One of a Kind

Chapter 13

The man dangling alongside me pushed a helmet onto my head, gave me a dazzling grin and buckled a final strap.

‘Haul away!’ he shouted, and suddenly the harness he’d fastened around my body went completely tight and I was yanked out of the mud and dragged along the surface of the landslide with my jeans ripping on the rough edges and my waist and armpits subjected to an incredible force. Metre by metre I bounced and scraped my way along until the gradient meant I could swing free and, suspended entirely by the harness around my midriff, fall up the cliff.

More scraping ensued, but this time it was grass and the occasional cowpat and I was so relieved to be moving in a forward direction that I could barely muster the energy to say ‘Ow’. Eventually I stopped, face down, and more hands came around me, this time helping me to my feet and unbuckling the harness so that I could step out of it in a far more dignified way than it had gone on.

Whereupon all strength left my legs and I collapsed against a large piece of whining machinery, which turned out to be an electric winch, powered by a Land Rover parked a judicious way from the cliff edge, just inside some impressive orange fencing. I looked up in time to see Sally slithering up over the edge like a monstrous birth. She was muddy to the eyebrows, a long shape of brown, with occasional flaps of fabric, and an incongruous white helmeted head. I imagined I looked pretty similar, but lacked the energy and willpower to check.

Radios crackled. Strong arms picked us up and supported us over the field and across the orange tape, past some large and impressive ‘Danger of Death – Keep Out – Cliff Subsidence’ signs, down to a road that had clearly not been used for some time. Weeds grew out of the tarmac, brambles were blurring its edges, and there, rotating with anxiety and paler than death, stood Ivo and Tony.

All inclinations towards being a Strong And Independent Woman went out of the window and I flung myself into Ivo’s arms, buried my face against him and cried. His normally slight body felt steady, secure and wonderfully permanent. It felt like coming home.

I knew he was in shock too, because he didn’t speak. Ivo, who never usually shut up, was a silent, solid presence, holding me close and warming me through the mud and wet clothes. When I eventually stopped sobbing and gasping, he put both hands under my arms and supported me over to the Volvo, which was parked in the overgrown roadway, where he sat me firmly down on the passenger seat with my legs out of the door and him crouched on the grass in front of me.

I gave another, stifled sob. ‘I’m all muddy.’

‘Yes, well, I don’t think we’ll worry about the upholstery just now.’

Behind us an ambulance bumped its cautious way over the rutted tarmac and two paramedics climbed out, eyes on the cliff edge about fifty metres away, as though we were about to be sucked down into the depths. Nearby I could see Sally being similarly embraced by Tony, and I was glad to see that she was at least as much of a blubbering wreck as I was.

‘We’re going to have you checked out now.’ One paramedic came towards me, while the other went to Sally. ‘We’ll take you down to St Mary’s.’

I clung to Ivo. ‘Come with me.’

‘Of course. I’m not letting you out of my sight from now on. You can expect stalker-levels of monitoring for at least the next six months.’ He gave me a shaky, but bright, grin. ‘It was a close-run thing there.’

I looked at him. Today’s cotton patchwork shirt was now obliterated by clay smears, his bleached denim flares were soaked to the knee and the ill-advised yellow cravat that he’d tied with such insouciance around his neck now hung in bedraggled soggy shreds down his chest. ‘And they didn’t get you?’

His knowing what the hell I was talking about was testament to his having put everything together far, far faster than me. ‘Evidently not.’

‘How?’ was all I could ask.

‘We’ll get to that. Suffice to say that I am a genius, and Tony is running me a close second. Get checked out first though. I’m not going to go through it if you’ve got amnesia and I have to do it all again.’

Hand in hand we went to the ambulance. Sally and Tony were in there already, and we were driven for what felt like hundreds of miles through the lanes, while I fell into a half-doze.

The hospital was bright and noisy, even compared to a landslide and the sea. My head still hurt, the sounds washed over me almost meaninglessly as I sat wrapped in a blanket and talked to doctors, nurses, watched lights, and was fed regular cups of terrible tea. Sally and I made occasional eye contact while it all went on around us. I was still 98 per cent relieved, but she was obviously having moments of terror as the implications of rescue and having to face some very awkward questions dawned.

‘Please,’ she hissed at me as we moved from one examination to another. ‘Let me tell them.’

‘As long as you tell the truth,’ I said. ‘Just be honest, Sally.’

‘It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?’ Her eyes were huge, pupils distended with fear and her skin the yellowy pale of old wax. ‘I’m going to prison, aren’t I?’

