One of a Kind

Chapter 5

The weather broke overnight. I woke from my position on the very comfortable sofa to hear Ivo in the kitchen and rain gurgling from the gargoyled downspouts. The rose beyond the window now hung soggily, with dejected petals occasionally pattering against the glass like soaked fairies.

I’d actually had a decent night’s sleep for the first time in a while, and my head felt clearer. Clear enough at least for me to wonder what the hell I was doing, encouraging Ivo in this current journalistic endeavour.

‘Tea? Toast?’ He bounced into the room and twitched the duvet aside so he could sit at my feet, thrusting a plate and mug in my direction. ‘I hope you didn’t mind the sofa? My spare room is full of all the things I needed when I moved in and then discovered I didn’t need at all. And that piano. Anyone staying over sleeps on the sofa. Really ought to do something about that.’ He sighed.

‘Thank you. I – what on Earth is that?’

‘Smoking jacket. I think Mum said it used to belong to Oscar Wilde. Or No?l Coward. One of those guys anyway. She’s related, well, distantly. Not to both, only to one of them, but I can’t remember which.’ Ivo’s wiry frame was resplendent in a crimson velvet… thing that hung to his knees, knees that jutted out decked in far more prosaic cotton pyjama trousers. ‘I use it as a dressing gown.’

‘Of course you do,’ I said weakly. Outside, the rain blew and the windows rattled. Ivo was quiet for so long that I eventually looked away from my tea. ‘What?’

He shook his head. His hair swept the collar and I wondered how the velvet of the jacket and the velvet of the sofa didn’t bond together in some kind of huge Velcro mass and stop him moving. ‘Do you have issues with the way I live?’ he asked eventually, and, for him, quietly.

I frowned. ‘No. It’s just, all the antiques and lovely old furniture and everything. The way you treat history like it’s utilitarian.’

Ivo stretched his legs out and stroked the scarlet jacket as though it were a pet. ‘What is it for?’ he asked. ‘If not to be useful? You can only put so much stuff in museums. And things like, well, this jacket, the glassware, the books – they were made to be used, not kept in a cupboard somewhere and only looked at.’ Then bird-bright eyes tilted my way, his head angled so he could look at me from under his hair. ‘Or is it because I can afford to replace them?’

After yesterday’s interrogation about my relationship status, this was another of those in-depth questions that I wasn’t used to from Ivo. We’d always taken one another’s lives pretty much for granted. He didn’t comment on the smallness of my cottage or my limited wardrobe and I didn’t goggle at the fact he had fresh flowers in vases on every antique surface and used crockery older than my house. Anyway, now I knew the flowers were probably down to parental influence and the incredible ‘Danusha’, which took some of the shine off.

My answer should have been: ‘No, Ivo. It’s nothing to do with your lifestyle. It’s because I like you so terribly, so horribly, and I fear that you may be as careless with your relationships as you are with your things; that nothing is precious or worth caring for because it’s all so disposable and easily replaced. I couldn’t bear to be that disposable thing that’s nice to have in your life for a while and then discarded.’ That’s how I felt and what I thought. But we didn’t have that kind of relationship, and he would have laughed at my reasoning, brushed it away with a casual keep-nothing-for-best attitude and I would find myself spiralling down into love with this beautiful, random man.

Right now, it was only distance that kept me safe.

‘It just annoys me,’ I said. ‘To see such valuable things being treated as though they came from IKEA. I know what you’re like.’

Then I hunched my knees up to give him more sofa room and we ate toast and drank tea while the wind curled its way up the outside of the gatehouse like ivy, and tapped stems against the windows. The breeze howled down the track and boomed against the underside of the archway as though a thousand ghostly carriages were hurtling their way to the house, but in here it was domestic and comfortable and addictive.

‘Right,’ I said, drinking down the last of my tea and happily appreciating the fact that I’d been able to taste the toast. ‘Shall we head to the university then? To get our Fred tested?’

