by Stef Penney
ALSO BY STEF PENNEY
The Tenderness of Wolves
Stef Penney
VIKING CANADA
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Published in Hamish Hamilton hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2012.
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Copyright © Stef Penney, 2012
Book design by Meighan Cavanaugh
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Penney, Stef
The invisible ones / Stef Penney.
ISBN 978-0-670-06631-5
I. Title.
PR6116.E58I58 2011 823’.92 C2011-906182-1
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For M
GLOSSARY
gorjio a non-Romany (n); non-Romany (adj.)
mokady unclean, taboo
Romanichal English Romany Gypsy
chovihano Gypsy healer or shaman
Romanes language of Romany Gypsies
dukkering fortune-telling
totting scrap collecting
rai gentleman
gavvers police
vardo traditional Gypsy caravan
1.
St. Luke’s Hospital
When I woke up, I remembered nothing—apart from one thing. And little enough of that: I remember that I was lying on my back while the woman was straddling me, grinding her hips against mine. I have a feeling it was embarrassingly quick; but then, it had been a while. The thing is, I remember how it felt, but not what anything looked like. When I try to picture her face, I can’t. When I try to picture the surroundings, I can’t. I can’t picture anything at all. I try; I try really hard, because I’m worried.
After some time, one thing comes back to me: the taste of ashes.
As it turns out, the memory loss may be the least of my problems. Technically, I am in a state of “diminished responsibility.” That is what the police conclude after paying me a visit in my hospital bed. What I had done was drive my car through a fence and into a tree in a place called Downham Wood, near the border between Hampshire and Surrey. I had no idea where Downham Wood was, nor what I was doing there. I don’t remember driving through any fences, into any trees. Why would I—why would anyone—do that?
One of the nurses tells me that the police aren’t going to pursue the matter, under the circumstances.
“What circumstances?”
This is what I try to say, but my speech isn’t too clear. My tongue feels
thick and listless. The nurse seems used to it.
“I’m sure it’ll come back to you, Ray.”
She picks up the right arm that lies like a lump of meat on the bed beside me, and smoothes the sheet before putting it back.
Apparently, what happened was this:
A jogger was beating his regular morning path through the wood, when he saw a car that had run off the road and come to a stop against a tree several yards in. Then he realized there was someone in the car. He ran to the nearest house and called the police. They arrived with an ambulance, a fire engine, and cutting equipment. To their surprise, the person inside the car didn’t have a scratch on him. At first they assumed he was drunk, then they decided he must be on drugs. The person in the car—me—was in the driver’s seat but could not speak or—apart from a convulsive twitching—move.
It was the first day of August, which went on to develop into a breathless day of milky, inky blue, like August days are supposed to be but so rarely are.
This much was relayed to me by someone I don’t remember, as I lay in my hospital bed. Whoever it was told me that for the first twenty-four hours I was unable to speak at all—a paralysis locked my tongue and throat muscles, as well as the rest of me. My pupils were dilated, my pulse raced. I was burning hot. When I tried to talk, I could produce only a gurgling series of unintelligible sounds. In the absence of external injuries, they were waiting for the test results that would tell them whether I had suffered a stroke, or had a brain tumor, or was indeed the casualty of a drug overdose.
I couldn’t close my eyes, even for a second.
During that time I don’t think I was particularly bothered by what had caused this—confused, delirious, immobile, I was plagued by a night-marish vision that I couldn’t pin down. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to pin it down. It disturbed me because it felt like a memory, but that cannot be the case, because a woman, however mysterious, is not a dog or a cat. A woman does not have claws, or fangs. A woman does not inspire horror. I keep telling myself this. I am not responsible. With any luck, the whole thing was—like that series Dallas—all a dream.
Now, someone looms over me, her face dominated by heavy black-rimmed glasses; blond hair scraped back off a high, rounded forehead. She reminds me of a seal. She’s holding a clipboard in front of her.
“Well, Ray, how are you feeling? The good news is you haven’t had a stroke.”
She seems to know who I am. And I know her from somewhere, so perhaps she has been here every day. She’s speaking rather loudly. I’m not deaf. I try to say so, but nothing very recognizable comes out.
“. . . and there’s no sign of a tumor, either. We still don’t know what’s causing the paralysis. But it’s improving, isn’t it? You have a bit more control today, don’t you? Still nothing in the right arm? No?”
I try to nod and say yes and no.