‘At least you’re alive to go to prison,’ I said. ‘It could have been worse.’

Those big eyes filled with tears again. ‘We nearly died.’

‘Yes. And I still have to get to the bottom of our rescue,’ I said, as I was helped away by a nurse, whose constant monitoring of my pupils was becoming wearing. ‘Ivo keeps hinting that he’s totally responsible.’

When I was eventually pronounced to have suffered little more than a touch of hypothermia, a wee bit of a concussion and some near-fatal broken nails, I was taken down to the waiting area, where Ivo was pacing up and down and speed-eating a packet of biscuits. Ruined wrappers dotted around on various surfaces told me this was probably not the first. There was a jaded-looking policeman in uniform stretching out over two of the seats and talking on his mobile phone, who raked me up and down with an acerbic look and carried on talking. He had an uneaten biscuit in his other hand, I noticed.

‘Cress,’ Ivo said, slumping with relief on seeing me. ‘Thank heavens. You’re all right?’

‘Keep an eye on the headache, keep warm, take it easy for a bit is all they’ve said. I can go.’

He slumped further, as far as one of the chairs. ‘I hate hospitals.’

‘Then we should go. I’m assuming we’ve missed the sailing?’

Ivo gave me a very direct look. ‘We can’t leave the island,’ he said. ‘For one thing, the police want to talk to you.’ He cast a meaningful glance at the extended form of the officer, who was still chatting away on his phone, although he’d now gone as far as eating half the biscuit.

‘Ah.’

‘And for another, all the sailings are cancelled, have you seen the weather?’ He stood up, brushed crumbs off his shirt, which caused flakes of mud to fly, and then sat down again.

‘Well, yes. I was in it.’

‘Oh, yes.’ For a second his eyes were very bright. ‘It was a wee bit touch and go there.’

‘Yes. And that has resulted in me having a lot of questions for you.’

He handed me the last biscuit, crumpled the packet and threw it in the bin. I ate the biscuit. It had been a long time since my last meal, and hunger was making itself known with a vengeance.

‘Let’s go back to the house. I’ve given it to the police as our address on the island, so we can’t really go anywhere else, even if we wanted to.’ He moved as though to leave the room, seemingly remembered me, came back, raised his arm and then lowered it again. ‘Do you need me to help you?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I tottered a few tentative steps. ‘No, I think I’m all right.’

‘Can I just hold your hand?’

I pondered. ‘I think that would be very nice, yes.’

With a surprising amount of resolution, Ivo took my hand, then put his other arm around my shoulders. ‘I don’t want you to ever do that to me again, Cressida, do you understand?’

I snorted a crumb-strewn half-laugh half-sob. ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to stay away from anything higher than a very small incline in future. Clifftop picnics are definitely out. I don’t think I’m going to fancy paddling much either, for the foreseeable.’

The pressure of Ivo’s arm increased. ‘Please don’t.’

We scuffled past the policeman, who gave us a curt nod, although what he could have done to have stopped us I had no idea, and Ivo called a taxi – ‘No Uber on the island, Cress, honestly, it’s practically primitive.’ – and when it arrived he helped me shuffle out of the hospital and into the back seat, solicitously adjusting the borrowed blanket so it covered my shoulders and also prevented the taxi driver from seeing the state of my clothing.

We got back to the treetop house with the rain still lashing down and the wind urging the tide high onto the cliffs below us. Curiously, the bleached wood and linen now felt far more homely and cosy, and when Ivo lit the fire in the classy modern grate, I started to relax.

‘You need a bath,’ he looked at me appraisingly.

‘I need to know what happened out there,’ I said, trying to find somewhere to sit that wouldn’t leave mud stains.

‘Have a hot bath, get changed, I’ll make us some food. When you’re looking a bit more… human, we’ll talk.’

I wasn’t used to Ivo being so… so in charge. But I still felt weak and a bit stupid from the blow to the head, so I meekly obeyed and had a long and soapy soak, after which I felt a lot better. There was still a crust of mud ground into my fingertips, and parts of me that had never been muddy before had had to have a thorough scrubbing, but at least I could move without cracking. I put on a pair of pyjamas and spared a quick thought for Sally. She may have been a complete idiot, thinking that drug smuggling was a get-rich-quick scheme, but she’d done it with the best of intentions, if anything to do with drugs could ever be said to have ‘good intentions’.

