Rod Greatorix. "Come Monday morning, the buggers in this office are
going to get a message about keeping a stock of tapes at all times." He
laid a big black twin-deck tape recorder on the desk and stretched its
lead across to a plug in the wall. Finally, he stripped the clear
wrapping from two tapes and inserted them into the waiting slots.
"Okay," he announced, 'we're ready to go ahead. I am Detective Chief
Superintendent Roderick Greatorix, Tayside Police; also present is
Deputy Chief Constable Andrew Martin of this force, and Deputy Chief
Constable Robert Skinner, from Edinburgh. Mr. Skinner is here to
volunteer evidence of..." He stopped in mid-sentence and glanced at
Martin.
"Identification."
"Thanks ... of identification, in respect of the current murder
enquiry. Mr. Skinner?"
"Thank you, chief superintendent. I have to tell you that I have seen
the body that was found today in Myrtle Terrace, Perth, and can
identify it as that of Michael Niven Skinner, aged fifty-six years."
Greatorix stared at him in surprise. "What was your relationship to
the dead man?" he asked, at last, remembering that he was taking a
formal statement.
"He was my older brother."
"What do you know of his whereabouts in the period leading up to his
death?"
"Nothing."
"When did you last see him?"
"Approximately thirty years ago."
"But you are certain of your identification?"
"Absolutely."
"Do you know of any associates he may have had in the period prior to
his death?"
"No. I have had no contact with my brother throughout my adult
life."
"Was he married?"
"Not that I know of. A GRO check will tell you, for sure."
"What happened to alienate you for so long?"
"I tried to kill him."
Andy Martin reached across and switched off the recorder. "For
Christ's sake, Bob," he exclaimed.
"It's true," Skinner retorted. "I've lived with it ever since. Now
switch that thing back on."
Martin restarted the recorder. "Interview temporarily interrupted," he
said, 'but now restarted; same three people present."
"Thank you. As I was saying, the last time I saw Michael there was a
violent dispute between us. I was sixteen years old, and at home. I
heard my brother shouting, at the top of his voice, screaming
obscenities. I found him in the kitchen, and I also found my mother.
Her nose was bleeding. Michael had demanded money from her, and when
shie had refused him, he had punched her and tried to take it from her
purse.
"I wasn't full-grown, but I was a big lad nonetheless. I went straight
for him. As I've said, there was about ten years between us in age,
and my brother had been taught how to look after himself in the army,
but he wasn't in the best of shape, not any more. I remember he threw
a couple of punches at me, but I just walked straight through them and
nut ted him. He didn't shift off his feet, though, so I hit him. I
remember it clear as day, straight fingers in the gut, and a punch to
the left temple that almost broke one of my knuckles. He went down
then, all right. He was spark out, and I wanted him to stay that way.
My brother had thumped, abused and threatened me for much of my young
life, but he had run out of time. I had outgrown him. Still, I knew
what he was capable of if I gave him half a chance. So I grabbed him
by the tie as he lay there, and I hit him again, and again, and
"I reckon I'd have finished him, if it hadn't been for my father. He
was a very strong man, and big as I was, he got behind me, put a full
nelson on me, and lifted me clean off Michael. I struggled for a
while, but I couldn't move; he could have broken my neck with that hold
if he'd liked.
"Eventually, when he thought I'd calmed down, he let me go. But the
thing was, I'd never lost it. I'd known what I was doing all the time.
The bastard had hit my mother and I was going to kill him. At the time
I was angry with my father because he didn't react just like I had, but
later I came to realise that he couldn't let himself feel that way. I
thought I was a hard boy then, but I found out later that I was nothing
compared to what he had been.
"I was still ready to do for Michael, though, and my father knew it. So
he called the police, as well as a doctor. Michael was taken to Law
Hospital; he was still unconscious when he left the house, but I heard
that he came round in the ambulance. They kept him in for a couple of
days, and then he was charged with assaulting my mother.
