"No, I said I'd be back by one, not that I'd left by one, there's a difference, Carol." I had the phone wedged between ear and shoulder, indicator ticking, and she was still going on about the immersion heater when I saw the blue sign for services in two miles.
"I've got to stop, I'll call you back." I didn't wait for her answer.
Tetlow Bridge Services sits on the A614 between nothing and nothing else, the sort of place you'd forget existed if you didn't need a wee at two in the morning. Open 24 hours, the sign says, and it is. What it doesn't say is that nobody's ever behind the till.
I'd stopped there before, doing the Grimsby run, maybe eight or nine times over the years. Always figured the staff were out back, stocktaking or having a fag by the bins. The lights are always on. The coffee machine hums. The doors slide open when you walk up. Somebody has to restock the sandwiches, and somebody has to price the meal deals with that little gun that goes click, I'd thought about it before and never once seen who.
That night the car park was empty except for one skip lorry, engine off, cab dark. There was a sticker in the windscreen for a haulage firm out of Scunthorpe, I remember that for no reason at all. I went in past the fuel pumps, which were also unmanned, obviously, they're always unmanned, that's not the strange part. The strange part is the shop.
The fridges were fully stocked. Every shelf faced out, labels forward, like a display in a catalogue. The meal deal stickers had that morning's date on them. I picked up a tuna sandwich and the sell-by said today. Not yesterday. Today, and it was gone two a.m.
I went to pay and there was no till open, just the card reader blinking its green light, ready. I tapped my card against it without anyone asking me to. It beeped, took £3.40, printed a receipt from a machine with nobody standing near it.
I want to say I left straight after that. I didn't. I went to the toilets because I actually did need to go, and that's where I noticed the mop. Wet floor, fresh marks fanned across the tiles, still glistening under the strip light, the kind of sheen that hasn't had time to dry. Nobody in the corridor. Nobody in the stalls. I checked, pushed every door, even the disabled one at the end which never has a lock that works properly anyway.
On my way back through the shop I looked at the fridge doors again, the glass ones with the drinks in, because something about the reflection had caught wrong the first time and I hadn't let myself look properly. In the glass, behind where I was standing, there was a shape at the far end of the aisle, low down, like someone kneeling to restock the bottom shelf. Facing away from me.
I turned round. The aisle was empty. Every shelf was already full.
I didn't look at the glass again. I put the sandwich down, unwrapped, on the counter by the card reader, and walked out past the skip lorry, past the dead pumps, into my car. Pulled onto the slip road doing sixty before I'd checked my mirror.
The receipt sat in my coat pocket for three days before I found it, folded small the way they come out of those machines. Under the total, where the till roll usually thanks you for shopping, it just said: Restocked 02:14. Thank you for your custom.