Ivo didn’t, as I’d expected, leap to his feet. He sat thoughtfully, chewing a sourdough crust and staring at a point in the middle of the room.

‘Ivo?’ I prompted.

He shook his head for a second. I didn’t know whether he was dismissing me or his thoughts, but then a beaming smile lit his face and he grinned at me. ‘Of course. Um, Cress…’

‘What?’ I asked cautiously, in case he was going to follow this up with something dreadful. With Ivo, you could never be quite certain of his conversational twists and turns.

‘If Fred – well, if he turns out to be from somewhere else, not around here I mean, somewhere geographically, would you want to take him back? And, if so, will you let me come with you?’

There was a small crease between his eyes, I noticed. The sort of crease normally seen in people who habitually wear glasses but have forgotten them; the kind of crease caused by squinting or frowning really hard. Ivo was worried. And Ivo was almost never worried, not on a micro scale. He worried on a planetary basis – about global warming, bee deaths, pollution of the seas and single-use plastics, but seeing him worried about something as small as a squirrel was certainly a first.

‘Of course I’ll take him back,’ I said. ‘Someone must be missing him if he’s been hand-reared. I suppose our Mr Williams could have been the one who reared him, but in any case there must be somewhere to take him back to, because he most certainly didn’t bring Fred up in his trouser pocket.’

‘And you’ll let me come?’

I sighed. ‘Yes, Ivo, if it’s that important to you. Why do you want to come anyway? A sudden urge to check out squirrel breeding programmes?’

Ivo jumped up, toast crumbs spraying across the rug. ‘Excellent! No, really brilliant, Cress. Fabulous. Road trip.’

‘He might turn out to have come from somewhere twenty miles down the road. Not much of a trip, more of a bus ride.’

‘I just feel…’ Ivo rubbed his hands up and down his jacketed arms and I winced for the aged velvet, hoping he didn’t still have butter or jam on his fingers. ‘Fred is central to all this.’

‘What’s “all this”?’ The duvet fell away as I stood up and revealed my nightshirt covered in a tiny puppy print. ‘We don’t even know if there’s anything dodgy going on.’

He didn’t answer. ‘Do you want a shower? You can use my bathroom, upstairs on the right. There are towels and… stuff.’

‘Soap, Ivo. It’s not an exotic concept.’

But he didn’t answer this either, just waved a hand at the hallway, from which the stairs wound their Georgian way up to the first floor, and curiosity got the better of me. I didn’t really need a shower but I did want a look at the rest of Ivo’s house and this was a great excuse. All my previous visits had been hasty, just-passing-through ones, never giving me enough time to do more than use the loo, let alone to examine the architecture.

A window on the landing arched like a quizzical eyebrow letting in some rainy grey light down the left-hand stairway and giving a view of the stables, and also illuminating a mural painted along the landing wall. There were cherubs and pots and it looked like a picture of an orangery in a nudist colony. Very Restoration, with topless women hanging out of windows and saucy men gazing up at them from behind the topiary. Why Ivo’s family couldn’t just have wallpaper like us plebs I had no idea.

On the right-hand side was the mirror-image arched window, allowing in a greenish light, filtered through ivy growth, because the place was hot on symmetry but not so good on actually letting in daylight. The rooms on that side of the gatehouse were really only used when Ivo threw a party, the study, which contained the piano too large for the space and a tiled-and-panelled utility-cum-boot room. From comments made by many of our university friends, up for the shooting and general Yorkshire summers, it wasn’t that unusual to only live in half your house. If I only lived in half of mine, I wouldn’t have been able to lie down or cook dinner.

I locked myself in the exotically decorated bathroom filled with wall paintings of foliage and nymphs and indulged in the rainforest downpour from the walk-in shower. It was wonderful and I felt far more human when I came out, back in my work uniform again, as though the wildlife rescue jumper gave me legitimacy. If anyone asked what I was doing with a red squirrel, I could at least point to the badge on my chest and not feel as though I were committing some dreadful wildlife crime. Little puffs of Ivo’s really expensive shower gel filtered through the scratchy wool of my top; I hadn’t stinted myself in there.

