One of a Kind

Chapter 6

Back at the gatehouse, I decanted Fred from his travelling cage. He swung his way out and into the larger one, pausing only to hang briefly on the front bars and eyeball me with a stare like a newly uncased conker. His ears twitched so that the tufts of hair that sprouted from the top of each one waggled and he seemed most perplexed.

‘Were you hoping we were taking you home?’ I asked softly to the intense gaze. ‘Sorry. We will, as soon as we find out where you’re from.’

Another moment of reflected light and then the little squirrel bounced away again, flashing his white stomach in the glimmer of sunshine that saw fit to creep through the barred glass of the stable windows. I sighed and went to head back indoors, walking past Ivo’s car parked neatly on its grassy spot alongside the bridleway, when I had a thought.

Ivo had found that hotel receipt up on the path where the man had died. But he wouldn’t have had the time or opportunity to search for anything else. He said that the litter pickers had been there the day before, so, as he’d proved, anything left there was a result of that lone walker coming along in the dead of night. Did I really believe that?

I stopped dead, one hand on the still-warm car bonnet. Yes. I believed Ivo had found the receipt, of course I did. But he hadn’t found the driving licence, which might still be up there, somewhere, hidden amongst bracken and fern. Or in Ivo’s pocket, being kept from the police for his own reasons?

The kitchen window had been thrown open, and from inside I could hear Ivo singing along with the radio and the sounds of cupboards opening and closing as he, presumably, gathered the ingredients for his plum sauce. He seemed happy and relaxed, or as relaxed as Ivo ever was, and his relaxation would have put fully wound elastic bands to shame.

Did I really think Ivo had anything to do with the death of a man on a lonely footpath in the dark?

Then I thought of the path as I knew it. Rarely travelled, except by the horse riders and gamekeepers, and the occasional walker. Maybe that driving licence was still up there? If it was – it would put my mind at rest that this was nothing to do with Ivo, and maybe I could find it. I was, after all, far more used to combing through undergrowth than most people. An injured small creature will burrow itself in to feel safe, and there’s nothing like a fingertip search through vegetation on the hunt for an injured fox cub – all the while waiting to have those very fingertips bitten off by a fear-crazed creature – for teaching you how it’s done.

I tried to keep away the thoughts that Ivo might have already found that licence. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. After all, why would he have kept it, rather than handing it over to the police now we already knew the man’s identity? It was only his utter, unwavering focus on there being something to investigate that made me think otherwise, after all.

Plus, there was that book beside his bed.

‘Ivo?’ I shouted in through the open window. ‘Can I borrow the car for a bit?’

The singing stopped, although the radio continued to play, echoing off the high ceiling so that it appeared Harry Styles was serenading from inside a bucket. ‘The car? Yeah, course you can.’

‘Where are the keys?’

There was a moment of frantic-sounding activity, lots of movement of stuff and the clatter of bowls, then a fistful of keys appeared on the window ledge. ‘Don’t be too long, Cress, I need serious sous-chef-ing in here if I’m not going to go mad and produce sweet-and-sour doorhandles.’

‘I won’t. I’ve just got to… pick up a few bits.’

Ivo’s face appeared behind the keys, hair dishevelled and his frothy collar jutting at odd angles. ‘Have fun.’ He grinned and then bobbed back to whatever he was doing.

I picked up the keys. It was so typical of Ivo not to say ‘be careful with the car’, or anything else that indicated he cared at all about his belongings. He’d always had an open-handed attitude to his things, as though he didn’t care; it was part of the ‘antiques are to be used’ frame of mind. Although I had once seen him upset, when another friend had ‘borrowed’ some books and then lent them on in a chain, which meant Ivo never got to the bottom of who actually had possession, and had to relinquish them to the great unknown. He’d been quietly disappointed, a view of Ivo that had made him even more attractive to me. He hadn’t got angry, he hadn’t gone storming round to the first borrower demanding to know what right they thought they had to lend on things that weren’t theirs. He’d just sat on the edge of his bed, head in hands, staring at the gap on his bookshelf, saying ‘my grandfather gave me those books’ as though he couldn’t comprehend where they had gone.

That was Ivo. Thoughtlessly generous. Impulsive. Hopelessly attractive.

I drove the car up to where I’d parked yesterday, and walked out along the trackway. There were marks of booted feet in the new mud; the police had been back since it had rained, but the little tent was gone and there were no other signs to show that someone had met a sudden end amid the heather and boulders, until I stood right where the body had lain. There the undergrowth was crushed and trampled, but any blood had washed away in the rain showers and the sheer force of nature was returning the place to its innocence.

