Kitabı oxu: «Only Darkness»

1

It was a Thursday in December, the night that Debbie saw the killer.

She had just finished her evening class and was on her way out of the college. It was late – about nine-thirty. The students had kept her talking after the class was finished, and by the time she had dumped her books in the staff room and grabbed her coat, Les Walker was standing in the entrance lobby waiting to lock up after her.

He jingled his keys as she approached and tapped his watch meaningfully. ‘Not got a home to go to?’

‘Doesn’t seem much point now,’ she said, looking at her watch in response to his gesture. ‘Sorry. Are you on again first thing?’ Debbie hated keeping people waiting. ‘Have I stopped you from going home?’

Les shook his head. He didn’t seem too put out. ‘No, it’s gone ten by the time we’re finished here. Got to check all the rooms on the top yet.’

He opened the heavy entrance door. A gust of wind pushed it in against him, and a spatter of rain hit the floor. ‘Wild night,’ he observed. ‘Got your car in the top car park? We’ve not locked it yet.’

‘No.’ Debbie looked apprehensively at the shiny dark of the pavement. ‘I’m on the train.’

‘You be careful then.’ Les was serious now. ‘Remember those girls …’

Thanks, Les, I needed that. ‘That was way over outside Doncaster.’

‘Not got him yet. He’ll do it again. That kind of nutter, he’ll keep on till he’s caught. They want hanging, doing something like that, I’ll tell you …’

The sound of feet on the steps outside silenced him, and Rob Neave, the security officer, pushed his way through the door. His hair was plastered to his face with the rain, and water was dripping from his jacket. ‘Finished over here?’ he said to Les. He acknowledged Debbie with a nod.

‘Just got the top floor to do.’ As Rob Neave had overall control of the day-to-day running of the building, and a reputation as a bit of a new broom, the caretakers were wary of him. ‘Just seeing Debbie out. I was telling her …’

The wind gusted again, and the sound of a window swinging back against its hinges stopped him. He looked at Debbie. ‘You be careful, now.’ He disappeared up the stairs, leaving her with Rob Neave.

She finished fastening her briefcase and looked towards the door. ‘I’d better be off,’ she said uncertainly as the wind sent rain spattering across the windows.

‘Are you in the top car park? The lights are out. I’ll walk across with you.’ The car park, late in the evening, was dark and deserted.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks. But I’m on the train.’

He looked at her thoughtfully. She was aware that her mac was only showerproof and her shoes were lightweight for this kind of weather. It was fine this morning! She pulled out her umbrella, and he shook his head and laughed. He held the door open for her and watched her down the steps as she struggled to open her umbrella against the wind, then he closed the door, leaving her to the mercy of the storm.

And it was a storm. The rain was drenching, and the wind carried it round, up, under her umbrella, driving against her, freezing her face as she tried to pull the collar of her coat around her. She hurried down the hill towards the station. She was later than usual, but there was a chance the bad weather might have delayed her train and she had some hope of catching it. If not, she was in for a half-hour wait on a freezing platform. There was a small waiting room, with seats and a wall heater, but it was always locked when the last of the station staff left at nine.

She reached the main road and waited for the lights. It was raining too hard to see clearly if any cars were coming. The air smelt unusually clean. Normally, there was a miasma of car fumes at this junction, but the rain seemed to have cleaned them away. The green man lit up, and she hurried across the road, towards the bridge. She might just do it. As she crossed the bridge, she could hear the river rushing against the narrow banks, swollen by the rain.

Another gust of wind caught her, and she heard the sound of glass shattering. Some insurance jobs tomorrow, she thought, reminding herself to check for fallen roof tiles in the morning. She splashed through the puddle outside the station, and was under cover.

The ticket office was a blank face requesting her to buy her ticket on the train. The screen showing arrivals was a black and white blur – another storm victim. She began to run towards the platform in case her train was in. She hurried down the covered ramp, and then, seeing that there was no train on the platform, slowed down. Had she missed it, or was it late?

The platform was empty, and she began to realize that there was something wrong with the light. It was yellow and flickering, not bright enough. The shadows in the corners were larger and darker, and the waiting room was black. She tried the door. Locked. The opposite platform – the only other platform – was in darkness, and the fair-haired young woman who sometimes shared Debbie’s evening wait on the other side of the rails wasn’t there. There was no one there, so the Doncaster train must have gone.

I didn’t mean to think about Doncaster.

The wind caught the platform sign and sent it rattling on its chain against the pipe work. The rain splashed on the rails, and then stopped. The light flickered again, the strange, yellow light, and then there was silence.

