The desperately sad voice of Maria Callas filled the room around them, matching his mood, and hers, after the story which he had set out for her over dinner.
‘What’ll happen to him?’ she asked at last.
‘He’ll plead guilty to the murders of Carole, Medina and the Comedian.
‘As for the others, we’ll keep our promise to McCartney and Kirkbride. The pair of them will do their twelve years each and think they’re the luckiest men alive.
‘Jackie Charles will plead guilty to tax evasion, up to an agreed amount, and will pay his dues, plus fine and interest, out of his Cayman Islands money. He’ll do about two years, and then he’ll disappear, off to the Caribbean, never to return.
‘There will be no trials, no evidence led in detail, no cross-examination, no verdicts for juries to deliver, no stinking linen washed in public. There will be no public chronicling of all the betrayals of trust and loyalty that my team has managed to uncover over the last few days.’
‘But Donaldson,’ she repeated. ‘What about him?’
‘He’ll be sentenced to a minimum term, not less than twenty-five years. He’ll expect to serve it mostly in solitary, for his own protection. But somewhere along the line, a man with a blade and a grudge will get close enough to him. Or maybe, he’ll tear off a strip of bedsheet and do the job himself. I don’t think he’ll ever breathe free air again.
‘I saw him this afternoon. I interviewed him formally, with Andy and the Chief, for more than four hours. Davie Pettigrew, the Procurator Fiscal, sat in on it as well, and Hamish Lessor, the best solicitor we could find to act for him. He confessed to everything, in detail.
‘Lessor will have him examined by psychiatrists. So will Pettigrew. I guess that there’s a possibility that he’ll be found insane and unfit to plead. But I doubt it. He knew exactly what he was doing, all the way along the line, from the moment he fell into Carole Charles’ honey-trap until the end, when he squared up to me with that blade.’
His head dropped down and he hissed, aloud. ‘Ahh, what a traitor. Everything we stand for in this job. Everything I’ve ever believed and tried to teach, he betrayed. I’ve encountered some cold and ruthless people in my time. Indeed, if I was to be honest, I’d apply that description to myself. But Donaldson’s the worst I’ve ever met. His only motive was self-preservation. He had no guiding principles, no cause: only himself. For his own interests alone, he killed, or had killed, half a dozen human beings.
‘God protect his poor wife, and his poor kids. But God damn him to a hundred hells.’
She propped herself up on an elbow, and looked down at him, solemnly. She understood that the blow which he had suffered from Donaldson’s treason was only one of a series, physical and mental, that had torn his life apart. When he had called to ask her to join him for dinner at Gullane, and as he had prepared their meal, she had sensed the depth of his hurt, and had known the flood of feelings that he was holding back.
She wanted to hug him, to comfort him, to make him realise that trust and loyalty are not always repaid in kind. She wanted to, but instead she simply reached down and stroked his cheek. He looked up at her and smiled, weakly.
‘Forget Donaldson,’ she whispered. ‘He’s just another criminal you’ve caught. The point is that you did catch him. You alone found him out. And at last, after all this time, you’ve got Jackie Charles, and he’s going to jail.
‘Most of all, perhaps, you’ve solved the mystery of Myra’s death.’ She smiled at him, as he took a sip of his malt.
‘What you have to do now,’ she said, ‘is to draw a line under it all, and get on with your life, and your career. Now that you know everything.’
He looked at her and grinned, but very sadly. ‘Know everything? Know that my wife had a secret side, that she was two personalities, the classic mother-whore image acted out?’ He reached up and ruffled his hair, and in the instant, his mood seemed to lighten.
‘I’ll tell you what I do know. I know that, when Myra died, the whole village turned out in grief to bury her, because they knew and loved the same Myra I knew and loved: the one who was there for nearly all of our lives together, apart from the odd occasion when being Bob Skinner’s wife got too much for her.’ He laughed. ‘Myra was big-scale. When she kicked over the traces she kicked them good and high.
‘She’s dead now, and properly put to rest. Her diaries and her glad rags are ashes, and the person who killed her . . . well, one way or another, she died by much the same sword. No tears for Carole Charles, except perhaps from Jackie, although I wouldn’t bet the house on that.’
He smiled, looking, all at once, very, very tired.
‘Get on with my life,’ he chuckled. ‘Okay. Let me tell you about that. I’ve made a decision. A few weeks ago I was asked by someone very important if I wanted to be considered for a very senior job. I told him I’d think about it.
‘I have done, for over a month. This morning I went to see him in St Andrew’s House and I told him yes, that I do want my name to be in the frame. It would be a big jump, and I probably don’t have the command experience to be a serious contender, but even to be in the running is a huge compliment.
‘What I was really saying, really deciding, I think, is that having closed the book on the first half of his life, Bob Skinner is looking for new motivation. Maybe it’ll be in Edinburgh, maybe down South, maybe somewhere else, but he’ll find it . . . trust old Bob to do that.’
He sighed, and looked up at Pamela, into the warmth of her eyes.
‘After I’d made my call, I went to see Sarah, to tell her what I’d done, and to see how she would react. She wasn’t there. Instead I found this.’ He reached out and picked up a letter from the low table beside the sofa, handwritten, on plush cream note paper. He began to read, aloud.
My Dearest Bob,
This is to say I’m sorry, for what I did with Jimmy, and for the way I’ve behaved since you rediscovered how Myra died. Now, at last, I can tell you why I acted like I did.
Alex came to see me the night before last, in something of a state. She told me the whole story about you giving her Myra’s diaries, about her reading them, about wearing her clothes, and about learning the whole truth about her. I understood why the poor kid was so upset. Because you see, I’ve read those diaries too, from cover to cover. I knew about Myra, her affairs and her secret pregnancy by Jackie Charles, before either of you.
Understand me, I tried not to look in that trunk, after you told me what it was. But it was a hell of a temptation, and I just wasn’t strong enough to resist it. So piece by piece, whenever I was at Gullane on my own, I read my way through Myra’s life story. I almost tried on the clothes, just like Alex, but something held me back. Finally, when I was done, I tied all the diaries in yellow twine and put them back in the trunk, hoping against hope that you’d never read them; until I realised that once you started on your precious mission, inevitably, you would.
So you see, Bob, I have a secret side too. I’m not just the jealous manipulative woman you fell out of love with. I’m someone else who can give in to temptation. Only I found I couldn’t handle the consequences.
When I came to Gullane last week, after you had gone from here, it was to throw myself at you, to spill the beans and to make a last effort to rescue things. But when I saw you watching that cine film, I knew it was too late, and I realised how deeply Myra, dead as she was, still had you in her grasp.
If I’d been honest with you when it mattered, maybe it would have been all right. If I had confessed to you at once that I had looked in the trunk, and shown you what was in it, I guess you’d have had the strength to handle it. But I wasn’t honest. I wasn’t honest about that, or about my job. I wasn’t frank with you about one or two other things either; like for example about my being less than content to be settled in Edinburgh for the rest of my life.