I lifted my head and looked outwards. The view was wonderful, the sky stretched like a canvas with far hills printed flatly upon it; one way the heaped rise of the Yorkshire Wolds looked green and smooth, the other way, the more wooded Howardian Hills, rugged and determined. Behind me, the woods sloped down to meet the rise of the moors. And in front of all, the blue-grey of the moorland in a foreground of sprouting heather bells and the green upthrusts of bog-myrtle and sedge. The track formed a peaty outline, curving across the moor, with the woods that edged it dropping away down the steep hillside. Nothing to see here, apart from a glorious view. Not something you would come to appreciate in the middle of the night. Even the wildlife would mostly be invisible, apart from a few owls and the odd stoat. Definitely no red squirrels.

I walked a little further down the path, avoiding the muddier spots, where puddles lurked dark and hidden under the roots of the bracken that grew alongside. Far off to my left, away towards where I knew Beverley and Hull lay beyond the swollen rise and fall of hills, clouds massed and a gauze of rain dragged along the edge of the view, coming this way.

I lowered my eyes, looking for that driving licence. Or – well, I didn’t know what. Anything. Anything odd, anything extra. The beaten down nature of the undergrowth did not exactly enthuse me with possibilities; it looked as though the police, despite my reservations, had given the area a pretty thorough check for anything dropped or discarded. There was nothing to see apart from peat that gave up its water-loading in a boot-squelch when stepped on, fingers of rock, a lot of view and even more sky. No small, plastic oblongs bearing a helpful picture, name and date of birth, no carefully typed confessions. Not so much as a bit of blown tissue bowling along over the hoof-marks.

Had Ivo really found that receipt just lying in the mud? And nothing else? It hadn’t, perhaps, been in the ‘bag’ we’d heard about from Mr Thixendale, and surreptitiously removed by Ivo to create a mystery, just for him to solve?

I tucked my hands in my pockets and shrugged my shoulders up against the bustling wind, which came in smelling of the distant sea. Rain was fringing its edges and the far hills were no longer visible behind an approaching shower, so I moved back, off the track and into the shelter of the overhanging trees. Tiny deer paths streaked through the wood, marking where the animals headed through cover and down the hillside, and I took one of these, treading carefully amid the upthrust roots and bramble snares until I was well under the branches of some spindly birches that cuddled up against conifer cover.

The rain had come in earnest now; it whispered and gossiped its way among the leaves down to earth, plashing and spattering onto the track but mostly missing me, huddled under my umbrella of branches. I leaned back against the trunk of a birch, rough with lichen and wind-scoured bark and pushed my hands further into my pockets. The occasional drop hit my head as the wind shoved body-sized gusts between the growth at me, and I moved further back to use the trunk for more cover.

Nothing here but wet. No evidence, no signs that anything had happened here, other than a casual passing of tourists and view-seekers, and I began to realise how stupid I felt. Almost as though I had to find something to give legitimacy to my coming up here in the first place. What on Earth had made me think that Ivo could have had anything to do with what had happened here, apart from his bedtime reading material?

I smacked my hand against the tree, wanting to punish myself for the thoughts. Why did I do this to myself? Why couldn’t I get caught up in the enthusiasm that he had for this case without looking for some hidden darkness? After all, here I was, spending time punishing myself in an enjoyable way with a man I had fallen for practically on the first day of university. He wanted me around. And yet, here was me, being the ‘yes, but…’ girl, when I should let go, enjoy the moment, and stop trying to find ulterior motives in everything.

I knew Ivo. Knew how his flyaway attention span could so easily get caught up in things that were less than savoury and how hard it was for him to extricate himself. Ivo was the kind of person who would take something offered at a party to avoid giving offence and then find himself trying to hide stolen goods in his house while the police battered the door down and big men with dogs and minders climbed out of the upstairs windows.

But, as he said, it had only been the once and he’d got off with a warning. Ivo’s general ineptitude and his ability to dig himself a very big hole armed only with good nature and a desperation to be liked had been visible to the judge. Having an incredibly fortunate background and parents in the public eye had, admittedly, pushed it further into their line of sight, of course.

Water dripped dismally off the overhanging leaves and I gave myself a talking to. I was flailing and I knew it. Caution was practically my middle name, a dislike for not knowing what came next, a desire to have every eventuality mapped out and accounted for. Spontaneity was just a collection of vowels as far as I was concerned – I didn’t understand it. Which put Ivo at the opposite end of the behaviour see-saw to me, and I didn’t understand him either.

