastic band wound up and waiting for a single touch to unleash potential. Or snap and take your eye out, in Ivo’s case.

‘Is he all right?’ I’d made Ivo stand at the door, so as not to upset the squirrel any more than was necessary. ‘Confessed to the vile killing of Mr Williams, strangled with his tail or something?’

I turned. Ivo was silhouetted in the doorway to the old building, where a wide door led to the cobbled passageway that linked all the loose boxes. Everything was panelled in mahogany, the rails that gave the horses a view from their stables were polished brass, and the floors were immaculately swept. The National Trust ownership only covered the house and grounds, but this place was still kept as though the general public might pop round for a look. Hell, it was kept as though the king might be round any moment.

‘Who does all the stable work?’ I asked idly, ignoring his wilful whimsy. ‘I’m guessing you don’t get up at six to muck out.’

Even though we’d known each other for so long, had been in and out of one another’s houses since we’d become friends and had spent far too many university nights drunk together at various parties, I didn’t know that much about Ivo’s life. He had a way of talking for hours and sounding as though he was giving you the secrets of his universe, until you woke up and realised that you still had no real idea what he thought about anything, or, indeed, if he thought at all.

I had, during some of my darker, most lonely, moments, wondered whether he was keeping things hidden on purpose.

‘There are – girls.’ He waved a hand. ‘Lovely, lovely girls. Oh, and some lovely boys too. But mostly girls. Nothing to do with me, it’s all parental, I just live here. The aged Ps are usually in town, they’ve got a little place over there’ – another wave – ‘for holidays.’

‘Town’ must be London. I really couldn’t see Ivo’s parents, whom I’d met once or twice, as people who’d be happy with a small North Yorkshire market town where asking for daikon would get you narrowed eye looks of deep suspicion and possibly followed home by people throwing stones.

Fred swung back to the front of the cage and tipped his head to one side to look at me again out of those shining brown eyes. His fur was red silk in the sun that came through the barred windows and his tail twitched interrogatively.

‘No, no more nuts, sorry,’ I said, putting my finger to the bars and hoping he wasn’t a biter. But then, would a man have put a squirrel with a biting habit in his trouser pocket? Seriously?

A narrow head, rounder than that of a grey squirrel, rubbed against my fingertip for a second, as though to reassure himself. Then, with another tilted-head look, he was gone, tail whisking a dismissive farewell, back to the nest box.

‘He’s really, really tame,’ I said, going back to Ivo, who was still picturesquely outlined in the doorway. ‘I mean, ridiculously. I still think he was hand-reared.’

‘And that’s illegal, you said?’ Ivo moved to let me pass him out into the stable yard. Everywhere smelled of horses and saddle soap.

‘Yep, unless you’re properly licensed. Those guys’ – I jerked my thumb over my shoulder to indicate Fred and his ilk – ‘they’re protected up the wazoo. We’re probably breaking umpteen laws by having him here, except that I’ve got exemption because of being wildlife rescue and everything.’

I sounded slightly smug and I knew it. Wildlife rescue was important. It was a real thing. I just had to keep telling myself that.

‘You’ – Ivo coiled an arm around my shoulders – ‘are a valuable person to know, Cress.’

I leaned, for one second, into the embrace. ‘I have… certain skills,’ I said.

‘So why do you have a degree in History, from Cambridge no less, but your skill set is British wildlife and its protection?’

Ivo was looking at me carefully now. I wasn’t used to such intensity from him. Well, certainly not outside his areas of particular interest, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about being one of those.

‘Can I gently point out that your degree, a very, very good one too, is Philosophy, Politics and Economics? And that you work on a local newspaper covering stories about stolen bikes and criminal damage?’

With a twitch of a shrug Ivo was away again, twisting out into the sunshine like a trapped gale. ‘I like to confound explanation,’ he said. ‘Besides, PPE is a great degree to have if you want to go into politics.’

The thought of Ivo being a politician clanged in my head. Two things further apart I found it hard to imagine and I simply couldn’t reconcile the image of politics, with a lot of sitting down and big dinners, and Ivo and his perpetual motion and compressed energy. I laughed.

To my relief, he laughed too, and didn’t question me any further about my degree. It was odd, I thought, as we walked back down to the little gatehouse that was his home now, that we’d known each other for so long and this was the first time that questions like this were being asked. Almost as though we’d been happily friendly on a superficial level before, but something about this squirrel business was making other, deeper issues surface.

Maybe we were just growing up, I mused, following Ivo into the shadowed coolness of the house. It was situated on, or more exactly, over, a track that led up to the big house and had once been part of the carriageway, now disused. There hadn’t been much call for sweeping up to the gates in a coach drawn by sweating horses in the last hundred years or so, and the gatehouse now only heard the passage of local riders off for a canter in the parkland. The cottage arched over the track with two rooms on either side, necessitating either a marathon run up one staircase, across a landing and down the other or a quick, chilly trip outside when you wanted to go from the living room to the study. Ivo got around this by only using half the house on a daily basis. His bedroom lay in the room that straddled the gateway. He liked the echoes, apparently, but I couldn’t comment. I’d never been in there.

‘So, what’s next?’ I asked, then sneezed again. The cold medicine must be wearing off, but I wasn’t due another dose for a couple of hours. Bugger.

He looked at me appraisingly. ‘First, I make good on my promise to tuck you up on the sofa,’ he said, a wide-flung hand indicating the furniture in question. ‘Then, I’m probably going to think. I may throw questions your way though, so be prepared. Tea?’

I nodded and sat down on the blue velvet sofa. Despite its apparent modernity and trendiness of fabric, it was over a hundred years old. Ivo treated antiques as useful things rather than as ornaments, in an offhand way that made me feel simultaneously comfortable and slightly edgy. It was great that these things were being utilised rather than kept behind glass and admired, otherwise, what was the point of them? But, conversely, it was horrific to drop and break something to be casually then told that it was two hundred years old, or rather, it had been.

