She nodded and stepped up to the Mini’s driver door, while I dug out my phone. I have the police communications centre number stored. I retrieved it and pressed the onscreen button.
‘This is Bob Skinner, formerly chief constable,’ I told the civilian operator who answered. ‘I’m in the Fort Kinnaird car park, close to T K Maxx and M&S. There’s been a traffic incident involving my car and two others. The driver of one of them, registration,’ I glanced at the plate, ‘Charlie Oscar Sierra One Echo, has fled the scene on foot. White male, twenties, slim, medium height, wearing a grey hoodie and blue jeans. I suspect vehicle theft; either that or he’s uninsured, and just panicked. I need police attendance, and paramedics for a third driver, an elderly lady who looks to be in shock, after the so-and-so drove into her vehicle.’
‘Officers and an ambulance will be with you as soon as possible, Mr Skinner,’ the man replied. ‘You’ll need to remain at the scene yourself.’
‘I know that, pal,’ I snapped: my temper was still on a hair trigger. In fact, I couldn’t have gone anywhere even if I’d wanted to, for our little section of roadway was blocked at either end by the redhead’s off-roader and the old dear’s damaged car.
Pocketing my phone, I turned to the BMW once again. The driver’s door was open and the engine was still running. I walked round, leaned inside and turned it off, using a handkerchief to twist the key and touching nothing else. As I did so I could see my own car through the windscreen. As I had expected there was a dent in the corner, but it looked drivable.
Backing out, I took a longer look at the red saloon. The personalised number gave no clue to its age, but from the dullness of its paintwork and its boxy lines, I judged that it had to be at least ten years old. For sure, ‘COSIE’, its personalised plate, was worth more than the car itself.
‘So why steal it?’ I murmured to nobody in particular. ‘Not just for the number surely . . . unless the guy’s a total idiot, for that only has value to the registered owner.’
I moved slowly around the vehicle, inspecting its damage. The collision impact on the front nearside wing was less than that on my Merc: old steel versus modern plastic, I imagined. There was a scratch along the side, the kind a vandal might leave with a key or a nail, but it was the rear end that had been most affected by the shunt. A light cluster was smashed, and the boot was distorted, its catch shaken loose.
I took out my handkerchief again, wrapping it round my fingers before giving the metal a firm push. But the lock didn’t take; instead the lid swung slowly upwards, opening fully and revealing what was inside.
In the moment that I saw it, I jumped backwards, my reactive scream muffling itself in my throat.
A child stared up at me, a little girl. She looked to be around the same age as my younger daughter, Seonaid. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was open too, as if she was as startled by me as I was by the sight of her. She was dressed in a tartan skirt and a blue quilted jacket. Beneath, she wore a sweatshirt with a cartoon penguin on the front, the type of garment that has taken the place of a blazer in many schools.
I reached into her place of containment and touched her cheek, as gently as I touch Seonaid’s sometimes, when she’s asleep, but I didn’t need to feel the coldness against my fingertips to know that the poor little innocent was dead.
I couldn’t put a number to the crime scenes I’ve visited over a thirty-year police career, or to the number of victims of violence I’ve stood over.
Latterly, I was involved in a couple of really bad ones; they got to me in a way that others hadn’t, and made me vow to walk away, to leave the bloody aftermath to others while I could still feel some compassion for the dead, before I became as dehumanised as they were.
I never quite managed that as a serving officer, not even as a chief constable, but as a civilian, that day in that car park, I did something I’d never done before. I buried my face in my hands, so that nobody could see my tears.
That’s how I was standing when the cops arrived.
Two
I suppose that an objective observer looking at my career might say I did all right for myself, but I see it differently. I was okay until a few years ago, and then it all went south.
My problem was that I found myself in a job for which I was totally unprepared, and temperamentally unsuited. Most of my police service, from detective sergeant up, was spent in major criminal investigation. I was a specialist, not an all-rounder.
In my final years I was in a position to take myself out of that; as chief constable of my force, and before that as deputy chief, I could have positioned myself well away from CID.
Sir James Proud, my predecessor in the top office in Edinburgh, was a career administrator. I could have followed in his footsteps and played it his way; if I’d been any good at the job, I would have done that very thing.
But I’m not Jimmy, nor could I ever have been like him. I had no background in the things that he did well, nor any aptitude for them, and that was a problem, for those were the skills that had made him such an outstanding chief police officer.
In my heart, I’d known this. I had resisted, until the very last minute, the pressure that was put upon me to follow in Sir James’s footsteps, pressure applied subtly by the man himself, more overtly by friends and colleagues, and most forcefully of all by she who was my wife at the time.
They meant well, all but one of them. I didn’t know it then, but out of all my boosters only one person had her own interests at heart, rather than mine. That’s one of a few reasons why Aileen de Marco and I aren’t married any more.
My ego won over my common sense; in truth that was never a contest. When Jimmy announced his impending retirement, I put my name forward and I was anointed, as Chief Constable Robert Morgan Skinner, QPM.