I didn’t truly think he was hiding Mr Williams’ driving licence. On the one hand, it just wasn’t Ivo, but on the other hand, what was Ivo? He was my friend, but that was where any certainties ended.

I was trying as hard as I could not to think what I really felt. Just because I really like him doesn’t stop him being a bad guy, it just stops me seeing that he might be. Just because I want him to be more to me than a friend doesn’t mean he wants the same or is doing anything other than using me as cover. I could get really, really hurt and yet, here I am.

The feeling made me colder than the rain, which had percolated down through the trees now and was dropping occasional icy fingers down my collar. To distract myself, I started walking along between the trees, parallel to the trackway, dodging whippy branches and hitting my hand against scabby trunks. Don’t think, act.

I’d walked back to where the body had been found now, and peered out at the site from between the trees. Rain spiralled the surfaces of the puddles. It was getting harder and more persistent, so I huddled back into the woods again, coiling back deeper into cover and catching my foot on something that crunched slightly as I went.

I bent down to see what it was, scrabbling with my fingers until fragments of wire and wood came to light, covered with a blown scatter of last autumn’s leaves, which were scudding around in the wind. It was nothing much, a splintering of plywood and metal; it could have been an old piece of fencing, discarded when the new one was replaced. But there was something about the angle of the wood, the gauzy metal sheet, that was familiar. I stirred my hand through the leaves and came up with more bits, flat panels torn where the screws had given way, metal catches flapping uselessly with nothing to attach to.

I knew what this was. We used them ourselves at the wildlife unit, for transporting sick or injured animals to the vet or from the place they were captured to our holding pens. I had one right now, back in the stable entranceway. It was a small-animal transport cage. Smashed and ruined, but, presumably, how Fred had been moved from place to place. Mr Williams could have had him in this in the BB and nobody would have known. If he’d thrown his jacket over the box it would have looked like a bag or any other luggage; all the sides were solid wood with only the front having a tight metal panel, and even that had the mesh so closely woven that first sight wouldn’t have shown a squirrel.

This was a clue! Suddenly as overjoyed as though I’d solved an entire murder mystery, I scrabbled about until I had collected as many of the pieces of cage as I could find. The top, with its handle, was intact but the rest was smashed and broken. All the bits were mostly in the same place, with a few pieces swept against tree trunks or concealed by leaves, and I cuddled the splintered wood and loose hinges to me under my jacket against the rain, then headed back to the car.

If this really was something to do with why Fred was here, then Ivo couldn’t have had anything to do with it. The thought made my heart lift. Because if he had, he would have removed this. My hands shook slightly on the steering wheel and I had a moment of knowing what Ivo had meant when he said he just knew things were important. Somehow I just knew this cage was important, it meant that Fred hadn’t been trouser-transported around the place, and that meant he’d been brought here on purpose. It meant that Mr Thixendale had mistaken it for a bag – its size and narrow dimensions could have been mistaken for a small satchel, particularly if it were covered. Which meant no bag that Ivo could have furtively searched.

My hands were still shaking. Ivo couldn’t have anything to do with this. For the first time in two days, my breath came more easily, and it wasn’t because the cold was finally leaving my respiratory system, it was a weight lifting from my chest and heart.

That cage was broken and casually slung into the woods. The litter pickers would have found it if it had been there all along, nobody would leave a scatter of metal just off the path, where animals could be injured by it. I found it, so it all made it more likely that Ivo had found the receipt, on this otherwise immaculately litter-free bridleway. He may even have seen the cage, but mistaken it, as I had at first, for bits of fencing. Only because I’d known what I was looking at had I picked it up. The weight lifted further, freed my neck and then my head, and I found I was sitting up straighter, breathing more deeply and handling the car like a Formula 1 ace along the narrow lanes back to the gatehouse.

Not Ivo. He was just caught up in this, the same as I was.

I pulled the car into its usual space and got out, clutching the wooden splinters and protruding screws to my chest, ignoring the scratches and snags in the same way as I would ignore the nips and claws of a small animal. Ivo was still in the kitchen; I’d not been gone as long as I thought. All that skulking about in the woods and second-guessing Ivo had made time slow down uncomfortably, but here in the real world it was still music and cooking smells and an unreasonable amount of blue smoke.

‘Is something meant to be burning?’ I asked, coming through the door into the living room, where Ivo was piling old newspapers up on the floor.

‘Burning?’ He looked up at me and I felt that flash in my heart for a second. I was halfway in love with this man. ‘Oh, shit!’

