Quintin Jardine: Skinner's rules

Twisting the valve to turn off the shower, Bob took the towel which Sarah held out to him. As she rubbed her auburn hair, he smiled at her slim brown body, its colour accentuated by the white bikini marks. Sarah’s parents lived in retirement in Florida. In October, she had visited them to break the news of the widowed policeman who had come bursting into her life seven months before.

Sarah had met Skinner in her first week as a part-time police surgeon, introductions effected over the body of a middle-aged man, stabbed to death by his only son in a squalid house in Newhaven. At first she had been in awe of the famous DCS Skinner. A hard man, she had heard from colleagues. Perform well and you were okay. Slip up, and you’d never forget it.

She had done well, and she knew it. Skinner had been polite, even complimentary. And, Sarah thought, to her great surprise, a bit tasty for a Detective Chief Superintendent.

When he had telephoned a week later to invite her to dinner, she had been astonished. But she had said yes, pausing only so that she did not sound too eager, yet answering, she thought afterwards, more quickly than she should have. ‘I didn’t even ask if he was single,’ she said to herself, but then she recalled the story. Skinner, widowed at twenty-seven by a road accident, was married to the job.

He had taken her to Skippers, ostensibly a dockside pub, but in reality, Edinburgh’s finest seafood restaurant. The meal was relaxed; Skinner was charming, suddenly younger than he appeared at work. Her preconceptions of the man had been obliterated from the moment she opened the door of her Stockbridge flat, as Skinner had arrived to collect her. The copper’s overcoat had been nowhere in sight. Instead, he had stood there, tall, lean and shining, flowers in hand, dressed in calf-skin moccasins, tan slacks and a soft brown leather jacket, with the collar of a blue and white striped Dior shirt, worn open-necked, spread wide on the shoulders. His only jewellery was an eighteen-carat gold rope neck chain.

Over their first meal together, Skinner, skilled and subtle interrogator that he was, had found out almost all there was to know about Sarah.

She had been born in Buffalo, New York, to a prosperous forty-year-old lawyer and his twenty-eight-year-old teacher wife. She had been brought up in a fine house with a pool and educated at the finest schools and colleges, where she had always achieved good grades and had been an enthusiastic member of the tennis squads. She had graduated from medical school six years earlier and had shocked her parents by turning down the local internship which her father had arranged for her, through what he called the ‘Buffalo Magic Circle’, in favour of a job in the wildest hospital in the Bronx.

Her first experience of what she soon learned to call the ‘real world’ had changed her life. She had remained on the staff of the hospital after her initial contract was over, and had undertaken post-graduate studies of scene of crime’work. She had given her time voluntarily to clinics offering free medical care to New York’s thousands of poor families, mostly black or Hispanic.

She explained that her move to Scotland had been prompted not by job dissatisfaction, but by the break-up of her three-year relationship with, and six month engagement to, a very earnest young Wall Street fund manager.

‘What happened?’ Skinner asked.

‘I just realised that having my pants bored off wasn’t necessarily the best way.’ She had answered him naturally, without thinking, then had realised what she had said. Her mouth had dropped open, she had gasped, flushed and then they both had laughed. To her surprise, she had noticed Skinner blush slightly.

Before the evening was over, Skinner had known the story of the twenty-nine years of Sarah Grace, all the way up to her decision to find out what the world outside New York State was like, beginning with Edinburgh. It was only after he had dropped her off at home, declining her offer of coffee, and unknown to him, maybe more, that Sarah had realised that she still knew little or nothing about him.

That had changed four days later, on a bright spring Saturday. As arranged, Bob had picked her up at 1.00 p.m. When he had made the date he had said something vague about a football match, Motherwell versus Rangers. Great! Sarah had thought; just what I want — a sports freak.

But instead of joining the flow of football traffic, he had headed east-wards out of Edinburgh towards the East Lothian coast. They had stopped in Gullane, pulling up outside a grey stone cottage, set in what looked like half an acre of ground. In recent years the house had been extended, to the rear and into the attic, to provide more living space. A big wooden hut stood in a comer of the garden.

On the drive out, he had talked about his life; his Glasgow up-bringing, his education at a modest fee-paying school, his decision to join the police force, taken out of a desire for an ordered life. Then his tale seemed to become one of growing loneliness, as he spoke of the illness and death of his father, a lawyer like Sarah’s, of the more recent death of his mother, and finally, painfully, of the loss of his wife Myra sixteen years earlier in a car crash.

‘It was just here,’ he said. They were taking a long left-handed curve between the villages of Aberlady and Gullane. ‘We had just moved out here. I had just made Detective Sergeant, and Myra was teaching. We were comfortable and very happy. She had this Hillman Imp. It hit a patch of black ice, then a tree. Broke her neck.

‘So that was me left with two jobs in life — policeman and single parent.’

And when he had opened the door, there she had been. Alex, at nineteen. Bob Skinner’s secret, the daughter he had brought up alone, in the country, shielded from the reality of his work. Since his first days in the Edinburgh police, Skinner had kept a barrier between his work and his home life. He had always been seen by his colleagues as a private man, with an inner driving force. Very few colleagues knew what that force was; even fewer had met Alex.

The girl was stunning. She was taller than Sarah, and as slim. Long dark hair fell in ordered confusion on to broad shoulders, framing a perfectly oval face, which was lit by huge, soft blue eyes.

‘Hi,’ Alex had said with a sudden smile, putting her at her ease with an outstretched hand. They had shaken, formally, and then the jumble of words which was Alex’s trademark had come pouring out.

‘You’re really a doctor, then. And a New Yorker. That’s great. Pops thinks that Glasgow is on the other side of the universe. I’m at university there, doing Law, did he tell you? My greatest threat to him is that when I graduate I’m going to join the Strathclyde Force and set up in opposition.’

‘The hell you will!’ Skinner had snorted in a John Wayne drawl. Sarah had realised just then that she had never seen a man look so alive.

And so by that introduction to Bob’s other life, their relationship had been put on a formal footing. It had blossomed at once. Sarah had found out from Alex the things which Bob hadn’t said, and which she could not ask. She had found out that since his wife’s death he had never had a long-term relationship. ‘A few dates, that’s all. You’re the first girlfriend who’s ever been in this house.’

Alex had returned to Glasgow that evening in her silver Metro, pleading study. And Sarah had come into Bob’s bed without a word of it being said. He was big, but he was gentle, and when they made love for the first time, Sarah had felt him explode inside her with the force of a bursting dam as if the years of loneliness were flooding away. She had drifted out of her own mind for a time, on the crest of the deepest physical sensation she had ever known. And afterwards, when they had returned to the present, she had nibbled his ear and said: ‘Now, that’s the way I’ve always thought it should be.’