His bedroom was at the top of the opposite flight of stairs. It would have been very bad form to have peered in through the door to check it out, so I only looked sideways at the bits visible from the landing. A huge and rumpled bed, a large window seat cushioned in the ever-present velvet and bearing a book that lay crumpled-paged, face down with its spine bent like an accident victim, blazing its title in lurid purple print and an almost unreadable font, into the air.

The book was Committing the Perfect Crime.

Despite the heat of my recent shower, my body went cold under my thick work jumper. Not a physical cold, but a creeping internal chill that pulled at my spine and made the hair on my neck prickle. I had to lean against the doorframe for a moment to take the weight off my legs while my brain processed.

No. Not Ivo. Never Ivo.

I thought of the speed with which he’d been at the scene and his glee at having something to ‘investigate’. It would be just like Ivo to have read something, somewhere that set him off. While I didn’t think… no, I really didn’t think that Ivo had anything to do with the man’s death; his bedtime reading could simply have encouraged him to build a mystery out of circumstance and unconnected events.

Ivo would never hurt anyone. Then a little voice, deep down inside my head, whispered, He’d be certain he’d get away with it. He’s clever and his mother is a high-court judge. Maybe he’d put his faith in the family to sweep any case against him away?

But what crime had actually even been committed? Unless Ivo had scared our Mr Williams into falling over and cracking his head, and he’d planted the squirrel in his pocket… I shook my head. The ferocious temperature I’d been running alongside this cold was giving me stupid, feverish ideas.

Slowly, slowly, I made my way down the impressive staircase with my joints almost creaking, to find Ivo bouncing around in the living room, fully dressed. He didn’t look guilty. In fact, he seemed only too keen to get to York and get Fred tested, and that would only get us closer to finding out what really had happened up on that moor in the middle of the night. If he really were guilty, surely he’d be trying to put it off, throw me off the scent?

Not Ivo. Not my Ivo.

Unless… I watched him looping around the room, supposedly tidying up but actually causing more chaos – unless he suspected how I felt? Did Ivo know that I was halfway in love with him? Did he think I would cover for him, keep secrets, blur lines? Was that how he saw me?

Oh, for goodness’ sake! This was getting beyond cold-medicine hallucinations and into actual brain-fever territory now. Ivo could be odd, yes. But I liked his cheerful random branch of weirdness. It made him fun. Made him unpredictable, a whirlwind of ideas, activity and quotations. Made him adorably Ivo, a continent away from my stolid, unimaginative workmates. Although, they were steady, reliable, always turned up when they said they would and didn’t feel the need to go and look up a Tennyson poem in the middle of pulling electric fence off a fox, so there was that.

I didn’t really think Ivo was involved in anything nefarious. It just wasn’t the sort of thing he would do.

But he did sometimes get ideas. That book… it might have given him a nudge. A hint of ‘would it be so bad if…?’ that he couldn’t resist following through to the end?

Behind me, Ivo dropped a cushion that he’d been half-heartedly rearranging. It caught the side of a vase, which tipped, and water and flowers cascaded over the floor in a mirror image of what was happening in the weather outside. ‘Oh, bugger,’ said Ivo, mildly, watching the water drip from the edge of the table into the puddle, and beginning to pick up the flowers.

‘I’ll get a cloth,’ I said. ‘Mop the water up first, before it does any damage, then worry about the flowers.’

He gave me a rueful grin and I went off into the kitchen to search out a cloth, feeling my shoulders drop a little. Nobody that disorganised could be part of a crime, however persuasive his bedtime reading might be.

I was rooting about under the sink when the thought struck me, that Ivo might have got me to help him investigate as an alibi, and I didn’t dare let myself wonder whether, if it came to it, I would lie for him.