He abandoned the newspaper pile, which promptly toppled, and ran into the kitchen, where he swore in a continuous stream of consciousness while, from the sound of it, running water into a pan that had become far too hot and was spitting and letting steam join the smoke.

An alarm went off in the porch, and Ivo ran through, grabbed a newspaper and began flapping it in the direction of the shrill noise, while water ran in the kitchen and splattered from the sink onto the floor.

I couldn’t help but grin and continue clasping the bolts and splinters. Ivo was back to being my lanky, blond-haired friend. That shadow of suspicion had faded, although it was rapidly being replaced by a degree of unexpected annoyance at his inability to concentrate on cooking to the extent of burning a pan.

‘What happened?’ I asked, when he finally stopped flapping, sorted out the spilled water, and came to sit down, ignoring the re-scattered papers on the carpet.

‘I was heating the sauce, then I thought about what you said about clearing out the porch, so I moved some of these papers out from the bench. Then I started reading as I was tidying and’ – he spread his hands in apology – ‘I forgot the sauce.’

‘Is it ruined?’

‘I can make more. Why on Earth are you sitting as though you’re expecting your appendix to burst?’

I frowned, then realised that I was leaning over my knees, still embracing the tatty pile of screws and broken wood. ‘I found this. Up in the wood near where the body was, just off the track.’

His eyes flickered from my lumpy bundle to my face, and then back again. He didn’t speak.

‘It’s an animal transport cage, one of the small ones. It means that Fred was carried up there, then something happened, I don’t know, maybe our man dropped the cage and it broke and Fred got out and he had to get him back again and he slipped and fell?’ I rattled to the end of my conclusions. Ivo was still looking at me. His continued stillness made me nervous. Wasn’t I meant to find this? All the doubts came flooding back and I felt them settle on the back of my neck.

‘You went up there just now?’ His voice was toneless. Very level. ‘Without saying?’

Oh God, was he about to confess something? ‘I was just… wondering,’ I said, slightly pathetically. ‘If there was anything that might have been… missed.’

‘But we could have gone together.’ He sounded flat. ‘Scoped the place out and looked for things. You didn’t tell me you thought there might be something else.’

‘I didn’t know.’ A sharp edge dug into my stomach. I wriggled and a screw fell to the floor, its silver brightness shining like a fallen sun amid the newsprint and dust. ‘I only went on the off chance. Looking for stuff.’

Ivo’s gaze fell away from my face and he sat on the floor by the newspaper pile. ‘But without me.’ His eyes seemed to move over ancient headlines. ‘You didn’t tell me where you were going, and you went for another look – without me.’ His mouth twisted. ‘You thought this case might be something to do with me?’ He reached out and began folding the edge of the nearest paper, pleating it into a fan of print. ‘You don’t trust me and so you went up there without saying in case there was something incriminating.’

A flat statement. And honestly, nothing I could deny, so I sat, silent, with several of the sharper pieces of wood digging into my ribs. My heart was digging into them from the inside too, seeing the closed-off expression on his face.

He bent forwards, rubbing his hands over his face. ‘Oh, Cressida,’ was all he said, as his cheeks moved and reshaped under his fingers. ‘Were you going to destroy it, or confront me with it?’

I still didn’t speak.

Ivo took a deep breath and held out a hand. ‘Can I see?’ he asked, his voice still strange, even and lacking his usual exuberance. ‘The cage?’

I unbundled my front and let the random collection fall to the floor in a shower of pieces. ‘That’s all I could find.’ My voice didn’t sound normal either. It was much smaller than usual, which wasn’t surprising because I’d had to force the words out down a throat that felt as though I’d swallowed a mousetrap. ‘I was really looking for the driving licence.’

Ivo looked down at the ramshackle bits and pieces. I saw his eyes flicker, taking in the catch, the screws, the bolts and the smashed wood, but he didn’t really seem to be processing any of it. It was almost as though he was using the time to think of something to say. My heart began to beat faster, until I could feel it in my ears.

Please don’t have anything to do with this. Please.

Eventually, and still looking at the floor, he spoke. ‘Cress, do you trust me?’

I had no idea what to say to that. Part of me wanted to scream, ‘I’d trust you to the end of the Earth, you mad, unpredictable fool!’ but that would make me sound like the female lead in a 1950s film. Another part of me wanted to say, ‘I like you a lot, but your behaviour is sometimes that of a person whose moral compass seems to have been assembled in a magnet factory.’ But the hurt in his voice meant I had to say something.

