Yet I might have gone the other way. It was clear to me that David Mackenzie hadn’t survived his abuse. I understood the boy who had thrown that superhot oil over his uncle. Part of me even admired him. He did something about his awful treatment; I didn’t.
My revenge could have been a lot simpler than his. I could have told my father, but I was too scared by Michael’s promise of the consequences, specifically, the amputation of my thumbs with garden shears, ever to do that. Instead I bore it and waited for my growth, turning myself gradually into someone far more formidable than he had ever been, making myself the one to be feared.
I went on to become, I reckon, a properly functioning adult. I learned how to love, rather than despise. I don’t believe that David Mackenzie ever did the same. He’s been accused by many of being in love with himself, but when I talked to Lennie about him, afterwards, he was convinced that the opposite was true, and that ultimately the man had been consumed by self-loathing.
But I wasn’t thinking of David as I dialled Mia’s number, from a lay-by on the outskirts of Edinburgh. As those bedroom door butterflies returned to my stomach, I was thinking of Michael.
‘Hello, Bob,’ she said, before I had a chance to utter a word.
‘Hello, Mia,’ I replied. ‘How did you know it was me?’
‘Nobody else has this number. It’s a throwaway, bought with cash and a false identity.’
I surprised myself by laughing. ‘How many have you got, for fuck’s sake?’
‘Three. I still have the paper version of my Mia Watson UK driving licence, and a Tunisian passport in another name, the one I showed when I bought the phone. The Spanish need an ID for all phones these days. Officially, though, I’m known as Maria Centelleos. But I suspect you know that by now.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I told her truthfully. ‘I haven’t been part of the investigation into your mother’s murder. I know none of the details, none at all, but I knew your name had come up. You should contact the police in Edinburgh, not me. I’m not part of that force now.’
‘I know you’re not,’ she told me. ‘I know most of what there is to know about you, Bob. You have a very high profile on the internet; key in “Robert Morgan Skinner” and all sorts of stuff comes out.
‘For a start, your wives, including the most recent one dropping her knickers for that actor Joey Morroco. Then there’s Alex’s progress. . I thought that kid would go far; she could play you like a Stradivarius. Stories about your big cases, your rise to the top, to the very top.’ She paused, for breath I thought, but no, for effect. ‘Which I could have halted with one phone call, at any time.’
Trepidation? Yes, it was back well and truly, but I cuffed it round the ear and sent it scurrying.
‘You reckon? How would that work out?’ I asked.
‘It would work out because the only thing that you can’t Google is you and me, and what happened between us when you were investigating my brother’s killing.’
‘One night, lady, that was all. One night of admittedly pretty good sex, and then you brushed me off in the morning.’
‘I didn’t brush you off,’ she claimed indignantly. ‘You went psycho on me when you woke up.’
‘I had a bad dream, Mia,’ I protested, suddenly aware that we were having an argument that had been postponed from one century into the next. ‘I’d been at a crime scene in Newcastle the night before,’ I went on, agitated by the memory. ‘Christ, I’d seen a guy with his tripes out on his own kitchen table! Of course I was fucking jumpy!’
‘It wasn’t just that,’ she said. ‘All your dreams weren’t bad. You kept calling me “Alison” when you were talking in your sleep.’
If I’d been standing, that might have cut the feet from under me, but she wasn’t to know that.
‘Are you sure it wasn’t “Myra”?’ I snapped. ‘Or maybe “Madonna”. I fancied her at one point. Either way, this is not “career ending with one phone call” kind of stuff.’
‘Maybe not, but tipping me off that I’d become a suspect in my brother’s murder and warning me to get out of town, that might cut some ice.’ She had a point there, I must concede. . but it wasn’t conclusive.
‘The way I read the press,’ she continued, ‘that First Minister guy doesn’t like you much.’
‘Then read again. Clive Graham and I get on okay.’
‘If you do, it’s out of necessity on his part. This new single force he’s setting up: with you in the top job you’d be as powerful as him. No politician wants that. Yes, he’d be very interested in what I have to say.’
‘Then go ahead,’ I challenged.
‘No, because there’s more than that, something that you could not possibly survive professionally. You help me and it will stay a secret. I’ll tell you what it is, but it has to be face to face.’
Her intensity got to me. What the hell, there would be no harm done, and maybe even a little good.
‘Suppose I agree to meet you. Where? Starbuck’s in George Street. The Sheraton Hotel lobby, where we met once? Your old place in Davidson’s Mains, so we can go over old times?’
‘Nowhere as convenient for you, but not completely inconvenient. Your favourite family restaurant, you called it, so you’ll know the place I mean. I’ll meet you there.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. Eight thirty, dinner. You’re paying; I got the lunch in the Sheraton, remember.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ I gasped. ‘It’s in another country.’
‘I’m not kidding in the slightest. I’ve checked, and you can do it. Hell, you’re Bob Skinner, you can do anything.’ She gave a small laugh and then her voice seemed to be younger, that of the Mia I’d known. ‘Apart from remembering the name of the woman you’re sleeping with, that is.’
Sixty-Six
Maggie Steele believed that she would not have survived as a person, far less a chief police officer, without her daughter. She had been in the middle of her pregnancy when she had been hit by two piledrivers, the sudden and unexpected death of her husband Stevie, and her own cancer diagnosis.
At one point she had been given a likely choice between her own life and that of her child, but she had delayed the surgery until Stephanie Rose Steele had been safely delivered, and they had both pulled through, mother and daughter together.
It had been a fecund couple of years in her force, she had observed one evening to her sister, who lived with her and did much of the daytime child caring. ‘First Stevie and me, then Mario and Paula; now Ray Wilding’s gone and got Becky Stallings up the duff.’
Bet had reacted with a smile ‘That’s nice, though, isn’t it? That you all have something at home to take your mind off your jobs, especially the detectives.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, sis, but you don’t have to manage a team around maternity and paternity leave. Bloody nightmare!’
‘You set the example,’ Bet had pointed out.
‘Maybe, but I never thought then that I’d wind up as chief. Mind you, there were lots of things I never thought.’
Stephanie was playing happily at her feet as she faced Mario McGuire across her round kitchen table, the one that Stevie had built in when he had moved into the place, before they had been as much as a lustful gleam in each other’s eye. Her mug of green tea was warm within the circle of her hands. She had asked Mario to phone her after the interview of Cheryl Mackenzie was over, but he had called on her in person.
‘Were there any glitches at all?’ she asked.
‘No. She gave us it all without any pressure. They had a fight, over the way he’d reacted to an argument he and I had, and he hit her. He went crazy, she said. She thought he was insane, and maybe he was.
‘However, she may not be too attached to reality herself, because she’s decided it was a mercy killing. She talked us all the way through it, repeating for the tape all of the stuff that Bob uncovered in the first interview.’