One of a Kind

Chapter 8

We ate in a tiny building up a sandy track, overlooking a bay where trees ran down to the sea like a playgroup day out and the rest of the coastline stretched itself out into the distant setting sun. A stack of rocks that could have been a ruin or just a geographical feature formed the back wall of the restaurant, and we ate fresh fish and debated whether the owner had insurance in case a landslide flattened his entire kitchen. It was the kind of conversation that Ivo was best at. He was never going to be a ‘stand quietly and look at the sunset’ person. At least, not for very long. By the time we’d finished, the sun had fallen into the ink-black sea and night had crept over the sky. It was too dark to hunt down what he insisted on calling the Squirrel People, who were really the local squirrel trust, so we went back to the boat house in the sky, fed Fred, and went to bed in rooms so widely apart that it felt as though we were making a point.

I slept in a tiny single bedroom up in the eaves, with Fred huffily clumping around his cage for most of the night. Ivo took one of the bigger bedrooms, which looked as though the captain of an eighteenth-century schooner had felt homesick and recreated his natural environment on land. It only needed a harpoon and some ropes and you could have keelhauled whales in there, or whatever it was you did to whales when at sea – my knowledge of cetaceans was limited to some lectures on dolphin rescue.

I lay awake for a while, listening to the unfamiliar calling of gulls on the roof and the distant swoosh and sway of treetops caught in a sea breeze. A few days ago I’d been wallowing in my sick bed, and now I was on the south coast of England with a man I was half in love with and an orphan squirrel. In a house that looked straight from a Sunday supplement advert, having eaten at possibly the most picturesque restaurant ever.

A brief memory from childhood flashed into my brain. My mother, in an uncharacteristically chatty moment, had pointed to a house we were passing as the bus droned up yet another hill on its way into town. ‘I grew up there, you know,’ she’d said.

The house had been, to my young eyes, huge. Old and detached in an orchard of, as I always remembered it, flowering fruit trees, with a scramble of outbuildings half concealed behind clematis and jasmine and a long driveway down to the road. I’d wanted to ask her then about her family, whether she’d had the brothers and sisters I felt the lack of so acutely, and what it had been like to be at the boarding school she’d occasionally dropped mention of. But when I’d looked at her face, reflected in the window of the bus’s top deck, it had had such a sad, closed expression that I hadn’t dared. She’d blown her nose and changed the subject, but every time I’d taken that journey subsequently, I had looked out for the honey-stone building amid the trees and wondered.

Much of the story had come out later, of course, but too late for me to be understanding during a childhood of coupon-clipping, penny-saving and charity shop clothing. Was that one of the reasons I found Ivo so attractive? Knowing that his upbringing had been very similar to the one I’d been denied? Was it less sex-appeal and more a second-hand jealousy that drew me to his carefree ways and careless generosity?

Grumpy gulls stamped on the roof with the noise of men in boots, gargling their cries to one another, and I pulled the pillow over my ears and went to sleep.

The next morning we drove out into the countryside and found the Isle of Wight Red Squirrel Protection Society, while Ivo complained about the lack of available vowels to turn them into a proper acronym.

‘You just can’t say IWRSPS,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous. Sounds like some kind of visual impairment, where you see hornets all the time. They should think about their branding.’

The HQ was a Portakabin down a forestry track. Even the Volvo struggled with the pits and ridges of winter storms and large vehicles, and we ended up parking next to a big black van, which was evidently the Squirrel People’s transport and no more able to cope with the churned-up surface than the Volvo.

‘What do we tell them? Do we say where we found him? And what happened?’ I asked, as we picked our way over the mountainous terrain of mud.

Ivo hesitated. For a moment his eyes flickered as though he were reading an internal list of instructions. ‘Let’s not,’ he said.

‘Why not, though? Surely, just asking if they’ve got an exchange programme going on isn’t really a job for MI5, is it?’ I tried, unsuccessfully, to tiptoe over the top of two ridges, the depths of which contained some unpleasantly greasy-looking water.