“The scan shows no indication of brain damage, which is great. We’re waiting for the results of the toxicology tests. You seem to have ingested some sort of neurotoxin. It could be an overdose of drugs. Did you take drugs, Ray? Or you might have eaten something poisonous. Like wild mushrooms, perhaps . . . Did you eat any wild mushrooms? Or berri
es? Anything like that?”
I try to think back, to those slippery, treacherous images. I ate something, but I don’t think there were mushrooms in it. And I’m pretty sure drugs weren’t involved. Not any I was responsible for, anyway.
“Don’t think so.”
It comes out sounding more like: “Duh . . . n-sah.”
“Have you seen anything strange this morning? Do you remember? Has the dog been back?”
The dog . . . ? Have I talked about her? I’m sure I never called her a dog.
The name on the badge pinned to the front of her white coat appears to begin with a Z. Her accent is crisp and loud—East European, of some description. But she and her clipboard sweep off before I can puzzle out the collection of consonants.
I think about brain damage. I have a lot of time to think, lying here—I can’t really do anything else. It gets dark and it gets light again. My eyes burn with lack of sleep, but when I close them, that’s when I see things, creeping toward me, stealing out of corners, lurking just beyond my field of vision, so on the whole I’m grateful to whatever is keeping me awake. The slightest muscular effort leaves me gasping and exhausted; my right arm is numb and useless.
I can see out of the window to where sunlight hits the leaves of a cherry tree. From that, I deduce I must be on a first floor. But I don’t know which hospital I’m in, or how long I’ve been here. Outside, where the cherry tree is, it’s hot, with a heavy, breathless torpor. After all the rain we’ve had, it must be like the tropics. Inside, it’s also hot, so hot that they finally crack and turn off the hospital heating.
My temper has been better. It’s like being catapulted into extreme old age—eating mashed food, being washed by strangers and addressed in loud, simple sentences. It’s not much fun. On the other hand, there’s not a lot of responsibility.
Another now: another face above me. This one I definitely recognize. Soft fair hair that falls over his forehead. Steel-framed spectacles.
“Ray . . . Ray . . . Ray?”
An expensively educated voice. My business partner. I don’t know how I came to be here, but I know Hen, and I know he’s feeling guilty. I also know that it’s not his fault.
I grunt, trying to say hi.
“How are you? You look much better than yesterday. Did you know I was here yesterday? It’s okay, you don’t have to talk. I just want you to know we’re all thinking about you. Everyone sends their love. Charlie made you a card, look . . .”
He holds up a folded piece of yellow paper with a child’s drawing on it. It’s hard for me to say what it represents.
“This is you in bed. I think that’s a thermometer. Look, you’re wearing a crown . . .”
I take his word for it. He smiles fondly and props the card on my bedside locker—beside the plastic cup of water and the tissues used to wipe up my drool—where it repeatedly falls over, being really too flimsy to stand up on its own.
Gradually, I find that I can talk again—at first, in slurry, broken phrases. My tongue trips over itself. In this, I have something in common with my ward mate—Mike, a genial homeless drunk who used, he says, to be in the French Foreign Legion. We make a good pair—both of us partially paralyzed, and both prone to screaming in the middle of the night.
He has been telling me about the alcoholism-induced stroke he suffered a few months ago. That’s not why he’s in the hospital. The stroke led to severe sunburn on his feet because he couldn’t feel them burning, but he didn’t notice anything was wrong until the sunburn turned gangrenous and started to smell. Now they’re talking about chopping bits off him. He’s remarkably cheerful about it. We get on pretty well, except when he lets rip in French in the middle of the night. Like last night—I was jolted out of my sleepless trance by a shrill scream, then he shouted, “Tirez!” Then he screamed again, the way they do in war films when they’re bayoneting a bag of hay in uniform. I wondered whether I should start making my escape—with my legs in their current state, it could take me five minutes to get out the door if he starts acting out his nightmares.
He doesn’t want to talk much about his time in the Legion, but he is fascinated when he finds out that I’m a private investigator. He badgers me for stories (“Hey, Ray . . . Ray . . . Are you awake? Ray . . .”). I’m always awake. I tell him a few in a mumbling monotone that improves with practice. I start to worry that he’s going to ask me for a job, although, on reflection, he’s probably past that point. He asks if the work is ever dangerous.
I pause before saying, “Not usually.”
2.
Ray
It begins in May—a month when everyone, even private investigators, should be happy and optimistic. The mistakes of the last year have been wiped clean and everything has started again. Leaves unfurl, eggs hatch, men hope. All is new, green, growing.
