One of a Kind

Chapter 10

The next morning I was up and ready to meet Sally while Ivo was still blearily trying to find his jacket.

‘Where’s she meeting you? I’ll drop you off and head over to try to winkle Tony’s secrets out of him before she comes back to spoil my plans.’

I checked my phone. ‘She says to meet out on the cliffs somewhere. She’s sent me the what3words.’

Ivo shuddered. ‘I’ll drop you nearby then. I’ve had enough of cliffs for a week or so.’ He’d got lightly sunburned during our evening picnic and there was a red ridge along his forehead about which he was being ridiculously self-conscious. ‘When we get back to Yorkshire I’m not going any higher than the third rung of the stepladder. The gutters can take care of themselves.’

He found his jacket, crumpled casually on the sofa, and put it on.

‘I can’t imagine you ever having anything to do with guttering.’ I followed him out to the car. It was strange how our friendship felt easier now that we’d moved on into something else. Or was it easier because I wasn’t having to pretend that was all it was?

‘Ah, I can be surprisingly practical when I so choose.’ He paused for a moment, sliding into the driver’s seat. ‘I wanted to be a painter and decorator for a while. But then Latin happened, and I discovered that I look dreadful in overalls.’

‘Stop it.’

I appreciated his attempts to make me think he had simply shrugged off what I’d told him about my family. I knew it would resurface at some point; there would be questions about my mother, how often I saw her and whether we got on, how I felt about her inheritance of the whole of her own mother’s fortune. Lots of questions. But, from Ivo, they’d feel like curiosity. Like wanting to get to know me better. And they wouldn’t hurt.

He dropped me at a footpath sign, where a narrow pathway between two hedges led relentlessly upwards, and I trudged amid the birdsong and flappy-stemmed bouquets of wild flowers to where the path opened onto a windswept field, with a far-off view of the sea.

Two men were up there, close to the edge of the cliff, wearing fluorescent overalls and pegging tape like temporary fencing all along the periphery.

Sally was waiting for me, sitting on a half-hearted wall and kicking in a desultory way at the masonry. ‘Hi.’

She sounded downbeat. When I got closer, I realised she’d got the kind of abrasion along one cheek that usually comes from a thrown fist. ‘Morning. Are you all right?’

‘Sure. Yes, of course.’ She shook her head as though to cast off memories. I wondered if she’d got an abusive partner tucked away somewhere. The job of wildlife rescue means a lot of strange hours, irregular meals and constant wet clothing. It’s not an easy gig for someone who has a suspicious other half who demands their dinner on the table and a body in the bed at pre-directed times. I had a quick moment where my brain tried to wonder what Ivo thought of me living that kind of life. But then, wasn’t that the same as his job, only with cuddly animals instead of stolen bikes?

Or had it been irrationally angry Tony? I had a brief, heart-clutching moment of worry for Ivo, who could, right this minute, be driving towards fifteen stone of argument.

I closed my fingers around my phone, itching to text a warning, but not wanting to look rude or dismissive in front of Sally, who’d clearly already suffered enough today. She smiled at me, a little tightly.

‘What are those men doing?’ I asked, trying to distract her away from what seemed to be irritation.

It worked. Her expression opened as she looked up to watch the men staring down towards the sea, seemingly arguing about the distance at which to peg the tape from the edge. ‘We’re due a storm,’ she said. ‘That bit of cliff might go, so they put up warning tapes and signs.’ She sighed. ‘I wish that we got a tenth of their budget, but it seems like protecting humans is more important than protecting animals sometimes.’

I wanted to debate this point, but her ferocity was off-putting. ‘Excuse me a second,’ I said. ‘I just need to let Ivo know that I’ve met you all right. He was a bit worried we were in the wrong place.’ Then I added, ‘He’s going down into town to do some shopping for souvenirs, that sort of thing,’ in case she suspected he might be going to the rehabilitation unit to disrupt her squirrels and upset Tony.

I didn’t want to lie, but then I didn’t want to tell her that I thought her co-worker might be a dangerous lunatic. Anyway, Ivo could look after himself, and, if Tony was aggressive, then he’d just get back in the car and drive away.

Sally’s been punched. Be careful of Tony today.

That should be enough. I put the phone back in my pocket and gave her my best bright, unconcerned smile. ‘There.’