‘Well, no. But it doesn’t look like a straightforward job, does it? Midnight, moors, all that, it just has clandestine written all over it. So, they may not want to be admitting to anything, and might, in fact, lie to us. Let’s keep it easy. We’re finding out where he came from and who took him to Yorkshire, and then we can take it from there. Let’s have it that you had the squirrel handed in to you and you’re just returning him, shall we? See what they say to that. Hard to see that the world of illegal squirrel movement has stretched its hand out as far as Yorkshire, or even why, but, well, you never know.’ He grinned at me. ‘Come on.’

I stopped walking for a moment and Fred’s cage swung perilously in my hand. ‘Are you trying to make this mysterious again, Ivo?’

His smile was nine-tenths Puckish now. ‘Maybe. Little bit.’

I ‘tch’d’ and then we pitched and tossed our way over the final bit of track and up the steps to the door, which opened to reveal an office full of hot electrical equipment and a desk. Behind the desk was a red head in a green jumper very similar to mine, except for the logo. She was hitting the side of a printer very hard and swearing. Fred instantly went into his sleeping quarters and hid. I wished I could join him.

She looked up when she saw us come in, her face tight and full of frustration. Then she saw the cage, my wildlife rescue jumper and put two and two together, although Ivo’s eye-bending shirt was probably causing her to come up with the answer of fifteen.

‘Ah! You’re the Yorkshire people, yes? With a squirrel?’

Ivo gave her one of his ‘set to stun’ smiles and introduced us. I stayed quiet and watched his charm at work. ‘We are, and we’d just like to know if you recognise him and where he may have come from,’ Ivo said. ‘Bit of a mystery, him turning up in Yorkshire.’

The girl, whose name label proclaimed her to be ‘Sally’, gave me a glance that seemed to have some suspicion built in. ‘I’ll scan him as soon as I can find the scan gun,’ she said, her local accent as soft and rolling as the waves. ‘No idea what one of ours would be doing away from home, though.’

‘No exchange programmes or anything?’ I asked.

She hesitated, momentarily, and I wondered whether she suspected us of stealing Fred and was waiting for us to ask for money to return him, but her pause was seemingly only occasioned by the need to give the printer another battering. ‘Not as far as I know, but they don’t always tell me. In fact, they frequently don’t tell me if we’re moving offices or firing people, I’m meant to find out through osmosis. Ah, here it is.’ Sally moved a pile of printer paper and gestured to me to put Fred’s cage down. I saw her glance sideways at Ivo and frown again. She definitely thought we were up to something, although she might just have been stunned by Ivo’s sex-appeal.

Expertly, Sally opened the cage and grabbed Fred in a fist. His little head protruded, looking hugely indignant, but he stayed still while she ran the microchip detector around the back of his neck and stared at the readout. She frowned again and bit her lip.

‘Well, he’s definitely one of ours,’ she said slowly. A moment of clattering on a keyboard and she stood back, looking a little worried. ‘Yep. He’s 13721. Two-year-old male, found as a newborn in Borthwood copse and raised in our unit here where we keep the squirrels that we hand rear for one reason or another and that can’t be released.’

She was still speaking slowly, as though trying to come to terms with Fred’s sudden appearance.

‘Wow, 13721? We’ve been calling him Fred.’ Ivo looked at the little squirrel, still being held by Sally, but now looking resigned to his fate, like a prisoner of war who’s tunnelled out and made it to the border, only to be recaptured.

‘Fred. Yeah, that’s a good name.’ Sally looked at us again. ‘How did you get hold of him?’ The suspicion was leaking out in her voice now.

I opened my mouth, but Ivo leaped in. ‘Bit of a long story, he was – removed from someone and given to our Cress here, who works for a wildlife unit.’

‘Removed? What, like surgically?’

‘Someone found him, that was all. He was loose up on the moor.’

Sally smiled now and it made her slightly pale face become animated and lovely. Ivo smiled back. He also looked animated and lovely and I felt like an Ugly Sister, but I smiled too, just in case anyone was looking at me. Ivo was being so economical with the truth that it would probably last for a week. I wondered why, then reasoned that it was his reporter’s instinct at work. Either that or he’d watched too many Miss Marple episodes and was keeping back information for his own reasons.

‘Oh.’ Sally looked at Fred again. ‘I wonder how he got there? That’s very strange, as far as we knew he was still out in our unit.’ Her words sounded a little forced, as though her brain was busy and I saw her glance, just once, quickly at the window beyond which the shadowy figure of a man came and went. ‘But then we don’t exactly count heads. And I suppose there’s a chance one of the others here might have agreed a movement, and I’ve just not seen the paperwork. But if he was being moved properly he should have been in a transporter case; how come he was loose?’

