The Fare to Nowhere

The request came in at twenty past eleven, on a wet Tuesday night in October, and I accepted it because I had been parked outside the Harcastle Co-operative for forty minutes with nothing but a cold flask for company. The pickup pin sat at the far end of Harcastle Road, where the street lamps give out and the road drops towards the railway cutting. I had never been given a fare there. The estimate was eleven minutes away.

I drove it in nine. The rain came in sideways off the allotments, and the wipers on my Skoda have never cleared more than the middle two-thirds of the glass. At the underpass I slowed, as I always do, because the road narrows there and the brick sweats. The work phone sat clamped in its mount on the dashboard, and the pin on its screen showed a blue dot, then a blue dot with a ring around it, then the word *Arriving*.

Then the screen froze.

I have driven for the app for three years and I know its habits. It stalls in the cutting and under the rail bridge; it stalls whenever a lorry parks too close to the mast on Fenner Lane. A frozen screen is nothing. The map goes grey, the little car stops turning, and the radio carries on without it. I put the handbrake on and counted, as one does. One. Two. The heater ticked. Three. Somewhere behind me a drainpipe was emptying itself onto the tarmac.

Four, and the display came back, and the rear door was shut.

I had not heard it open. I want to be exact about this. I heard no latch, no change in the weight of the car on its springs, no rush of rain. But the interior light was off, as I had left it, and in the mirror there was a man sitting directly behind me, hands folded on his knees, a hat on his lap.

"Good evening," he said. "I'm sorry to have kept you."

"Mr Drummond?" I said, because the app said so. *Harold D., 4.9 stars.* There was no photograph.

"That's right."

He was perhaps sixty. His face had the colour of wet slate, not ill, exactly, but finished with colour, and his raincoat was dry. I noticed that at once and decided not to notice it. The coat was of a cut my father wore. The hat on his knee was a flat cap, and it was dry as well.

"Where are we heading?"

He gave me an address: *Number nine, Wick Yard, off the Harcastle Road.* I typed it. The app considered it and returned a small red line of text. *Address not found.* I tried it without the number, then without the yard. Nothing. I said so, apologetically, and offered to use my own map.

"You won't need it," said Mr Drummond. "Keep to the road. I shall tell you." He settled back. "You mustn't mind the quiet, Mr Whitlow. I'm not much for conversation."

I had not told him my name. It was on the dashboard card, of course, in the little plastic window, and I told myself that.

I released the handbrake. The display was still lit, and in the corner, where the bars of signal should have been, there was a single grey dash. Beside it, in type too small to read, the app had begun to count something upwards.

In the mirror, Mr Drummond was sitting very still. It seemed to me that the back seat was a little narrower than it had been.

• • •

I drove on because there was nothing else to do. Mr Drummond named the turnings a half-second before I reached them, *left here, now the second right*, in a voice with no weight behind it, and at the end of Wick Yard there was no Number nine. There was a wall, a drain, and a sodium lamp that had been dead long enough to grow moss. I stopped. When I turned in my seat the back was empty, the leather dry, the cushion not even dented. The work phone gave three bars of signal and a rating request. I did not give one.

On Wednesday the account asked for me again.

*Harold D.* The pickup was the Harcastle Road underpass, where the concrete takes every bar from the screen, and I told myself I would cancel. My thumb was on the button when everything stopped. The picture did not go black. It held, bright and perfectly still, and the clock in the corner stopped at 22:41. I heard the rear door close. Nothing had opened it.

"Good evening, Mr Whitlow."

He sat behind the passenger headrest now, no longer in the middle. I could see the flat cap in the corner of the mirror, and one grey ear. "Mr Drummond," I said. "What is it you want? Where is it you want to go?" He said, "Keep to the road." The clock moved. 22:42. I drove him through four miles of wet streets that led, as before, to nothing. He spoke only to direct me. When I asked a third time what he wanted, he looked out of the window as a man does who has been asked something rude.

On Thursday I took the pickup in the car park behind the Harcastle Infirmary, which has been shuttered since the spring, with plywood across the casualty doors and a single fox watching me from the ambulance bay. I had decided to keep both hands on the wheel and not turn. The display froze again. I counted. At four seconds the cold arrived at my right shoulder, the way a draught arrives from a door you thought was shut, and a hand came down upon the console between the seats.

