The rain beat monotonously on the huge expanse of triplex. Two twenty-four-inch wiper blades religiously drew their proscribed arcs across the centre of screen and, occasionally, when the gusting wind blew rain in huge sheets of heavy water and they seemed unable to clear the deluge, the next sweep mercifully restored the view ahead. The A3 (South) on Fridays was the end of the week for thirty-three year old John Towers – tonight could have been the end of the world for all he knew since Portsmouth was still thirty-eight miles hence and the luscious Sandra two hours away. The late autumn gale had been driving across southern England all day and the roads were awash with water and the mulch of brown leaves meaning that, in the heavy traffic, visibility was limited and driving conditions were hazardous. Thirty-eight tons of articulated Scania were scant protection from driving winds on the more exposed sections of the highway, but offered a lofty view of the road ahead over the lesser autos that scampered past the rumbling leviathan that soaking evening.
Ahead was the long drag up to the aptly named Devil’s Punchbowl. Apt, because it was the only remaining section of the A3 from London to Portsmouth that was still single carriageway and, understandably, a bottleneck of automanic proportions during the daily commuter migrations. In the summer the Punchbowl offers stunning northerly views of the green rolling hills of Surrey for Sunday morning walkers – the natural amphitheatre protecting all those who used the hilltop cafe and the septuagenarian-friendly paths. This evening there would have been no view and anyone foolhardy enough to have left the warmth and relative comfort of their car would have been soaked in seconds by the driving, drenching rain.
Approaching the beginning of the single carriageway section, John Towers could see the brake lights being applied by the vehicles ahead as they slowed to funnel into the wooded section that marked the beginning of the approach to the Punchbowl. High mounted ‘safety’ lights with their brighter bulbs momentarily blinded all that followed in the spray. Fully-loaded with boxes of jeans destined for a processing plant just outside Portsmouth – they washed and pressed them before their delivery to stores across the South – meant that the forward momentum generated by his truck and notwithstanding the fact that he was travelling up an incline, he would have to brake as well. A quick check in the offside door mirror revealed that a similarly proportioned giant to his own was close to his rear doors, its own headlights reflecting back into the cab so that John could clearly see the face of the driver, an older man with a shirt and tie. A Stobart truck surmised John. He gently applied the powerful air brakes so as not to surprise his fellow tarmac tramper, and the Scania started to slow.
About one hundred yards before the end of the dual-carriageway is a parking area where long distance travellers stop to relieve themselves in the bushes and HGV drivers coming south from the north of the country occasionally sleep a few hours to comply with the stringent tachograph rules before the early morning dash to the ferry-port. When John was approximately thirty yards from the entrance to the parking area something next to the carriageway caught his eye. Standing on the wide, grassed kerb, and flashing like a strobe light from the passing headlights, stood a figure braced against the wind and rain, a hand reaching out to the traffic with an upturned thumb. John could just make out what looked like a bag in the other hand, being blown about in the swirling wind. The Scania’s speed was easing to the early thirties and John made a decision. He never picked up hitchhikers but there was something about the forlorn figure that made him question its countenance. What, he worried, could possibly be the reason for a person needing to hitch a lift in a spot as remote as this, and on an evening so foul. Could it be that it was a woman and her broken down car was sitting, disabled with rain-soaked electrics, in the parking area, protecting her crying baby still strapped into its safety seat. What would he do if, in the days that followed, he learned that a woman had been sucked, unnoticed, into the road by the vicious vortex from a vehicle such as his and had, like a fox, been squeezed into the bitumen by the south-bound commute whilst her baby cried out the night. He snapped on his left indicator. As he passed the figure by the roadside he was afforded a better view as his own headlights swept the nearside kerb. His two-second view showed that the person certainly had long fair hair and was of a slight build, but the face was obscured by tassles of hair that were plastered across her face. They must be soaking thought John as he swept into the lay-by, his orange indicator repeater lights accentuating the shadows of the bushes that grew close to the kerb.
As he pulled to a stop near the top end of the lay-by, one of Eddie Stobart's finest, sanitised, heavily marketed, and immaculately turned out trucks which had been following him, swept past, the driver staring ahead into the maelstrom, his brake lights blazing and his wheels throwing up mountains of spray into the offside of John’s Scania. As the cab gently rocked from side to side from the blast that accompanied the spray, John looked into his mirrors one at a time. He could see no sign of the hitchhiker who was probably forty or fifty yards behind him. He could also see no sign of a car in the lay-by.
A minute passed as John, staring into his nearside mirror, looked for the hiker. No sign. Suddenly he saw something that startled him. A face appeared at the nearside passenger window. Being that he was startled by the sudden appearance of seeing someone at all when he had not seen them approach along the flanks of his truck, made the face seem even more frightening than perhaps it really was. It was the face of an unshaven man who looked to be in his early thirties with short dark hair and a large gold earring in his right ear. He seemed to be pulling on the door handle of the large door which was, thankfully, refusing to open on account that it was locked, and frantically mouthing soundless and indecipherable words, whilst water dripped from his nose and his ears. After staring at the face for a couple of seconds, a sudden screech, caused by the windscreen wipers that were now receiving less raindrops than they had been due to the fact that the Scania was stationary and the rain was being collected by the remaining leaves in the trees which hung darkly overhead, brought John to his senses. Something was wrong. This was not the tragic figure he had seen further down the road. This was something else.