Uneasy, Debbie stood at the edge of the platform looking to see if the train was coming. Her feet crunched in something. She looked down. Glass, broken glass. She remembered the noise of glass breaking as she came over the bridge, and looked round. Up. The glass over the light was broken, and the tube was hanging loose, giving off that dull, flickering light.

That wasn’t the wind. Someone broke that. Someone broke that just as I crossed the bridge. No one came out of the station.

She looked back up the ramp towards the only exit. Her mouth went dry. Someone was standing there at the top of the ramp, not moving, just looking towards her on the platform. She couldn’t see him – it must be a him, he was so big – clearly. The light was behind him. Her sensible brain said, It’s a passenger, don’t be stupid, but the hairs were standing up on her arms, and her heart was thumping. The figure began to move towards her down the ramp.

There’s no way out!

Just then, the sound of the train came up the track. She waited in suspense for its lights in the dark. Her legs felt shaky and she wanted to grab the train door as it went past her, slowing. She pressed the door-open button without waiting for the light, and when the door finally slid open almost fell into the carriage. Then she felt like a fool, and looked out of the window to see what her alarming fellow passenger was doing.

But there was nobody there.

By the time Debbie got home, it was late. She closed her umbrella, shaking it as she did so, and hurried down the passage that led on to the back of the row of small terraced houses. She went in through the kitchen, dumping her coat and umbrella behind the back door, and quickly through to the living room, turned on the gas fire and stood there for a few minutes soaking up the heat. Debbie’s dream was to come back to a warm and welcoming house, but she didn’t have central heating yet, and Debbie couldn’t see when she would be able to afford it. The salary of a young further-education lecturer didn’t allow for luxuries.

The room was starting to warm up now. Debbie looked round it with some pride. She’d bought the house eighteen months ago. It had been, in estate agents’ jargon, in need of modernization. She hadn’t been able to afford rent and a mortgage, so she lived in the house, keeping one room more or less habitable, while the rewiring, plumbing and plastering went on around her. Now it was gradually starting to look the way she wanted it to, and this room was almost finished. Fitted carpets had been beyond her pocket but her mother had offered her the Persian rug from the little-used front room of the house Debbie had grown up in. Debbie accepted the rug, sanded, varnished and sealed the boards herself, and the rug glowed in the middle of the floor. She had changed her mind about a fitted carpet when she had seen how it looked. There was very little furniture in the small room – two easy chairs and a polished table in between. Bookshelves ran up each side of the chimney breast. There were pictures on the walls – a drawing of the woods outside Goldthorpe, and a framed poster for the Monet exhibition that Debbie had seen at the Royal Academy a few years ago. The only other ornaments were a group of photographs on the table.

The photographs were strictly family – her father with a younger Debbie, looking proudly at his daughter as she smiled toothily and waved a trophy. What was that for? The junior swimming gala? Her mother looking unaccustomedly serious in her Open University graduation gown. She’d insisted on having an official photograph taken. I’ve waited long enough for this, she’d told Debbie and her husband. A later picture of her father, taken about a year before he died.

The cat flap sounded its snick-snack rattle, and Debbie’s cat came urgently into the room, tail up, with breathless mews of excitement. She picked it up and went into the kitchen, looking for the tin opener. The cat nibbled her ear and clawed impatiently at her shoulder. She put it on the floor, where it wove in and out between her feet, tripping her up as she filled a dish with food. When the dish was on the floor, the cat single-mindedly put its head down and ate. Debbie hadn’t meant to get a cat. She was out a lot, she needed to go away, it just wasn’t convenient, but when a bedraggled kitten had turned up cowering behind the old shed in the garden, she couldn’t turn it away. It had taken her a week to coax the little animal closer and nearly a week more before she could touch it. After that it began to come in the house. Two weeks later, it was turning its nose up at cheap cat food and ambushing Debbie’s ankles as she went past. She called it Buttercup, because of its yellow tabby coat.

She remembered her wet mac in the kitchen, so she took it into the hall and hung it on a hook. If it didn’t dry in time, she’d just have to wear her jacket tomorrow. She was reluctant to sit down and be quiet. Usually after an evening class, she spent maybe half an hour just winding down, having a glass of wine or maybe a beer, listening to music; and then she would take another glass of wine into the bathroom and run a hot deep bath – setting the water heater to come on early on Thursdays was one of her extravagances – then lie there sipping wine and relaxing. When she felt sleepy, she went to bed, and usually fell asleep in minutes, not waking again until the alarm went off at eight.

