The Invisible Ones (5 page)

I can’t answer, as I need all my breath for lowering the chair down the steps without dropping it. It feels like the veins in my face are going to burst. Also, I’m sure it was Ivo’s turn.

“Sorry . . .”

“Right, let’s go and visit my aunt.”

That’s how Great-uncle asks to go to the toilet. I’ve never heard him say the word “toilet”—it isn’t nice.

Inside the service station there is French pop music and the smell of real coffee. I must say, French pop is pretty awful compared to English pop, which is the best in the world, but then, maybe that’s just the stuff they play in service stations. When I live here I expect I’ll find out about the good stuffthat they keep to themselves.

We head for the gents’, where Great-uncle, as usual, asks me to wait outside. It’s to preserve his modesty, and mine, I suppose, but honestly, I’d rather go in than hang around outside the men’s lavs looking like a gaylord. I’m not allowed to walk away, either, as he’s been known to shout
for me when he gets into difficulties. I try to look as though I’m not remotely interested in anyone else going into the gents’, but they always stare at me. Maybe it’s because I’ve got long hair. Yesterday, a man came up and asked me for the time. I told him, in my best French, that I didn’t have a watch (
“Je suis désolé, monsieur, mais je n’ai pas une montre”
), but he just smiled at me and jerked his head toward the door. I stared back, confused. Then he made a filthy gesture. Suddenly I realized what he meant, and I ran like the clappers. Great-uncle was really cross—he’d managed to drop his pipe, and it rolled behind the toilet where he couldn’t reach it. He kept yelling until some man and his wife came and found us. They said my grandfather needed me. They looked scared—people often do around wheelchairs. Great-uncle wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. But how was I to know?

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t love Great-uncle. I do. He’s interesting to talk to and can be really funny. We like the same TV programs—old black-and-white Western serials and police shows. He knows lots of bloodthirsty Gypsy stories, and used to tell me them when I was younger. He doesn’t do it anymore, because I’m too old—and maybe because I used to ask tons of questions that annoyed him—like “But why did the king’s son get a golden feather? He didn’t use it!” and “How could the second brother be so stupid? He sees his brother die, and then he does the same thing!”

He also lets me listen to his records—Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Cash, lots of old American stuff. He likes country and western, as it’s about people having a really bad time, which makes you feel better when you listen to it. Take Johnny Cash: a lot of his songs seem to be about how he’s killed someone, and now he’s in prison, having a bad time but deserving it. I like those ones. Last year in art, we had to do still-life painting. Most people did fruit and stuff, but I did murder weapons. The teacher wanted to talk to Mum after that. But they weren’t bloody or anything, it was more Agatha Christie–type things—candlesticks, a rope, poison bottles . . . (they didn’t have a gun in the art cupboard, which was a shame, as I’d have liked one). And, I mean, painting it isn’t the same as
doing it, is it? In the same way that singing about killing people isn’t at all the same thing as killing them. Johnny Cash has never actually killed anyone, as far as I know, and no one wants to talk to his mum. People can be so literal.

Great-uncle has a lot to put up with, of course. He wasn’t always in a wheelchair. He was in a car crash a few years ago and broke his back. He was driving his car by himself and drove off the road and the car went into a wall. It was amazing that he survived at all. Ever since then, he hasn’t been able to walk, and that—if you’ve ever tried it—makes living in a trailer really difficult. They wanted to make him go and live in a house after the accident, saying he needed a bungalow without steps and you can’t have a trailer without steps, so what else could he do? Great-uncle just said he would rather die than live in a house—he wasn’t a house Gypsy and never would be. He said he had his family around him and they would manage. Although, actually, he didn’t have his family around him then: it was just him and Ivo and Christo at the time, but when Gran and Granddad and Mum found out what had happened to him, they saw that they would have to help Great-uncle, and Christo, too, so we all came back together and have been together ever since.

That was six years ago, more or less. In fact, a lot of stuff happened around then. With our family, things tend to happen together—it’s like we’re accident-prone or something. Great-uncle had his car crash and went to the hospital for ages, and at about the same time, Ivo’s wife, Rose, ran off because they found out that Christo, who was only a baby, had the family disease. So they were all pretty bad things. Even though I was only seven, I was really sorry. Especially about Rose running off like that. I met her only once, at the wedding, but she was nice.