It made me very, very careful around things in Ivo’s place.

I blew my nose, copiously and saw him wince as he carried through two steaming mugs. ‘I’ve made you nettle tea,’ he said, handing me mine. ‘It’s good for colds.’

I pulled a face. ‘Can I not have good strong Yorkshire tea instead?’

‘Can you taste it anyway?’

‘No, but…’

‘Then you may as well have something that’s doing you good instead,’ he said, sternly for Ivo. ‘Since you could be drinking anything. Get that down you while I think.’

I sipped. He was right, basically all I could taste was ‘hot’ with a hint of sweetness from the spoonful of honey he’d stirred in. Apart from the fact that the tea was a pale greenish colour, I could have been drinking bathwater. Then I rested my head against the high sofa back and watched Ivo.

Ivo didn’t do anything sitting still. His brain only seemed to work when he was in motion. ‘How long for the DNA test to be done?’ he asked, then looked at me. ‘No, don’t answer, I’m not asking, I’m just thinking. DNA test, find out where – Fred, is it? Find out where he comes from. Might give us something to go on, because it’s all we’ve got.’

He twisted his lip and frowned, pacing between the large French windows that opened out onto the garden at the side of the house, and the sofa where I was languishing like a Victorian in the latter stages of consumption.

‘We know our dead man is called Williams,’ I threw in. ‘So there’s that.’

‘Yes. Gives the poor bloke a name at least, so we don’t keep calling him “the body”, which is just distasteful.’ Ivo finished another circuit of the living room and stopped, staring out into the garden with his back to me. Outside, a rose that was growing up and over the window in an almost unbearably attractive way blew in a breeze and tapped pink heads against the glass in a soft kiss of petals. Ivo sighed. ‘University of York, you said? Maybe we could get our squirrel sample over there today for them to start work on? What do you have to do, swab his cheeks? And I’m going to check with Rufus, in case they know more about our Mystery Man.’ He rattled the catch to the window as though checking it was still closed and the rose couldn’t get in and savage us. ‘He’s not allowed to tell me anything, obviously.’ He spun round now and his grin was wickedly manic. ‘But as we already have a name, he won’t have to keep it secret, and I might get something out of him.’

I sighed. It really was very pleasant being here. The sun filtering in through the roses, the polished and cared for antiques, the smell of the nettle tea that came and went as my nasal passages cleared – it was all contributing to relaxing some of the tension I found myself permanently holding. My shoulders began to slump and my uniform jumper snagged and caught against the velvet of the sofa back.

‘Are you all right, Cress?’ Ivo surprised me with the question. I’d probably been drifting off to sleep.

‘Mmm? Yes, why?’

Now it was Ivo’s turn to look surprised. ‘I just wondered. You don’t – I mean, obviously, we haven’t got that kind of relationship or anything and for all I know you’re… but I don’t know.’

‘Finish a sentence mate, please,’ I said tiredly. His habit of talking as though the other half of the conversation was being filled in ‘off-screen’ could be wearing when you weren’t feeling your sparkly best, and weren’t psychic.

He sat down beside me, moving a set of cushions aside and heaping them onto his lap in order to have room. ‘I’ve never said this before and I don’t know why, but you always seem a bit…’ He waggled a hand. ‘Worried when you’re with me. As though you’re looking over your shoulder all the time. So, are you all right? It’s not going to cause – problems for you, if you’re over here helping me find out about our friend Fred out there?’

He jerked a hand up, towards the stables, which were visible through the shimmering summer air as an eighteenth-century block on the horizon.

Define ‘problem’, I thought. Torturing myself with thoughts of what I wanted, but couldn’t have, and which teetered on the edge of not knowing whether I really did want, or whether it was the allure of Ivo, wasn’t a problem as such. More a psychological condition. ‘No. I’m officially off sick for a week,’ I said. ‘I told you that.’

‘Nobody else going to give you hell if you’re with me?’

‘No.’ I frowned. ‘Who else would worry?’

Ivo was up again, cushions bouncing to the floor as he moved across to one of the bookcases built in to the gatehouse wall. ‘I don’t know, do I? That’s why I’m asking.’ He tipped a couple of volumes, stared at their spines.

‘Only Lilith and Dix and I left them a note.’

‘Oh. All right. If you’re sure.’ He moved across to the small table, which looked as though it formed a receptacle for all the post that had ever come through the door, envelopes and brochures and leaflets tottered in an uneven pile across its highly polished surface. He left the books out of alignment on the shelf and I itched to go and push them back in, but this was his house. If he wanted to live as though he’d been burgled and was waiting for a police visit, that was up to him.

‘Ivo, are you asking if I’ve got a boyfriend who will object to me being here?’ It struck me suddenly, in a heart-pounding moment, that this could be the case. Seriously? Why the hell would Ivo be worried about that? Did he think I’d got a burly seven-footer lurking in the shrubbery to leap out and yell ‘Aha, I have you now!’ and pound Ivo into the sandy soil of the bridleway? He needn’t have been so concerned. The number of men willing to hang around waiting for me to be available between variable working hours and random wildlife call outs was currently nil. It would, perhaps, have been easier if there had been someone. I could have used their concern over my absence as an excuse for the nervous, edgy feeling that I had when alone with Ivo. If he even suspected how I felt… I felt my face heat up with advance embarrassment. ‘If you are, the answer is no. You already know my track record isn’t exactly stellar, and I am currently single, thank you very much for reminding me yet again about my general failure with the opposite sex.’

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 BB, 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 BB 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 BB.’

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.