‘We think the case must have got broken or otherwise disposed of,’ I said. ‘And Fred escaped.’

‘No sign of it?’

I was about to tell her that I’d found it, smashed, but Ivo interrupted. ‘Oh, and by the way.’ He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Any idea who this might be? We think he might have had something to do with Fred being in Yorkshire.’

It was the drawing he’d done of the deceased Mr Williams. Sally took it and I saw a quick flash of surprise cross her face. ‘Weeeelll,’ she said slowly, ‘I’m not completely sure, but it does look a bit like a guy I’ve seen hanging round with Tony.’ She looked up into Ivo’s face. ‘When you say “might have had something to do with Fred being in Yorkshire”, do you mean that there’s something fishy going on?’

Ivo laughed his best carefree laugh. It was very convincing and I wondered how many times it had taken me in. ‘No, nothing like that. Nothing suspicious. Just someone said they saw a man who looked like this who possibly had something to do with squirrels, and we’re – well. We’re just nosy, aren’t we, Cress?’

A printer beeped on the other side of the room and threw out about fifteen sheets of paper, then two red lights came on and it stopped.

‘Tony. Is he man or squirrel?’ Ivo went on and Sally laughed. I adjusted my position in the corner and tried not to feel like a third wheel.

‘Tony. He works here. In fact, I think he’s round the back in the unit. But he can be a bit…’ She waggled her hand. It was still enclosing Fred, who waggled with it and looked even more resigned. ‘Strange. I sometimes wonder…’ She tailed off, stretching out a leg and giving the newly jammed printer a hefty work-boot to the side. ‘Bloody cheap equipment!’

‘We have the same,’ I sympathised. ‘Told to print out a hundred and fifty leaflets advertising a fundraiser, but it’s not that easy when the printer jams every five copies.’

She nodded and I was worthy of a smile now. ‘I sometimes think it would be quicker to sit down with a pack of crayons and just do them myself. How are we supposed to raise money when we can’t even print out the begging letters?’

‘Right, well, if you two have finished bonding over rubbish electronics, can we let Fred in with his fellow squirrels?’ Ivo asked, with a nod to the still enfisted Fred. ‘He’s probably had more than enough of being portable. We’d love to see him return home, especially Cress, who’s been looking after him.’

As he spoke, he gave me a sidelong look with a hint of something in the depths of his eyes, behind the otherwise bland appeal of his gaze. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it looked like he wanted my agreement.

‘Yes, I’m going to miss him horribly,’ I said. It was true, to a degree. Without Fred, without all this tiptoeing about trying to detect things, I’d have no reason to stay at Ivo’s and torture myself with thoughts of what might have been. But I would miss the squirrel.

‘Oh.’ Sally looked out of the Portakabin window behind her. Looking properly, I could see a large fenced enclosure out there, and a man who now seemed to be sweeping in a sullen fashion. ‘I’m… I’m not sure. Tony doesn’t really like strangers very much.’ She lowered her voice, although Tony could only have listened in if he’d had the hearing abilities of a bat. ‘He has some mental health problems, you see,’ Sally said, confidentially. ‘Can be a bit prone to – well, irrational acts, if you see what I mean. Nice as pie one minute and the next…’ She mimed an explosion. In her fist, Fred corkscrewed through the air wearing a deeply pissed off expression.

‘We’ll be very circumspect,’ Ivo pressed the point. ‘Truly.’

I stared again at the figure outside, a shaded outline beyond the grubby windows, and hesitated. I really did not want to have to come face to face with someone who might start swinging at us with any work equipment he had to hand.

Out of Sally’s line of sight, Ivo trod deliberately and slowly on my foot. ‘It would mean a lot,’ I said, somewhat tightly. ‘I’m going to miss having Fred about the place.’ The weight of Ivo on my instep added a tiny bit of emotional wobble to my voice and I saw him give me the smallest of nods.

‘Well, all right. I’ll come and introduce you. He’s a little volatile and I don’t want to risk him storming off.’ Sally seemed to remember she still had the squirrel in her hand then, and diverted via her desk to poke him into his travel cage. Fred shook himself and started to groom his fur. ‘He’s really keen on the job, and it’s hard to find people who stick around once they realise it’s mostly photocopying and fundraising.’