So there I was, sat in the big chair, I had all that silvery braid on the uniform that I’d always hated wearing, and I had all the power in my hands, with a few thousand people, cops and civilians, under my command. And most of it bored me bloody rigid.
I was lousy at the job. Nobody said so then, and nobody’s said so since, but I know it. As soon as I was properly away from it and could look back objectively I could see that I’d got almost everything wrong.
I made appointments on instinct, without proper consideration, decisions that my head of human resources would have advised me against had I bothered to consult her, as Jimmy Proud always did.
I allowed myself to get sucked into a battle with the politicians, my wife among them, over the creation of a single Scottish police service. It was a proposal by government that I was dead against, and the argument was public and divisive. Inevitably, with little or no political support I lost the fight and, with it, my marriage . . . not that the latter was worth saving.
My old mentor, Sir James, was as opposed to a single force as me, but he would never have tackled it as I did. He would have played its proponents quietly, identifying any divisions in their approach and exploiting them until they fell into line with his thinking without ever realising that they’d been steered in that direction.
But all that said, it wasn’t really the battle for the future of the service that derailed me as a chief constable. I’m a pragmatist; let others create the framework and I can work within it. No, my biggest problem was that when it came to the parts of the job that I loved, I could not delegate to save my life; I could not look at a major criminal investigation and stand aloof from it.
Don’t get me wrong when I say this, for Jimmy Proud, an Edinburgh toff by upbringing, made a point of getting to know every square yard of his territory, down to the very roughest, but he was always content to leave the messiest part of the job to those of us who were good at it. He had no CID background and he would only ever appear at the scene of a homicide if one of our own had fallen.
Me? I couldn’t keep away. When I became chief
I had the best head of CID in the country and some of its best detectives, and yet I was all over them, looking over their shoulder in everything they did. I was rarely called to the scene of a major incident and yet I hardly missed one, not even the open-and-shut domestic homicide cases.
I should have known that my constant presence was undermining the people who were supposed to be in charge, but it didn’t occur to me. I’m sure they felt it, but they were my friends, not mere subordinates. If they found the situation difficult, they’d have been reluctant to say so.
All the same it might have come to that, if a sudden act of violence hadn’t catapulted me from Edinburgh to the place I’d said I’d never go, Glasgow, and into the chief constable’s office in the massive Strathclyde force. Unification was on the way, but Scotland’s largest constabulary needed a chief to see it out of existence. Sure, I could have turned that job down too, but the Skinner ego really was out of control by then.
It all came to an end when I found out about Ignacio, the Spanish-born teenage son I never knew I had. He’s the product of a one-night stand back in the nineties, with a woman named Mia Watson, who had a very shady family background. She had to leave Scotland in a hurry shortly after our encounter, and she didn’t come back until she was in even more trouble than she’d run away from. Unfortunately she landed Ignacio right in the middle of it, and that’s why he’s in prison now.
Ironically, his predicament was my salvation. I decided that it made my position as a chief constable untenable, and so I withdrew my name from candidacy for the leadership of the unified Scottish Police Service. I’d opposed its creation, but career-wise, it was the only show in town, and I wasn’t ready at that point to chuck it.
But for Ignacio I’d have gone through with my application and I’d have been appointed. I would have taken the post and been a disaster. It would have finished me.
There has been darkness in me from my earliest days, since my childhood, when I was abused and terrorised by my beast of an older brother. I survived that, and when I was ready I overcame him, but he left his mark upon me.
Myra, my first love, shone some light into my life and gave me my precious daughter Alexis, but she had her own demons. Even if she had not been killed at the wheel of her speeding car, I doubt that our marriage would have endured.
Raising my child alone gave me no time to dwell on my past; when the job was done Sarah came into my life and, with her, what I call my second family.
I might have put those earlier years behind me, and become a normal human being, but that’s not how it worked out. I was stabbed, and almost died; in recovery I unearthed some secrets that would have been better left untouched. Subsequently I was involved in some very serious work incidents, and they took their cumulative toll.
Sarah had her troubles too, and we were heading for the rocks, when Michael, the brother I thought I’d put away forever, came back into my life through his death, reminding me of all my childhood horrors.
I was never the same after that. My humanity started to erode, I grew harder, became less kind, and behaved in all the wrong ways. I cast Sarah aside for a woman who was always wrong for me. I became difficult to work with, testing the loyalty of my colleagues. Even worse, I found it more and more difficult to live with myself, and I found myself hating the man I’d become, yet I was driven onwards by my obsession with the work that had supplanted even my children as the focus of my existence.
Then Sarah came back, and almost simultaneously I learned that I had a teenage son who’d been kept from me all of his life, and who needed me very badly at that time.
Between them, the two events forced me to look at myself, and to own up to my failures, my imperfections, my selfishness. Most of all they made me realise that I had been drowning in a well of loneliness. The greatest blessings this life can give are the people who love us, warts and all, yet for years I’d been keeping them at a distance, and in Sarah’s case, I’d been pushing her away from me.
And so I put it all behind me, I set a different course, and through that I felt reborn.
It was a different Bob Skinner who stood in that car park, that morning, shocked and weeping over a dead child.