When I say I met her once, it was actually a few times over several days, which was how long the wedding lasted. It was one long extended party with lots of eating and drinking, as far as I remember. I remember playing hide-and-seek with her in a pub. And I remember the funny mark on her throat; she was always putting her hand over it to hide it, which just made you notice it more. I told her that her throat was dirty and she
should wash it, and she told me it wouldn’t come off. I stared, and she let me touch it. It was soft, like the rest of her skin, not scary at all.

I didn’t care about the birthmark. I thought she was lovely, not like someone who would run off and leave their baby because he was ill. But then, what did I know? I was just a kid.

6.

Ray

Sometimes you can know too much. Of all people, I know this to be true. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power. Which would you prefer? I have seen countless people walk in through our door, having, like Mr. M., chosen option B. They end up miserable, and paying me to make them so. Because they have to know. I once asked another client—a likable man—if, having found out his wife was unfaithful, he wouldn’t rather go back to living in ignorance, and he paused a long time before answering.

“No, because there was something I didn’t know. She knew, and I didn’t. And that was stealing my life. All the time she lied to me, I didn’t have the choice about whether to stay with her or not. She had the choice and I didn’t. That’s what I can’t bear. The years I lost.”

“But it’s only now you look back, knowing that she was cheating on you, that you are, retrospectively, miserable. You weren’t miserable at the time. That time wasn’t lost—or stolen. When you didn’t know, you were happy.”

“I thought I was.”

“If you think you’re happy, then you are. Isn’t that the best we can hope for?”

He smiled a difficult smile. I think he really cared about her but was
divorcing her nonetheless. I shrugged. I don’t tell people what to do; I’m just the man they pay to sift through their rubbish. They wouldn’t listen to me, anyway.

Anyway: stakeout.

It’s better than rubbish-sifting, which usually isn’t as fruitful as it’s made out to be. To be honest, there’s a certain excitement about a stakeout—at least for five minutes, when you park across the street, camera on the pas-senger seat, Dictaphone, thermos, sandwiches, spare roll of film . . . It’s the same as the door to our office. I insisted on a half-glass door when we were fitting out our premises. Why? So we could have our names on it, like Philip Marlowe in
The Big Sleep
. Every private detective I’ve ever known talks about how there is no glamour in the job. They’re all liars. There’s plenty of tedium, of course, plenty to depress you: uncertainty, insecurity, meeting a lot of people who are not at all happy to see you. But every time I walk through that door, run my eye over the somber gold letters and think, That’s my name, there it is, just for a second: a thrill of pleasure. Isn’t that the same thing as glamour?

Same with stakeouts. You’ve all seen the movies. Well, so have we. Anything could happen, at any time. Usually doesn’t, granted, but you never know. Although there isn’t any glamour this time, but that’s because this particular party is one I’ve seen before; I’ve already got evidence, bags of it; this evening is just by way of backup. Nail in the coffin of guilt.

For fifty minutes nothing happens, unless you count my eating a ham sandwich and drinking a cup of tea. I’m watching a house on a street of identical houses on the edge of Twickenham. There’s a light on upstairs, but it could be on a timer, so I don’t read too much into that. At 7:28 a car parks down the street, and a man—fortyish, slightly overweight, foolish face—gets out, walks up to the house, and lets himself in with a key. There could be a flicker of movement inside the hall, but I can’t be sure.

He has a key.

At 8:09 the door opens again and the man comes back out, having
changed his jacket for something warmer. So he has clothes at this address. Now he is accompanied by a woman of a similar age, flamboyantly dressed, good-looking, slim, Chinese. They walk toward his car, side by side but without touching, seemingly without exchanging a word. As they turn out of the gate and onto the street, the woman flicks her head in my direction, but I can’t tell whether she’s registered my car or if it means anything to her. Ruler-straight dark hair swings across her face as she does so—like the swift strokes of a brush. I take a couple of photographs. They’re not very good ones, profile at best, and the light is pretty poor, so there won’t be much detail. Not that it matters.

I know exactly who they are.

