NIGHT DRIVER
I’ve driven a lot of people around this town. Thousands. I’ve taxied expecting mothers to the maternity ward, patients to the hospice, and played a minor role in every milestone in between. Sometimes they speak, the passengers. More often these days, they don’t. The backseat glows with the light from their phones, and that’s alright. What is there to say? Faces come and go in the rear-view mirror, but some meetings, even the briefest, stay with you. After the sun goes down, anything can happen.
The following occurred in October 1989. It had rained all day – there’s always work in rain – but had cleared up by ten and the night was slow. Dead, actually. I’d been sitting at the rank for more than an hour when I finally gave up and went wandering.
Sometimes, when I wasn’t quite ready to call it a night, I liked to drive six miles south of the town centre to Cheapside. I thought the area must have been named ironically. Cheapside, with its mansions backing onto the golf course; by that logic, the estate on which I lived with my wife and girls should’ve been called Richside.
A strange car prowling these roads might’ve drawn suspicion, but I always kept my bubble lit and often I did find custom. Even better, it was the sort of custom that wouldn’t vomit on the upholstery or run out once we’d reached the destination. Back in town, I’d had my float robbed half a dozen times, twice at knifepoint and once when I’d chased a runner who led me straight to his waiting friends. Now I carried a wooden billy club in the pocket of my door. All the drivers did. Working at night, working for cash, you soon learned that the world could bite.
I had no premonition of trouble, saw no ominous signs
I didn’t get the sense something was wrong until I saw the woman
in my flask of tea. I was just a man in his early thirties, following his own headlights, dreaming big. One day we’d live out here, I thought. One day soon.
Up ahead, the gem of Cheapside: my Dream House. I had no idea who lived there then – by the following week, the whole country would know – but, assuming I didn’t have a passenger, I would always slow down as I passed. At Christmas, the house had the best lights in town, even better than the displays on the high street; the rest of the year, it was spectacular enough without them. The Dream House; that’s how I’d thought of it before that night, and I would soon discover the irony in that name too.
I didn’t get the sense that something was wrong until I actually saw the woman. She was coming down the driveway, skirting the parked Bentley, moving away from the house. She was limping, but that didn’t seem to be slowing her much.
In my time, I’ve seen it all. I’ve facilitated more affairs than I could count. Rescued bloody men from beatings when the pubs kick out, and bloodier women from their spouses. I’ve driven drug dealers to clients and clients to dealers without qualm. Yet in that moment, when I saw that silhouette barrelling away from that picturesque property – waving now, flagging me down – I very nearly kept on driving. I don’t know why. I’d had no premonitions up until that point, and there was nothing supernatural about it now; it just felt, somehow, like I’d landed in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. It smelled like more trouble than it could be worth. Perhaps it was because
of the house itself. Power is intimidating, and the problems of the powerful are best avoided. Maybe it was just the illusion of the perfect house, something I enjoyed and didn’t want to spoil for myself.
Either way, I decided to drive on. Pretend, even to myself, that I never really saw her. Go home to my family.
That, I think, is what stopped me: an image of the people I loved needing help… and help just looking the other way. Sighing, I pressed the brake and came to a complete stop. My life has never felt quite the same since.
She opened the rear door, momentarily illuminating the dome light overhead, and fell in behind me. At first, she only panted. ‘Bus station. I have to make a stop first, though. Stanley Street, bottom end.’
I never asked if she was alright. I just drove, because that’s all she was paying me to do.
A silly argument, I told myself. The daughter of a bickering family. And yes – though I couldn’t see her clearly in the mirror, nothing but two sad eyes reddened from crying – I realised now that I’d been wrong to think her a woman. She was a girl, eighteen at most. I reconstructed the image in my mind, the sight of her on the driveway. Her coat had been much too large. A man’s overcoat, lapelled, fancy. Something she’d grabbed in a blind fury on her way out of the house.
It was only once I’d arrived at Stanley Street that I began to feel inexplicably uneasy. The road is a dead-end, progressing from terraced housing to overgrowth. Beyond that there is some ragged wire fencing, and beyond that is Stanley Pond, a stretch of water that’s almost the size of a reservoir and rumoured to be bottomless. The whole area is wasteland.