‘Oh it is, isn’t it!’ I burst out. This was one of the banes of my life, along with Dix’s inability to hold a tune in the shower and having Ivo as a friend. ‘So many people think it’s all nursing wounded animals back to health and grateful looks as we release them back into the wild. Lots of cuddling fox kits and badger cubs.’

Sally threw me a look of understanding. ‘People underestimate the sheer amount of shovelling, don’t they?’

‘Nobody ever wants to muck out. Or get up in the middle of the night because someone has reported a goose struck by a car on the A170 that you know is going to be gone before you get there.’

‘And the biting! So much of the job is getting bitten!’

We grinned at each other. Any enmity I’d felt towards Sally, which had mostly been occasioned by her admiration of Ivo admittedly, evaporated in our mutual admission of the sheer drudgery and physical pain that working with animals incurred.

‘Right, lovely bonding moment,’ Ivo said. ‘Now, are we going to let Fred go, because I want to show Cress some of the beaches while we’re here.’

‘You’re here on holiday?’ Sally was a little perkier now we’d stopped talking about the frustrations of small-animal management.

‘Oh yes. Just for a couple of days. Heading back tomorrow. I’ve been before, but Cress has never visited, so we’re going to have some nice meals, do some sightseeing, that sort of thing.’ Ivo bounced.

‘Good idea!’ Sally’s whole demeanour had changed. Her face had relaxed from its tightly worried expression and she looked far more animated as she picked up the cage and began a monologue of the best beaches on this bit of the Isle, throwing in advice to visit a ruined castle and a brewery too.

I frowned to myself. Ivo hadn’t mentioned beaches to me. Was this another example of his butterfly mind coming out with the first idea to occur to it? Or had he said that for a purpose?

We went out of the Portakabin by a back door, which brought us, via another set of muddied stairs, to the front of a large wire-mesh pen. In fact, it wasn’t just large, it was huge. Inside it, I could see the man who’d been visible through the window armed now with a set of clippers, trimming back some undergrowth. His head was bent and he wasn’t wearing gloves; his hands were a mass of scratches and beads of blood.

‘Tony!’ Sally called across. ‘These guys have a returned squirrel! Number 13721, apparently found up in Yorkshire, which is a bit of a mystery.’

Tony looked up. He was dark and stubbled and his uniform stretched across wide shoulders. ‘Thought I hadn’t seen him about lately,’ he said, coming over and rolling back the sleeves of his coat to reveal arms also covered in scratches. ‘He’s a devil for making me worry. I was wondering if he’d gone into one of the nests and – well – died. I was going to start looking for him when I’d finished this.’

Reassured by his not immediately assaulting us with the broom, I gave Tony a small smile, but worried a tiny bit about him going to look for a deceased squirrel. What was he going to do with it if he found it?

‘No need now.’ Sally handed me Fred’s cage. ‘He’s back.’

I opened the front of the cage, which now had a Fred stuck to it. He swivelled out into the open air, eyeballed me, and then flung himself into the nearest bush, from where he scurried up to a branch and sat, looking down on us. ‘Bye, Fred,’ I said, slightly sadly.

‘Oh, you called him Fred? I call him Swoop because he’s a devil for suddenly dropping down right by you and making you jump!’ Tony said, watching the little squirrel with happy interest.

‘Do you give them all names?’ Sally asked, almost impatiently. ‘I mean, how can you even tell them apart?’

Tony shrugged. ‘Like people. They’ve all got different faces y’know, Sal. You just have to look at them properly. Take your time, and all that.’

‘Nice if you can,’ she retorted, sharply. ‘I have to do the paperwork. It’s all right for you being able to be out here, faffing and fiddling and being “at one with nature”, some of us have to deal with keeping the place running.’

‘Oh, ah,’ Tony said, in a tone of such resigned agreement that I knew this argument was perpetual. I was mildly reassured that Sally didn’t seem to feel that he was so volatile that she had to soothe his feelings at all times, and I felt a knot of tension in my stomach begin to relax. I’d been preparing myself to hide inside the Portakabin if Tony had reacted badly.