"My father got one of his partners to represent him. It was carved up
between him and the fiscal that Michael would plead guilty and be
remanded for psychiatric reports. They showed that he was legally
sane, but had a serious personality disorder. He was also a chronic
alcoholic. The sheriff read the reports and put him on probation, on
condition that he enter a psychiatric hospital as a voluntary
patient.
"He was in there for six months. I don't know what they did to him,
but I'm told that it calmed him. They couldn't keep him off the drink,
though. I don't think they even tried, since that kept him on an even
keel too. My father found him somewhere to stay, a hostel in Gourock,
well away from the family home, and well away from me. The only order
he ever gave me in my life was never to see my brother again. He told
me that he was afraid, for both of us, of what might happen if I did.
Michael was looked after, financially, to a modest extent. He was
unemployable, so my father set up a trust fund for him, to keep a roof
over his head, to feed and clothe him, and to keep him in a certain
amount of drink... enough, but not enough to let him drink himself to
death.
"And that is how my brother lived out his life for the last thirty
years; until he fell in the Tay and drowned, or just maybe, until
someone hit him over the head and chucked him in the river to die. It's
ironic, isn't it, that the last two times I saw my brother he was laid
out on a stretcher."
Bob Skinner looked at Martin and Greatorix, then nodded at the tape
recorder. "You can switch that fucking thing off now," he said.
Neither of the other men moved, so he reached across himself and
pressed the twin 'stop' buttons. The head of CID took the tapes from
their slots. "I'll go and brief the team," he murmured, and left the
room.
The silence he left behind was unbroken for around half a minute. "Why
did he turn out that way, Bob?" Martin asked, eventually.
"As I said earlier, son, he was a flawed personality; he was weak and
he was jealous. I've only ever tried to live up to my father, but I
think that Michael had to out-do him. Mum and Dad wanted him to go to
university... he was bright, he'd have made it no problem .. . but he
insisted on joining the army, straight from school. I don't know if
any strings were pulled, but he got into Sandhurst.
"He got his commission in the Royal Engineers when he was twenty. He
served in Germany at first without incident, but then he was posted to
Honduras, in support of some counter-terrorist operation out there, and
the trouble began. He was drinking pretty heavily by then; he had done
since he was about sixteen in fact. He used to keep a stash of booze
in a cupboard in his bedroom. I found it one day and he walloped me. I
was seven at the time, but he slapped me cross-eyed and broke one of my
fingers."
"He did what?" Martin exclaimed.
"You heard. He took it and snapped it just like that, and he told me
that if I didn't keep my mouth shut about it and about his bevvy, he'd
break the fucking lot. I believed him. I told my mum I'd slammed it
in a door."
"Bloody hell!"
"It was the first of many. He used to beat me up regularly; I'd just
take it and keep it all to myself, waiting for the day. When Michael
went to the army I started karate classes, and I did a bit of boxing
too, until I gave that up."
"What made you chuck it?"
"I hurt a kid one day. I was fifteen; for a minute I imagined the boy
was Michael, and I just hit him too hard. I detached the retina of his
right eye. That was enough for me; I was a boxer, not a man-hunter. I
wanted to be Ali, not Marciano. There was only one guy I really wanted
to damage. The fact is, if the thing with my mother hadn't happened,
I'd have done him anyway, probably with no one around to stop me."
Skinner paused. "Anyway, back to the army thing; like I said, he was
in Honduras, a section commander or something. His CO carpeted him for
being unfit for duty once; he was given a reprimand, a stiff warning
with a threat of demotion, but from what I gather that just made him
sneakier. Finally, there was an incident on a jungle patrol. The
platoon Michael was with was attacked by insurgents; there was a
fire-fight, and the guerrillas got wasted, but two of our guys were
killed. The trouble was that when they dug the bullets out of them,
they were found to have come from Michael's gun."
"Jesus. Was he charged?"
"No, no, no; that would have caused a scandal and it wouldn't have
done. No, they gave the dead boys medals and buried them with full
military honours, and they gave Lieutenant Skinner an immediate
discharge."
"Did your father know?" asked Andy.
