Under the Skin Read Online Free PDF Page A

to bring somebody home every day, anyway? One a week should be enough to satisfy any reasonable person.
    Giving up around midday, she headed back north, playing with the notion that if she announced resolutely enough to the universe that she’d abandoned all hope, she might be offered something after all.
    Sure enough, not far from the sign inviting motorists to visit picturesque seaboard villages on the B9175, she spotted a miserable-looking biped thumbing the watery air in the snubstream of the traffic. He was on the other side of the road from her, lit up by the headlights of a procession of vehicles sweeping past. She had no doubt he would still be there when she’d doubled back.
    ‘Hello!’ she called out, swinging the passenger door open for him.
    ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he exclaimed, leaning one arm on the edge of the door as he poked his dripping face into the car. ‘I was beginning to think there was no justice in the world.’
    ‘How’s that?’ said Isserley. His hands were grimy, but large and well-formed. They’d clean up nicely, with detergent.
    ‘I always pick up hitchers,’ he asserted, as if refuting a malicious slur. ‘Always. Never drive past one, if I’ve got room in the van.’
    ‘Neither do I,’ Isserley assured him, wondering how long he was intending to stand there ushering rain into her car. ‘Hop in.’
    He swung in, his big waterlogged. rump centering him on the seat like the bottom of a lifebuoy. Steam was already rising before he’d even shut the door; his casual clothes were soaked through and squeaked like a shammy as he settled himself.
    He was older than she’d taken him to be, but fit. Did wrinkles matter? They shouldn’t: they were only skin deep, after all.
    ‘So, the one bloody time I need a lift,’ he blustered on, ‘what happens? I walk half a bloody mile to the main road in the pissing rain, and do you think any bugger will stop for me?’
    ‘Well …’ Isserley smiled. ‘ I stopped, didn’t I?’
    ‘Aye, well you’re car number two thousand and bloody fifty, I can tell you,’ he said, squinting at her as if she was missing the point.
    ‘Have you been counting?’ she challenged him sportively.
    ‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘Well, rough head-count, you know.’ He shook his head, sending droplets flying off his bushy eyebrows and abundant quiff. ‘Can you drop me off somewhere near Tomich Farm?’
    Isserley made a mental calculation. She had ten minutes only, driving slowly, to get to know him.
    ‘Sure,’ she said, admiring the steely density of his neck and the width of his shoulders, determined not to disqualify him merely on the grounds of age.
    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