‘You were so sure there was something going on,’ I said in a tiny voice, keeping my eyes on him. ‘The driving licence that nobody has found, where is it? And you’re sometimes just so…’ I whirled one hand in a wordless indication. ‘There’s that book I saw beside your bed, about committing the perfect crime. You could be mixed up in all sorts. I wouldn’t know.’

He stood up suddenly and walked over to the window. The rose knocked to come in again as another violent squall blew through. The windows boomed and rattled in the rapid gale and, for a moment, they were the only noise in here, apart from my heartbeat, which was trying to drown out the wind.

‘You thought I’d searched the body and taken the driving licence, what, and the receipt?’

My silence must have indicated that this was precisely what I had thought.

‘And you went up there to try to find it, so that I would be exonerated? Or to prove something to yourself?’ Ivo sighed. ‘Oh, Cressida. Do you really think I’d involve you if I were caught up in something shady?’ Ivo asked at last. ‘I mean, seriously?’

I didn’t say anything again. It was beginning to dawn on me that, if Ivo really had got himself involved in anything illegal, then the last thing he’d want to do would be to bring someone else in. He could have pretended to investigate by himself and he wouldn’t have had any inconvenient questions to answer, or someone berating him for burning the plum sauce. He could have sat in here, in his gentleman’s smoking club of a living room, in his Dorian Grey outfits, and nobody would be any the wiser.

‘I had to know,’ I said finally, when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to speak again until I did. ‘You’re odd, Ivo. You say it yourself. You could have anything going on in your head and I’m not sure that even a professional mind-reader could have any idea what it was.’

He turned around. The light of the window behind him made it difficult to judge his expression because most of him was in shadow, with the rose banging frantically just behind his left shoulder as though the ghost of Gertrude Jekyll wanted a word.‘I don’t have the driving licence, and I never touched the body. The book is a novel,’ he said. ‘It’s rubbish, by the way. And I have ADHD. I thought you knew.’

‘I thought that was for kids,’ I said, feeling my brain expanding with the possibilities.

‘You don’t get better.’ Ivo still sounded strange. ‘I was diagnosed at eight, spent most of my adolescence medicated. Now I dip in and out of the tablets, depending on whether I need to be – normal, for want of a better word. I thought with you…’ He stopped again.

ADHD. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Of course. Of course. My mind felt like a giant Jenga as the thoughts, memories and probabilities slotted in. The randomness, the scattered behaviour. The occasional intensity. I should have seen it before – only I’d been too busy putting it down to drugs and a highly indulged upbringing. Those tablets I’d seen him take, the ones we’d never spoken about – not something illegal, to keep him awake or to sharpen his wits, but actual medication. Of course. The relief was so total it almost felt solid.

‘Oh, Ivo,’ I said, and I stood up now too. ‘I am so sorry.’

‘It’s not something to be sorry about. It’s just a thing about me. Like having blue eyes and a patch under my nose where I just can’t grow a moustache.’ He was still speaking as though he were disappointed in the world. ‘I thought, with you, I didn’t need to pretend.’ He carried on talking, his face still shadowed by the outdoors. ‘I thought you didn’t care about the… about my eccentricities, shall we say? I really thought you liked me as I am.’

‘I do.’ I took a step towards him. ‘I really, really do.’ Oh no. No, Cressida, stop now before you… ‘I liked you from the first time I saw you, pulling that stupid suitcase on wheels into our student flat, doing your Sebastian Flyte thing with that rubber duck of yours.’

Ivo coughed. ‘You remember Donny the Duck? Wow.’

‘Of course I do. I remember just about everything you’ve ever done, every expression that’s ever crossed your stupid face, every daft comment and every weird outfit.’ Too late now to start pulling punches. Everything was coming out and I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. ‘And I kept hoping you’d ask me out or want to hang out with me as more than part of the group, but you always went out with girls who were seven feet tall and looked like they should be on the cover of Vogue, and whose parents had the chalet in Switzerland next to where you skied.’ I took a deep breath and tried to regain some composure. ‘Or something like that.’

Too much, Cressida. But at least I managed to keep it all in the past tense, when every atom has been screaming to get into the present. This doesn’t make me so vulnerable; there’s nothing to fear in the past tense.

‘But they were only…’ He shook his head and the collar of today’s absurd shirt flopped. ‘No. No they weren’t. And you could have asked me out, you know. Twenty-first-century, female-centric society, finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist and all that. Ah, well. We missed our chance there, didn’t we? Those tempus have well and truly fugit. But I’ve been wondering about that driver’s licence myself – where is it?’