‘Are you done?’ Ivo tapped on the bathroom door. ‘Only I’ve made some food. Well, I think I’ve sort of made it. I put it on a plate. It smells nice.’

I opened the bathroom door and was confronted by Ivo, wearing a rainbow outfit of a metallic red and gold jacket, a scarlet T-shirt with ‘Hello, Sailor’ emblazoned across it and a pair of bright blue shorts, from which his legs protruded to end in Nordic knitted socks.

‘Good grief,’ I said, weakly. ‘I think I might have a relapse.’

‘Don’t. I found these clothes here. I’m not sure if it was someone’s wardrobe or the dressing-up box, but they’ll do for now. Everything else is wet.’

We faced one another for a few seconds, then we both started to laugh. It was the half-hysterical laughter of people who’ve been in a life-threatening situation from which they have escaped but are as yet uncertain as to the damage that has been done. We both had tears in our eyes when we stopped.

‘Food,’ Ivo said, eventually, hooking his hair back and sniffing. ‘Food and coffee, in front of the fire.’ He looked at one of the porthole-windows. ‘Best place to be.’

‘Look, you’re going to have to tell me.’ I settled myself in front of the driftwood coffee table, which stood stylishly in the middle of the room. ‘How did you find us? How did you even know to come looking?’

Ivo put down the cafetiere and a plate of leftovers from our picnic. I was now so hungry that I almost fell face down on the plate and just ate everything lower than my eyeballs, but I restrained myself to taking a plate and putting a careful selection of food onto it, watching Ivo as I did so. He was pouring coffee, slowly. Working on his reply, clearly.

‘When I’d dropped you off to meet Sally,’ he said, ‘I went down to the rehab unit and Tony was there. D’you know he does aerial photography? Fascinating thing, he’s had pictures on calendars of the island…’

‘Shut up, but go on,’ I said, folding ham into my mouth.

‘I showed him the picture of our Mr Williams. Now, after Sally had told you that she thought he was a friend of Tony’s, I was expecting – well, a reaction. I’d got my best ju-jitsu moves to bust out if he got violent.’

‘You did ju-jitsu?’

‘Until I was twelve. Once I went off to prep school I started fencing instead. With rapiers, I mean, not penning areas of land. Had enough of that from the ancestors, what with the Enclosures Act and all that, and I don’t think the peasants ever forgave us. Anyway. There I am, all braced, and Tony just stared at the picture and said that the guy was an old school friend of Sally’s.’

‘But she said…’

‘I know, Cressida, darling, and that’s what first gave me the heads up that something was amiss. Why would anyone need to lie? It’s just a man who took a squirrel, no biggie. So I started to wonder. If Sally lied about that, what else might she have lied about?’

‘Or Tony was lying,’ I added. ‘Trying to shift the blame onto Sally.’

‘Either way’ – Ivo picked up a sausage roll – ‘someone was telling porkies bigger than these rolls. So I chatted to Tony, who was still refusing to allow me to bring out my best take-downs and showing absolutely no animosity whatsoever, disappointingly. I told him what Sally had said about him having anger issues, and he laughed.’

‘Presumably not in an aggressive way,’ I put in.

‘Not at all. He said that he was the last person to have anger issues, and his ex-wife actually divorced him for being too placid. He and I have a lot in common,’ Ivo added. ‘So, together we worked out that Sally wanted us, that’s you and me, not me and Tony, to stay away. Two strikes to Sally, and by now those spidey senses that you told me I ought to develop are starting to twitch. Then I got the message from Ru.’

Ivo pulled his phone out of one of the pockets of the ridiculous jacket and flipped up the message.

Rufus

Look mate, this is all hush hush so don’t go plastering it all over the site yet, but wanted you to be in on the ground floor. Your dead body on the moor has been on the slab and our guy reckons it wasn’t an accident. Couldn’t have hit his own head, apparently, so we’re looking at a deliberate act. Being as it’s a murder, and you and your girlfriend are involved with returning the squirrel, best not to make any waves, and just get back home as soon as.

‘Girlfriend?’ I asked.

Ivo stared at me. ‘Really? Seriously? We’re in the middle of a murder enquiry, people are lying to us, anyone could have done anything – and your take-home is that Ru called you my girlfriend?’

I hid my face behind my coffee mug. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It’s just a bit…’

‘Anyway, you are, aren’t you? I mean, I know we’re… that we’ve not… that it’s all up in the air, but can we just let that go for a minute?’

