The Invisible Ones Read Online Free PDF

wouldn’t have had many chances, you know, what with . . .” He waves his hand at shoulder level and pushes a photo toward me. “Not many boys would’ve had that.”
    The young girl in the picture looks entirely normal, except for a port-wine birthmark on her neck. The size and darkness of it are slightly alarming, until you realize what it is.
    “Anyhow, the Jankos used to go off on their own and wouldn’t be seen nor heard for ages. So, next we heard, she’d gone. Run off—and they didn’t know where.”
    “So that could be what happened.”
    “I feel sure she’s gone. I feel it in my bones. I just know it.”
    “Right . . .”
    Leon clasps his hands and bangs them down on the desk in front of him.
    “To tell you the truth, Ray—and I say this to you as you’re one of us—I had a dream recently . . .”
    I have a sudden thought that someone is trying to put me out of business, or at least make me look ridiculous.
    “In my dream she was dead. She came to me and told me that Ivoand Tene done her in. Now I’m not a great one for dreams or dukkering or none of that; I’m not that way inclined, but this was different. I just know it.”
    I stare down at my notepad, irritated. I can’t imagine a more hopeless case. On the other hand, it could mean a lot of boring-but-lucrative work. One can’t be too fussy in this life.
    Leon is staring at me.
    “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m a crazy old man . . . dreams and whatnot, huh? ’S been a long time, I know that. But she’s not here, my daughter. And no one knows where she is, or if she is anywhere at all. So what happened to her?”
    The phone rings. It makes me jump. Andrea must have forgotten to put the answerphone on. I pick it up and put it down again. Too bad if it’s another case. More likely to be the landlord.
    “Do you know how to get in touch with the Jankos?”
    “They won’t tell you nothing. They say she ran offseven years ago, or six it was, with some boy.”
    “We still need to start there, with where she was last seen. Then work forward.”
    “They had a bob or two, the Jankos. Tene liked to move on. He was one for the old ways, you know, determined.”
    “When did you last see the family?”
    Leon fidgets in his chair.
    “I haven’t really seen them since then. No.”
    “Since . . . the wedding.”
    He shakes his head.
    “Ray . . . Mr. Lovell . . . you know as well as I do that if I went to the police with this, they’d laugh in my face. They’d think, here’s some cracked old gyppo—put him in a home. Who cares about his poxy daughter, anyway? One less gyppo—good riddance, that’s what they’d think.”
    My eyes are drawn to the bulging notes peeping out of his pocket, and he notices. They, at least, look real enough.
    “You can look at all the official stuff, can’t you? All them computer things. You know about all that.”
    He looks happy, knowing that he’s snared me, despite myself. He looks confidently at the Amstrad on my desk as though it’s a crystal ball, as though I can switch it on and see anything I want. And I agree to look into it. I give him the usual qualifications about missing-persons cases— long, expensive, often thankless. And he reminds me about Georgia Millington. So he does read the papers. Or someone reads them to him. And before he leaves, he takes one of the rolls of tens out of his pocket and leaves it on my desk, where it uncurls slowly, like a creature awakening after hibernation.
    When I’m alone again, I flick through the notes—I’ve seen plenty of fakes, and these are real. Then I sit there rattling my pencil against the desk. Strange, isn’t it, how you can think of yourself as one thing for ninety-five percent of your waking life, and then an encounter with something or someone jerks you into remembering you’re something else, that other five percent that’s always been there, but slumbering, keeping its head down. I’m subtly different from the person