There was a sensation in the middle of my spine, as though I were melting. The slow drip, drip of the loss of the tension that I carried in my shoulders whenever I was with Ivo; the horrible feeling that he might, at any time, explode into song lyrics or start clearing out a drawer while we were supposed to be revising, or helping with something, or that he might shut himself into his flat for a week and only emerge when tempted out with treats, like a rescue dog in a new home. It wasn’t drugs and I hadn’t imagined it. Ivo was just – well, being Ivo. But he was right. We’d missed our chance. Our time had been back then, when we were young and life could be stitched together from casual sex, late-night parties and frantic weekend revision sessions. Now we were grown-ups – no more Donny Duck, no more spontaneous relationships. That was then and this was… safer.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, with a little more emotion. ‘I really never even thought.’

‘Bet you thought it was cocaine. You did, didn’t you? Coke, or some other substance that keeps me on my feet when everyone else is dropping; revising all night then leading a guided tour all day and dancing alone when everyone else has gone?’ He sat, suddenly, in the armchair and a small puff of dust wafted up around him. ‘This is my brain, Cress, and sometimes it just won’t turn off. Of course, other times it won’t fire up and I get over-faced by things that most people wouldn’t even notice, but, hey.’

He looked at me. Tousle-haired, one side of his collar jutting up under his ear, the other side lying like a hound’s tongue across his throat. ‘This is me, Cressida, and I’m tired of pretending. I’m glad you’re my friend. And please notice that those are two separate sentences and I’m not trying to get rid of you.’

There were blue shadows under his eyes, I noticed now. Things about Ivo that I’d carefully not seen because I thought they were symptoms of drug use, like the fact that he didn’t always shave and he often looked – not tired exactly, but as though he had been living on fumes and excitement for days. I’d overlooked these things because of the general beauty of him, but now I looked properly and without the tiny, suspicious lenses of fear, he seemed ragged and tense.

I wanted to hug him. But I didn’t dare. ‘You are impossible, Ivo,’ I said softly. But it meant something different now.

Into all this, my phone rang. Ivo jumped, I swiped at my pocket and knocked the phone to the floor, where it continued to buzz, raising more dust from the rug.

‘Hey!’ It was Ginny. ‘Can I speak to Ivo, please?’

I looked at him, perched on the edge of his own chair with his eyes wide. ‘Maybe better to talk to me,’ I said gently, hoping that this was going to be news about Fred and not an offer of gig tickets. Being the third wheel in a relationship was kind of my default setting, with Lilith and Dix, and Ivo and whoever his latest gorgeous companion was, and I wasn’t about to start it with her as well.

‘Oh, okay. I’ve run Fred’s test.’

‘Wow, that was quick.’

Over on the chair, Ivo perked up. ‘She’s got a result? That’s amazing, those machines must be really efficient.’

I shook my head at him sadly. Ginny had clearly given him priority treatment in an attempt to impress. Poor girl.

‘We brought up all the current results and we got a match straight away, luckily your little guy is from an established colony.’

Established colony. That meant he had been brought in from somewhere else. ‘Whereabouts?’ I asked, trying to beat Ivo away from the phone as he attempted to listen in. I could have put it on loudspeaker, but didn’t want to listen to more chat-up lines while Ginny flirted and Ivo… did whatever Ivo did.

‘Isle of Wight,’ she said, surprising me, because I’d been thinking of somewhere much closer, Cumbria, perhaps, or the Scottish borders. ‘Your lad is genetically from there.’

‘That’s fabulous. Thank you so much.’ My mind was whirling.

‘And Ivo’s not there?’ Ginny’s voice was dropping with disappointment. ‘I wanted to ask him… something.’

Ivo made a ‘ker-ching’ gesture, listening over my shoulder, then shook his head when I looked at him questioningly and my heart rose. We’d both so nearly admitted to something, I didn’t want real life to blow it apart, not just yet.

‘Sorry, no. But thanks again.’ I disconnected the call. ‘We owe that woman a large bottle of something. Or, in your case, a date.’

Ivo raised an eyebrow and straightened his collar. His piercing fell out again. ‘Can’t go on a date,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve got company, it would be rude.’

‘Have you?’

‘Well, kind of. You’re here and I am attempting to feed you my duck in plum sauce, that’s all the distraction I can cope with right now. Besides, she’s got purple hair and that’s a touch too try-hard for me.’

I shrugged. ‘I’m only here because you felt sorry for me and my acres of snot.’

He laughed then and grabbed at my hand, whisked me into a ‘waltzing’ position and cantered the pair of us around the floor. I felt every finger pressed into the small of my back and the cool clutch of his palm against mine as though my body were made of Plasticine. Each touch would remain embossed into my skin forever.

