Rain

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

Lucy Ashdown is a girl with a mission - to find the driver who ran down and killed her sister Christine. Now she has a lead and she's off to London. Disgraced Detective Joe Lucas is as dedicated as Lucy. HIs aim is to bring her home. By any means necessary. Stepping into her sister's shoes, this small-town girl is thrust into a terrifying night journey of deceit, danger, and degradation. By recreating her sister's journey, she unwittingly heads toward her sister's fate; and even as she believes that she's closing in on the murderer, the murderer is closing in on her.

Release date: April 4, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 306

Sample

THE FIRST time that he saw her was across the parking lot of a motorway service area. It was about a quarter to midnight, and it had been raining. He could see that she was tired and cold and that she’d probably been on her feet for some time. She didn’t look much more than sixteen, although he knew that she was older. She shifted from one foot to the other, waiting with her awkward bundle of papers under her arm like some census-taker worn down by a few too many rebuffs. He saw her walk up and down under the forecourt’s dripping canopy, watching her for about fifteen minutes as she killed time and waited for new arrivals; and then, after she’d covered the same piece of ground more often than he could count, he saw her turn and go back inside.

He got out of his car, and followed.

At the glass doors, he hesitated; now she’d stopped a lone driver at the foot of the overpass stairway, and although the sound didn’t reach him at this distance he was able to supply his own dialogue track as she fumbled out her well-worn photograph and made her familiar pitch.

“Excuse me. I wonder if you can help me … “

She’d been opening with the same line every time, trying not to catch them too much off-guard but still making them wary of some imminent request for money, or a lift, or worse. They’d look at her suspiciously, and the suspicion wouldn’t entirely clear until they’d heard her through and were able to back away, shrugging and shaking their heads. After which she’d repack her papers, stuff the bundle under her arm again, and carry on.

He knew how to observe without being seen. On the outside there were plenty of shadows but inside, and at this hour, there was no crowd to hide him, and so he waited before pushing through the glass doors to follow. She’d gone ahead into the cafeteria, a long gallery of blond wood and oatmeal-coloured tile at the far side of the concourse; from here to there was mostly dead space at night-time, the Game Zone and the magazine shop darkened behind roll-down chain metal shutters. His footsteps echoed in emptiness as he crossed the vinyl floor.

Once inside the cafeteria, its windows a long gallery of darkness overlooking the motorway, he made sure that he kept his distance from her. There were two or three dozen people already inside, most of them late-night, tired-looking, and slow. The haulage drivers were grouped together, spinning out their supper breaks; the rest were bleary tourists in twos and threes, huddled over trays of Danish and tall paper cups of Coke. He was the only one who sat alone.

From a corner table, he watched. When she moved, he would move after.

Two hours of this. It might even have been more.

THERE WAS a pattern to what she was doing. For a while she’d stand out front as she had before, walking the length of the building and looking over the cabs of the lorries pulled nose-in toward it, and then as her energies and her attention flagged she’d go inside and sit for a while, and instead of cabs she’d scan faces, and edge nearer to lorry drivers’ conversations as if in the hope of picking up something useful. Some of them knew her, some of them seemed to know her well. Sometimes she’d sit with a group of them although never, in any sense, did she seem to get close to anyone.

He studied her. From every angle, at every distance apart from close-to. A mousy little kid with a self-administered peroxide job that had almost grown out, weary and driven and dressed in cast-offs like some refugee from an earthquake zone. He saw her tackling strangers, he saw her with her guard down at a corner table when she thought she was unobserved. There, she had the look of a child; some distance travelled, some illusions still intact. But then there would be a new influx of late-running haulage drivers, ambling in and bantering and sometimes tousling each other’s hair, and she’d rise to the occasion with a face that read business as usual.

It grew late. Then it grew later. By now most of the tourists had moved out and even the professionals were beginning to disperse, some back to the road and others to sleep in their cabs. He knew that she’d noticed him a while ago; nothing special, just one new face in a night when there were plenty of new faces mixed in amongst the regulars, but it placed a limit on how long he could continue to stick around without making her suspicious.