I mopped up the water while Ivo fiddled about, picking up the vase, putting it down to gather the dropped stems, then trying to pick it up again with his arms full of wet foliage, which tipped it over and more water dribbled onto the carpet. I took the vase, mopped again, and stood the vase upright, somewhere out of Ivo’s random flailing reach.

‘So.’ He took the soggy cloth from me and threw it into the sink, scraped the dropped flowers off his shirt and flung them in on top. ‘How are we doing this? Do you need me to get our Fred in a headlock so you can pluck him? Won’t it hurt?’ Then, with a slightly worried frown, he added, ‘And will he bite?’

I thought of the book, crumpled and careless on the window seat by Ivo’s bed. ‘I think it’s best if we take him to the lab to get the hair,’ I said. My mind was running ahead of me now. If we took Fred into the university lab, they’d know about him. More people would have seen him. Just in case Ivo had been up to something, my brain was whispering, the more people who knew I was with him and we had the squirrel, the better. ‘If we take the hair sample there, there’s less chance of cocking up and contaminating or losing it.’

‘Good idea.’

That reassured me. Ivo didn’t want to keep the squirrel a secret. I watched him pulling on his boots, which looked as though they’d come from an army surplus store. He sat on the bench in the small porch, where riding crops stood in an old umbrella stand. Everything was spun with cobwebs, and an ancient, tatty side-saddle shed its stuffing on the floor. ‘Do you use any of this?’ I asked.

Ivo glanced up and suddenly seemed to notice all the equestrianism around him. ‘No, not really. I should clear it all out, shouldn’t I? Make a bit more room?’

‘Not if you don’t want to.’

But he’d started collecting armfuls of whips from the stand. Dust billowed; they didn’t seem to have been touched for years, and Ivo’s loose jacket was decorated with strands of horse hair whose owners had probably been contemporaneous with Marengo. Then he stood, uncertain.

‘We need to get to York, Ivo.’ I took a wobbling schooling whip from the pile under his arm. ‘These can wait.’

He turned in a circle, the crops scraping the wall. ‘But you’re right. It should all go, there would be more room. We could put a little table there instead.’ He pointed, and half the whips fell to the floor, like spillikins.

‘It needs a coat of paint and a good dusting.’ I looked up. Probably ancient beams were festooned with cobwebs, into which straw and hay was woven like some huge pagan symbol. ‘But anyway. York.’

‘Yes!’ He dropped the bundle still under his arm onto the bench. More dust issued into the air and the little porch was now full of it. Ivo didn’t seem to care, but that was Ivo all over. Impetuous and careless. My heart gave an uncomfortable thump under the sturdy wool of my work jumper. ‘Let’s take Fred on his day out to the big city.’

‘I’ll put him in my carry cage. We can’t lug the big one around the labs.’

Ivo shrugged. I had to admit that I was watching him more closely now. Looking for signs of guilt? Or just admiring the way he was dressed in the close-fitting sandy trousers and the shirt with lace foaming around the neck in a way that would have made Byron take notes, and, possibly, a couple of line drawings?

‘What?’ Ivo caught me looking at him. I must have had a thoughtful expression on my face, rather than this just being the way my eyes were pointing, because he looked almost smug.

‘Wondering about your costume choices. You’ve always been about the velvet and the suede and everything, haven’t you? Even back at university you wore clothes that looked as though you wanted to be stroked.’

His smugness increased a notch and he grinned. ‘I get dressed in the dark a lot,’ he said. ‘It helps.’

I smiled and shook my head. Nobody this winsome could be guilty of anything more than, maybe, dodging a parking fine. Surely.

We drove to York through a random scatter of showers. Most of the other traffic was optimistically heading in the direction of the coast, and the open stretches of road seemed slightly unnatural at this time of year. The minster stood on its bubble of hill, highlighted by the sun, which picked it out like a spotlight on a superstar, and the river ran alongside the road, a silver artery following our progress as we circumvented the city.