‘I do, and I did, and this is marvellous!’ He half-sang the words. ‘And Fred is from – oh, of course! Fist! Of course!’ He laughed and I began to fear that our recent conversation had turned his brain.

‘Back two steps, Ivo, and I don’t mean dance-wise.’ I was a bit breathless and it came out as panting.

‘Fist! Mr Williams! I bet you a glorious date in a London eatery of your choice that he came from Andover! Andover Fist!’ Another turn around the furniture, as though the tiny living room had turned into the Strictly set.

‘Oh, what? No, that’s dreadful.’

‘I’m not responsible for it, blame our BB man with the sausage smell.’ We whisked to a standstill beneath the window and Ivo bent me over backwards in the traditional ‘final flourish’. ‘He didn’t really look as though he were up to quipping bon mots in Latin, did he? We, my dear Cressida, are off to the Isle of Wight to find out what our Fred was doing being carted all the way up here!’

He held me for a moment too long and our eyes met. His contained that wicked anticipatory look that I knew only too well. Ivo was plotting and planning, three moves ahead and several bits of paperwork behind and any regrets for the lost chance of emotional entanglement would have to wait.

‘Are we?’ It was all I could think of to say.

‘You want to get Fred home, don’t you?’

‘We’ll need to book the ferry,’ I said, the voice of reason to his flight of fancy. ‘And somewhere to stay, it’s a long way and we won’t get there and back in a day.’

‘Oh, Ru has some friends with a holiday home there,’ he said as carelessly as though this went without saying. ‘Cowes week isn’t until July; I’m sure they won’t be down yet and we’ll be able to borrow the place.’

‘Stop it,’ I said, but I was grinning. ‘That’s just ridiculously coincidental.’

Ivo gently released his hold on me, one finger at a time, so I didn’t fall. I collected myself and my dignity and sat on the sofa, having to move another pile of newsprint to do so. ‘No, no,’ he said airily. ‘Ru sails, or he did, before he joined the police. He may still do, not sure, I’ve got no interest in boats. But loads of his sailing friends have places on the island, for the yacht racing and all that, and I’m pretty sure I can blag us a couple of nights for business purposes.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes being posh has its uses.’

‘You are impossible.’ I seemed to say this a lot lately. The smell of dust and burned sauce was getting through to my cold-thickened sinuses, so I went over to open the window, watching him watch me.

‘I am. It’s been said by many, many people. Pretty much every previous girlfriend, most of my teachers, two private tutors and my parents.’ He sat on the arm of the sofa while I breathed in the welcome fresh air and peeled splattered rose petals from the glass panes. ‘It’s what I am though, Cress. Not who I am.’ His voice was a lot softer now. ‘And it’s not always a bad thing. I think fast, I make connections other people don’t; I see things other people don’t because my brain is going a million miles a minute. If I’m really, really into something, then I can focus like nothing you’ve ever seen. To the exclusion of all else, actually, which, now I come to think of it, can be a bit of a bugger.’

I heard him get up and walk behind me and, even though he didn’t touch me, I could feel him between my shoulder blades. ‘But that’s me, Cress. Like Alice, six impossible things before breakfast. I can’t help it.’

I turned around and almost collided with him, he was so close. The lace from the ruffles on his shirt scraped against my cheek, it was like playing Sardines with Gabriel Rosetti. He smelled of burned jam and hot upholstery, but it was the most alluring perfume I’d ever smelled, and I was so tempted to reach up and touch his face, with those huge blue eyes boring down into mine, and cup my fingers over his carved cheekbones.

But I didn’t. Instead, I took a small step back and a deep breath. ‘I know you can’t, Ivo. A lot of things make sense now,’ I said gently.

‘I’ve never made sense in my life.’

I let out a silent thank you to any gods that may be listening that he couldn’t tell how very desperately I wanted to say, ‘You do, to me.’ Every inch of him exerted an almost magnetic pull, and for ten pence and a filthy duster I would have thrown myself into his arms.

But this was Ivo who wasn’t like other men. I’d seen him careless with other people’s feelings – not exactly “love ’em and leave ’em”, he was more exquisitely mannered than that – and I couldn’t have borne it if I’d reached up to touch his face only to have him back off in a state of well-bred horror amid stammered apologies. Nothing would ever have been the same again, and I’d rather have as much of Ivo as I currently had, than none at all.

‘Ah, you’re not that bad.’ I had to smile then. He looked like a Labrador who’d heard his supper dish rattle. ‘You might talk gibberish, but some of the actual words are kind of comprehensible. I’m sorry if being ADHD has made you feel that people look at you differently though.’