‘Our main facility is this way.’ Sally began to walk ahead of me. I looked down to my right, where the land gave way to sky, a rapid descent, and then the plunge and rear of large waves, and followed her.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked again. ‘You seem a bit…’

Seemingly unaware, she raised a hand and touched the sore spot on her face. A bruise was forming underneath it, the reddened skin turning blue. ‘I’m good,’ she said, ‘Thanks.’

A bit further on she stopped. We were quite close to the edge of the clifftop here, with no fence to prevent a sudden plummet and the two taping men considerably behind us. I wanted to move back, further into the short-grassed field, which was studded with golden flowers, as though the grass had been fixed down with brass staples. But Sally seemed lost in thought, peering down towards the sea.

‘Your squirrel,’ she said at last. ‘The one you brought back to us. Where did you find him, exactly?’

Her voice was a little tentative, as though she hadn’t really wanted to ask the question.

‘Up on the moor above Helmsley.’ It couldn’t really do any harm to tell her, could it? After all, it was just a stupid series of incidents, nothing that anyone could have foreseen. ‘The man – the one Ivo showed you the picture of, the guy you said you’d seen with Tony? He’d taken Fred up on the moor and then had some kind of accident.’

‘Accident?’ Sally didn’t seem to be able to look away from the drop. I took half a step back.

‘Yes. He’d fallen and hit his head. Died up there. Fred’s cage was all smashed up, probably when the man fell or by animals coming afterwards, and Fred had crawled into his pocket. They called me out to look after him.’

‘His cage was broken?’ Sally seemed incredulous. She half-turned towards me, frowning ferociously. ‘You found it?’

‘Yes, lying in the woods a little way away. Completely smashed.’

She let out a little sigh. ‘Okay. That’s… Okay. I’d been… wondering how he was transported.’ Her voice still sounded odd. As though she was talking about one thing while thinking about another. I’d got so used to Ivo’s ability to switch topics within a conversation that her stilted responses struck me as awkward.

‘So were we! It was a bit of a puzzle until we found the box.’ I laughed, although Sally seemed very serious about the whole thing. ‘All just a bit of a tragedy wrapped around an enigma, really. Well, no, not an enigma, but we still don’t know what Mr Williams was doing with Fred all the way up in Yorkshire.’

‘Williams? You found out his name?’ Sally edged a little bit closer to the point at which the cliff looked decidedly unsafe.

‘We took his picture round the local BBs.’ I put out a hand, almost without thinking. ‘Can we go back a bit? Heights make me nervous.’

‘And there was nothing… weird about it? Nothing else turned up, nobody asking questions?’

‘Only us.’ I grabbed at her sleeve, like a child. ‘Please. I don’t like the edge.’

‘It’s fine. It’s all stable up here. That’s why they’re marking off back there, you have to know the cliffs to know where’s safe.’ Sally looked at me now, rather than the several hundred feet of drop. ‘Just you and Ivo, then?’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘Just you and Ivo. Here on the island, trying to find out what happened?’

‘We’re only curious because of the squirrel.’

To my relief, she took a step back, then another, and then we were secure with several metres of the rabbit-grazed grass between us and the drop. ‘I see.’

‘And we’re pretty much resigned to not knowing, now. It’s just been a good excuse for us to come away together and work some stuff out. Fred was incidental, really.’

‘You and Ivo, you’re…?’ Sally let the question hang. She seemed to have relaxed a bit now. Perhaps the person who’d given her the incipient black eye had accused her of having a ‘thing’ for Ivo, and knowing that he and I were – well, whatever we were, would eliminate that particular threat.

‘We’ve been friends a long time. There might, just possibly, be more, but he’s a posh idiot and I’ve got hang ups.’

Now she laughed. ‘Ah, a bit of posh never hurt anyone. If he’s got money you can tap him up for funding, can’t you?’

I was affronted by the suggestion. ‘I don’t think so. It’s his family that are loaded really, not him specifically.’

‘And he didn’t want to come and see our unit with you?’

‘No.’ I didn’t want her to even suspect that Ivo might have gone to see Tony. If Tony really had been responsible for her blackening eye, then she might stop opening up to me, and I really was interested in seeing what they were doing with their rescued squirrels. ‘He’s sightseeing. Like I said, he went down into town to look around and shop,’ I finished.