So then he went outside, and waited to see what she’d do next.

He stood under the awning, as she’d stood some time before. Even at this hour, there was activity; freight and haulage vehicles had moved in and taken over the daytime car parking area, and their sounds were a backdrop to the night. The engines of static lorries beating time, the occasional hiss and release of air brakes, chains rattling and shackles crashing as furtive uncouplings took place in the distant darkness. Way out beyond the trees there were even more of them, all crowded in together like sleeping cattle; and as he looked, his eyes was caught by the movement of a police Range Rover taking a slow cruise along one of the aisles.

Another world, he thought. Another life, lived by another people. She moved among them, and they seemed to treat her like a mascot.

He wondered if she knew how dangerous this might turn out to be.

A big United Transport wagon, its cab backlit like a dark-faced Jack O’Lantern, was moving into one of the few empty spaces alongside the main building. Its lights were a smeared trail on wet asphalt; the rain was so faint that it was barely perceptible apart from where it showed up directly under the floodlights, but it was a presence that couldn’t be ignored. Many of the nearby drivers had their engines running and their heaters on, their windshields steamy and streaked on the inside.

He decided to go over and wait in the car.

Sitting with his window half-open and the radio playing low, his attention was caught by the police Rover again. It was now beyond the diesel island, its lights snapping on after a prowl along the perimeter road without them, and he half-smiled in the darkness. When the night was long and at its lowest, perhaps it could take a little more than patience to get the boys through.

Night games, he thought, just night games, and as the Rover passed behind his car he glanced in his mirror. He could just about make out the white blurs of the faces of its occupants, and the distinct yellow slash of the reflective bands that they wore over their uniforms.

And then, as they moved on, he returned his attention to the night game that was his own.

She came out only a couple of minutes later. Same spot, essentially the same routine. Jesus, did she never grow tired of it? He switched off the radio and leaned well back, but she wasn’t even looking his way. She was sorting through her papers, looking at them, checking, compiling, rearranging as if for the thousandth time. He felt his heart go out to her as it might to some noble thing reduced to the indignities of a zoo where it could only repeat the same futile pattern of behaviour again and again.

Someone came out through the glass doors behind her, catching her by surprise.

“EXCUSE ME,” she began, but the man was ready.

“No, sorry,” he said.

He was a youngish man with a towel over his shoulder and a soap bag in his hand, his hair in dark spikes from a coldwater splash and a vigorous rub; he wore what had to be one of his oldest sweaters, out at the elbows, and he carried under his arm a two-litre Pepsi bottle that he’d filled at one of the washroom basins. He’d seen her through the glass, had probably decided that at the very least she had to be tapping people for spare change, and had taken the furthest of the doors with the intention of putting himself beyond her range as quickly as possible. He didn’t even pause, or meet her eyes.

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask you!” she called after him as he hurried out and onto the tarmac.

Perhaps it was the indignation in her voice. Or perhaps it was some streak of common decency, that faulty defence mechanism that forces people to sit through a sales pitch for something they know they don’t want, and which sometimes even persuades them to buy. But he stopped, and he turned.

“I’m sorry,” he said, flinching a little under the faint, needling touch of the rain. “But I can’t give lifts. It’s a company rule.”

“I’m not looking for a lift.”

“Then it’s money.”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I just want you to look at a picture of somebody.”

The driver looked at her warily, as if to say And you mean that’s all? But she’d already extracted the photograph from her bundle and was holding it up to show him.

He peered at it. They were about a dozen yards apart, and he’d have needed the eyes of a spy satellite to make it out with any clarity. With an air that he was somehow going to be sorry for this, he came back under the awning and out of the rain.

She didn’t let him take the photograph but held it up before him, and he made a show of looking. An ordinary snapshot, postcard sized, lousy exposure.

“Very nice,” he said without any particular feeling. “Who is she?”

“My sister.”

He took another look, with some interest this time; becoming involved in spite of himself, his wariness already dimmed a little by curiosity, and after glancing at the picture and then again at the face of the girl who was holding it, he said, “I reckon she is, at that.”

