The Invisible Ones (44 page)

“How’s your work—you busy?” she says.

“Yes . . . You?”

“Very. Actually . . . I’ve left the job in Richmond. I’m working in a home again.”

Her voice changes, takes on a slightly higher note.

“Oh . . . How’s that going?”

“It’s okay.”

I wait for her to say something else about it.

“How’s your hand?”

“All right. Still a bit numb. But I can do most things.” I waggle it about, to demonstrate that I can waggle it.

“Must be a relief.”

“Yeah, being able to drive, especially. And type . . . dial phone numbers—amazing what you take for granted . . .”

“Yeah.”

She gives me a brief smile. The blood is beating in my ears. I wonder whether to take the smile as encouragement.

“So . . . are you . . . ? Your job, I mean . . . Are you,
um
, what sort of home is it?”

“Old people. They’re not too bad, most of them. Not senile or anything, I mean. It’s quite a nice place. Not too far away.”

“Good. Makes a change, anyway.”

“Yeah.”

We sit in silence for a minute. I’m going to shoot myself if I don’t ask, I think.

“Do you still see him?”

She goes still, and instantly I regret it.

“Sorry, it’s none of my business. Forget I . . .”

“No, it isn’t. No.”

She takes a deep breath and looks at the mural on the wall opposite. At the top is a bright yellow sun. The unlikely birds fly in a circle around it. She smiles a little.

“It’s quite funny, really. He met someone. Someone more like him.”

“In a wheelchair?”

It pops out before I think about what I’m saying.

“No! Some posh
gorjio
woman.”

“Oh. I see . . . Right. Yes, I suppose . . . Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Got to be, haven’t I? Least I’ve got another job.”

Her voice sounds strained. Maybe she really did care for him. I wonder what to say next. It feels vital that I get it right. She checks her watch.

“I should probably go and see what he’s up to.”

Then she looks up, looks past me, and freezes.

I look at her face, then follow her eyes to the double doors. My first thought is: it must be David from Richmond. The doors have opened automatically, because a young woman is standing behind them, but instead of walking through, she shrinks back, her eyes darting over the room, wary.

I relax: at first I think she looks vaguely familiar, but she’s not someone I know.

It’s not until her eyes meet mine that I realize. It is the reaction I see there that convinces me I am not dreaming. The terror in the eyes. The guilt. In a second, or less than a second, the doorway is empty.

Lulu has clutched my arm.

“Fucking hell!”

Her voice is a strangled rasp.

I jump up and run through the doors, Lulu beside me, and, maddeningly, we have to wait for the doors to slowly, gently, automatically, swing
open again; we run down the corridor, out into the brightness outside. The staff car park. The pavement. Not there. Not there.

Lulu goes left; I go right.

Ivo—wearing a printed cotton dress and baggy sweater—could have come out only this way, but he’s not there, and there’s no crowd to hide among. An empty pavement. No cars pulling away.

I run down the street, checking doorways, turning my head—the park gates? No, it’s open, no sign of him. He could have gone into a shop, I suppose, any shop, an office . . . A couple walking on the pavement opposite: I chase after them, ask them if they saw someone—a woman— a minute ago.

“He just came out a few seconds before me, black hair, blue cotton dress—I mean, she came out . . . You didn’t see anyone like that . . . ?”

The couple—tourists, burdened with maps and rain jackets and cameras—stares at me dumbly, shaking their heads. They seem frightened of me.

I jog on, come to a crossroads. I can’t see him. No reason to turn left rather than right. Take one course and you miss another. Get it wrong, you lose your chance. I turn right. I end up half jogging, half running, taking one random turn after another. My thighs burn, my lungs start to complain. I’m out of condition, since hospital. Kidding myself. When was I last in condition? I run back to the first turn and go the other way. I don’t see Ivo anywhere.

At length, I find myself leaning, hands on my knees, pulling great tearing breaths into aching lungs, staring at a woman pushing a child on a little wooden horse with wheels. They stop at a zebra crossing. The child’s blond head turns this way and that. I can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. The mother sees me watching and hurries them across the road with an alarmed, hostile look.

When I finally get back to the hospital’s reception area, Lulu is already there, talking to a member of the staff. She rushes over to me, questioning.