We turned off the main road and approached the university, all modern and ergonomic amid the history. The buildings looked oddly misplaced, as though someone had beamed a modernist architectural sample book into Rome and then put a pond in to blur the join. At least there was plenty of parking and we found ourselves a spot outside the university labs. I carried Fred in his cage up the stairs, following the directions that Danny had texted me, and with Ivo trailing me anxiously.

‘It won’t hurt him, will it?’ He caught me up on a landing and peered in at Fred, who cocked his head and peered back.

‘No. Just a pulled bit of fur. Like getting his tail caught on a twig or something.’

‘Oh. Good.’ He ran a couple of steps ahead and then stopped to turn back. ‘You’re sure? It’s not like that time at the vet when my dad told me they were only going to give poor Tosca an X-ray and she came back three days later looking like Dr Frankenstein had had a go at her?’

‘No! Why would I lie to you?’ I wondered who or what Tosca had been.

‘Dunno. Why did Dad lie?’

‘Maybe he genuinely thought she only needed an X-ray. Perhaps it came as much of a shock to him.’

Ivo stopped dead, hand on the stair rail, feet arrested in action, so he looked like a freeze-frame. ‘I never thought of that. Look. Floor four. This is us, isn’t it?’

Danny’s ‘mate in the labs’ turned out to be Ginny, a pretty girl with purple hair, who’d been briefed on our request and who turned out to be a dab hand at squirrel wrestling. We extracted the required hair, complete with root bulb, to Fred’s distinct chagrin, while Ivo bounced about keeping up a running commentary.

‘Is he always like this?’ Ginny asked me quietly, tipping her head in Ivo’s direction while she secured the hair sample in a tube with a stopper and wrote my name on it.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Wow. He makes the squirrel look restful.’ She looked in at Fred again. He was grooming his tail and peered out from beneath it at us with one narrowed eye, keeping his paws on his fur. I hoped he didn’t think I was going to make a habit of extracting it. ‘Cute, though.’

I wasn’t sure if she meant Fred or Ivo and didn’t want to commit either way, so I just grunted and moved the cage from the desktop where it had been resting while we’d accosted the squirrel.

‘How long before you know anything?’ Ivo bounced happily alongside us. Fred side-eyed him, but as Ivo hadn’t been part of the tail-pulling horror, he was clearly excused suspicion. The squirrel flung himself at the mesh and flashed his white-streaked underparts, in case there were treats.

‘Tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon.’ Ginny turned the tube holding the gathered hairs. ‘Luckily, this comes under my PhD, so I’ll get a go on the machines next time round. I’ll just need to extract his DNA and cross match against the profiles, which should tell us where he’s from.’

She squeaked between her lips, which brought Fred back to the bars again, and Ivo cocked his head. ‘He’s very responsive.’

I was going to choose to assume she meant the squirrel. ‘I think he was hand-reared,’ I said. ‘Someone will be missing him.’

The now-reappeared sun slanted through the blinds that were drawn in a pathetic attempt to shade the lab from its onslaught, and fell in hot shreds around the room. Fred gleamed liked burned ginger where its rays hit his fur and his eye reflected us in a saucer-shaped alternate universe. Ginny squeaked again and tufted ears wriggled, triangulating the sound.

‘It’s very quiet.’ Ivo leaned against a desk. ‘No students?’

‘Not many.’ Ginny jerked her attention back to the other centre of attraction. ‘They’ve all left. We’ve just got summer schools and some of us beleaguered post grads, which is why I’ve got time for your squirrel.’ She tilted her head, but he didn’t pick up the hint. ‘Lots of spare time,’ she threw in. ‘I’m sometimes quite bored, really.’

‘Uh huh.’ He slouched off back around the small lab, looking at wall posters of flower parts and fiddling with a pile of microscopes on a table.

