Quintin Jardine: Grievous Angel

This is my story, or part of it. A memoir, and a confession, by Robert Morgan Skinner, chief constable. And this is how it came to be written.

I love my wife, unequivocally.

I knew that from the off. On the morning that I met Aileen de Marco, in a conference room, around a crowded table, I understood that things were going to happen between us that would reshape my life.

Few would take me for a romantic, that’s not my image, but I can be. I believe in the existence of the soul. I believe that when two people who are meant for each other come face to face, their eyes lock and in that time, something passes between them, a bond is formed that transcends… everything. I believe in soulmates.

That’s how it was with Aileen and me. It took a little while for her to realise it, but I knew instantly. For I’m one of the lucky ones; it had happened to me before.

Not that I understood at the time. I was only a kid, and so was Myra Graham, but when we met at that party something shifted inside me.

You might not believe this if you know me, but until that point in my life I was an introverted lad. From the age of four or five, I’d been bullied and abused, in secret, by my furtive beast of a brother. I was too scared to complain to my mother, not that it would have done me any good, for as far as she was concerned, in what I didn’t know at the time was her alcoholic haze, her Michael was followed by his own wee patch of sunshine, everywhere he went. As for our dad, he was a busy man, with ghosts in his own past that made him remote in my early years… and I’d been warned by my oppressor that if I opened my mouth to him, I could kiss goodbye to my two front teeth. Even at that, why did I stay silent? Let’s just say that shame came into it.

If I hadn’t met Myra when I did, in a dark corner at a Saturday-night sixteenth birthday bash for the older brother of a schoolmate, whose name is lost to me now, who knows how it would have ended. Today, my guess is that the sly beatings, the Chinese burns, the arm-twisting, the finger breaking, and yes, okay… it took forty years before I could admit this to a living soul, and even now, only Aileen knows the whole truth… the sexual attacks, would have carried on until I’d done something terminal either to myself, or to Michael. (The latter more likely? Possibly. I can’t say for certain.)

He was ten years older than me, and by the time I found Myra, he had gone into the army, his absence affording me physical, if not emotional, relief. She changed me, just by looking into my eyes, that brave, reckless, lustful, dark-haired girl.

My class marks had always been good, and I had made the school football team easily, but in spite of that, I was a kid with few friends and no self-esteem, living in a fog of fear of my brother’s frequent home leaves, and in dark, undefined guilt over things that I knew were wrong but couldn’t rationalise. I was a damaged, troubled, introverted boy. Who? Bob Skinner? Come on! Yes, honest to God, that’s how it was.

But in the moment that our souls bonded, Myra’s and mine, a hot wave surged through me. It took me years to define it properly, but now I know that it was my first realisation that I was, after all, a person of value, and that someone could appraise me without pity or disgust.

Then she took my hand. ‘You’re not odd at all, Bob Skinner,’ she said. ‘Louisa in your class told me you were weird. I reckon she’s the daftie. Actually I think you’re quite dishy.’

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to reply. So I kissed her, hard. I didn’t know how to do that either. On the day I die, I’ll still recall the way her tongue licked my teeth and opened my mouth. She will always be the boldest person I’ve ever known. It was her strength, and her weakness, all in one.

‘Silly Louisa,’ she whispered, as we came up for air.

She made me walk her home, and she made me take her to the cinema, which was still clinging to life in Motherwell, on the following Friday. During those six days, I did a lot of thinking; it was confused at first but gradually I reached conclusions. I couldn’t express it, but I was in love. I wanted Myra, but to have her, I knew that I had to be more than ‘dishy’. I had to become someone she could admire truly. That meant that I had to become someone worthy of my own respect. I had to fight back against Michael. I had to stop being afraid. I had to turn my shame into anger.

I was nowhere near full grown, but I was fourteen years old, big for my age, my voice had broken and the hair was sprouting on my crotch. I was beginning to be aware of my body, and of its potential. Even before my first proper date with Myra, I did two things. I joined the YMCA, so that I could use its gym, and I joined an amateur boxing club. The coach there threw me in at the deep end with an experienced lad around my own age and size, to see what I could do naturally, before he started teaching me anything.

I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. All my knowledge of boxing had come from television so I decided to imagine I was George Foreman and that the other kid was… Michael. Someone rang the bell, and thirty seconds later they were hauling me off him.

I trained four times a week after that, twice at the gym, twice at the boxing club, where the coach took me in hand and taught me proper technique. When my sadist brother came home three months later, I bided my time, for a couple of days. I stayed up late one night after my parents had gone to bed, waiting for him to arrive home from the Electric Bar. I knew he’d have a bellyful in him but I wasn’t about to give him an even chance. I was there when he stumbled into the kitchen, in my jeans and my boxing vest. He blinked when he saw me; by then he wasn’t that much taller than I was, and I’d put on muscle in the gym. I stepped in close and hit him in the gut. The breath left him first, and then the beer. I left him lying in it.

I lay awake all night waiting for him to sober up and come looking for me, but he didn’t. I expected vengeance next day and I was ready for it, but nothing happened. Michael rarely spoke to me after that, or came near me. Bottom line, he’d been a coward all along.

Our relationship did end in violence, a couple of years later, after he’d been found out by, and kicked out of, the army, and alcohol had taken over his life completely. He hit our mother, and I walked in on the scene. By that time I was sixteen and serious; I beat him senseless with her screaming in the background. In the wake of that, he was institutionalised, and I never saw him again, until a few years ago, when I identified his body.

All of that stayed secret, locked up within me. I never told my parents, or Myra. The first person to hear any of the story was Andy Martin, my closest friend. I had to tell him because Michael was found drowned in his territory, but even then I withheld the most personal truths.

My first soulmate changed me from a scared, scarred little boy, and put me on the road to becoming what, for better or worse, I am today. She set me free; without her influence… Who knows? But of this I’m certain. I wouldn’t be telling this story, in this form, today.

I didn’t change her, though; I never curbed that recklessness, or that self-indulgence of hers. If Myra wanted something and it was within her reach, she would have it. The same applied to men. Make no mistake, she loved me as much as I loved her, but for her, love and sex were separate things. I wasn’t perfect either, mind; at university, I had a relationship with a charismatic, talented girl, who went on to great things later. It might have flowered, but the guilt was too much for me, and so I ended it. Myra never felt such qualms though. I don’t know how many lovers she had in our time together. I told myself, and my daughter, that I knew nothing of them until after she was dead, but if that were true, I wouldn’t be the detective I am. Of course I had suspicions over the years, but I kept them secret, within myself. I’m good at that: it may be a legacy from the horror years with my brother.