The Invisible Ones (2 page)

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.

We have a form, in duplicate—yellow and white—that Andrea gets people to complete when they come in for the first time. All the usual details, plus the reason why they’re here, where they heard about us, how much money they’re prepared to spend . . . all that sort of thing. Some people say you shouldn’t do this stuffformally, but I’ve tried it this way and that way, and believe me, it’s better to get it down in writing. Some people have no idea how much an investigation costs, and when they find out they run a mile. But with this man, I don’t even reach for the drawer. There’ll be no point. I’m not saying that because he might be illiterate but for other reasons.

“Lovell,” he goes on. “Thought, He’s one of us.”

He looks at me: a challenge.

“How can I help you, Mr. . . . ?”

“Leon Wood, Mr. Lovell.”

Leon Wood is short, slightly overweight in a top-heavy way, with a ruddy, tanned face. People don’t say weather-beaten anymore, do they?— but that’s what he is. His clothes look expensive, especially the sheepskin coat that must add a good six inches to his shoulders.

“My family come from the West Country; you probably know that.”

I incline my head.

“Know some Lovells—Harry Lovell from Basingstoke . . . Jed Lovell, round Newbury . . .”

He watches for my reaction. I have learned not to react—I don’t want to give anything away—but the Jed Lovell he’s referring to is a cousin of mine—my father’s cousin, to be precise, who always disapproved of him, and therefore of us. It occurs to me that he hasn’t just seen my name— he’s made inquiries; knows exactly who I am and who I’m related to. To whom. Whatever.

“There are a lot of us around. But what brings you here, Mr. Wood?”

“Well, Mr. Lovell, it’s a tricky business.”

“That’s what we do here.”

He clears his throat. I have a feeling this could take some time. Gypsies rarely get straight to the point.

“Family business. That’s why I’ve come to you. ’Cos you’ll understand. It’s my daughter. She’s . . . missing.”

“If I can stop you there, Mr. Wood—”

“Call me Leon.”

“I’m afraid I don’t take on missing-persons cases. I can pass you on to my colleague, though—he’s very good.”

“Mr. Lovell . . . Ray . . . I need someone like you. An outsider can’t help. Can you imagine a
gorjio
going in, annoying people, asking questions?”

“Mr. Wood, I was brought up in a house. My mother was a
gorjio
. So I’m a
gorjio
, really. It’s just a name.”

“No . . .”

He jabs a finger at me and leans forward. If there wasn’t a desk between us, I am sure he would take my arm.

“It’s never just a name. You’re always who you are, even sitting here in your office behind your fancy desk. You’re one of us. Where are your family from?”

I am sure he already knows about as much as there is to know. Jed would have told him.

“Kent, Sussex.”

“Ah. Yes. Know Lovells from there, too . . .”

He reels off more names.

“Yes, but as I said, my father settled in a house and left off the traveling

life. I’ve never known it. So I don’t know that I would be of much help. And missing persons are really not my speciality . . .”

“I don’t know what’s your speciality or not. But what happened to my daughter happened with us, and a
gorjio
won’t have the first clue about how to talk to people. They’d get nowhere. You know that. I can tell by looking at you that you can talk to people. They’ll listen to you. They’ll talk to you. A
gorjio
won’t stand a chance!”

He speaks with such vehemence, I have to stop myself from leaning back in my chair. Flattery, and poverty, are on his side. And maybe
there’s a touch of curiosity on my part. I’ve never seen a Gypsy in here before. I can’t imagine any circumstances in which someone like him would go outside the family. I idly wonder how many other half-Gypsy private investigators there are in the southeast for him to choose from. Not many, I imagine.

“Have you reported her disappearance to the police?”

Under the circumstances, this might sound like a stupid question, but you have to ask.

Leon Wood just shrugs, which I take for the no it’s meant to be.

“To be honest, I’m worried that something’s happened to her. Something bad.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s been more than seven years. We’ve heard nothing. No one’s seen her. No one’s spoken to her. Not a phone call . . . not a word . . . nothing. Now . . . my dear wife recently passed, and we’ve been trying to find Rose. She ought to know about her mum, at least. And nothing. Can’t find a thing. ’S not natural, is it? I always wondered, I did, but now . . .”

He trails off.

“I’m very sorry to hear about your wife, Mr. Wood, but let me get this straight—did you say that you haven’t seen your daughter for over seven years?”

“’Bout that, yeah. Leastways, she got married back then, and I never seen her since. They say she ran off, but . . . now I don’t believe it.”

“Who says she ran off?”

“Her husband said so, and his father. Said she ran off with a
gorjio
. But I had my suspicions then, and I have more suspicions now.”

“Suspicions of what?”

“Well . . .” Leon Wood glances over his shoulder, in case we’re being overheard, and then, despite the fact that we’re alone and it’s after hours, leans even nearer. “. . . That they done away with her.”