She poured herself a glass of wine, went back into the living room and sat down in front of the fire. The memory of that encounter at the station lingered and she couldn’t settle. When she closed her eyes, she could see that strange light. The drumming of the rain on her window became the drumming of the rain on the station canopy. The figure on the platform began to walk towards her and her legs were heavy and she couldn’t move. She tried to call out but her voice was too weak to make any sound. She looked for the train coming in, but the line was gone and a fast-flowing river, smooth and dangerous, ran beside her. She looked at the ground and the river was running underneath her feet. The thin lattice she was standing on began to crumble away. The dark figure was behind her, but she couldn’t see it.

She jerked awake in the chair, the image shattering, the rushing of the river becoming the hiss of the gas fire. It was time she was in bed.

Early next morning, in the small hours, after the storm had blown itself out, a freight train taking a load of scrap from Leeds to Sheffield slowed a bit as the train approached the junction near Rawmarsh, in response to the signal. As it speeded up again beyond the junction, the driver noticed something slumped against a post by the rails. It could have been a sack of rubbish. He radioed through and the call went to the local police to investigate.

‘Where exactly did he say?’ Kevin Naylor walked along the track side and shone his torch along the line towards the bridge. The railway was particularly inaccessible here, and they’d had to bump the car along a muddy bridle path and walk to the bridge.

‘Just beyond the junction.’ His partner, Cath Hill, was fed up. It was cold and wet and she didn’t want to push through the thick undergrowth alongside the track in search of somebody’s dumped rubbish. They’d been heading back for a break when the call had come through. She poked around in the bushes. ‘Enough condoms here to start a factory. It’s along the line, he was coming through the junction, he said. He hadn’t stopped but he’d slowed right down, so it’s probably not too far along. He said something about a post. Let’s get this done and get back to the car.’

As they walked back along the line, playing their torches ahead, the light from the steelworks faded behind them. Cath shone her torch against the bushes. The wet leaves glistened back at her, but the light hardly penetrated the shadows in the thick foliage. Gravel crunched underfoot, and something rustled and moved in the undergrowth. She shone her torch at the sound, but it wasn’t repeated. The wind was getting up again, and Cath had to brace herself as it rattled the leaves, releasing a sudden spatter of rain water. Ahead was a cutting where the track ran into darkness. Cath didn’t fancy going into that narrow space without knowing what was ahead. The hairs on her arms were beginning to rise, and she looked back along the track to make sure she wasn’t alone.

She shone her torch through the gully, playing the light up and down the wet stone. She could see the post now, just beyond the far end, and, yes, there was something bulky lying against it. Her fatigue had gone, and she felt apprehension tightening her stomach. Her senses sharpened. She called to Kevin who was shining his torch into the undergrowth further back along the line. He started in her direction. Cath walked towards the post. She didn’t hurry now because she knew what was there. In the torchlight she could already see fair hair, and as she got nearer she could see the woman’s face oddly shadowed, her eyes great pools of darkness. She moved up to the woman and crouched down in front of her, shining the torch directly into her face.

‘Oh Christ, oh shit!’ She pulled the torch back as Kevin’s shone over her shoulder. She heard his exclamation as he turned away. The lower half of the woman’s face was covered with black tape that had made it appear shadowed from a distance. Her eyes were – not there. She stared at them from bloody sockets, her head held back against the post by the wire twisted tight around her neck.

Rob Neave turned over in bed, woken up by his radio. Half past five, just time for the shipping forecast and Farming Today. He usually woke at this time, early shift or not, and either listened to the radio as he got up, or lay in bed listening as the shipping forecast became the farming programme, and then Today. The farmers were worrying about pigs again this morning. He was getting to be an expert on pigs – the price of pork, anyway. He’d never seen a real pig in his life.

He decided to go in for the seven-thirty start again. There wasn’t too much to be at home for, and if he didn’t have to go to work, he found it hard to get out of bed at all. Didn’t seem much point really. He hadn’t got in until gone ten the night before, listened to some music, drunk a couple of beers. It had been a long day, so he’d made himself something to eat and gone to bed. Sleep hadn’t come easily. He’d turned on the radio in the end and listened through close-down and then the World Service.

He was coming out of the shower, towelling himself when he caught the end of the first news bulletin … The body of a woman was found on railway lines early this morning in South Yorkshire. A police spokesman commented that it is too early to say how the woman had died. Three women have been killed in the South Yorkshire region in the past eighteen months and their bodies left on or near railway tracks …

He listened to the end of the bulletin which just recapped on the killings, but gave no more information about the dead woman. He could see Deborah Sykes in her light mac, struggling to hold her umbrella straight as she had disappeared into the storm the night before. He decided to leave breakfast, and started pulling his clothes on, looking round for his keys and cash. Ten minutes later he was braking for the first set of lights that held him on red in the middle of an empty road.