It was a large hand, grey as the face, the nails cut square. It lay beside the gear stick with the fingers a little spread, patient, exactly where a driver rests his own. There was a gold ring on it, worn thin. A faint smell came with it, and I knew it before I could name it: engine oil, and pipe tobacco, and the inside of an old coat.

"Mr Drummond," I said, and my voice did something I had not permitted it to do. "Please. What do you want?"

He did not answer. He was looking, I think, at the wheel. I could feel him looking at the place where my hands were.

The picture thawed. 23:17. A single bar of signal came back, and the app, with its usual cheerfulness, congratulated me on a ride completed.

The hand was still on the console. It stayed there for the whole drive home, and I did not once look down. When I parked outside Alder Close and switched off the engine, I sat a long minute listening to the rain, and then I heard the rear door open and close, quietly, and I understood that he had stepped out first.

• • •

I did not telephone anyone that night. I sat in the kitchen with the lights on and the back door locked and a cup of tea I never drank. At some point after two the cup was cold, and I found I had been watching the chair opposite me.

In the morning I rang the driver support line from the bottom of the garden, standing among the wet bean poles. It seemed to me that a thing which could follow a car might not follow a signal as far as a shed. I used the house phone, the cordless one, carried down the path with its aerial out. The work phone, the one that ran the app, I had left in my coat pocket on the hook by the shed door.

There was a menu. There was a recording that told me my call was important. After eleven minutes a young woman took my driver number and my name, asked me to describe the issue, and listened to the description with the courteous blankness of someone reading from a card. She said she would put me through to a supervisor. The line clicked twice.

"Hargreaves," said a man. "Vernon Hargreaves. Go ahead, Mr Whitlow."

His voice was flat and unhurried, a voice with the edges planed off. I told him everything: the Tuesday request, the four seconds, the man in the back, the three nights since, the hand on the console. I said the account name twice, and spelled it. I heard him typing, slow, two fingers by the sound of it.

"There's no Drummond," he said. "Not as a rider, not as a driver. No account under that name, no trips to or from Alder Close with that profile. I've pulled your history for the last fourteen days. Every fare you've taken is matched to a named passenger with a payment on file."

"Then look at Harcastle Road," I said. "The underpass. The car park behind the infirmary."

More typing. Somewhere behind him a door closed, and the sound of it went on a little too long, as if the room were larger than a room ought to be.

"What I have," said Vernon, "is you. You've been logged in for six hours, Mr Whitlow. Same stretch of Harcastle Road. Your location hasn't moved since eleven last night, and your status has not changed. It still shows you available." He paused. "Are you at the car now?"

"I'm in my garden."

"Yes," he said. "That's what's odd about it."

I waited for him to suggest a doctor, or a rest. He did neither. The typing had stopped, and the line carried only the thin sound of an open connection, the sound of a long corridor. I counted nine seconds. I was going to say his name when he spoke again, and his voice had lost its flatness. It had become careful.

"I'm going to tell you something that is not in the script. I looked at the wrong screen. The account exists. It was never deleted, only flagged, and I am looking at the flag now." A breath. "Harold Drummond. He drove a cab on Harcastle Road for twenty-two years, and in November 1987 he went out on a wet night and was not seen again. The cab was never found. The account was opened for him afterwards, Mr Whitlow. Opened. Nobody here can tell me by whom."

"That is not possible," I said, and heard how little it was worth.

"There's a note on the flag. Head office has been told that the application fails in one circumstance only. When a ride is marked completed that was never started." The corridor sound swelled behind him. "Mr Whitlow, did your app congratulate you last night?"

I did not answer. Down by the fence the bean poles ticked in the wind, and in the coat on the hook the work phone, which I had not touched, gave a single soft chime.

• • •

I did not answer the supervisor. I let the line run on, the corridor sound and Vernon Hargreaves breathing in it. I took the work phone out of the coat on the hook and read what it said. *Trip completed. Thank you for driving, Douglas. You earned £0.00.* There was a rating beneath it, five stars, and no name against it.

"Mr Whitlow?"

"I'm here."