I smiled. Ginny slumped with disappointment, and we left her to carry out her tests, the squirrel cage tucked under my arm with Fred pinging around the bars again.

‘She was angling for you to ask her out, you know,’ I said, as we reached floor three, our footsteps echoing up the empty staircase, accompanied by the metallic sounds of our caged friend.

‘Was she?’ Ivo looked stunned. He draped himself over the rail, bending backwards so he could look up the narrow stairwell, back where we’d come from. ‘Seriously?’

‘Oh, come on,’ I said, exasperated. ‘You’ve had girlfriends, Ivo, I know you have! So this ingénue, “what, little ol’ me?” act must work on some people.’

We clattered down the remaining stairs and out of the main doors into the steel-bright sunlight. Fred tucked himself away at the back of the cage.

‘I don’t…’ Ivo started, then shook his head briefly and stared out over the water that made this part of the university look like a nature reserve. ‘I don’t always pick up on things like that. It’s not an act, Cress.’

His voice was quiet, almost serious now, which, from Ivo, was always surprising. It made me – what, nervous? I busied myself with tucking the cage into the back of Ivo’s car and not looking at him. There were shades of things in his tone, things unsaid, things he wanted to say but needed the right time for, and, if any of those things were going to be an admission of inclusion in the crime that had brought us here – well, I didn’t know how I would feel about that.

I turned my face towards him, closing the boot carefully so as not to alarm Fred. ‘Hopefully Ginny should have a result in the next day or so.’

It was a pointless sentence, just a rehash of what she had said herself only a few minutes before, but it broke his mood and stopped the look that had crossed his face.

‘Yeah, then we can get Fred where he belongs and find out a bit more about what our Mr Williams was doing up on that moor!’

‘We may never know that, though.’ I leaned against the door while Ivo fiddled about, getting in. ‘If it really was just a bloke taking his pet for a night walk and hitting his head on a rock in the dark.’ And, I thought quietly, you’re using his name like you know him – where is this driving licence that the police could have used to identify him? Was all that going around the BBs just a ruse to throw me off the scent? Did you already know who he was?

I watched Ivo carefully. Surely, if there was anything he needed to tell me, any involvement he had in any of this, now was the time?

‘I know.’ His thoughtful expression didn’t change. He sighed. ‘I know, Cress. I can’t help hoping though, that this will be the big one. The story that I can follow through on, that leaves everyone talking.’

‘The case that makes your career? Does that still happen, given social media and online news pages and all that?’

I had to avert my eyes now and stare at the bonnet of the car, where the heat was making the air shimmer in a haze of unreality. This whole thing felt unreal. Yesterday I’d been lying in my sick bed with no worries apart from running out of tissues – come to think of it, the cold was a lot better today, maybe the nettle tea had helped – and today, here I was wondering what the hell was really going on. I worked in a wildlife rescue centre, for goodness’ sake, not Agatha Christie Land.

Whatever depression had made Ivo look cast-down and thoughtful had clearly passed, because he gave me a big grin and bounced on his toes for a moment. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Worth a shot though, isn’t it?’

‘Look, poor Fred’s frying in there.’ I pointed at the back of the car. ‘Let’s go home and wait for Ginny to get us the results. Then we can return Fred to his people, that’s the really important thing, and – well, you can take it from there, can’t you?’

Ivo opened the car windows, but didn’t start the engine. The thoughtfulness was back. ‘Shall I cook dinner tonight, then?’ he asked, as though we’d been discussing food for the previous ten minutes. ‘I can check in the freezer, there’s probably some duck or something.’

The conversational ground had shifted so fast that, even knowing Ivo as I did, I found it hard to rebalance myself. ‘Er,’ I said, adjusting from thinking about the future of Fred to thinking about meals. ‘That sounds nice, thank you.’

‘Well, you are staying. I only really cook when I have guests.’ He started the car and we circumnavigated the geese, who were wandering across the tarmac, with caution.