“Did you ever see her before?”

“No, but I wouldn’t turn down the chance.”

“She’s dead,” the girl said flatly, and returned the photograph to join her other papers. The young haulage driver stood rumpled and nonplussed as the girl went on, “She died about a year ago. She was hitching up from London. I’m looking for the driver who dropped her off. All I know is that his lorry had some kind of a cross on the front.”

“What, a Jesus-type cross?”

“No, a … ” she didn’t have the exact word, but she raised her forefinger and made an X in the air between them.

The young man said, “I don’t get it. This is what, last year?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re still looking?”

She seemed to be avoiding his eyes, running through her papers again as if in search of something else. “Yes.”

“What about the police?”

“The police aren’t interested now.” She pulled out a well-worn, handwritten list. “Absolutely the last question. Do you ever get around any of these places? They’re all lorry parks and service areas.”

This time, she let him take the paper. He ran his eye down the list and said, “Some of them.”

“Can you keep your eyes open for anything that could be a cross on the front of a cab? It might be painted or a trademark, I just don’t know.”

Some kind of cab design in the form of a St. Andrew’s Cross? Such a feature might not be quite as common as a set of wheels and a tailpipe, but it wasn’t exactly a rarity either, especially not here on one of the main southbound routes coming down out of Scotland and the north. Shivering a little as the night’s cool touch began to seep into him, the driver said, “Well, it’s a bit vague … ”

“I know. Somebody saw her being picked up, but that’s the only thing about it they can remember. She was dropped off less than an hour from home, and that’s when someone ran her down.”

“In a truck?”

“It could have been a truck or a car, nobody’s sure. The police reckon it was hit and run, that’s why they’re not so interested now. They said it was probably joyriders.”

“They could be right.”

“I’d still like to know.”

He handed back the list and said, “Suppose I see something. How do I get in touch?”

“Here,” she said, taking the paper, “or any of these other places. I’m always around.”

“Every night?”

“Just about.”

He shifted the Pepsi bottle from where he’d tucked it under his arm. It was the clear plastic kind, no weight at all when it was empty and as awkward as anything to carry when full. The girl was reassembling her bundle again; each of them was about as well-organised as the other. At the photograph of her sister, she stopped and looked at it as if some once-hidden detail had now been identified for her.

“You really think there’s a resemblance?” she said.

“Absolutely. What’s your name?”

“Lucy Ashdown. My sister was called Chrissie.”

He shifted the bottle again. “Listen,” he said, “I was going to doss down in the cab for a couple of hours. But if you like, I could take you around a few places that you haven’t covered.”

She looked up from the picture.

“No, thanks,” she said.

Maybe he’d sounded too eager, changing his tune too quickly. Or maybe it was simply that she could read him better than he thought; their eyes met and hers were firm and steady while in his could be seen the realisation that, near-child or not, this kid was pretty well bullshit-proof.

He shrugged, and gave her a smile.

Her expression didn’t change.

So then he turned and walked away, back through the rain toward the shelter of his cab.

SHE WATCHED him go.

Lucy Ashdown, just a couple of months shy of her eighteenth birthday. She knew that she looked younger, that was why some of them tried it on. Probably assumed that a kid out so late had to be a lost cause already, so what the hell? Most of the men that she spoke to reacted to her in some way or another, but she’d quickly learned to distinguish the would-be protectors from the would-be seducers, and to get some idea of all the shadings in between. It hadn’t been easy knowledge to acquire, and a couple of times she’d come close to paying heavily for it. Each time, it had been exactly like this—somebody who’d think himself ordinary, probably no history, reading in just a little more than her questions could justify. What might follow, if she was stupid enough to let it, could be the first step toward a doorway that would open for him onto an awesome and exhilarating darkness with the realisation that the question Why Not? didn’t necessarily have any answer. To such men she was just an open wallet on the ground, with no name attached and no-one to observe; and whilst this wasn’t true of everyone, she could see its potential in more than a few.

Lucy had learned to spot this some time back near the beginning.