‘That’s a shame. Our favourite people to show around are the ones with money.’ We were walking downhill, away from the clifftop path and towards a small cottage surrounded by trees and sheds. ‘This is our main rescue centre,’ Sally said, sounding far more relaxed and conversational. ‘Come on, I’ll show you round.’

As we looked around the squirrel rescue and conservation project, Sally became increasingly professional and less wound up. There were three other people working there, two men and a woman, who said brief hellos and then kept their heads down. There were a lot of clacketing keyboards and swinging doors as they typed and then dashed outside to deal with outdoor work, then back in to check their emails.

‘We’re on a knife edge, funding wise,’ Sally said, as we raided the kitchen for coffee and biscuits. ‘Everything’s a bit tense.’

‘Everywhere’s like that though, isn’t it?’ I sipped at my cup of cheap instant and restrained myself from dipping into the dubious allures of the biscuit tin, because they seemed to be down to Rich Tea and crumbs. ‘We work on a shoestring and our charity status.’

Sally looked at me over the rim of her ‘I Heart Red Squirrels’ mug, which highlighted the bruise on her cheekbone. ‘Really a knife edge,’ she whispered, with a head-jerk to the office, where muted conversation had broken out. ‘We’re looking at not being able to pay those three next month. Then it will just be me and Tony, covering all bases.’ She lowered the mug and then went on in a slightly louder voice. ‘There’s a couple of fundraising efforts in progress. The holidaymakers do love a good fete, and they’ll pay to come and see the rehabilitation unit.’ Then, back to the whisper. ‘We might manage to keep afloat until autumn.’

I looked around the walls. They were covered in posters about squirrels; care, feeding and handling, what to do if you found an injured red squirrel, and the numbers of local vets, presumably those trained in red squirrel management.

‘Fundraising is hard,’ I said. ‘We do our share too. Donations are good though, if we can manage to get ourselves into the local press, and everyone loves a rescued furry animal story.’ Then, remembering the newts, snakes, dumped reptiles and rats. ‘Of course, we tend to only publicise the cuddly ones. You’ve at least got all cute and fluffy on your side.’

Sally was looking around at the posters too now, as though she’d only just noticed them. ‘We have to stay open,’ she almost hissed. ‘We have to.’

Her expression was one of furious determination. Slightly worrying, from my side, but no doubt her energetic anger was reassuring to her co-workers. I knew what it felt like to be working in a job that could be gone in a heartbeat, and only the fact that I didn’t have a mortgage, and that Lilith and Dix were sharing the bills stopped me from having biannual breakdowns over the stress.

Sally’s phone rang and I left her to it, wandering into the main office, which was deserted now. Two of the work force were getting into a small car and the remaining bloke was outside, disinfecting transport boxes and screwing replacement hinges. Squirrels could be tough customers; we’d got lucky with Fred.

Sally stayed in the kitchen. I could hear her occasional answers, although I was trying very hard not to listen.

‘Yes. Yes, I asked. No. No, nobody seems to think anything of it. Mmmm. Must be what I said, it was taken. No, on her own. Oh, yeah?’

Then she went quiet, seemingly listening to the other end. I flipped casually through some leaflets about IWRSPS and mused that Ivo was right, a good acronym would do wonders, checked my own phone to see that he had read my message but not replied, felt another little burst of warmth in my stomach at the thought of him, and it was only when I heard Sally start speaking that I half listened again.

I had to admit that I was curious. Was she talking to the person who gave her the bruised cheek? There was something slightly apologetic in her tone, she sounded conciliatory, and I wondered why I hadn’t asked her outright what had happened. Was Ivo right about my risk-averse nature making me not want to poke a hornet’s nest of emotion?

Sally was uh-huh-ing and saying ‘but’ an awful lot, but the person on the other end seemed to not be letting her get a word in edgeways. I knew how that felt. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘No, really. It’s only the two of them and they don’t know… it would be stupid.’

And then she said something that made my neck go tight. ‘He’s in town,’ she said. ‘Shopping for souvenirs.’ She gave this phrase a little twist of bitterness, as though all the souvenirs anyone could ever want to buy should be purchased through IWRSPS and contribute to their funding.

