He paused. ‘Look, I’d better get to the point here.
‘You know DCI Rose? She was with me when I saw you yesterday at Haddington.’ Pamela Masters nodded briefly, intrigue replacing the concern in her eyes.
‘Well, before her promotion, Mags held one of the most important jobs in this force. She was my personal assistant.’ He pointed to the piles of paper which still rose from his desk. ‘As you can see, I am badly in need of a replacement.
‘I’m looking for someone who is mature, responsible, intelligent; someone who is capable of broadening my outlook on most issues and of contributing original thought when asked; someone who does not draw back from using initiative and where necessary from taking decisions; most of all, someone with whom I can get on, and who can put up with me and my occasionally short fuse.
‘This isn’t a competitive interview situation. There are no rules about how I fill this one. The job’s yours if you want it.’ He smiled, as he saw her mouth drop open in surprise.
‘There’s no promotion involved,’ he said. ‘Recently the post has been filled by a DI, but that doesn’t mean a thing. What I will say is that if you spend time in my outer office, even a short time, and make a go of it, you will be seen as being on a fast track.’
He stood up, and Pamela Masters followed his lead. ‘Take twenty-four hours to think about it. Talk to Maggie Rose, if you like. She’ll tell you about my dark side, as far as she’s seen it. If you turn me down, no-one will ever know and it won’t affect your prospects in any way; but I’d like to think that you’ll be with me first thing on Monday morning.’
He began to escort her towards the door, but she stopped. ‘I’ve thought it over, sir. I appreciate your permission to speak to DCI Rose, but I always like to trust my own instincts.
‘Can I ask you two questions?’
‘Sure.’
‘What time do I report on Monday, and should I be in uniform or plain clothes?’
10
Skinner thought that he could catch traces of Pamela Masters’ perfume hanging in the air a good ten minutes after his office door had closed behind her.
After she had left he had buzzed Ruth and had told her to make arrangements for her transfer from Haddington CID to his staff. Next he had dictated memoranda for typing next day to Andy Martin, and to Dave Donaldson, as line commander, to advise them of his decision.
He had just finished his memo to Donaldson, and had turned his attention back to his paperwork when he was interrupted by Ruth, on the intercom. ‘Sorry, sir, but you asked me to call you whenever the Chief got back.’
Sir James Proud had barely settled behind his desk when Skinner rapped on his door and slipped into the room. ‘Yes Bob,’ he said, as ingenuously as he could, ‘what can I do for you?’
The DCC frowned down at him. ‘You can continue our conversation of this morning. I’m your second in command, yet you let slip that you had discussed my trip to America with someone before deciding to send me. If it was my other boss, the Secretary of State, that’s understandable. If it was another Chief Constable, say Jock Govan, fair enough. Now if it was Jim Elder or Andy Martin, while I could live with that, I’d feel like chinning them for not mentioning it to me afterwards.’ He paused.
‘No, no, Bob,’ said the Chief hurriedly. ‘Don’t say anything to Jim or Andy!’
Skinner looked at him, curiously. ‘What’s going on here? Why are you on the defensive about this?’
Proud Jimmy fidgeted behind his desk. ‘D’you remember? ’ said his grim-faced Deputy. ‘I said “If you want me to go on this thing, you’ll have to order me.” And you said “So be it.” Now it seems that you had set it up with someone else.
‘I want to know who that was. No, I demand to know who it was.’
The Chief swung round, in his swivel chair, shaking his silver head as he gazed out of the window across the force playing field.
‘Oh dear,’ he muttered. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’
11
‘Let me go over this again, because I still can’t believe it!’ Bob Skinner was almost shaking with rage, and had failed entirely in his resolve to keep his voice below a shout.
‘You went to my Chief Constable, and you asked him to send me on a trip which you knew I would hate, and which you knew would take me out of the country for a month. You had the unbelievable temerity to interfere in my professional life, and to keep it totally secret from me!
‘Do you realise that in the process you compromised the relationship between Jimmy and me, and put the poor guy in the impossible position of having to choose between the interests of friends?
‘Do you realise that you persuaded or bullied him into behaving unprofessionally, and put him in a position in which I would be justified in making a complaint against him to the Police Authority?
‘Now why . . .’ he roared the word, ‘. . . did you do that? How in Christ’s name were you able to bring yourself to do that?’
He loomed over Sarah, his face as dark as hers was pale. His black leather overcoat lay crumpled on the floor on the far side of the kitchen, where he had thrown it as he had burst through the door to confront her.
But she stood her ground. ‘I told him what I believed,’ she shouted back. ‘That you were going back to work too soon after sustaining such a major injury, and that I was afraid, you being such a stubborn, reckless character, that you might put yourself in a physical situation where you could do yourself long-term harm.’
‘That’s a bloody lie!’ he bellowed, his rage unabated. ‘You knew the shape I was in a month ago. I was back to full fitness.
‘How did you find out about the bloody thing?’ he barked. ‘Christ, I didn’t know about it till I was told to pack my bags.’
She looked up at him, her hair ruffled and her eyes blazing. ‘Andy told Alex about it. He said that he was on the short-list to go, but that the Chief would probably send Jim Elder. Alex mentioned it to me. I saw it as a way of making sure that you took care of yourself properly and didn’t put yourself at risk.’
‘No!’ he shouted at her again. ‘That’s a lie, a lie, a lie. I’ve been lied to over the years by real experts. You’re a bloody amateur. Now, you will tell me the truth!’
She broke away from his glare for the first time, and turned her back on him, leaning over the kitchen work-surface, gripping it as tightly as she seemed to be holding on to herself.
At last, she could hold on no longer. She spun round to face him. ‘Okay, Goddammit!’ she screamed, her voice suddenly coarser, her accent more American. Her face was flushed, suffused with anger.
‘I did it in the hope, the vain fucking hope, that in the month you were away you might forget about this stupid, blind obsession with solving what you imagine to have been your first wife’s murder.
‘For the three months before you went away, we couldn’t talk about anything but it would come round to Myra. Why the Goddamn woman even found her way into our bed!’ Her right hand flew up, and she slapped him across the cheek, leaving a vivid red mark.
‘She must have been one great lay, Bob, because you were thinking eighteen years back when you were screwing me, moving differently, doing things you’d never done before. Did she really like that? Was she really that wild?’