I got another grin but it was one that came with a self-deprecating swing of the shoulder. ‘I cope. I survive. I just wanted you to know, that’s all.’

‘Thank you for telling me,’ I said. ‘But, look. We’ve got this whole business of Fred going on and we need to concentrate on that. I understand now why you’re fixated on getting to the bottom of all this, I really do, but we need to make getting Fred home a priority.’

I watched Ivo’s face as I spoke. I could see his acceptance of the facts in the way he ruefully raised his eyebrows and his mouth wandered about as though words were queueing up inside it. Finally he said, ‘I am the king of inadequate multi-tasking. But you are right, I suppose. We need to get Fred home and I need to stop obsessing about finding out who Mr Williams was and why he was there. It doesn’t, in the hugely enormous scheme of things, matter quite so much.’ But there was a twitch to his lips that made me think he wasn’t being entirely serious.

‘We need to send something to Ginny to thank her for rushing Fred’s results through. She must have put her own research on hold to…’ I so nearly said, ‘to impress you’, but Ivo already knew that Ginny fancied him. I didn’t want to push my luck by reminding him. ‘To get them to us so fast.’

‘Hmm.’ Ivo scraped at one of the side tables with a fingernail. ‘I hope you’re not trying to talk me into taking her on a date. As I said, purple hair.’

I took a deep breath. I was his friend. That was all. ‘You could have a quick dalliance,’ I said. ‘You’ve not been out with anyone for ages, and she seems nice.’

‘I quite like the idea of being a dalliance.’ Ivo had moved away now; he was back with the pile of newspapers. ‘Makes me sound rather dashingly romantic, don’t you think?’

‘The phrase “dashingly romantic” just makes me think of premature ejaculation,’ I said and gave him a severe look. ‘And she may not even want to go out with someone who can’t cook.’

‘Oh, no problem there,’ he said cheerfully.

‘You burned the sauce!’

‘I meant the premature ejaculation,’ Ivo said, in a ‘hurt’ tone. ‘But you’re right. I’ll send her something. Flowers?’ He looked around the room. There was still a damp patch on the carpet from the last flower-related incident. ‘Maybe not. I know, there’s a gala dinner thing the police are holding, in aid of something or other, I’ll send her a couple of tickets. I’m sure Ru’s got some spare.’

‘You don’t think two tickets might send her the wrong message?’

He frowned, looked thoughtful, put a finger up to where his piercing had previously precariously lodged, and then bent down to scan the carpet for it. ‘Bugger. That keeps happening. Don’t know why I bother with it. What message?’

‘Message?’ I’d got left behind again.

‘What message might it send to the lovely Ginny if I were to donate her a couple of, very expensive, I may add, tickets to a policeman’s ball? Ah, there it is.’ He picked up the fallen eyebrow ring, stared at it for a second and then put it on the table. ‘The pictures will go into Country Life. Or Tatler. She might like that.’

‘Don’t be obtuse, Ivo.’ I gave him a stern look. ‘She’ll think you want to go with her.’

‘I can’t send her one ticket though, can I? That’s like saying, “Hey, I know you’re Belinda No-Mates, here, go to this party entirely on your own. You might meet a burly chief inspector to marry and have a load of little sergeants with.”’

‘You have a point.’

‘Can I be absolutely clear here?’ Now he sounded exactly like he did when he’d been making one of his speeches at the debating club at uni. Ivo was going to be a gift to politics one day, but whether it would be to his own side or the opposition I wasn’t really prepared to say. ‘You’re saying that I can’t send two tickets because she will assume that it’s an invitation to a date. But I can’t send her one ticket, because that would be an implication of utter loneliness and desperation. How many tickets would you consider to be optimal in this situation?’ He gave me a smile of such charm that I could feel a spontaneous smile breaking out on my face. ‘Bearing in mind that they’re about a hundred and fifty quid a pop and I really can’t afford to send her and an entire friendship squad?’

‘Um,’ was all I could say.

‘Perhaps just the flowers then.’

‘You,’ I said, ‘and I know I am repeating myself here, are utterly impossible, Ivo.’ My voice rasped a little with relief that he was dismissing, out of hand, the idea of taking Ginny on a date. Several of his previous girlfriends had had hair that had been far more startling than Ginny’s purple.

‘Well that’s decided, excellent.’ He swept out into the kitchen and I could hear him opening cupboards and clattering dishes and pans. ‘Excellent!’ he said again, jauntily.

I let my heart settle and my composure return before I went after him, to oversee the sauce.