One of a Kind

Chapter 11

Eventually the van slowed, bumped over some quite violent ruts, and stopped. Then there came a terrible pause. Nothing happened at all, not a door slam, no voices, only the distant sound of birdsong filtered through the metal of the doors.

I huddled down in a corner, trying to stop my brain from imagining a huge wrecking ball swinging towards the van while running through every scenario I could come up with for escape. I could lie down under one of the crumpled tarpaulins and hide – only, it would be pretty obvious where I was, and the thought of discovery made my flesh feel as though it was sliding sideways on my bones. Or… or maybe none of this was what I was imagining, and Sally would let me out of the van down at the rehab unit, full of apologies and offers of tea and cake? Huge misunderstanding, so sorry, never mind, forget all about it, go home…

I’d dropped the cages into a different corner. If I could stick to my ‘not knowing anything’, then I just might have a chance of getting out of this. But Ivo’s message – the word ‘murder’, I was beginning to see how it could all slot together, and this ‘holiday to return a squirrel’ stopped being a cute deceit. Stopped being a reason to be in Ivo’s company, all fun and laughter and ice cream on a beach, and became something altogether darker and more sinister.

I couldn’t avoid a kind of sarcastic half-laugh at the thought that it was me, risk-averse Cressida, in this van, when Ivo would have had an absolute field day in here, and probably not have experienced a moment’s panic. He would have processed the situation, understood it well before the whole ‘get in the back of this van’, and probably dug his way out with a spoon and one of the hinges before he’d ever arrived at this destination.

Those final words of his message, ‘don’t go’, cut off by the fact that my phone only showed the first two lines on the preview screen, meant that he presumably now knew I was in some kind of danger. Unless the full sentence would have read ‘don’t go off the deep end and start shouting until I get there’? Or ‘don’t go to the beach, I’m on my way to pick you up’?

Because if the sentence had been ‘don’t go anywhere with anyone, wait for me’, then I was going to have words with him about brevity and getting to the point much, much faster.

My knuckles were sore where I’d punched the metal wall, and blood was dripping from the scrape I’d engendered. I wiped the blood off on the edge of the tarpaulin and hoped I hadn’t broken anything. All I needed right now was to be stuck here, locked in a van with a broken hand. It was all distraction; I knew that from the way my heart would pulse into my throat and all my internal organs seemed to be frozen every time I let myself wonder what happened next and who Sally was meant to be ‘leaving things’ to. Because if this was what I thought it was, she wasn’t leaving me to people who were going to offer me an iced bun and a hot chocolate.

This was serious.

Eventually the birdsong was broken by the sound of another car engine, coming slowly. It stopped, still distant and I could very faintly hear voices, if I pressed my ear to the door closure mechanism. I tugged, feebly, at the inside of the door, just in case it had been unlocked, but it remained a static, solid wall between me and any hope of getting out of this in one piece.

The voices came closer. One was Sally, I could hear her higher-pitched tones amid the grumbling lower ones of what sounded like two men, but no words. Nothing distinct anyway, until I heard Sally shout, ‘No!’ and then a male voice telling her, in no uncertain terms, to shut up. There was a note of hysteria in Sally’s voice that made me wonder. None of this seemed natural to her. She didn’t seem to want any great harm to come to me. And that yell of ‘No!’, did that mean she was on my side and was here under nearly as much duress as I was?

All this was, of course, purely academic, since she was out there in the open air with, presumably, every chance to get away and I was locked in the back of a van with bleeding knuckles and a terrible sense of impending doom.

The voices faded and came back, as though the talkers were walking up and down. Why? They knew I was in here; were they waiting for me to die of natural causes, or trying to work out what to do with me? Where were we? I’d seen enough of the Isle to know that there were hidden, secluded spots that, even in this high-summer heat, tourists wouldn’t venture to, privately owned beaches and tucked-away little corners. My heart went down a little further, allowing my stomach to rise in its place with the knowledge that Ivo would have no idea where I’d gone. He’d be on high alert; I could almost picture him standing on a clifftop somewhere with his head up and his hair streaming back in the wind, searching for me. The pulse in my throat gave a painful double beat as I realised that I was actually hurting at the thought of Ivo looking for me, worrying about me.