I didn’t hear the officers arrive. I wasn’t aware of them at all until someone grabbed my right arm and tried to put me in a restraining hold.
Shaken back into the moment, I reacted instinctively, without thinking, wrenching myself free and planting a hand in my assailant’s chest, then shoving violently, sending him sprawling backwards across the roadway. It was only when I turned to face him that I saw he was a cop, a youngster, one of the new breed, probably fresh from college, and from one of those stop-and-search courses that they say don’t exist.
He was scrambling to his feet and reaching for his extendable baton when a voice called out, ‘Jules, hold up! Do ye no’ ken who that is?’
I looked beyond him, and saw a sergeant whom I recognised from past encounters. He was called Jack Lemmon, which used to be worth a few laughs, until his old actor namesake died.
‘But Sarge,’ the PC protested, ‘do you know what’s in that car?’ The boy was rattled; I doubted that he’d ever been near a body in his brief service.
‘I didn’t put her there, son,’ I told him quietly, then turned to Sergeant Lemmon, who was standing beside me by that time, looking into the boot of the BMW. ‘No fuss, Jack,’ I murmured, ‘but you need to report a suspicious death, and ask for urgent CID attendance. There are paramedics on their way here, but they’ll be no use for this. Skip the medical examiner and ask for a pathologist, pronto. Also, you’ll need a full crime scene team. More uniforms as well to secure this area.’
I was telling him stuff he knew already, but I couldn’t help it. I was back in my old world, in full senior investigating officer mode.
He tore his eyes away from the chid. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, then looked at his sidekick. ‘PC Hoare, get something to cover the poor wee lass up.’
I countermanded him. ‘Sorry, Jack. He can’t do that. Nothing can be touched here till the CSIs say so. You know that.’
‘Ah suppose,’ Lemmon conceded, then began to speak into his radio, doing as I had told him.
‘Will you stand back from the scene too, sir, please.’ PC Hoare felt the need to show a little personal authority.
‘No,’ I replied, abruptly. ‘I’ve already contaminated it.’ I turned and looked into the Mini. The redhead stared out at me, her eyes full of questions. The elderly driver looked even more shaken than before, if that was possible; I began to worry about her well-being, and wonder where the paramedics were.
They arrived a few seconds later. ‘Tell them to attend to the old lady there,’ I instructed the constable. I felt sorry for him; I was in his boots once, thirty-something years ago, a first-timer at a death scene.
He frowned at me. ‘But what about the wee girl? Should they not look at her first?’
‘The child is dead, son,’ I said, in little more than a whisper. He flinched, and a look of distress crossed his face. A good sign, I thought. It isn’t second nature to him yet, and hopefully it never will be.
I stood guard over what was in effect an open coffin, my back to it because I wasn’t brave enough to face the accusation in the little lass’s eyes.
You let me down, they were saying. You were supposed to protect me, all of you, not lead me here.
I may not have been looking at her, but nonetheless I could hear those words in my head, and the voice that spoke them was that of my Seonaid.
A few passers-by stopped, curiosity getting the better of them, gazing at me and at the two paramedics as they took the old lady from her battered car and eased her into a wheelchair. One of the pair, a large woman with dark hair and heavy-framed spectacles, spoke to Jack Lemmon, and her message carried to me.
‘We’re taking her to A and E,�
�� she announced. ‘She’s not responding to our questions, and she’s not moving properly. It might just be shock, but there’s a possibility of a wee stroke. Her keys are in the car if you need to shift it.’
As the sergeant nodded assent, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, a couple of youngsters, teenage boys who looked as if they had taken a break from a busy morning’s shoplifting, were approaching.
‘What’s up, mister?’ one of them called to me. ‘Did you bash her motor?’
‘Move on, lads,’ I said.
‘Free country, pal,’ the other, a hulking, dull-eyed youth, retorted.
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ I growled. ‘On your way, now.’
‘Fuck you,’ the kid sneered. ‘What’s in the boot? Gaun, let’s see.’
Too stupid to read the warning in my glare, the pair closed in on me, one from either side. I was ready to restrain them, bigger one first as always, but it didn’t come to that, for PC Jules Hoare manned up and stepped between us.
‘Do what you’re told, or I’ll arrest you both.’ His uniform had more effect than my suit. The kids stopped, backing off a little.
‘Ye cannae,’ one of them protested. ‘We’re only fifteen.’
‘That’s all the more reason why I should,’ PC Jules countered. ‘You ought to be in school. Beat it, or I’ll take you there myself, in handcuffs. The girls will love that, I’ll bet.’
The pair chose the path of wisdom, muttering as they wandered off, leaving me to dwell upon how naked I had felt without a warrant card in my pocket.
As they left, two others arrived, emerging from a grey Ford Mondeo in need of a wash. Familiar faces, at last.
‘Detective Inspector Pye; Detective Sergeant Haddock,’ I exclaimed. ‘Glad to see you.’
‘Chief Inspector now,’ the young DS told me, nodding sideways at his gaffer.
Private Investigations Page 2