I remembered, as I sipped the wonderful hot and strong coffee, how I’d felt about Ivo when I’d thought I was going to die. How I’d been almost more worried about him than about myself. How it had given me the impetus to hold on and keep climbing.

‘All right. Glossing over that for now.’ I continued to look at him over the mug rim. ‘Now you know it’s murder.’

‘Yep. So I messaged you, but you never opened the message. There’s a little tick, you see, when a message has been?—’

‘I do know this, Ivo.’

‘Sorry, yes, of course. I could see you hadn’t read the message. And I’m getting a wee bit worried now, because you’ve been an awfully long time looking at squirrels, or whatever you were doing, and you usually check your phone pretty often. So I started thinking, out loud, with Tony. There was the SUV, we saw it heading down towards the rehab unit – that lane only goes down to the forest, and then we saw it again down in that little cove.’

‘If it was the same SUV.’ I licked my fingers.

‘Of course it was. It’s highly unlikely there would be two white SUVs with identical damage to the front wing. And that little motorboat coming in just offshore – what were they doing down there? Both Tony and I could only come up with one solution – well, no we had a couple, but one involved jet skis – and that was drugs. Once we got that, everything else fitted into place and I knew you were in danger.’

‘Jet skis would have been more fun.’ I cleared the cold meat plate and started in on the olives.

‘You’re not online. You’re not answering your phone. Drugs have come into the picture and Ru’s telling me that our Man With Squirrel is a murder victim. So I did the obvious, and panicked like an Outlander fan denied a tartan.’ A silent hand came out from underneath a sausage roll, scattered with pastry crumbs, and touched my wrist. ‘I really care about you, Cress.’

It was said quietly, evenly, but with such feeling that my heart started the whirlwind impression that I’d only just got it to calm down from after being rescued. ‘We’ll get to this bit, Ivo,’ I said, my voice thick. ‘For now, go on.’

‘You’re missing, there’s a storm coming in, according to the office Sally’s out somewhere and I don’t know what’s going on. There is also a high likelihood that I’m next on the list to go mysteriously missing. The first item on the agenda today, is to find you. The rest can, quite frankly, go fuck itself once I know that you are safe and well. So, we set out to find you.’

‘How, though?’ I felt warm. Not just outside, where the coffee and the fire were doing a sterling job keeping any incipient hypothermia at bay, but inside. Somewhere around my solar plexus a tiny bonfire had ignited and my inner woman was dancing around it, naked.

‘I said that Tony does aerial photographs? Well, he has a drone. Keeps it in the office on charge, just in case it’s needed to do something squirrely. I have no idea what use squirrels could have for a drone, perhaps they might want to stage a world takeover? But anyway, there was this drone. I did experiment with calling him “Droney”, but he didn’t like that so I only did it to myself. Quietly, when he wasn’t listening.’

‘Oh!’ I said, remembering the weirdly shaped black thing with the glowing green light that I’d seen in the Portakabin. ‘That thing was a drone. I thought it was some new design of printer.’

‘We had to stay hidden, because we’d worked out that there must be people out there on the island who were looking for me. So we went to Tony’s place – he’s got a lovely little cottage not far from the rehab centre, actually. We put the drone up and started looking for you. Tony knew where you were supposed to be, over at the IWRSPS HQ, so we started from there. And then I found the van.’

‘How did you know it was our van though? There must be thousands of black vans on the island.’

Ivo gave me a look that was almost pitying. ‘I recognised the number plate.’

I stared at him. ‘You knew the number plate of her van?’

‘Of course. Just as well, too, Tony didn’t have a clue. I noticed it when we were over at the rehab unit.’ Ivo shuffled a little closer to me. ‘You forget, Cress,’ he said softly. ‘My brain doesn’t work like yours. I get fixated on details. When I’ve got focus on something it’s like… it’s like there’s just no room for anything else. I can see detail, patterns, that nobody else would notice. It’s shit when I don’t want it, when I’m trying to organise something that doesn’t have a pattern, because my mind tries to impose one and that can cause all kinds of confusion. But, to answer your question, yes. I knew Sally’s number plate. So when I saw it on that beach, with the SUV with the dented wing – I put two and two together. You were either there, or Sally had dropped you somewhere and she knew where you were. Then the drone saw the vehicles drive off but neither you nor Sally driving, so… And then, when Tony and I found the van parked up on that disused road near the clifftop, there was blood inside it and I’m afraid I rather lost it. Channelled my mother more than I usually like and started barking orders at people.’

