“Stop!” Patrick ordered, holding up his hand. “Get yourself a white coat and a hat from the hook over there, and stick a pair of wellies on your feet. You’d better get the same for me.” As Dan walked over to the line of hooks, Patrick added, “Minus the wellies, of course.”

Over the next hour, Dan was once more fully indoctrinated into yet another thriving Trenchard business. He walked beside Patrick as he guided his wheelchair slowly through the prawn washing area, the packing room, and on into the bay where the prawns, packed neatly into polystyrene boxes, were cryogenically frozen in a vast, stainless steel chamber. They stood for barely a minute in the dispatch freezer, where the temperature was kept controlled at –25 degrees Centigrade, as they watched the well-muffled storeman scoot back and forth on his forklift, shifting around shrink-wrapped pallets loaded with the polystyrene boxes. As they went, Patrick talked with incessant enthusiasm about the business, while Dan broke in with questions that he hoped would not show himself up as a complete ignoramus.

“How many people do you have working here?”

“Fifty-five maximum, but that goes down to about forty in the low season.”

“And what’s the output of the place?”

“Again, it depends on the time of year, and what the weather’s like. After a storm, for instance, it can take three days for the seabed to settle, so it can be feast or famine quite often. But generally speaking, in the winter months we can process about six tonnes per day, but that can go up to ten tonnes a day, no problem, in the high season.”

“So summer is when you put in the hours, then?”

“Do we not! We start at seven o’clock every morning regardless, and sometimes we don’t get away until about two o’clock the following morning. That’s why most of our workforce comes from abroad—Spain, Russia, those kinds of places. For most of the year, we work pretty antisocial hours, and the locals aren’t too keen on that.”

“And your principal markets are France, Spain, and Italy?”

“That’s right. We pack the prawns according to the requirement of each country. For France, it’s one-kilo boxes for the frozen market and three-kilo boxes for fresh. The latter get sent down to Glasgow and are being sold in the market next morning in Paris. For Italy, it’s eight hundred grams frozen, and Spain, one and a half kilograms frozen. The quality specifications differ as well. The French and the Italians, for instance, love greensacks, but the Spanish won’t touch them.”

“What’s a greensack?”

“A prawn that is carrying its eggs. They show up on the neck and give a sort of greeny tinge to the overall colouring of the prawn. Greensacks are only caught in June and July, though.”

“So, which harbours are you buying from now?”