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.’