On its own, nothing particularly noteworthy. But it replaced the heat of the day and this over-stuffed office with a tingle of goosepimples and chill.

She could only be talking about Ivo. She’d even used the same words I had, as I’d busily invented a destination for him. ‘Shopping for souvenirs.’ But, why? There was no reason for her, or anyone else, to care what Ivo might be up to.

I shuffled a little bit closer to the closed kitchen door.

‘But then what?’ Sally was asking, in a voice that sounded slightly tearful. ‘Then what? Do I have to…?’ An indrawn breath. ‘What do you mean, “leave it to us”? What are you going to…? Well, yes, of course I do, but…’

No further mentions of Ivo. I must have been getting the wrong end of the stick here, perhaps one of her fellow workers had been keen to meet him, or someone else had gone shopping and my phrase had just stuck in Sally’s head. It could be anything.

Then she stopped speaking so suddenly that I wondered what was happening in there. Half a packet of dry biscuits and a jar of dreadful coffee weren’t enough to provoke the almost sinister silence that had descended. It sounded as though she’d not only stopped speaking, but breathing and moving. She made a small sound, somewhere between a cough and a sob and then whispered something I could only half hear, even though the door between us was uninsulated plywood. ‘I don’t want anything to happen. They’re nice.’

Another moment of breath-holding silence and then I heard her footsteps so I dashed back across the office to pretend a close interest in a Save Our Squirrels poster as Sally opened the kitchen door and came out.

I glanced quickly at her face, but her expression was so full of turmoil that I went back to the poster again. After all, her personal affairs were nothing to do with me, and a mention of someone shopping could be me leaping to conclusions. Nothing I’d overheard meant anything to me; maybe I was feeling the effects of being a long way from home with a man who challenged me on every level, not enough sleep and too much roaming around, and I was retrofitting every word Sally said to try to slot it in with my experience because my brain was tired. Perhaps it was, as Ivo would no doubt have brought up, my risk-averse nature, seeing things to worry about that didn’t exist.

What could any of it be to do with Ivo and me?

After a moment’s lurking in the kitchen doorway, Sally gave a huge sigh. ‘I’d better get you back,’ she said, and her voice was thick. ‘I’ll take you down to say goodbye to the squirrel.’

‘Ivo said he’d pick me up,’ I said airily. ‘It’s fine.’ Then, when I’d turned to see an awful look of conflict on her face, ‘Truly. Then you can carry on with your day. It’s been lovely to see round the unit, but you must have a lot to do.’

‘No,’ she said, and her voice still sounded odd. ‘I need to go over to the office there, I’ll take you.’

After I’d talked up Ivo’s shopping trip into town I had to stick to my story now. And she looked so tense, strung out, as though half her mind was elsewhere. ‘All right. Thank you.’

‘When is he expecting you? I mean.’ She shook her head as though correcting herself. ‘When is your sailing? You said you were going back today.’

‘We didn’t really set a time. I didn’t know how long we’d be, and I said I’d call him when we were done. He’s…’ I stopped myself from saying we’d agreed to meet at the rehab unit. Sally hadn’t exactly given the impression of being bosom buddies with Tony, and she may not like the idea that Ivo was at the rehab unit without her permission. Red squirrels are highly strung and easily upset and she probably wouldn’t want Ivo stalking among them. ‘He’ll come and pick me up. We thought we’d take a late sailing, and we have to go back to the house, to pack.’

Sally seemed to relax a little. ‘Come on then. The van’s out here.’

She opened the door and ushered me around to what had evidently been the garden of the cottage, before it had become the headquarters of IWRSPS. Lilac bushes dropped sad brown flower heads onto unmown grass and roses unleashed from domestication scrambled unpruned and reckless amid the saplings and a half-fallen wooden arch.

The van that had been at the rescue unit was parked in the middle of the erstwhile lawn, and Sally clicked it open as we approached. ‘Um, would you mind going in the back?’ she asked, opening the sliding door to reveal transport boxes, gloves, bottles of disinfectant, maps and tarpaulin all scrambled together on the floor. ‘The passenger seat is wet. I left the window open last night and it rained.’