I thought that Ivo might whip out the picture of Mr Williams for Tony at this point, but he didn’t. Perhaps, like me, he was unwilling to risk an outburst when we were shut in a metal cage with no form of protection but some spindly trees and an unseen audience of squirrels. Sally didn’t stomp off back to her printers either despite the fact that we could hear something whirring and clicking uselessly inside the Portakabin. Overhead, Fred clung to his branch for a second longer, peering down at us between the hazel leaves, which, highlighted by the sun shafting between the trees, shone like emerald chips. Then he stretched and yawned, giving us a glimpse of incredibly large teeth for such a tiny mouth, and bolted upwards to vanish in a haze of green and gold.

‘Could we… could we come back and say goodbye?’ Ivo asked tentatively. ‘Before we leave?’

I, who had been thinking we’d head for home today, and who would be more than glad not to have to spend another night amid lime-washed wood and taut linen, frowned. ‘Shouldn’t we let Fred settle? He’s been disturbed enough, what with – well, being deserted on a moor.’

Ivo gave me a sideways look that was unreadable. ‘But you’ll miss him, won’t you, Cress?’ He leaned against my shoulder. ‘Just pop in to say goodbye before we head home; we’ll never see him again, remember.’

I wanted to point out that, should I have felt the need to say goodbye to every animal that I rescued before either it, or I, left, I would never get anything else done, and that the animals wouldn’t care and would most likely be relieved if they never saw me again. But I didn’t. Ivo’s weight against my shoulder seemed to render me dumb.

Sally looked at us thoughtfully. Tony picked up his clippers again and began snipping away, adding to the trailing tangle of offcuts at his booted feet. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t unsettle the squirrel too much,’ she said slowly. ‘If you just wanted to say goodbye before you left.’

‘They don’t mind.’ Tony forced himself further into the bramble thicket, thorns squealing against his sturdy coat. ‘As long as you don’t bring a brass band. And young Swoop, he likes a bit of human company so he’ll probably be around.’

From high in the tree above our head there came a quick kerfuffle of shaken branches and squeaks, as though a high-pitched wind had moved through. Leaves fell and scattered on our shoulders.

‘Only, I ought to be here; it’s my job to keep an eye on visitors,’ Sally added.

‘I’ll be here,’ Tony said comfortably. ‘It’s fine, Sal.’

Sally, clearly uncomfortable with the thought, bit her lip again. I side-eyed Tony and wondered about the nature of his sudden explosions. He’d not shown any hints of sudden explosive anger since we’d been here, but maybe that was the problem? If he could go from the laid-back tidying up persona to irrational and potentially violent fury without warning, then I guessed it could be dangerous.

‘I can be around,’ she said finally. ‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘Oh, we won’t be leaving late,’ Ivo said blithely. ‘We’ve got a long drive and we need to get back.’ His ability to extemporise so casually astonished me and I realised that Ivo could be very good at what he did, when he wanted to. He had a swift capability that I’d never seen before and I wondered whether the ‘baffled buffoon’ that irritated and intrigued me in equal measure was only half the story of the man.

Sally seemed to relax. ‘That will be fine, then. I have to be at a school to do an educational visit at twelve, so if you can be here before then, that would be great.’

As she led us to the enclosure gateway, not giving us any further chance to look around at the squirrels, I heard her phone ring in her pocket. She opened the complicated mechanism that kept the wire-mesh door closed, ignoring the unidentifiable tune playing somewhere in her trousers and I looked back over my shoulder to see Tony leaning against a tree and watching us go. Low, diagonal beams of sunlight blurred his edges and the green of his shirt and trousers blended him even further into the background.

Ivo was trotting alongside Sally and engaging her in conversation about the best, and quietest, beaches. He almost seemed to have forgotten I was there.

We trooped back through the Portakabin, knocking the mud from our boots on the top step, and Sally led the way briskly through, between the clicking and flashing machines. Her phone had stopped ringing now, but she took it from her pocket and laid it on the desk without looking at it. I knew what that was like; when you were on duty the phone almost never stopped with reports from the public about random swans, loose cattle (not our problem), adders in the forest and injured deer. It was hard to have a single conversation without being interrupted by pleas for help, and I admired her for being able to not answer. I bet she’d snatch up the phone and return the call as soon as we were out of sight, just in case it was an animal in need of urgent attention – ours was a job it was very hard to put on hold, and the guilt you felt for not permanently being available could be incredible. Sally was clearly very good at what she did.