‘Do your parents fly in food parcels the rest of the time?’ I sounded a little more acerbic than I’d meant to, and saw Ivo flick me a look.

‘I eat a lot of sandwiches,’ he said, almost apologetic. ‘Cooking for one, well, seems a bit of a waste of time. D’you find that? Or do you cook for your housemates as well?’

‘No, I… look, can we go back a couple of conversational steps, please, Ivo? Fred. We return him, and then what are you going to do?’

‘Ask questions. Mr Williams either took Fred with or without permission, and either of those possibilities will mean something. And if Fred was actually his, which, given his pocket location is a distinct probability, then maybe someone can tell us what on Earth he was doing in Yorkshire.’ Ivo negotiated the roundabout and we slid down onto the bypass in a haze of conversational acceleration.

‘What if it turns out that Mr Williams was a hermit, with no friends, no colleagues, who bred red squirrels in his shed in his spare time, what then? What if there’s no one to ask?’

‘You said you have to be licensed to keep them? The squirrels?’

‘Yes, but he might not have had a licence. It’s possible Mr Williams got hold of one some other way, for some reason. Red squirrels are hardly up there with Golden Retrievers as suitable pets.’

There was a pause. I didn’t want to see disappointment on Ivo’s face so I kept my eyes averted, looking out of the window at the clouding landscape, where another savage band of rain was heading in to sweep holidaymakers into town from the beaches. He seemed so set on this being a mystery that would be easy to solve, like a TV programme. All the clues, neatly laid out for us to track back to the point of origin, where a moustache-twirling bad guy would tell us all his plans just before the fortuitously called police swept in to arrest them and tell us how great we were. Perhaps that was what his bedtime reading had prompted him to think – that life had a narrative. He didn’t seem to have considered the general messiness of life, or the random behaviour of humans.

I just wanted to get Fred home.

A thought struck me. ‘Oh God. What if he really was an illegal squirrel breeder, working on his own out of his garden shed? What if there’s a whole shed full of squirrels somewhere, and he’s dead and nobody is looking after them?’

‘Is that likely? Someone would have to know, surely? An entire shed of squeak and rattle, the neighbours are going to wonder.’ Ivo put his foot down and the car overtook a Kia full of disappointed shrimping nets, sending road spray over the windows.

‘It’s illegal. He’s hardly going to ask people round to admire his pets, is he?’ I had horrible visions of a bunch of red squirrels, unfed and unwatered in the heat of a smelly locked shed and it made me fidget in my seat, and gave me a burning feeling of urgency deep in my chest.

‘So we have to identify Fred’s place of origin and get there before they realise that nobody is around to feed them?’ He gave me a quick, almost amused, look. ‘Good. I’m glad you’re fully on board, even if it does mean you’re going to be worrying about the poor fluffy creatures.’

I stared out again at the acres of hillside, fields of ripening barley bending soggily under the weight of the rain. ‘Yes. But then, he must have had other people who knew what he was up to. What would he tell everyone he was doing in his shed for hours? And if he’s been supplying squirrels to other people – I mean, who?’ I shook my head. ‘None of this makes any sense at all, to be honest, Ivo.’

‘Probably not.’ Ivo overtook another car. The Volvo buzzed along, windows dappled with raindrops and, in any other circumstances, I would have enjoyed the journey, having Ivo to myself in the cosy confines of the car. ‘But there’s just something,’ he said. ‘I can feel it. Even if we bring in a ring of illegal squirrel breeders, hey, that would be a result, wouldn’t it?’

I couldn’t think of a reply that wouldn’t puncture his Scooby-Doo-esquegood nature. Nor did I really want to. Although I didn’t, for one second, believe that a dead man with a squirrel was the ringleader of an international racket of any kind, I couldn’t bring myself to wipe that expression of anticipatory glee from Ivo’s face.