"Then I'll say the rest of it. The logs show your app has dropped out eleven times in three nights. Each time, directly afterwards, the trip is marked complete. Nobody has ever started one." He cleared his throat. "I would not take another request."

I thanked him. I ended the call. I stood among the bean poles with the rain beginning again, and I laid the three nights out in a row, as I would have laid out a week's takings.

He had never wanted to go anywhere. That was the thing I had missed. He had given me an address that was not in the system, and an address that does not exist cannot be reached, and so the journey could never end. That was why he had never once asked me to hurry. He had asked me only to be easy with the silence.

He had moved from the back seat to the headrest, and from the headrest to my shoulder, one reach of the arm at a time. Each reach had been made in the four or five seconds when the display froze and the road stopped being a road. I had taken those seconds for faults. They were the only seconds in which the car belonged to nobody, and he had been using them as a man uses a gap in a hedge.

He was not a passenger. He was a driver who had lost his seat in 1987, on a wet night, on that same stretch of tarmac, and he was working his way back to the wheel.

I ought to have deleted the application. I ought to have sold the car. I did neither, and I have thought since about why, and the honest answer is that I wanted to be certain. A man will walk into a good deal for the sake of certainty.

At ten past eleven that night, with the work phone clipped back into its mount on the dash, it chimed again. *New request. Harcastle Road underpass. 4 min.* The account name was blank.

I drove there with the wipers on their slowest setting. The underpass is two hundred yards of brick and sodium light, with a drain at the lowest point that has been overflowing since the council last mentioned it. I stopped at the mouth, set the handbrake, and looked down into it. The signal bar on the screen had already shrunk to a single stroke. I watched it flicker. The back seat was empty, and the mirror showed me only my own face.

I turned the heater off. I did not want warmth to confuse what came. Then I pressed the button on the side of the handset and held it until it asked whether I was sure, and I said aloud, "Yes," as if someone had asked me.

The screen went black. The little blue light on the mount, which had been lit for three years, went out.

I released the handbrake, put the car into gear and rolled forward into the underpass. Behind me, with no sound of a door, the rear seat took a man's weight and settled.

• • •

The hand on mine was cold in a way I can only call dry. There was no damp in it, though the whole city outside was running with rain. It lay over my knuckles on the gear stick and the weight of it was exact, each finger placed, as a man might rest his hand on a thing he had owned for many years.

I had thought I would speak. I had prepared a sentence in the car park at home, something about what he wanted, and whether he could say it plainly now that there was no signal to interrupt us. I did not say it. The engine idled. The dashboard, which I had not touched, lost its brightness by degrees. First went the clock, then the fuel gauge, then the small orange lamp for the oil. After that the only light came from the sodium lamps at the mouth of the underpass, and then not even that, for the car had rolled further in than I had meant it to.

The seat behind me creaked as it gave up its weight, and the seat beside me creaked as it took it, though I had heard no one pass between. I did not look. I looked at the windscreen, at the brick curving overhead, at the water running down to the drain. I could smell old upholstery and the sweetish stale smell of a cab that has been smoked in for decades. My own car had never smelled of either.

"Mind the quiet," said a voice beside me, mild and dry. "Most don't."

The hand lifted from mine. I heard the click of a seat belt, mine, being undone, and I felt myself rise, or be raised, with no more effort than a coat being taken from a peg. There was a draught of cold air, a door that did not open, and the sound of the gear lever being worked by someone who knew exactly how stiff it was.

Then the screen in its mount, dead a moment before, lit by itself.

The light was white and very bright after the dark. I had to blink before I could read it. I was sitting upright in the back seat, behind the passenger side, where the vinyl was cracked in a long diagonal. Across my chest ran the belt, drawn snug and clicked home by hands that were not mine. I tried my arms. They moved. I did not try the door.

In the driver's seat sat a grey head, bare and narrow, the hair combed flat with something that had dried long ago. Two hands rested on the wheel at ten and two. The wipers began, slowly, on their own. Beyond the glass the underpass was no longer an underpass but a road I did not know, lit and empty, and the rain fell on it without a sound.

The mirror showed me nothing at all. Only the screen spoke, in its small clean letters:

*Trip started. Pickup: 14 Alder Close.*

It was my address. The indicator ticked, left, left, and Harold Drummond drove me home.