The Invisible Ones

by Stef Penney

  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.

  We don’t have a lot to go on. First we run the obvious searches: DVLC, electoral rolls, utilities, land registry. The name Rose Wood or Rose Janko doesn’t appear anywhere. I would have been surprised if it had. Even now, few Gypsies have passports or appear on electoral rolls. And if Rose has changed her name, we’re not going to find a thing there, anyway. With a missing person, there is a set of procedures to follow. You check the official records—dull, time-consuming work. You run “hookers” in the papers— small ads asking for the missing person to get in touch to find out something to their advantage, or to collect an inheritance. When you don’t know what area someone lives in, that’s a very big net to catch a small fish— and not everyone reads the small ads—but still, you never know. And, of course, you talk to the people who knew them, starting with immediate family and widening out in ever-increasing circles—school friends, work colleagues, acquaintances, hairdressers, doctors, dentists, local shopkeepers, paper boy . . . Only with Rose, there doesn’t seem to be a set of increasing circles; there is just one. No school friends, because she barely went to school; no colleagues, because she never worked. There is only family, and that so long ago: a small, tight, closed world from which a good girl does not stray.

  At 7:30 the next evening I trudge up the drive to Hen’s house. Thanks to Madeleine’s money, they live in a vast detached house in a leafy neighborhood. Even though it’s much closer to central London than I am, I feel like I’ve come to the country. When I ring the doorbell, Madeleine answers and pecks me on the cheek. I’ve always had the feeling that Hen’s aristocratic wife doesn’t really like me. One look from those pale blue eyes, and I feel like I should be coming in through the tradesmen’s entrance.

  “Ray . . . How lovely to see you. It’s been too long.”

  I hold a bottle of wine up in front of me. It’s probably the wrong kind, but this is one thing, over the years, I have stopped worrying about.

  “Oh, lovely. Thank you. We promised Charlie you’d read him a story. Would you mind?”

  I don’t mind. Charlie is their youngest child and my godson. I can’t imagine how Hen managed to talk Madeleine into that one; perhaps he has a file of incriminating photographs stashed in a vault.

  Charlie is in the kitchen, hanging on to Hen’s leg and dragging his security blanket, which he sucks, wrapped around one thumb. He has his father’s floppy pale hair and diffident approach to life. I put the bottle of wine in the fridge. Blu-tacked to the fridge door is a typed list of the skills that Charlie needs to work on to bring him up to scratch. I read it with interest: “Speech—do not give him anything until he has named it properly. He must eat only without his blanket—do not give in! Hand-eye coordination—throwing and catching soft apple or blue ball. Numbers— get him to repeat them every day . . .” The list is laminated. Charlie peers at me with watery green eyes, a tinge of resentment in them: he knows I get to walk away from the list at the end of the evening, but he’s in it for life. He drags me upstairs to read a story—about a big wolf who scares people without meaning to. But Charlie is more interested in telling me that there was a big storm, and it made him wet his bed.

  “When was that, Charlie?”

  “When I was young.”

  Charlie is four years old. I think his development is frighteningly advanced.

  The evening is tolerable, for dinner at their house. There is a nasty moment when Madeleine springs on me that she’s invited a friend of hers along—allegedly at the last minute. Vanessa is recently divorced—purely a coincidence, of course. Hen raises his eyebrows to signal that it’s none of his doing, but would I please go along with it? Actually, Vanessa is surprisingly okay: not too many expectations, not overly bitter. A handsome streaked blonde, solid but shapely, a legal secretary. We eat lasagna and drink red wine (mine was the wrong color), followed by a lonely salad, and a bitter coffee-flavored trifle with a foreign name—all made by Madeleine, who needs to prove she can do everything. The two older girls— both in their teens—are “studying with friends,” apparently, although I half hope they are doing something much more rep
rehensible.

  Actually, the conversation is reasonable, the atmosphere surprisingly unstrained. Vanessa laughs at my jokes and appears genuinely interested in our work. I suspect Madeleine of exaggerating the exciting nature of our setup—to make Hen look good, of course, but I am her husband’s boss. Of course, she will have added—as a spice—that I am half Gypsy. A little bit of rough.

  For a while, I’m grateful to be sitting at a table, having a meal and talking—like people do when they don’t go to pubs anymore. It’s normal. I suppose it’s nice. Vanessa’s nice. She deserves someone better than me. I ponder this—for Madeleine to line her up with me, she must be a rather low-status friend. I stop pondering when Vanessa comes home with me afterward. She’s fun, a good sport, but half my mind is occupied with wondering if she’s going to tell Madeleine, and then feeling sorry in anticipation for Hen. Madeleine will complain to Hen about my rascally behavior, and he’ll be the one—not me—to get it in the neck. The other half of my mind is somewhere else, too. Not that Vanessa seems to notice my distraction.

  She leaves in the morning with a smile and a wave, and there is none of that tremulous, brittle fishing around about calling or phone numbers or seeing each other again. Sensible woman. Low expectations: the key to happiness.

  7.

  JJ

  We’re only ninety-eight miles from Lourdes! So hurray. Hurray even though it’s my job to cook tonight. I’m doing Joe Gray, which is stew made with a tin of soup—any soup—potatoes, onions, carrots, and bacon. It’s traditional, and one of my favorites. I discovered that bacon’s called lardon in French, which makes me laugh. I make a joke about it putting the lard on; I think it’s rather good, personally, but only Christo laughs—and that’s because I’m clowning around, not because he gets it— and Gran just smiles a bit. No one else laughs. Uncle Ivo and Great-uncle have had some sort of major falling-out, but I don’t know what it’s about. Ivo took Great-uncle off for a walk earlier, and they came back not speaking. In fact, Ivo came back without Great-uncle at all, and I had to go and find him. It was just starting to rain. Luckily, he wasn’t very far away.