‘Sure.’ I climbed in. Travelling ‘in the back’ was pretty much my default anyway. Someone had to make sure that nervous animals didn’t get rolled about too much, or that urgent injuries were attended to en route to the vet. As practically the only employee of the rescue centre who didn’t get crippling travel sickness when thrust into the boot of an unpleasant smelling vehicle with unsatisfactory suspension, it felt like my rightful place.

‘And I know this is going to sound stupid,’ Sally went on, ‘but could I borrow your phone? I need to message Tony and tell him we’re on our way, but my battery’s flat after that phone call.’

I scrabbled in my pocket. ‘I keep forgetting to charge mine too,’ I said, sympathetically. ‘Were you on call last night? I sleep with my phone under my pillow when I’m on the night shift, and then forget to plug it in when I get in!’

‘Yes, something like that,’ Sally said. She seemed to have her teeth clenched and she was jittering like Ivo when he got really excited. ‘Thank you. I’ll just take it in here…’

‘I’ll unlock it for you.’

I pulled the phone from my pocket and opened it. The screen burst into life and I saw a notification of a message flash up. Just those first two lines.

Ivo

Ru just called and still hush hush but they think it’s murder.

Don’t go…

Sally snatched the phone out of my hand and gave me a push. I was already halfway into the van, so the shove sent me tumbling headfirst in among boxes and empty sacks, and the next thing I knew was the sound of the door sliding shut and darkness descending.

‘Sally?’ I called, but she didn’t reply and I heard the van’s engine start, felt the thrumming as we moved off over the grass and everything in here with me jostled up to me and away as the vehicle swung.

Sally? Murder? What the hell was going on? What could Sally have to do with the death of a man on a moor three hundred miles away? I banged again at the door, but more in an experimental way than because I expected release. The vans were sturdy and dark, you wouldn’t want a squirrel escaping and pelting around inside while you were driving, nor any chance of it getting into the cab or out on the road.

My hands were sweating. Where was she taking me? And why?

‘Sally!’ I yelled against the part of the van nearest the cab. ‘Stop!’

But, predictably enough, she didn’t and I rolled around like the last pickle in the jar, with my heart suddenly banging against my breastbone hard enough to make my pulse sing in my ears and my mouth dry to a bitter stickiness.

‘Sally!’ I screamed the words now. She’d got my phone. She was taking me… somewhere. That conversation I’d half overheard, what had she said? Something about leaving it to someone else? Was I the ‘it’ in this scenario? Why hadn’t I listened more closely?

Answer, because until I thought she’d been talking about Ivo I’d had no need to. I’d been so caught up in looking round the unit that I’d never even felt the vibration of Ivo’s message coming in – my phone was always set to vibrate rather than ring, because small and frightened animals don’t respond well to the sound of Fallout Boy from a pocket.

Bloody hell. I’d only gone and got myself kidnapped. The supreme irony being that I had absolutely no idea why. The possible murder of Mr Williams? What the hell could I say about that, other than I didn’t know anything about it, other than he’d had a squirrel on him.

We cornered tightly and a couple of the transport boxes bashed into me again. I caught hold of them to keep them from smacking me in the ribs, and found myself sitting with them on my lap to try to prevent further injury, fiddling with the cage fastenings to give myself something to do other than collapse into hysterics.

I knew nothing. That would be obvious to anyone. This was all a big mistake. Of course it was. Fiddle, fiddle.

The cages were slightly larger than our smallest animal transport; one of them was of the same manufacture as I was used to, the other sturdier. Idly, I turned it over in my hands, wondering why it needed to be bigger. Red squirrels were smaller than greys. Fred had been quite happy in our smallest cage; what did they need the bigger one for?

I held the two cages side by side as we careered along, with frequent jolts that told me we were probably going off-road. The normal one and the bigger one, identical in every way, except one was bigger. But was it? When I looked into the animal compartment, they were both the same size, pretty much exactly. So why was this one…? I turned it upside down, the base compartment fell out, and suddenly I knew.

I threw both cages away from me, leaping to my feet, despite the precariousness of my situation, and being hurled back down again by another sudden corner.

‘Shit! Shit, shit, shit!’ I banged again at the side of the van, feeling my knuckles split with the impact, but it was no less than I deserved for my stupidity. Of course this hadn’t been about the squirrel. It never had been. But I’d been so tied up in Fred and getting him home that I’d never stopped to think about his transport cage.

And what else may have been in there with him.