"He got his commission in the Royal Engineers when he was twenty. He served in Germany at first without incident, but then he was posted to Honduras, in support of some counter-terrorist operation out there, and the trouble began. He was drinking pretty heavily by then; he had done since he was about sixteen in fact. He used to keep a stash of booze in a cupboard in his bedroom. I found it one day and he walloped me. I was seven at the time, but he slapped me cross-eyed and broke one of my fingers."
"He did what?" Martin exclaimed.
"You heard. He took it and snapped it just like that, and he told me that if I didn't keep my mouth shut about it and about his bevvy, he'd break the fucking lot. I believed him. I told my mum I'd slammed it in a door."
"Bloody hell!"
"It was the first of many. He used to beat me up regularly; I'd just take it and keep it all to myself, waiting for the day. When Michael went to the army I started karate classes, and I did a bit of boxing too, until I gave that up."
"What made you chuck it?"
"I hurt a kid one day. I was fifteen; for a minute I imagined the boy was Michael, and I just hit him too hard. I detached the retina of his right eye. That was enough for me; I was a boxer, not a man-hunter. I wanted to be Ali, not Marciano. There was only one guy I really wanted to damage. The fact is, if the thing with my mother hadn't happened, I'd have done him anyway, probably with no one around to stop me."
Skinner paused. "Anyway, back to the army thing; like I said, he was in Honduras, a section commander or something. His CO carpeted him for being unfit for duty once; he was given a reprimand, a stiff warning with a threat of demotion, but from what I gather that just made him sneakier. Finally, there was an incident on a jungle patrol. The platoon Michael was with was attacked by insurgents; there was a fire-fight, and the guerrillas got wasted, but two of our guys were killed. The trouble was that when they dug the bullets out of them, they were found to have come from Michael's gun."
"Jesus. Was he charged?"
"No, no, no; that would have caused a scandal and it wouldn't have done. No, they gave the dead boys medals and buried them with full military honours, and they gave Lieutenant Skinner an immediate discharge."
"Did your father know?" asked Andy.
"It was my father who told me about it, years afterwards. One of his old service buddies was in the Advocate General's office; he called him and tipped him off on the quiet. When Michael turned up back in Mother well, he spun everyone a tale about being invalided out, but it didn't wash. He had no pension for a start, no discharge money, and what little he had saved went on drink, damn quick. He was twenty-four when he came home. Within six months he was the town drunk. He broke my mother's heart long before he broke her nose. At first my father tried to keep him in check by refusing him money, but he just stole stuff from the house. The bastard even stole from me.
"So, against that history, will you tell me, Andy, now that he's dead, after thirty years of being cut out of my life, at my father's behest at first, but eventually of my own choosing, why do I feel so fucking guilty about him? And why do I want so badly to avenge his death, if it wasn't accidental, when back then I wanted to kill him myself?"
"Because he's your brother, I guess. It's only natural."
"But I never thought of him as a brother, only as a thug about the house. No, I feel guilty because I'm grateful. We did have the same mother, same father, and we both swam out of the same gene pool. Yet it was Michael Niven Skinner got the bad seed, and Robert Morgan
Skinner who grew into the straight arrow. And it was a pure fucking accident; it could as easily have been the other way round.
"My father never stopped loving him, you know. I think what he had to do hastened his death. But I found no forgiveness. I let him rot away in Gourock, when I could have reached out to him. And I did worse than that; I kept his existence a secret from his niece, and later from his sister-in-law."
"Your first wife must have known about him, though. She was around then, wasn't she?"
"Sure, Myra did, but she was warned never to mention his name in our house. Anyway, she died before Alex was old enough to understand, even if she had let anything slip to her about him."
Skinner knitted his forehead until his eyebrows came together. "I may not have killed him physically, Andy, but I did in every other way.
Whatever there had been between us, he was my only brother, yet I let him live like a dog and die like one. Ah, man, the secrets that we keep."
Sixteen
Sarah Grace Skinner looked out of the window as she buttoned her shirt.
Her hair was still damp from the shower, and stuck to the collar, but she ignored the small inconvenience. She was still brooding over the fury of her argument with her husband.
She and Ron had gone back to bed afterwards, but the mood had been more than broken, it had been shattered like a smashed windscreen. So while he had gone downstairs to dig out his rarely used coffee percolator, she had set about dressing, and restoring herself to a state in which she could face Trish, and Mark, if he was still up and about.
She looked out over Ron Neidholm's front lawn; the sounds of the street drifted through the open window. A car drove by sedately. The kid across the way kicked a soccer ball against his parents' garage door.
The deep voice of Celeste Polanski sounded from next door as she bellowed the latest in a lifetime of instructions to her meek husband
Mort. The Polanskis had lived there for even longer than the
Neidholms. Celeste missed nothing; Ron had always called her the
Sheriff of Sullivan Street.
The house was modest for a sporting icon, much smaller than the mansion she had inherited from her parents, but then, Ron was a modest guy.
Also, she knew that it was not his only home; he had shown her a photograph of his farm in Tennessee, where he had spent the last seven years of his football career, and of his condominium in Maui, where he passed much of his vacation time, and in which he had installed his mother.
Ron and his younger brother Jake had been raised in a single-parent household, after their father's departure with a travelling saleslady from Tulsa, a year after Jake's birth. Crystal Neidholm had devoted her life after that to raising her boys, and to her job as a teacher in the local elementary school. She smiled up from a photograph on the dressing table, alongside a more serious study of Jake, in air force uniform.
Sarah winced as she looked at the younger Neidholm. She and he had been classmates in high school, and had even had a few tentative, feely-fumbling dates, but Jake's overwhelming focus had been on his worship of his older brother and on the real love of his life, aeroplanes. He had gone straight from school to the US air force, and had won himself a pilot's seat in a fighter squadron. His career and his life had come to a blazing end five years earlier, when a prototype bomber had gone out of control over the New Mexican desert during a test flight.
Ron had been no more than a name to her until her college days; she had seen him around, but Jake had never introduced them, and being in different grades in a large school their paths had never crossed. It had taken Ian Walker to bring them together, at a party in his apartment towards the end of Sarah's freshman year, and after she and
Ian had moved on from each other. The attraction was instant, and it had taken no more than a couple of hours for it to translate to action.
They were at different colleges, since Ron was a law major and she was in med school, but that was no barrier to their relationship, which had all the intensity and vigour of youth. She had taken him home at an early stage, and in turn she had met Crystal. All round, assumptions had been made.