Flicking the gearlever into first, John launched the Scania forward towards the exit of the lay-by. He didn’t look again at the face in the window and lifted his foot only momentarily from the accelerator before bolting into the nearside lane of decelerating traffic. Thirty-three year old Euan Roberts in his Lexus IS350, was aware that the dulcet tones of Grapelli which were wafting from the eight speaker sound system, had evaporated from his aural receptors as he was faced with the side of the thirty-eight tonner bearing down on his nearside flank. Dangerously stabbing the brake pedal with a velocity that would have unhinged the precarious balance between the rubber tyres and the rain-soaked road of a lesser car, the Lexus’ ABS swiftly slowed the sporting saloon to within a whisker of the huge girder, which passed as a bumper at the foaming rear of the truck. Glancing into his rear-view mirror, Euan saw that the following traffic was making similar sombre-reducing braking manoeuvres to avoid collisions with the vehicles ahead of them. Mercifully, they all survived the intrusion into their cosseted journeys and continued on their way. Only Euan, who had come to within centimetres of being charged the £500 excess charge made by his employers’ insurers to quell the over-indulgent driving habits of their software salesmen in their fast, upmarket marques, did not relax. He vowed to remind the driver of the truck just how close he had been to wiping out the mortgaged executive and his penile projectile. The set of traffic lights at Hindhead would be where he would get him. Staying close to rear of the box of steel-clad jeans and moving to the offside lane just as the two vehicles approached the glaring amber lights, he pulled up alongside the towering cab and leapt out of his warm, climactically controlled environment into the storm of the year. Loudly rebuking his erstwhile murderer whilst walking around the front of his car, Euan was faced with the sight of the driver sitting motionless in his cab, staring ahead, eight feet from the ground. Euan tugged at the door handle which failed to open the slab-like door and, standing on the step leading up to the cab, put his face to the drivers window whilst screaming obscenities and holding up a two-fingered gesture more common with football awaydayers when greeting their Saturday afternoon hosts. The driver turned his head slowly toward Euan and, with a look of absolute fear, drove forward onto the busy junction.
Euan leapt away from the lorry and fell against the nearside wing of his Lexus, twisting his right ankle as landed. The lorry disappeared in a cloud of spray, hitting nothing as the east-west traffic slewed to avoid its perilous inexpedience into their paths. Having neither the presence of mind nor a chance in hell of reading the number plate, Euan staggered painfully back to his seat, his soaking shirt sticking to his back and his tie wrapped angrily around his neck. The pain from his ankle was intense and rendered him unable to safely control the accelerator pedal. The honking of a horn from behind him and the movement of traffic on the inside lane signalled that the lights had changed from red to green. Gently pushing the gearlever into first, Euan gingerly propelled the Lexus away from the lights and across the inside lane to a bus lay-by. The pain was too great to continue and, using his mobile, he dialled up Gail explain the reason why he would be late. Grapelli swung away impervious.
The remainder of the journey to Portsmouth was largely uneventful for John Towers. The rain subsided to a miserable drizzle and traffic thinned away into the comfort of the weekend. Reversing into the soaking unloading bay John reflected on his journey. By now he had come down from the desperate fear that had sent him hurtling across the junction at Hindhead. By now he had decided that he must have been overcome by tiredness due to the long week and the atrocious weather. He had rationalised the horror at seeing the face at the window. He now realised that it was probably a couple of ‘travellers’ on their way to the camp outside Petersfield which the local Press had vociferated so venomously about over the past couple of weeks. The second face was that of some motorist he must have upset in his flight from the lay-by – big trucks very rarely see other motorists, especially when they are doing something unexpected. Yes, he concluded, a couple of pints of Stella at the Beacon would soon sort him out. Forget it.
Looking in his mirror he was disappointed to see that there was no-one at the bay seeing him back. Backing up as far as he thought necessary, he leapt from the cab and walked to the back of the truck. Perfect; the rear bumpers were six inches from the concrete apron. Just as he spun around to return to the cab to kill the still rumbling engine, his eye caught sight of something unexpected. At first he thought it was a crisp wrapper that had been whipped up by the swirling winds and had been caught in the left hand of the two long vertical bars that secured the rear doors. When he moved closer to remove the offending litter, he suddenly recoiled in horror. Caught in the bar were two fingers. Crying out in repulsion and nausea, the events of the evening flashed through his head all over again. They were the girls’ fingers – they were small and white with carefully manicured nails so new they must be. She must have reached the back of the truck just as he pulled away and, in her desperation for a lift she must have reached out at the rear of the truck and the first two fingers of her right hand had become stuck behind the bar. How long had he dragged her along before the tendons and flesh gave way? Was she pulled along on her knees, or did her initial stumble wrench the fingers from their sockets? What unimaginable pain must she be in now – was she still lying there on the tarmac in the pouring rain, blood oozing into the dark puddles.
Bob and Andy found John lying next to his lorry – he was lying on his back staring upwards with unblinking eyes. They ran over to him, thinking that he may have been hit by someone or that he had had a heart attack. He said nothing, he just stared. Bob sent Andy for help.
That night and the following morning the Surrey Constabulary conducted an intense search of the lay by and the surrounding woodland. There was nothing to suggest the violence that John Towers had guessed must have occurred at the scene. A check of the road surface in the lay-by gave no evidence of any blood – but then the heavy rainfall would have washed it all away, anyway. A check was made at all the hospitals in the South, but there were no reports of fingerless females being admitted for treatment. Forensics examined the two fingers which were, indeed, clean and unmarked apart from the tattered ends at the base which were joined by a small strip of unblemished skin. The light pink nail varnish was identified as being from a Revlon range called ‘Rose Among the Heather’. The fingerprints were taken but there was no trace of their owner.
John was back at work the following sunny Monday morning.
