Private Investigations Read Free Page A

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