In the morning, Hen eyes me warily from his desk. He’s had a row with his wife, Madeleine—that’s clear. He also has a sleep-deprived, haggard look about him—apparently Charlie, the youngest, was up all night with some unidentified childhood ailment.

“All right now, is he?”

“I expect he’ll live.”

The pencil between his teeth waggles up and down—a cigarette substitute.

“Madeleine wants me to invite you for dinner. Tomorrow.” “Tomorrow? Oh, I don’t know that—”

“She won’t take no for an answer.”

“What if I have a prior engagement?”

“Do you?”

“I might have. I might have a life. Why does she assume I spend my evenings drinking myself into solitary despair?”

“Because she’s met you. No . . . You know, she just wants you to . . . keep meeting people.”

I look at him.

“I don’t think she’s invited anyone, actually. Come on—just dinner. It’ll be . . . fun.”

. . .

The order of the day is simple. We have only one active case on file—Rose Janko, née Wood. Her father was finally persuaded to come up with some concrete facts and a couple of photographs. The first one Leon gave me— the one that shows her birthmark—was taken a couple of years before the wedding. She’s sitting with her mother in a stand at the races. She has a demure, self-contained air about her but is smiling slightly. Her hair is mousy, straight, and long; she has strongly marked eyebrows and a heavy, rather round jaw. Her head is turned slightly away from the camera, and you can clearly see the dark stain on her neck. It looks a bit like a hand, if you half close your eyes: as though someone is reaching around her throat from behind. I wonder if Ivo saw it before the wedding, if any of his family did.

The second photograph is from the wedding itself. In it, the newly-weds pose in front of a glossy cream trailer, holding hands but standing apart. A dog is a moving blur behind them. Chrome trim winks in the sunlight, and both have their eyes slightly narrowed against the glare. Rose has had her hair done—permed, lightened, and arranged into blond flicks that frame her face. The high neck of her wedding dress hides the birthmark. She smiles nervously. Her new husband, Ivo Janko, wears a black suit; he is blade thin, with longish, slicked-back dark hair, high cheekbones, and large dark eyes. He’s very good-looking, and looks as though he knows it. He does not smile—his expression appears arrogant, even hostile. He seems to be leaning away from her, his body tense, his chin lifted. Studying his face in the photograph—looking for clues—I decide that his expression is due less to arrogance than to nervousness. They are both very young, after all, and are marrying a person they hardly know. Who would look at ease?

Other facts are few and far between; Leon seemed to struggle to remember his daughter with any clarity. When I asked him what she was like as a person, he said that she was “quiet” and “a good girl.” But the girl at the races doesn’t look like a pushover. Rose was the third child, and the third
girl. I imagine her status in the family, with her mousy hair and strange, sinister birthmark, was lowly. Perhaps that was why she ended up marrying the son of a family who seem to exist—from what I have gathered— on the fringes of Gypsy society. Both, in their different ways, ill-favored.

Apparently, she and Ivo had a son within the year, and then—according to Leon—the next he heard was that there was something wrong with the child, and that Rose had run away with a
gorjio
, who was never named. Leon was angry that his daughter had deserted her husband and child. The duty of a Gypsy wife lies with her husband and his family—providing him with children and seeing to his domestic comfort. She obeys and puts up with whatever is dished out—including blows. To run away from her marriage—especially with a non-Gypsy—is to put herself beyond the pale. At the end of the day, Rose should have stayed, because her place was by her husband’s side.

Harsh rules. My dad never explained it, but he didn’t have to. He drove a deep rift between himself and his father when he married Mum. My grandfather never put it into words, either. But my brother and I understood that for him—for Tata—Dad had made himself unclean by choosing her. And even after he relented, and let her into his house and she could sit at his table, she wasn’t allowed near the sink, couldn’t wash up, and he had a special set of cutlery and crockery that he brought out only for us when we came over. He said it was the “good” china for guests, while he used the everyday stuff, even when we were there, but I am sure it was a special set reserved for “others.” He wouldn’t put a fork she had touched into his mouth. It just wasn’t done. Dad and he had a lot of arguments, but we were still young when his dad died, and I could never ask him about it. Tata was always nice to us boys, but then children can’t be unclean. We were innocent and in a state of Gypsy grace; dirty, yes, but not unclean—not
mokady
.