But for her sister Christine, the lesson seemed to have come too late and at the end.

She looked at her watch. It tended to run slow and the date display never worked at all, so it was only a rough guide at its best. Almost two a.m., and a diminishing likelihood of action between now and the first of the breakfast arrivals around five. There would be a steady drip of possibilities, night-freight drivers on their midway breaks, but no more than that.

What the hell. A quick check over the acreage of parked vehicles, and then she could retreat back inside to keep warm for a while. There was a new night manager—new to her, anyway—so she might have to try to stay out of sight a little more than usual, but once he understood the score with regard to his main clientele she’d probably be okay. She didn’t try to fool herself that she had any influence, but out of the through-flow of regulars she certainly had some friends.

After stowing her papers in a carrier bag which she then tucked under her arm, she set out for a circuit of the parking lot.

The rain could be seen more than it could be felt, a continuous spattering of light-rings on the surfaces of puddles. She didn’t mind it, much; not when didn’t soak her or drive her off the job, as she tended to think of it. The rain reminded her of something that Chrissie had once said to her. They’d never talked much, never even been particularly close in the way that sisters sometimes could be; in a perverse kind of way, Lucy felt closer to Chrissie now than she ever had when she’d been alive. Alive, Chrissie had mostly seemed to ignore her. Now, with the last traces of her fading from notice elsewhere in the world, it was almost as if she belonged to Lucy alone.

“Hello, kid,” she said out loud, because now she’d reached the spot where it had happened.

There was a sloping grass bank over on this far side of the perimeter road, topped by a line of bushes that screened the main service area from a business motel on a spur. The motel had an all-car clientele, vehicles lined up outside their doors like a row of sleeping puppies, somehow giving the impression of being both a safe haven and a soft option. The police had traced most of those who’d been registered on the night of Chrissie’s death, and not one of them had seen or heard a thing. Chrissie had been discovered in the bushes, thrown more than twenty feet by the impact of her collision with some unknown vehicle. Her hand luggage had been found on the roof of a removal van. She was a mess. She hadn’t died straight away, but she was dead by the time that she’d been found.

Looking down at the spot, Lucy felt almost nothing. It was no more than a stretch of oil and rain-streaked boundary road, right out on the edge of the lighted zone. No ghost walked here. The only lingering charge from the event wasn’t material, but emotional. And Lucy carried that with her wherever she might be.

If anything, she reckoned as she turned to re-cross the perimeter road, she’d grown to like it around here.

Let’s face it, she thought, the place had become almost like home. She’d discovered a great and unsuspected sense of mystery in this world, this transient network in which she’d been searching for most of a year; it was a way station outside of reality where no-one else lived and where everyone was just passing through. Where the great powered beasts were the dim intelligences and the rumpled, out-of-shape men that they carried merely their passengers. As she stepped down from the bank and onto the tarmac, she could see a number of them that had grown familiar to her; Road Trains, sixteen-wheelers, five-axle artics, ferry freightliners, semi-trailers, Strato tractors, tankers, tippers.

These weren’t just individual vehicles to her. Each had a place somewhere in her network; she could match faces to many, and routes to a few. The process of discovery had been an eye-opener for her. She’d come to realise that she’d spent almost seventeen years of her life without any real purpose to it, and without any real sense of a place where she belonged; whereas now, thanks to her obsession, she seemed to have both.

As she took a zigzag path to return through the maze of vehicles, only one caught her attention as a total novelty and this was a motorised horse transporter, interior lights on and its side-door open to allow the animals some air; she could glimpse their heads nodding and the moving flanks of live horseflesh as they turned in their stalls. She went around to the front of the blacked-out cab but there was no hint of an X-shaped design of any kind, just a bumper sticker that read God Made the Scots a Wee Bit Better. She thought about taking a note of the number, reckoned that it was probably on a once-only run, a race event maybe, and decided against.

Wearily, and with the dampness finally getting in to make itself felt around the shoulder seams in her coat, she headed back for the bright lights of the main building.

