A Hint of Death (A Bob Skinner Short Story) (Kindle Single) (5 page)

When we found ourselves on a collision course over the future of the Scottish police service, and its implications for my personal position, with Aileen determined to ensure that her side of the argument came out on top, and having the power to make that happen … well, to complete that journo’s analogy, the like poles that, in reality, we had been all along, repelled each other, as they always do.

Everything fell apart after that, very quickly indeed; not only my marriage, but my job, my career, my vision of the future; they were all cut from under me.

The one saving grace … and that’s something of a pun, given her family name … was the return of Sarah, the wife I should never have left in the first place, and the cautious rebuilding of our relationship. She and I have only two things in common: we love each other and we love our kids. She’s good for me and I know now that I was lost in the time we were apart.

When disaster followed disaster in my life, and everything reached its grim conclusion, it was only Sarah who kept me on the rails. I’d have sat brooding indefinitely in the house, over the offer of an unspecified role at an unspecified rank, or giving my lawyer a hard time as he tried to sort out the alternative, the terms of my departure from the police service. Indeed that’s what I did for a few weeks until she had enough of it.

‘Bob,’ she said, plucking what would have been my fourth Corona of that Saturday evening if she’d let me uncap the bottle, ‘this will not do. I know how shitty the last few months have been, but not even you can undo an Act of Parliament.

‘I know you’re having difficulty with the fact that you’re not Chief Constable Skinner any more, but it is not the worst thing that’s ever happened.

‘You’ve given thirty years of public service. Now it’s somebody else’s turn to catch the bad guys, to clear up after the pubs close, and to keep the traffic flowing smoothly, and those people are more than capable, since your generation has trained most of them. There was a police force before you and there will still be one without you, if you decide to go completely. What you have to work out is what you might be without it.’

I felt the corners of my mouth turn down as I watched her put the beer back in the fridge. ‘I might be nothing,’ I countered, mournfully. ‘Being a policeman might be the only shot I had in my locker.’

‘Rubbish!’ she laughed. ‘You’ve already been offered three non-executive directorships.’

‘I don’t do non-executive anything, love. You know that.’

‘Then you could write.’

‘About what?’

‘Your career.’

‘I’d have to leave too much out. A lot of my files are closed.’

‘You could try fiction,’ she suggested. ‘You could jump on the Tartan Noir bandwagon.’

‘Christ,’ I complained, ‘can’t we find a word in our own language to describe a Scottish institution, rather than nicking one from the bloody French?

‘If I did that, love,’ I pointed out, ‘… although I doubt that I have the talent … everyone would be convinced that it was all Skinner’s Casebook thinly disguised. There could be all sorts of legal problems … and besides, I don’t have the patience.’

‘Then you could teach.’ She pointed an authoritative figure at me. ‘I’ll bet that if you put the word out that you fancied a university chair, you’d have half a dozen offers.’

‘It’s easy for you to say that, my dear,’ I countered. ‘You’re a consultant forensic pathologist; you can do your job and teach it at the same time. Mine wasn’t like that. What would my lectures be about? Police procedure? Criminal investigation?

‘Sure I could do that stuff, but what I couldn’t teach, probably couldn’t even explain, is the instinct that separates an efficient officer from an exceptional one; the reason why one patrol officer in twenty will know when it’s time to kick a door in, then finds a sick old person or an abused child behind it, or why only a single detective in a squad might be able to look at all the known facts of a case, understand logically what must be hiding behind them, and then back his own judgement. I wouldn’t be interested in turning out clone cops, only risk-takers.’

She smiled, challenging. ‘Well?’

‘There would be no market for them. Risk only works when it’s rewarded.’

‘It worked for you.’

‘God knows how.’ I heard myself chuckle. ‘When I think of some of the chances I took …’

‘Then take another.’

‘How?’

She took a few moments to frame her reply. ‘Get the hell out of here for a while. The longer you sit around here sulking, the likelier it is that you’ll wind up as a middle-aged house husband with a shrinking golf handicap and an expanding waistline.

‘Already you’re drinking more beer than you should, and your coffee addiction’s come back. Is that what you want from the rest of your life?’

‘Probably not,’ I conceded, ‘although I like the bit about the golf handicap.’

‘You can play golf anywhere, and you need to do it somewhere else for a while. It’s less than a month to Christmas; take yourself off to the Spanish house for some of that time. You’ll be able to look at the future more objectively out there.’

‘I’m needed here,’ I protested. ‘My kids need me … all of them.’

‘They can do without you for a couple of weeks … they’ve had to in the past. Go away, Bob, and look forward, not back.

‘You’re in a great position. With the pension you’ll have kicking in if you decide to leave the force, you’ll be financially fireproof for life. The world’s the shellfish of your choice, since I know you don’t like oysters. Go: work it out.’

After thirty years of service, former Chief Constable Bob Skinner faces the possible end of his police career, at its pinnacle.

A quiet trip to Catalunya to contemplate his future soon takes on a different flavour when Skinner is approached by old friend, media owner Xavier Aislado, with an unusual request. One of his business’s brightest talents, Hector Sureda Roca, has vanished without a trace. Now it’s up to Skinner to track him down.

But as he conducts his search it soon becomes clear that another manhunt is also in progress, and that he himself is the target.

While his daughter Alex fights that battle on the home front, his search for Sureda takes one sinister turn after another, until he is faced with the toughest question of all. Is natural justice sometimes the only answer?