‘How far down?’ I asked, knowing the answer already. ‘Right to the end.’ I swallowed, a man of 250lbs made acutely nervous by a girl of maybe 100. She’d brought something into my car: a tension, tightly coiled.
‘Here’s OK,’ she said once I’d reached the bottom, as if I could go any further. ‘You’ll wait, won’t you? I’ll be two minutes. Please don’t go.’ Something about that request
– ‘please’ – made my mouth go dry. ‘Meter’s running.’
She got out and disappeared. She went right into the overgrowth.
I waited. Minutes passed. I felt too conspicuous with the headlights on, lit up like the Dream House in December, but I didn’t want to turn them off and sit here in the dark. It seemed all too plausible that her friends would come rushing out at any second, to drag me to that cold water, where they would drown me for my night’s meagre earnings. I caressed the gearstick. I considered driving away. What was she doing in there? An answer came at once, a flash-memory of her sad, reddened eyes. Somebody was going to drown, but it wouldn’t be me. The girl wasn’t planning on coming back. Not ever.
Had cruel fate put me on that street at the exact moment she’d come storming out of the house? Had I driven a young woman to her suicide?
I killed the engine – this might, after all, have been some ploy to steal my car and I didn’t want to leave it running – and got out, taking my billy club. I closed the door silently behind me and made my way into the darkness.
Thickets, I guess you’d call them. Overgrown weeds strewn with litter, broken bottles… I crept through a hole in the fence, a large man with a club following a frightened girl. I just had time to think ‘this is how you end up in the papers’, and then I saw her.
She was crouched at the pond’s edge with her back to me. She was naked, scrubbing her pale skin with murky water. I made to turn around, heat rushing into my face, but something caught my eye. The clothes she’d been wearing beneath the overcoat were beside her. The moonlight wasn’t bright, but I could see blood splattered on the material. There was enough of it for me to see. More than enough. Atop the clothes was a long blade, which she proceeded to rinse off in the pond.
I didn’t move. Only watched. For how long, I’m not sure.
She had two large holdalls; they must’ve been here all along, planned, premeditated. From one, she took a clean outfit and got dressed. Into the other, which was empty, she stuffed her soiled clothes, blade and overcoat. She added rocks from a neatly prepared stack. Very efficient. She zipped this bag and launched it. I was already scrambling back through the fence when I heard the distant splash.
I’d just put my car into reverse, ready to bolt, when she let herself in behind me.
A moment spun out between us. My hand inched back to my club. I could feel her considering me. She’d brought the second holdall with her; it probably contained everything she owned. I heard two words creak from my own mouth. ‘Bus station.’
‘Bus station,’ she agreed. I drove. Her eyes – cat’s eyes now, glimmering and knowing – watched me in the mirror. The journey seemed long. Our silence was huge. Outside the station, I took her cash. She opened the door, swung one leg out, and paused. We were alone in the drop-off zone.
‘Do you know who lived in that house?’ she asked.
Lived. Past tense. I didn’t answer.
‘A monster. A man who’s done things you couldn’t imagine. Things nobody would ever believe. There’ll be questions. Maybe even a reward. Just… don’t believe everything that you hear. It’s over now. Done is done, and he deserved it all. Believe me. He earned it.’
Then, without another backwards glance, she walked out of my life and I went home to my daughters.
By the following evening, it was national news. The tributes went on for weeks. A sort of shrine was set up outside the house on Cheapside; flowers, candles, pillar of the community stuff. They called it a burglary gone wrong. A slow, cruel way to die. His family made public appeals, and those were upsetting to see. They wanted closure and I could give it. Several times I picked up the phone. I never dialled. I waited for a knock at my door. The knock never came.
They named a wing of the children’s hospital after him. My granddaughter was there last year. Nothing serious, thank God. I walked through the door with his name on the plaque, and I felt nothing. Done, after all, is done.
We never did move to Cheapside. I still drive, but the job has changed. No more bubble on the roof. The company I work for, it’s all managed through an app; names upfront, paid online. Still, every now and then when I’m out there alone, and a passenger gets in behind me, I wonder. Just for a moment, I feel my stomach tighten. See glimmering eyes in my mirror. After the sun goes down, anything can happen. When night falls, in this job, you could meet just about anyone.
They called it a burglary gone wrong – a cruel way to die