Was I in love with Ivo? Being in danger, having him out there not knowing what was happening to me certainly made it feel as though I was. And the thought that he might be in just as much danger as I was gave it an extra twist. And that kiss last night on the clifftop – that had held such promise and all the meaning that we hadn’t been able to put into words.

I looked at the transporter box, thought of the implications, and it reinforced the sense of danger. I’d carefully replaced the loose panel that had concealed the large hidden section, my only plan to deny all knowledge of anything. After all, I didn’t know anything.

But my suspicions were diamond-hard certainties. Someone – Sally, Tony, the deceased Mr Williams, someone I hadn’t even met yet – was using the movement of squirrels to cover moving something else. And given the size of this hidden compartment, it could really only be one thing. Drugs. I looked over at the boxes, which I most certainly and absolutely was not going to touch ever again. Yes, you could get quite a few slabs of pure, what, heroin? Or cocaine? Or meth? Something like that, anyway, hidden away in there, with a cute and carefully flighty wild animal ensuring that nobody would risk opening it up. You could move practically anything around the country under the cover of relocating squirrels.

So presumably Mr Williams had been up on that moor to hand over a consignment to someone, someone who had got greedy, killed Mr Williams – and I really wished we knew his first name – smashed open the box and taken whatever was in there, with no worries about what would happen to the newly liberated red squirrel. They’d thrown the box into the undergrowth, left Mr Williams where he fell, and disappeared, presumably to go freelance with the spoils and removing any identification that he had on him to slow down any police involvement. They would, I thought, be in even more danger than me right now, but, again, to me that was academic.

And Fred, terrified, half-tame Fred, knowing humans to be a safe space, had crawled into a pocket to await rescue.

Oh, I was in so much trouble!

The voices came back, louder and closer and I heard sounds: someone leaning against the van, then the rattle of the door being grabbed. I tried to work on an expression suitable for one who has been unjustly imprisoned in a van with no idea as to why, then realised that I had no idea what this expression would look like and settled for the more natural ‘terrified’.

My eyes had adjusted to the dimness inside the van, so the blast of white sunlight hit my retinas and blinded me totally. I put my hands up to shade my face and more blood dripped from my split hand.

Two men stood at the opening. Men I had never seen before in my life, with Sally standing behind them, pale, wearing a new abrasion just above her jaw and with her face stretched with fear. I wanted to speak but my mouth wouldn’t work. A kind of horror had infected my voice box and paralysed my lips so that all I could do was sit where I was, half huddled in the tarpaulins, hands to my eyes and unable to move. The freezing of my face extended down to the rest of my body now, so I would swear my heart had stopped beating and joined the rest of my internal organs in one solid mass somewhere in my lower intestine. I couldn’t have stood up if everyone had said they would turn their backs and give me a minute to run.

This staring tableau seemed to go on forever, but eventually one of the men turned to Sally. ‘Get her out, please. We’ll do this in the cabin.’

For some reason, his use of ‘please’ made me feel better. Surely he was too polite to actually harm anyone? As Sally, still with her expression too wide and her skin too bleached for this brightness, reached in and grabbed my arm, I looked at the two men. Half of me was thinking, ‘I need to know what they look like so I can describe them to the police,’ and the other half was thinking, ‘Don’t look at them; if they think you can identify them then you’re dead.’ So I was trying to look at them without being obvious, while also trying not to be sick with fear and trying to force my arms and legs to co-operate with what Sally wanted me to do. All this attempting to do things was making me twitch like a landed fish; one leg had started to vibrate as if fifty thousand volts was running through my body, and my eyes were flicking over the men, Sally, the van as though I were having a seizure.

One man – the polite one – was smartly dressed, in a ‘casual summer yachting’ way. He wore blue chinos and a white shirt, with a sweater tied loosely around his shoulders. His hair was neat, he had the cheekbones of a catalogue model and he looked rather bored with this whole thing. The other man looked as though Central Casting was missing its thug. Shaved head, stubbled face, jeans and a T shirt – he was only lacking a set of visible tattoos and he could have stepped straight out of a Guy Ritchie film.