As we walked through to the main doorway, I noticed an unusual printer, sleek and black, half tucked under a desk. It gleamed a green light amid all the red and orange ‘jam warning’ and ‘out of paper’ that illuminated the inside of the office like tiny fairy bulbs. Something clearly did work; it looked modern and extremely hi-tech, and I would have asked Sally about it if she hadn’t been sweeping us so quickly back through the office to the entrance. It looked like something we ought to have in our workplace, indestructible and efficient, and I made a mental note to ask what it was when we came back the next day.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Sally said, when she could get a word in edgeways past Ivo’s profuse thanks. ‘I would have loved to give you a tour of the place, or show you our rescue facility, but’ – she waved a hand to indicate the Portakabin, from whose windows reflected warning lights were throwing tiny flickers onto the fresh leaves of the overhanging trees – ‘there’s just so much to do and only me and Tony to do it, and I have to get the resources prepped for the school visit and none of the machines are playing ball.’

‘I would have loved to have seen everything,’ I said, genuinely. ‘But it’s fine. We’ll pop back tomorrow to check that Fred has settled back in and then we’ll head back to Yorkshire, but I hope we can stay in touch.’

‘Of course!’ She seemed more effusive now; perhaps my obvious enthusiasm and disappointment in missing out on seeing any more of her projects had endeared me to her. Or perhaps it was the possibility of staying in touch with Ivo, as she was clearly very taken by him, with his excellent bone structure and classy accent.

‘And you ought to return that phone call,’ I said, nodding back through the office to where the phone sat on her desk.

‘Oh! Yes,’ Sally spoke slowly now. ‘Yes, I suppose I ought.’ She eyed me thoughtfully again. ‘It might be something that needs urgent attention.’

‘It usually is, isn’t it?’ I wondered why she seemed to think I may be responsible for this, then realised that she would be holding me responsible for being here and thus preventing her from answering in the first place.

Sally waved us off, watching as Ivo turned the Volvo in the narrow muddy space at the top of the lane and raising a final hand in farewell as we shot off back to the proper grip of tarmac.

‘You didn’t show Tony the picture.’ I turned in my seat to face Ivo.

‘Didn’t want the chance that he might go off on one, not with you there in the firing line,’ he said. ‘That’s why I want to come back tomorrow, I can do it then, if you distract Sally and stand somewhere a really long way away. Oh, thanks for agreeing to stay the extra day, by the way.’ He gave me half a smile and a wink. ‘There’s a few things I’d like to check out before we go back, and I really do think you could do with a holiday.’

The competence that I’d seen in him was fading now, as though he found it an effort to maintain. It seemed to be breaking down into the usual good-natured bafflement that was my Ivo.

‘Me? Why would I need a holiday?’

‘You’ve been unwell. You need to recuperate.’

‘Which is precisely why I took the week off work, and yet I’ve been dragged to the far ends of the Earth in search of a squirrel-smuggling racket that has yet to be resolved,’ I said, smartly. I didn’t want our killing time on the Isle of Wight to somehow become my fault. ‘I ought to be lounging around in the sun, eating vitamin-C tablets and drinking orange juice, not spending my time in some millionaire’s playpark.’

Ivo said nothing for a moment. He drove carefully down the narrow lane, overhung with fresh green and surrounded by banks woven with pink campion and ragged robin, overtopped by the umbrellas of cow parsley and hemlock. Grass scraped the Volvo’s bonnet, sending cascades of pollen blossoming into the air like tiny escape pods.

Finally he spoke. ‘What do you think is going on there?’ He sounded as though he really cared about my answer.

Going on? Apart from chronic underfunding, with which I was only too familiar, I hadn’t noticed anything suspicious at all. ‘Is there anything going on?’

Ivo looked at me and it was a look of peculiar intensity, as though his thoughts were off elsewhere doing their own thing but leaving his body here to drive the car. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I was itching in there. Oh, not actually itching, not like an allergy or anything, more… more a kind of itching in the back of my head, do you understand?’

‘Can’t you just have a spidey sense, like other people?’ I asked and he grinned now, ruefully.