I shake my head. I have walked back slowly, to let my breathing return to normal and the heat leave my face. And to think.

“You didn’t see him at all?” She sounds anguished as well as furious. “I didn’t see anything, but . . . the way I went, there were loads of shops, so . . .” She lifts her hands in frustration. “Oh . . . what the fuck?”

“Sorry, I didn’t see anything. But there weren’t that many places he could have gone. He must have had a car.”

“I can’t believe this. The fucking perverted little . . . fucker. How dare he . . . I’m going to fucking kill him!”

Her voice trembles with rage. Tears are threatening, glittering in her eyes.

I shake my head again. She isn’t going to kill him. I am beginning to suspect that would be impossible.

61.

Ray

When I get home, I decide to have a stiff drink. I pour myself a vodka and tonic. I need it, even if I haven’t earned it. I sit for a long time, not turning the light on, watching trains pass, their lights getting brighter as the day fades, hearing planes lumber overhead: monotonous, strident rhythms that I thought I would never get used to but now, when I spend any length of time elsewhere, I find I miss.

I switch on the answerphone. Andrea rings me on the days I spend at the hospital, to give me an update. Hen told me I should wait until morning, for all the good it’s going to do anyone. But she still does it. Dear Andrea—on her message I can hear her pencil striking through the items as she says them.

“Hi, Ray. Nothing much to report today. Hen has been checking on the Porter money; nothing so far. Couple of inquiries on maritals. And a DI Considine called. Could you give him a ring when you’ve got a minute.”

Thoughtfully, she has left a number. A home number.

When I say my name, I can tell from his voice that something has happened.

“You’ve got news.”

“Yeah . . . of a sort.”

“You’ve got an ID?”

“No. But Hutchins rang me today. Back from her holidays.”

He sounds oddly hesitant.

“And?”

“Well, she’s saying now that the body belongs to a young male, probably fifteen, sixteen years old but markedly underdeveloped.”

“This is the Black Patch body?”

“Yeah.”

“With the wooden flowers.”

“That’s the only one I know about.”

“The body in the Black Patch is a boy?”

“Yeah. Bit of a turnup, isn’t it? Apparently, it’s pretty conclusive.

Hutchins says there is about a three percent room for error.”

I switch the phone from one ear to the other to give myself time, thinking, That’s very precise, as well as very small.

The feeling that goes with this thought is, strangely, one of happiness.

“Ray? You there?”

“Yeah. But with young skeletons, I thought you couldn’t be sure. I thought they were difficult.”

“Well, she seems sure now. They found the pelvic bones and put them back together. Skull, too.”

“Did she say what she meant by ‘underdeveloped’?”

“She says he would have appeared younger than his age. Small and slight, you know. He might have been suffering from some sort of disease that retards development. And the other thing—there’s no obvious cause of death.”

“Right.”

I wait. For what, I don’t know.

“Sorry, mate.”

I put the phone down. I drain the vodka in one go. My next call is to Gavin. It takes ages to get hold of him—the babysitter informs me he’s
out, so I have to wait until he comes back. He’s not best pleased to hear from me at half past eleven, but, bless him, he is willing to talk.

When I hang up twenty minutes later, I know I’m not going to sleep.

She sounds suspicious and irritable.

“God, it’s after midnight!”

“Were you asleep?”

“No.”

“I thought you wouldn’t be. I’ve been thinking about what happened today. And I’ve . . . Can I come over and see you? I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Now? It’s the middle of the night!”

“I know. Maybe there’s somewhere that would be open—a caff or something? Anything like that near you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I suppose it can wait. Sorry to disturb you.”

A sigh.

“It’s okay. I can’t sleep, anyway. My address is 24 Tennyson Way . . . Oh, you already know, don’t you?”

Lulu has made a pot of tea and put it on a tray in the sitting room. The room is small but very neat. She is dressed as she was earlier. I have changed. I had a shower, too.

“So what’s so important, then?”

I spent the journey over here trying to think of the best way to tell her. I still haven’t reached a conclusion.

“This is going to sound crazy . . .”

She leans back in her armchair and lights a cigarette. She sends a stream of smoke in my direction. Already, she looks skeptical.

“Remember I told you about the human remains at the Black Patch?”