I took all this in and then my gaze fell to the ground, suddenly becoming fascinated by the irregular nature of the grassy surface and the little white flowers that studded it, nodding in the passing breeze as though affirming my glance.

Sally bundled me out somehow, and the two men led the way over the grassy surface to a building. My eyes had adjusted sufficiently to the light now, so I could see that the van, and the white SUV that seemed to be everywhere, were parked right at the bottom edge of a landslip that had subsumed much of a small inlet. The cliff had collapsed in a soggy and defeated mass, leaving a gradient now peppered with attempted regrowth, and right at the edge of all this, having been missed by the slide by a fraction, stood a tiny shack. Into this we went, and the sunlight was cut out once more by the closing of a wooden door.

Sally stood beside me and I could feel her shaking too. The inside of the hut smelled of soggy wood and mud and I couldn’t help but worry about the overhang of cliff that towered above it. On every conceivable level, this did not feel like a safe place to be.

‘Right.’ Polite man turned and looked at us. ‘Well. We’ve got ourselves into a bit of a pickle here, haven’t we?’

He was nicely spoken too. Surely he couldn’t be involved in drugs? But then I thought of my university associates, some of whom were so posh that they made Ivo look like a down-and-out living under a bridge. They’d been involved in drugs. Some of them still were. And they were working in professional jobs, still possessing all their teeth. There was no reason why someone in the illegal drug business should look like someone in the illegal drug business, was there? After all, wouldn’t that be counterproductive? I felt hysteria giving my solidified organs a kicking, and made a small squeaking noise of suppressed giggle.

Polite man frowned and then sighed. ‘I’m willing to wager you never thought things would turn out this way when you approached me, did you?’ He addressed Sally now. Mutely she shook her head and I felt her hand grope for mine as we stood side by side.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, and her voice sounded as though her throat was as closed as mine. I didn’t know whether she was talking to me, or to him, and couldn’t have replied anyway.

‘One hell of a way to raise funds,’ Mr Polite went on cheerfully. ‘Still. Here we are. And you’re absolutely certain that she’ – he inclined his head towards me – ‘isn’t the one who took the Middlesbrough consignment? They haven’t decided to go into the business up in Yorkshire? After all, it’s worked so well for you, perhaps squirrels and a couple of kilos of pure Colombian are synonymous now?’

He laughed, and his laugh was decidedly less pleasant than his appearance. He honked.

‘She doesn’t know anything,’ Sally whispered.

Eyes came back to me. ‘She didn’t,’ he observed mildly. ‘But she does now.’

Oh shit. There went my plausible deniability.

‘It’s Halvo’s lot.’ Mr Thug had joined the conversation now. He also was surprisingly well spoken. ‘Told you. Williams couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Or maybe he was going to cut a deal with the Durham boys and leave us out of it. Take the money and run, sort of thing.’

‘I suspect he’s changed his mind since,’ Mr Polite said, dryly. ‘Tch. There isn’t even honour among thieves these days. I don’t know what the world is coming to.’ He adjusted the sweater around his shoulders, as though he were feeling a chill. ‘But I suppose the prospect of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds – well, more once it’s cut, that’s an awful lot of honour going begging.’ Sally made a little noise and he looked at her now. ‘Sorry?’

She shook her head.

‘When is the storm forecast?’ Mr Polite turned to Mr Thug, and the question was so out of context that my brain couldn’t make sense of it. From drug smuggling to the Met Office in one sentence?

Mr Thug looked at his phone. ‘This afternoon. There’s a front coming in from France, heavy rain and storm force winds,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s going to stop the sailing,’ he added, in another non sequitur that nearly made my brain bubble out of my ears.

Mr Polite sighed. ‘All right,’ he said, then stopped as a tumble of earth cascaded alongside the cabin. Rocks bounced and there was a slither as something fell from the roof. ‘All right.’

He seemed to be thinking, fiddling with the sweater, which – rational thought told me in a flurry of unwarranted detail that it seemed to be using to distract it from what was actually going on – was cashmere. He sucked at his lips. ‘Any ideas?’ he asked Mr Thug. ‘Because we need to get out of here before the storm comes and brings that entire cliff down on our heads.’

