Ruby and the Parcel-Man

Have you ever really thought about how wet rain is? 1

With every inch of her clothes soaked in it, her glasses steamed up with it and more pouring down on her from above, Ruby could have been in no better position to consider this fact: rain is very, very wet.
Dismounting from her bike, she lent it against a lamp-post. She wouldn't be long, the man never wanted to talk. Walking a few yards up the vacant, midnight street (why do cities smell different in the rain?) she stopped in front of a shabby block of flats. Shifting the brown-paper package in her arms, she pressed the button for flat 11. 2

"Hello?" His voice was smooth and polite through the receiver.
"It's me. I have it".
"Thankyou".
He let her in and she handed him the package. He thanked her and asked if it caused her any trouble.
"No trouble - none at all", she replied, dripping on the carpet. Then she left, and rode home and next Friday she collected another parcel from the post office and delivered it to the mysterious man, who never talked all that much and never wore anything but jeans and white teeshirts. She would do this each week, and so it continued for many months. 3

But one night - she remembered it was the 9th of June - Ruby pressed for flat 11 and there was no answer. This had never happened before, and she didn't know what to do about it. She pressed again, hoping for the now familiar voice to thank her for the favour - which had caused her no trouble at all, incidentally - but none came. She tucked her blonde hair behind her ears and placed the parcel carefully on the doorstep. 4

Fitfully, Ruby called at the door of flat 11 every evening that week, without ever any sign that the man (what was his name anyway?) was at home. When Friday came, there was no package to be picked up. She sometimes wondered what she would say if he answered (at last) and she never came up with anything.
'I know it isn't Friday, and I don't have a parcel for you, but I just wondered if you where in..." She ran the words through her head and discarded them as ridiculous.
After a few more days, Ruby stopped going to his house, deciding that he must have gone away without notice. The man must have family or something to go and see, she told herself. But she thought about him rather more than was necessary, and craned her neck in the street when ever she saw a middle-aged man in a white teeshirt. 5

A month or so after the man didn't answer his door, Ruby saw his face in the paper. It was captioned in flaming letters with the words: 'Insane murderer, captured last Thursday after the slaughter of innocent victims'.
Ruby brought the paper and read it on the way home, her stomach twisting itself into a tight painful knot. When she arrived home, her neighbour stopped mowing his lawn to tell her the Police had called while she was out. 6

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