“The ones that aren’t Rose.”

“Yes. But there were wooden flowers in the grave, so it seemed likely that it was a Traveler Gypsy.”

She stares at me.

“I was sure that Tene and Ivo had some connection with the . . . person there. I thought it could be Christo’s mother, whoever that was. But tonight I found out—the remains are those of a boy, not a girl. A boy of about sixteen. He was small for his age, and weak. The pathologist said it was probably due to a developmental disease. That’s what Christo has.”

Lulu looks at me. Then she doesn’t look at me.

“So?”

“I’m saying that . . .” I take a deep breath. “What if Ivo died at the Black Patch, twelve years ago. Ivo is dead; like his brothers, like his uncles. He had Barth syndrome. He didn’t get better. There was no miracle.”

She stares at me; she looks concerned, slightly pitying.

“We saw Ivo today!”

“The other thing I found out is that Barth syndrome can only be passed down through the mother. Christo had to have a carrier mother— he had to have a Janko mother, not a Janko father.”

“But Ivo isn’t dead! We saw him. You saw him.”

Lulu stares. She is deciding, sadly, that I am out of my mind.

I take another deep breath.

“What if Christina didn’t die?”

Her eyes bore into me. That’s what it feels like: her eyes are hurting me. I wish I didn’t have to do this. She shakes her head slightly, stares at the ground.

“That’s insane.”

“I know it seems incredible.”

“Incredible! You’re saying that . . . What are you saying?”

“Well, I’m saying that the person you know as Ivo has really been Christina, for the past twelve years.”

Lulu is shaking her head.

A sharp exhalation, almost a laugh.

“You’ve been ill, Ray . . .”

“Think of what we actually saw today . . .”

“I saw Ivo!”

“What if . . . Just think, what if it wasn’t Ivo disguised as a woman, but Christina, for the first time in years, not disguised as a man?”

She makes no answer to this. I plough on.

“The disease—Barth syndrome—it gives us the answer. Lulu . . . please listen, these are facts: Christo could not inherit it from his father. I spoke to Gavin, the doctor, and that can’t happen. It’s an x-linked recessive disorder. That means he could only inherit it from his mother. His mother, Christina.”

“Christina died! She’s dead!”

“The other fact we can know for sure, Barth syndrome is incurable. You can’t get better. Ivo’s recovery wasn’t a miracle . . . It wasn’t Ivo.”

Lulu crushes her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Her face looks hard and wooden.

“Christina’s death was a . . . fiction. That’s why there was no funeral. That’s why no one knew how it happened, or where . . .”

I can’t think of anything else to say. I dare to look at her again. She’s lighting another cigarette. Her tea, like mine, is untouched. When she speaks, her voice grates.

“Why?”

The adrenaline, the certainty, that has been sustaining me suddenly decides to flag. I put my face in my hands. I think I know, but it is pure speculation. All so much smoke.

“Only Christina knows that for sure, and Tene . . .”

“My brother . . . ?”

“He had to know. He was there. Do you want me to tell you what I think? Lulu?”

Suddenly, tears are running down her face, although she doesn’t make a sound. It would be more bearable if she collapsed in noisy sobs; if she broke down, I might be allowed to comfort her, but I am not to be given that chance. Her face is wet but perfectly rigid, like that of a mannequin left out in the rain. She shrugs minutely.

“Um, well . . . I think they were very close, Ivo and Christina. Ivo got worse and worse. Their mother had died—you know all that, of course. Tene took Ivo to Lourdes, in a last-ditch attempt to help him, but it didn’t work. He died, perhaps at the Black Patch, I don’t know . . . But whatever, they buried him there, in secret, so that no one would know. And between them, they decided that . . . that it would be Christina that had died. Ivo was the last Janko heir. The only boy—the one they had pinned their hopes on—and they couldn’t bear to let him go.”

She still doesn’t speak. She doesn’t look at me. Not knowing what else to do, I go on.

“They were very alike, weren’t they? I’ve seen photographs. No one in your family saw Tene and . . . well, who they thought was Ivo, for years— until the wedding. And in that time the person you all thought was Ivo had gone from a sick child to a healthy adult—of course he had changed. I know it’s tremendously shocking, but it’s not impossible.”