Mr Thug frowned. ‘We can’t kill them,’ he said. My spirits immediately rose several notches, until he went on. ‘Even the Old Bill are going to be able to put two and two together if we keep disappearing people. Williams died, they came down here with the squirrel – she turns up dead, then that’s one whole line of operation closed down.’

They came down here.They knew about Ivo. They knew that someone had been with me. That someone whose brain moved at a million miles a minute and who had probably put it all together already, was out there on the Isle. I gave Sally a little sideways look. Ivo was in danger.

‘We really don’t know anything.’ I spoke up for the first time. ‘Honestly. We’re only interested in the squirrels, you see.’

All the eyes came to me now. I didn’t dare look at Sally again.

Mr Polite sighed again. ‘It really doesn’t work like that, you see,’ he said, almost sadly. ‘Because you do know. And I’ve got an awful lot of money tied up in all this, far too much to let you go.’

He fiddled a bit more as the sound of more earth slithering past us made the rest of us flinch.

‘Er,’ said Mr Thug. ‘I think we’re going to need a decision.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Mr Polite steepled his fingers in Bond-villain style. All he needed was a fluffy cat and somewhere more stylish than an old shed, and he could have carried it off. ‘Right. An accident will be fine, it will be believable. This lot’ – he looked upwards as another shower of shingle pattered on the roof – ‘will be coming down in the storm. The roads are all closed, the place is taped off. What they did…’ He tailed off, looking at us thoughtfully. ‘…is they drove down here to look for… squirrels. They came over the beach, so they didn’t see that the area was cordoned off for landslip, and they were, unfortunately, caught in the storm. So they decided to shelter in here, and…’ He did a dramatic mime with both hands, artistically expressing the reality of a geographical natural disaster. ‘Very sad, of course,’ he finished.

‘What if it doesn’t fall?’

A resigned look from Mr Polite. ‘Oh, I think it can be arranged to come down. I’m pretty sure I know people with access to explosives, only in a small way, you understand. If it doesn’t come down when the storm hits, we can send someone along to give it a helping hand afterwards.’

‘And nobody knows they’re here anyway,’ Mr Thug went on. ‘Could be weeks before they clear the slip and they’re found, if we shift the van.’

‘Except for her companion.’ Mr Polite pursed his lips. ‘We’d better get cracking then. Deal with these two and go and find him and perhaps arrange for him to be, what, standing unfortunately close to some very large waves?’

A sudden gust of air blew between the planking, carrying a scent of thyme and sea thrift in a perfumed waft.

‘The tide’s rising, so we can take both vehicles out the way we came, across the beach,’ Mr Polite carried on. ‘There’s no way out, once the sea’s in, unless they go up the cliff, which is too unstable…’

Another rattle of stones illustrated his point nicely. The cabin vibrated in the wind and more earth came down. I heard it slither over the surface outside, but I’d used up all my emotion and couldn’t even raise the adrenaline to worry about it.

Ivo is out there somewhere. In danger. Maybe looking for me, which will put him in even more danger…

‘Should we shoot them?’ Mr Thug asked, almost as though it were an academic point.

‘No, no.’ Mr Polite took the sweater and began putting it on. We could all feel the new chill in the air, and it wasn’t just a metaphorical one. The weather was changing, and fast. ‘It has to look natural. We’ll just leave them in here.’

My mind ran sudden images, probably gleaned from too much TV as a child. My mother had had to work, and school holidays had been boring as she’d always refused to get a television, so I’d go round to school friends’ houses and watch hours of unmitigated delight and unbelievability while being pumped full of crisps and Mars bars by their parents. Everyone had felt sorry for me, I knew. A somewhat ditzy mother who’d carried the air of faded gentility and a lot of the outmoded traditions – like no television or junk food – but without the wherewithal to really carry it off had seen me taken in by various families. I was still in touch with most of them.

Those hours of unfiltered TV watching had led me to believe that villains always tied up their victims, using rope that could be sawn through with a convenient sharp edge. Sally and I might just be able to get out of this, if we waited for Polite and Thug to get clear, untied ourselves and then managed to clamber up the cliff face before the storm took hold.

We could get out of this.

But then Mr Polite hit me very, very hard on the side of the head and I passed out.