‘Who were the blokes with all the equipment?’

‘Bunch of lads Droney hangs out with. Amateur climbers and cave divers, and very used to hauling stranded tourists up and down cliff faces. Once we knew where you were, Dro… Tony gave them a call and they all downed tools to come and help get you out of there, because they knew the cliff would come down today in the storm. And then it did, and they found you hanging there…’ He trailed off, his voice breaking over the words.

‘We owe them a bottle. Many bottles.’ I remembered that feeling of having given up, hanging there in the mud and the rain; the weak hopelessness that came with the resignation that we were never going to get to safety.

‘We do.’

The fire flickered and Ivo got up to throw another lump of wood on. ‘So, you said you worked it out too?’ He stayed crouched over the fire, watching the primeval glow.

I explained about the transport cage and finding the hidden compartment. I also explained about punching the side of the van and I even held up my injured knuckle to illustrate my point.

Ivo stared at my hand. There was still a deep gash running across the back, into which mud had worked itself so the wound looked like a satellite image of the Nile delta. His face crumpled for a second, he screwed up his eyes and twisted away.

‘None of this should have happened,’ he said hoarsely. ‘This was all my fault for insisting we found out about the squirrel.’

‘Maybe. But you weren’t to know it was all some big drugs mystery. It looked like an innocent, fun trip, let’s take the squirrel home, all cute and a nice holiday.’ I touched his shoulder. ‘You didn’t know, Ivo.’

It wasn’t like Ivo to be defeated and afraid like this. I realised that I could deal with ridiculously over the top Ivo much better than I could deal with deflated and depressed Ivo.

‘And you were there for me,’ I went on. ‘There’s me being afraid that I would be the one having to take care of you, and yet…’ My words died in my throat because of the way he was looking at me now, with a heat in his eyes that fanned my inner bonfire still further.

‘That’s relationships, Cress,’ he said softly. ‘You take care of each other. I want to take care of you.’ Then his voice strengthened. ‘Within defined parameters, of course. I don’t mind mowing your lawn or cooking you dinner, I draw the line at… at… actually, I’m not sure where I draw the line, but I’m sure we’ll know when we come to it.’

He came in closer now. I could see the blond stubble, smell the mud and oil and the indefinable sweet smell of hospital on his hair. ‘I do have to point out that you didn’t see me when I worked out that The Big Bad could well be after me too. There was a wee bit of screaming, running around in ever decreasing circles and some, frankly unrealistic, ideas of hiring a helicopter to get off the island.’ The grin didn’t touch his eyes, I noticed. ‘Tony talked me down from that one. The bad guys didn’t know where to start looking for me, which bought us time.’ Now he was right in front of me. ‘Can we do this, Cress?’ he whispered. ‘Can we make it work?’

He cupped my face and looked into my eyes. I watched his pupils grow and absorb the blue until his eyes were almost black with desire and the heat.

‘I think so,’ I whispered back, almost hypnotised by those eyes, the tracery of hair that wisped down over his brow, the way his lips were coming closer…

‘Good. Well, that’s settled then.’ Ivo let me go and sat back.

‘What?’ I snatched back the hand that I’d raised to run through his hair. ‘I thought we were going to… that you were going to… I mean, I want to…’

Ivo was looking at me with an expression of understanding but also of amusement. He raised his eyebrows and wiggled them. ‘Well, of course,’ he said, and his voice had lost the weighted tone of desire. ‘But not now. Now you’re still upset. And while I admit that my sheer sexuality has been known to send women into shock, I’d prefer that they went there from a baseline of normal, not already halfway into hysteria. So, go to bed, Cress.’

I stared at him. My inner bonfire was trying to scorch off those wiggling eyebrows and my inner naked woman had her hands on her hips. ‘You bugger, Ivo,’ I said.

‘Not really. Now I know that you want to try something with me, I shall sleep far more soundly. Go to bed.’

‘Is that you channelling your mother again?’

‘Possibly. Possibly. I’m beginning to admit that she quite frequently had a point. Although some of the shouting was a little over the top.’ Ivo stood up now. ‘I’ll clear up. You go and sleep.’

I hated to admit it, but now that we’d told our stories, most of the adrenaline that had been keeping me awake had vanished and I was bone-tired. My legs felt the drag of that awful wet clay again and began to shake.

‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘But under duress.’

‘Obviously.’ He began carrying plates back through to the kitchen, so I wobbled my way up the stairs to the little cabin bedroom in the eaves.