But we—that is, Lovell Price Investigations—are broke. The only case we’ve had in the last fortnight is a marital—that of poor Mr. M. He rang up, and after much hemming and hawing asked to meet me in a café because he was too embarrassed to come to the office. He’s a businessman, late forties, with a small company supplying office furniture. He’d never done anything like this before—he said so at least eight times during that first meeting. I tried to reassure him that what he was feeling was normal under the circumstances, but he never stopped fidgeting and looking over his shoulder while we talked. He confessed that just speaking to me made him feel guilty—as though admitting his suspicion to a professional was a corrosive acid, which, once unstoppered, could never be put back. I pointed out that if he felt suspicious, talking to me would not make it any worse, and, of course, he had plenty of reason to suspect his wife of infidelity: abstraction; unusual absences; a new, sexier wardrobe; a propensity to work late . . . I almost didn’t need to gather evidence; I could have said, look, yes, your wife is having an affair—just confront her and she’ll probably be relieved to admit it. And you’ll save yourself a lot of money. I didn’t say that. I took the job and spent a couple of evenings tailing the wife, who kept a small shop selling knickknacks on the high street.
The day after I met Mr. M., he rang me—she had just rung to say she would be taking inventory after work. I parked down the street to watch the shop, and followed her when she drove over to Clapham, where she went into a house in a genteel neighborhood popular with families. I couldn’t say for certain what went on in the two hours and twenty minutes before she came out, but the next day, the man I photographed her holding hands with in a wine bar was assuredly not the girlfriend she had claimed she was going to meet. I called Mr. M. and told him I had something to discuss with him, and we met in the same café as before. I didn’t even need to start talking; knowing what I was going to say, he began to cry. I showed him the photographic evidence, explained where and when the photographs were taken, and watched him weep. I suggested he try to talk calmly to his wife, but Mr. M. kept shaking his head.
“If I show her these, she’s going to accuse me of spying on her. And I have. It’s such a betrayal of trust.”
“But she’s cheating on you.”
“I feel like a horrible person.”
“You’re not a horrible person. She’s in the wrong. But if you talk to her, there’s a good chance you can straighten things out. You have to get to what’s behind the affair.”
I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I felt I had to say something. And I have done this a fair few times.
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“It’s got to be worth a go, hasn’t it?”
He wiped his nose and eyes on a dirty-looking handkerchief. His face was a ruin of its former self.
Yesterday, Mr. M. rang to say he had talked to his wife. He didn’t show her the pictures at first, and she flatly denied having an affair; then he brought them out, and she screamed at him with all the vicious rage of the cornered adulterer. Adulterers usually blame their spouses, I’ve noticed. Now his wife says she wants a divorce. He cried again. What could
I say? He didn’t blame me, or her, but himself. In the end I told him that it would be better in the long run; if his wife wanted a divorce now, then she had wanted it before he spoke to her. At least I didn’t spin out the process to charge him more; and there are some unscrupulous investigators out there who would have. These sorts of cases, which make up the majority of our work, can depress you if you let them.
Today is gray and undistinguished. It’s nearly five o’clock in our offices above the stationer’s on Kingston Road. I tell Andrea, our administrator, to go home. We’ve been killing time for hours, anyway. Hen is out somewhere. Through the double-glazed window with its double layer of dirt, I watch a plane emerge from the clouds, uncannily slow in its descent. I have drunk too much coffee, I realize, from the sour taste in my mouth, and am thinking of calling it a day when, just after Andrea leaves, a man walks into the office. Sixtyish, with gray hair slicked back behind his ears, and bunched shoulders and pouchy dark eyes. As soon as I see him I know what he is: there’s an air, a look about him that’s hard to put into words, but when you know it, you know. Large fists are pushed into his trouser pockets, but when he removes his right hand to hold it out to me I see a roll of crisp new notes—deliberately on show. I guess he’s just come off the races after a good day—Sandown Park’s less than thirty minutes from here. He doesn’t have that nervous, slightly shifty look that people usually have on walking into a detective agency. He looks confident and at ease. He walks into my office as though he owns it.
“Saw your name,” he says, after shaking my hand with a crushing grip, unsmiling. “That’s why I’m here.”
That’s not what people usually say, either. They don’t usually care who you are or what you’re called—Ray Lovell, in my case—they just care that they’ve found you in the Yellow Pages under “Private Investigators”—confidential, efficient, discreet—and they hope that you can fix things.