‘I know, I know, it sounds weird. I am weird, I admit it! Not exactly your normal, run-of-the-mill, “the two defendants were found guilty of stealing a motorbike and there’s another cow stuck in the river at Malton” local journo, am I? But I really and truly can’t help it, Cress; I don’t want to help it, this is who I am. How I am. Things just sort of prickle away in my brain and I can’t let them go until I’ve processed it all properly and something about this whole squirrel thing is going niggle, niggle, niggle. I need to ask Tony about the bloke in the picture.’ A car was approaching down the narrow lane and Ivo slowed the Volvo. The oncoming vehicle was coming faster than was wise.

‘You may have missed your chance.’ I had no idea how he could do this. On the one hand he was mentally working on the mystery of Fred as though it were something he needed to solve, and on the other – on the other he was being Ivo as I’d always known him. As though two men existed within the same body, fighting for dominance.

‘I know. I’ll try tomorrow, while you’re distracting Sally. I get the feeling that she thinks Tony will actually detonate on impact or something, but I didn’t get the feeling that he was that kind of person, did you?’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘But then people with anger issues don’t exactly have it tattooed on their foreheads, do they? If everyone had their personality problems out there front and centre, it would make life so much easier for everyone.’

‘Would it?’ He twitched the wheel and the car tilted at an uncomfortable angle, two wheels breasting the grassy edge to the road to allow the SUV to pass us in the lane, heading down towards the forest. It was still going too fast and made no attempt to get out of our way. ‘Do you actually think I’d have an easier life if I had “can’t concentrate, random focus, unable to order life correctly” where everyone could see? Seriously?’

I had a tiny inkling now of what it must be like to be Ivo. That duality of concentration versus distraction, at war inside his head all the time, must be exhausting. Something warm hit me in the heart as I realised just how many times I’d seen him fight himself to stay in a conversation when I’d thought he was being deliberately awkward. In reality he’d really been struggling. The feeling wasn’t pity, it was more like admiration.

‘Okay, maybe not.’ I closed my eyes. Ivo wasn’t my weird friend any more. He was a man who carried demons, demons he’d let me see for the first time. Things were, as Lil would have said, ‘getting way complicated’. ‘Fred didn’t seem that keen to run back to his mates, did he?’ I asked, half sleepily, to change the subject, and probably rhetorically since Ivo hadn’t really been watching.

‘Mmm.’

I opened one eye, but Ivo was concentrating on the road, flipping glances into the mirror to watch the SUV squeezing its way down the inadequate width of the lane behind us. ‘Maybe…’ I said cautiously, and then stopped.

‘Maybe, what?’

So he was listening to me. ‘Maybe there really isn’t any mystery? Maybe Tony’s friend “borrowed” a squirrel, just to show off, maybe he has a girlfriend he wanted to seduce by means of a cute furry animal?’

‘In Yorkshire?’ Ivo’s incredulity rang around the inside of the car like the singalong pop songs he was so fond of.

‘Yorkshire girls are allowed to date out of county,’ I pointed out. ‘We’re not constrained to only mating with our own kind.’ This was the Ivo I was used to; it was reassuring to have him asking random questions again.

‘I suppose so.’ Ivo tapped at the wheel, a tune only he could hear. ‘But unless someone comes forward, it’s going to be impossible to find out who he was meeting up there. If, indeed, he was meeting anyone and not just going for a particularly ill-advised late-night walk. With a squirrel.’

‘In a box,’ I added. ‘Which, somehow, got broken.’

Tap, tap, tap. Ivo’s inner tune stepped up the tempo. ‘Could have broken when he fell though.’ He flashed me a quick grin.

‘And thrown itself off into the bushes beside the track?’

‘You sound like me now.’ The grin widened. ‘I thought you were all about the “just an innocent man taking his pet for a wander”?’

I chewed my lip, thinking. But it was hard to think seriously when Ivo was giving it his best Columbo, and just having him sitting beside me was distracting enough. ‘If the box broke when the man fell, it could have been trampled and kicked off the path. There are a lot of deer tracks up there, and it would only take a few coming through to smash up one of the transport boxes; they’re not exactly reinforced oak planking. I broke one once by stepping on it, so, it could happen.’

