The Hitchhiker Got Out Before I Stopped

I picked him up in the rain, which was my first mistake, and I picked him up because he was old, which is not a defence, only an explanation.

He was maybe seventy. Flat cap. Wet through. He said thank you and got in the back, which I thought was odd, but old men are odd, and I am not the police.

He did not speak for twenty miles.

Then he said, "You can let me out here."

There was nothing there. Motorway. Hard shoulder. Rain.

I said I could not stop on a motorway and I would take him to the services, eight miles on, and he said, again, in the same flat voice: "You can let me out here."

I said no. I want that on the record: I refused. I kept driving.

The interior light came on.

You know the little chime — the one that says a door is open. It went. At just under sixty miles an hour, on a motorway, in the rain, the light came on and the chime went and I felt the change in the air on the back of my neck.