There was a spot down by the Game Zone where she knew she could settle for a while, out of everybody’s way and with enough floor space to check through her documentation. She had more than just a photograph and some lists in her bundle. She had maps of the motorway network, notes on drivers seen and leads suggested, names of drivers who might have mentioned seeing an accident around the time and whom she’d yet to track down. She had all the cuttings from the time of Chrissie’s death, and the brief coverage of her funeral from the local newspaper.

She had a photograph of their father. He knew something about what she did at nights, and didn’t approve. She hadn’t told him everything. And she’d never told him that she carried his picture, either.

She sat cross-legged in the alcove off the main concourse, her papers spread before her and her coat drying out by a warm-air vent at floor level. It had been a slow night and there was little to add, but there was always something to reorganise. Sometimes this gave her satisfaction, sometimes not. Sometimes, when she looked at the vast and disconnected amount of information and thought about the haphazard manner of its gathering, she felt a surge of something dangerously close to despair. In the arcade on the other side of the shutter, the Thunderblade game machine ticked ominously through the night with a pulsing sound that was unsettlingly close to a heartbeat.

Someone tapped her, none too politely, on the shoulder.

“Miss … ” he said firmly, as she looked up.

It was the night manager, the new man. He wore a caramel-coloured uniform jacket that only a blind man would have sported out of choice. As he stood over her, he said, “I want you to pick up your stuff and leave. Right now, please.”

Oh, damn, she thought.

“I’m not causing any trouble,” she said.

“If you want to move through and buy something, fine. But you can’t just hang around the premises all night.”

“I can’t buy anything. I haven’t got any money.” Which was true. Until her next Giro came through, she’d be surviving on goodwill and pennies and maybe a little light shoplifting when she really got close to rock bottom.

“Then there’s nothing here for you. Come on. Out.”

What was needed here was some sharp reply, something that would dumbfound him and destroy his authority and send him away humiliated. But damn it, as usual, the words just seemed to escape her. Wasn’t that always the way? And so instead, flushed with reluctant embarrassment, she regrouped all her papers and took her coat from the vent and clambered to her feet.

She winced a little as she put her coat back on. There had barely been time for it to dry out at all. She wondered if it was worth trying to explain about Chrissie, but decided from the look of him that there probably wasn’t. He looked the kind who could probably suck up honey and shit a pickle. She gave him a quick, tentative smile as she fastened her toggles, and it was deflected like spit from a propeller.

“I’m not trying to be hard,” he said, and was clearly unconcerned whether she believed him or not. “But if any of the customers complains, it’ll be me who has to answer.”

He held out his arm, palm upward, to guide her toward the doors. Where she went beyond that, he didn’t seem to care. Lucy moved as directed, knowing that she had little choice; she survived as she did almost entirely on the goodwill of others and when the goodwill ran out, as it seemed to have here, then much of her buoyancy was lost. Barred from the main building, there would only be one place for her to go; down to the motorway slip road, to stand on the hard shoulder and wait out the night until a sympathetic ride decided to pull over and pick her up … and she hoped to God that it would be a sympathetic ride, and nobody like the nutter who’d stopped for her a couple of months back and then, after about ten minutes of apparent normality, begun a long and rambling confession while calling her by some other woman’s name.

But then, through the plate glass, she witnessed the impending arrival of the cavalry.

The cavalry took the form of three Aberdeen fleet drivers. One looked like a mountain, another looked like a mouse, the third looked like a regular human being but hardly ever spoke and when he did, his accent was so dense that Lucy had difficulty following it. They wore blue uniforms in a way that always made her think of some attic dressing-up chest, and drove spotless refrigerated trailers carrying beef and bacon for the big supermarket chains south of the border. They’d come down in convoy, take a breakfast break at this or some similarly unsociable hour, and then split three ways toward their various distribution centres.

The glass door bounced back before the mountain and the mountain said, “Lucy! How’re you doing, girl?”

And with a glance at the manager, Lucy said, “It looks like I’m leaving.”

The mountain understood her meaning immediately. His name was Wilfrid and he called himself Ted, although every. . .