He was happy. He was investigating, which, he seemed to believe, was his job. There were many, many faults in this line of thinking, which I could have pointed out. But to utter any of them would be to take the shine off Ivo’s day; it would remove his focus and leave him flapping around, adrenaline-fuelled but no longer with any point. And I really didn’t want to do that. Okay, I may have to inconvenience myself for a few days, following him about so we could track ‘clues’, but this investigation would run its course and peter to an end of shrugging and, perhaps, a shed full of illegal squirrels. Ivo would count anything a result, and all I had to do was hang onto him to make sure he didn’t enthuse himself to death or get so carried away that he’d be arrested for interfering with a police investigation.

Yes. That was why I was here, sitting in the front of the Volvo, with Fred scraping the bars of his cage behind me like a prisoner intent on attention, watching the grey band of rain sweeping across from the hills to envelope the vale in squally splatters. To keep Ivo out of trouble.

Not at all because I was enjoying, in a somewhat masochistic way, having Ivo to myself.

‘So, yes, duck,’ Ivo said suddenly, as though that conversation hadn’t been roundly supplanted. ‘I do a very good plum sauce, you know. Unless you’d rather get a takeaway?’

Conversational ballet, that’s what it was. There may be many intricate moves, but the dancer always returns to the resting position, and clearly, tonight’s dinner was Ivo’s ‘resting position’ for now.

‘No, duck sounds great. I’ll give you a hand and you can show me how you make your plum sauce.’

There was a moment’s silence. The car began to swish as the rain settled on the road surface.

‘Actually, I feel I may rather have talked up the sauce,’ Ivo said at last. ‘It’s basically jam with a splash of balsamic.’ He flashed me a grin, one eyebrow raised. ‘And there goes my secret recipe. I may have to kill you now.’

‘Don’t.’ The image of the body lying, feet protruding from under the flimsy police cover, was still with me. A glimmer of an image of Ivo standing above it wielding a weapon flickered in the back of my brain for an instant, then degraded and fluttered off with other unworthy thoughts. ‘This week’s already had too much “dead” in it. And anyway, you wouldn’t,’ I said, half to myself.

He was looking at me, I could tell, even though I was still keeping my eyes on the view beyond the windscreen, where rain hissed as though a pantomime villain had just come on stage. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

Did he suspect any of the things that had gone through my mind? I turned to look at him, but he was staring out at the road in front, his expression neutral. A few stray hairs caught wispily in his almost invisible blond stubble and dragged along his cheek. Long eyelashes, very visible at this angle, shaded his eyes. He was almost impossibly beautiful, and almost impossible at everything else.

‘You’re an absolute bugger, Ivo,’ I said, equally softly. ‘Completely impossible.’

‘Yes, yes I am, aren’t I?’ he replied, pushing his hair away from his face with a wrist, and grinning happily. ‘Shockingly dreadful. Don’t know why anyone puts up with me.’ Another quick, sideways look. ‘Don’t know why you put up with me.’

‘Because you’re doing the driving; this is all your idea. And you’ve promised me duck in plum sauce.’

‘Oh yes. Suppose I have. Glad you have designs on my culinary abilities.’ Another cheery grin. ‘Because I haven’t got any others.’

‘Apart from the drawing, the French speaking and the country dancing,’ I said, without thinking.

‘Ah. You remembered that.’

‘Of course I did. You were busily comparing your achievements to Regency ladies, I think, and that somewhat sticks in the memory.’

‘I lied about the country dancing.’

‘I’m sure Jane Austen will get over the disappointment.’ I met his eye and suddenly we were both laughing at the ridiculousness of the conversation. Ivo didn’t do ordinary conversation. I’d never really heard him small-talking his way around a room; he would normally insert a chat-jemmy into any discussions about the weather or house prices by asking if anyone knew the best way to split willow to make hurdles or something equally random. You didn’t chat with Ivo, you embarked on a convoluted word-rollercoaster and you hung on to see how much made sense.

If you got off at the end with your hat still in place, you counted it a success.