‘Oh I do love an analytical mind!’ Ivo pulled the car over into a gateway and stopped. ‘So, the transport boxes aren’t particularly strong?’

‘They don’t have to be. For small animals you want to keep them safe from the outside, not the other way around, and we sometimes have to carry the boxes quite a long way. So we need them light, easy to carry and as long as they fasten tightly so the animals can’t get out – that’s the main thing. If the carry box was what Mr Thixendale mistook for a bag, maybe Mr Williams was using it to keep other things in, like his driving licence? So that might have got lost somewhere out in the forest too.’

‘Oh.’ There was a despondent tone in Ivo’s voice now. As though I’d told him unicorns weren’t real, a kind of reinforcement of a fact that went against a hope he’d held dear. ‘Bugger. You make it all sound completely rational. I was thinking something nefarious might have happened to it. That out there now there’s someone who’s stolen our Mr Williams’ identity and is, even now, running up huge debts and hiring helicopters in his name. That, or aliens took it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, no, you’re perfectly right. I’m getting carried away again, aren’t I? It’s part of my problem, I get an idea in my head and that’s it, fixed, and it won’t go away until I can positively prove that I’m wrong. But your idea sounds so… so sensible. No mystery other than why he took the squirrel, and that might have just been because he could.’

He was giving me another insight again. Little by little, I thought, Ivo was opening up, becoming less of the one-dimensional happy-go-lucky friend and more… something else. I had no idea how to deal with that, so I went for matter of fact.

‘And why he took it up on the moor in the middle of the night.’

‘Yeah.’ But he didn’t sound any more cheerful. Ivo not cheerful was a difficult concept; anyone who wore blue velvet trousers and a shirt that Adam Ant might have regarded as being a little too ‘over the top’ practically had cheerful fitted as standard. But now he dropped his head forward until it rested on the steering wheel in an attitude of abject misery that made me ache.

‘Why don’t you take me to one of these beaches you keep going on about?’ I tried. ‘You told Sally we were on holiday. You told me I needed a holiday, but you’re acting like a nineteenth-century poet who’s just had his daffodils napalmed.’

Ivo tipped his head so that he could see me. ‘I’m having a wallow,’ he said.

‘I can see that. But it occurs to me that wallowing isn’t good for you, whereas walking on a beach and possible paddling would be a lot better for your mental health.’

He grunted and turned back to face the dials and buttons of his dashboard. ‘Lewis would never have said that to Morse, you know.’

‘But Morse was his boss, and you’re my…’ I caught myself just in time, before I found I was trying to define whatever it was that we had. ‘…you’re the Mitchell to my Webb.’

‘I’d have said I was the Stephen Fry to your Hugh Laurie, myself.’ As though the change of subject had jerked him out of his misery, Ivo sat up again. ‘After all, I’ve got the Oscar Wilde jacket. Possibly. Or No?l Coward.’

‘So, let’s go to the beach.’

‘Oh, all right.’ Another grin, broader and more filled with mischief than the last. ‘You’re really good for me, Cress, you know that?’

As the car bumped back out onto the narrow lane and the sunlight reached us again from between the high banks and overhanging trees, I wondered to myself how I’d got drawn into all this. I mean, yes, obviously, Ivo, but he was, as we’d established, just a friend. He was gorgeous, that went without question, with the most brilliant mind I’d ever met. But was that brilliance at the expense of other people constantly having to buff it up and polish it to keep it shining? With their own mental gloss being overlooked?

Could I, in short, really stay his friend? Could I seriously see myself riding shotgun forever on his more elaborate schemes, while he carried on wooing and winning the girls on the sidelines? It had been fine up until now, but this new version of Ivo, with the confidences and the unwarranted intimacies, could I seriously have a friendship with him, without breaking my heart? It already felt as though I was treading too close to a self-drawn line that I hadn’t been aware of. I knew Ivo now, not the superficial, amicable, almost sibling-like knowledge I’d had before, but seeing him as a real, complex person. Which had only made him more attractive and heartbreak more inevitable.

I’d been stupid. I’d blindly set myself up as the ‘good friend’. Ivo had needed someone to talk to – and there I had been. Here I was, pretending that I was here to keep him company when really I had wanted more of Ivo than he could give, and deep down I knew it. I had always known it.

And it hurt.