He sat back, satisfied, but after a couple of seconds a glimmer of bafflement appeared on his stubbled spade of a face. Why were they not moving?
‘Seatbelt,’ she reminded him.
He strapped himself in as if she had just asked him to bow three times to a god of her choice.
‘Death traps,’ he mumbled derisively, fidgeting in a faint miasma of his own steam.
‘It’s not me that wants it,’ she assured him. ‘I just can’t afford to be stopped by the police, that’s all.’
‘Ach, police,’ he scoffed, as if she were admitting to a fear of mice or mad cow disease. But there was an undertone of paternal indulgence in his voice, and he wiggled his shoulders experimentally, to demonstrate how he was adjusting to his confinement.
Isserley smiled and drove off with him, lifting her arms high on the steering wheel to show him her breasts.
She’d better watch those, the hitcher thought. Or they’ll fall into her Corn Flakes.
Mind you, this girl needed something going for her, with glasses as thick as that and no chin. Nicki, his own daughter, was no pearl of beauty either, and to be honest she didn’t even make the most of what she’d got. Still, if she really was studying to become a lawyer instead of just boozing his allowance away in Edinburgh, maybe she’d end up being some use to him after all. Like, she could maybe find a few extra loopholes in the EU regulations.
What did this girl do for a crust? Her hands weren’t quite right. No, they weren’t normal at all. She’d buggered them up, maybe, in some heavy manual job when she was too young to handle it and too stupid to complain. Chicken-plucking. Fish-gutting.
She lived by the sea, definitely. Smelled of it. Fresh today. Maybe she worked for one of the local fishermen. Mackenzie was known to take women on, if they were strong enough and not too much trouble.
Was this girl trouble?
She was tough, that was for sure. Probably had been through hell, growing up funny-looking in one of those little seaboard villages. Balintore. Hilton. Rockfield. No, not Rockfield. He knew every single person in Rockfield.
How old was she? Eighteen, maybe. Her hands were forty. She drove like she was pulling a wonky trailer-load of hay over a narrow bridge. Sat like she had a rod up her arse. Any shorter and she’d need a couple of pillows on the seat. Maybe he’d suggest that to her – maybe she’d bite his head off if he did. Probably illegal, anyway. Highway Code regulation number three million and sixty. She’d be scared to tell them where to shove it. She’d rather suffer.
And she was suffering. The way she moved her arms and legs. The heating turned up full. She’d done some damage there somewhere along the line. A car accident, maybe? She had guts, then, to keep driving. A tough little bird.
Could he help her out, maybe?
Could she be any use to him?
‘You live near the sea, am I right?’ he said.
‘How can you tell?’ Isserley was surprised; she had made no conversation yet, assuming he needed more time to appraise her body.
‘Smell,’ he stated bluntly. ‘I can smell the sea on your clothes. Dornoch Firth? Moray Firth?’
It was alarming, this point-blank accuracy. She would never have expected it; he had the half-smiling, half-grimacing squint of the dull-witted. There was black engine oil on the sleeves of his shabby polyester jacket. Pale scars littered his tanned face like imperfectly erased graffiti.
Of his two guesses, she picked the one that was wrong.
‘Dornoch,’ she said.
‘I haven’t seen you around,’ he said.
‘I only arrived a few days ago,’ she said.
Her car had caught up now with the procession of vehicles that had passed him by. A long trail of tail-lights stretched, fading, into the distance. That was good. She dropped back into first gear and crawled along, absolved from speed.
‘You working?’ he asked.
Isserley’s brain was functioning optimally now, barely distracted by the steady pace of the traffic. She deduced he was probably the type who knew someone in every conceivable profession, or at least in those professions he didn’t despise.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m unemployed.’
‘You need a fixed address to get benefits,’ he pointed out, quick as a flash.
‘I don’t believe in the dole.’ She was getting the hang of him at last, and suspected this reply would please him.
‘Looking for work?’
‘Yes,’ she said, slowing down even further to allow a luminous white Mini into the queue. ‘But I don’t have much education. And I’m not that strong.’
‘Tried gathering whelks?’
‘Whelks?’
‘Whelks. It’s one of my lines of business. People just like yourself gather ’em. I sell ’em on.’
Isserley pondered for a few seconds, assessing whether she had enough information to proceed.
‘What are whelks?’ she said at last.
He grinned through his haze of steam.
‘Molluscs, basically. You’ll’ve seen ’em, living where you live. But I’ve got one here, as it happens.’ He lifted one cheek of his meaty buttocks towards her, to fish around in his right trouser pocket.
‘There’s the fella,’ he said, holding a dull grey shell up to her eye level. ‘I always keep one in my pocket, to show people.’
‘That’s very foresightful of you,’ complimented Isserley.
‘It’s to show people the size that’s wanted. There’s piddly wee ones, y’see, size of peas, that aren’t worth the bother of picking up. But these big fellas are just fine.’
‘And I could just gather them and get money for it?’
‘Nothing simpler,’ he assured her. ‘Dornoch’s good for ’em. Millions of ’em there, if you go at the right time.’
‘When is the right time?’ Isserley asked. She had hoped he’d have taken his jacket off by now, but he seemed content to swelter and evaporate.
‘Well, what you do,’ he told her, ‘is get yourself a book of the tides. Costs about 75p from the Coastguard Authority. You check when it’s low tide, go to the shore and just rake ’em in. Soon as you’ve got enough, you give me a tinkle and I come and collect.’
‘What are they worth?’
‘Plenty, in France and Spain. I sell ’em to restaurant suppliers – they can’t get enough of ’em, especially in winter. Most people only gather in summer, y’see.’
‘Too cold for the whelks in winter?’
‘Too cold for the people. But you’d do all right. Wear rubber gloves, that’s my tip. The thin ones, like women use for washing dishes.’
Isserley almost pressed him to be specific about what she, rather than he, could earn from whelk-gathering; he had the gift of half persuading her to consider possibilities which were in fact absurd. She had to remind herself that it was him she was interested in getting to know, not herself.
‘So: this whelk-selling business – does it support you? I mean, do you have a family?’
‘I do all sorts of things,’ he said, dragging a metal comb through his thick hair. ‘I sell car tyres for silage pits. Creosote. Paint. My wife makes lobster creels. Not for lobsters