"It was my father who told me about it, years afterwards. One of his
old service buddies was in the Advocate General's office; he called him
and tipped him off on the quiet. When Michael turned up back in Mother
well, he spun everyone a tale about being invalided out, but it didn't
wash. He had no pension for a start, no discharge money, and what
little he had saved went on drink, damn quick. He was twenty-four when
he came home. Within six months he was the town drunk. He broke my
mother's heart long before he broke her nose. At first my father tried
to keep him in check by refusing him money, but he just stole stuff
from the house. The bastard even stole from me.
"So, against that history, will you tell me, Andy, now that he's dead,
after thirty years of being cut out of my life, at my father's behest
at first, but eventually of my own choosing, why do I feel so fucking
guilty about him? And why do I want so badly to avenge his death, if
it wasn't accidental, when back then I wanted to kill him myself?"
"Because he's your brother, I guess. It's only natural."
"But I never thought of him as a brother, only as a thug about the
house. No, I feel guilty because I'm grateful. We did have the same
mother, same father, and we both swam out of the same gene pool. Yet
it was Michael Niven Skinner got the bad seed, and Robert Morgan
Skinner who grew into the straight arrow. And it was a pure fucking
accident; it could as easily have been the other way round.
"My father never stopped loving him, you know. I think what he had to
do hastened his death. But I found no forgiveness. I let him rot away
in Gourock, when I could have reached out to him. And I did worse than
that; I kept his existence a secret from his niece, and later from his
sister-in-law."
"Your first wife must have known about him, though. She was around
then, wasn't she?"
"Sure, Myra did, but she was warned never to mention his name in our
house. Anyway, she died before Alex was old enough to understand, even
if she had let anything slip to her about him."
Skinner knitted his forehead until his eyebrows came together. "I may
not have killed him physically, Andy, but I did in every other way.
Whatever there had been between us, he was my only brother, yet I let
him live like a dog and die like one. Ah, man, the secrets that we
keep."
Sixteen.
Sarah Grace Skinner looked out of the window as she buttoned her shirt.
Her hair was still damp from the shower, and stuck to the collar, but
she ignored the small inconvenience. She was still brooding over the
fury of her argument with her husband.
She and Ron had gone back to bed afterwards, but the mood had been more
than broken, it had been shattered like a smashed windscreen. So while
he had gone downstairs to dig out his rarely used coffee percolator,
she had set about dressing, and restoring herself to a state in which
she could face Trish, and Mark, if he was still up and about.
She looked out over Ron Neidholm's front lawn; the sounds of the street
drifted through the open window. A car drove by sedately. The kid
across the way kicked a soccer ball against his parents' garage door.
The deep voice of Celeste Polanski sounded from next door as she
bellowed the latest in a lifetime of instructions to her meek husband
Mort. The Polanskis had lived there for even longer than the
Neidholms. Celeste missed nothing; Ron had always called her the
Sheriff of Sullivan Street.
The house was modest for a sporting icon, much smaller than the mansion
she had inherited from her parents, but then, Ron was a modest guy.
Also, she knew that it was not his only home; he had shown her a
photograph of his farm in Tennessee, where he had spent the last seven
years of his football career, and of his condominium in Maui, where he
passed much of his vacation time, and in which he had installed his
mother.
Ron and his younger brother Jake had been raised in a single-parent
household, after their father's departure with a travelling saleslady
from Tulsa, a year after Jake's birth. Crystal Neidholm had devoted
her life after that to raising her boys, and to her job as a teacher in
the local elementary school. She smiled up from a photograph on the
dressing table, alongside a more serious study of Jake, in air force
uniform.
Sarah winced as she looked at the younger Neidholm. She and he had
been classmates in high school, and had even had a few tentative,
feely-fumbling dates, but Jake's overwhelming focus had been on his
worship of his older brother and on the real love of his life,
aeroplanes. He had gone straight from school to the US air force, and
had won himself a pilot's seat in a fighter squadron. His career and
his life had come to a blazing end five years earlier, when a prototype
bomber had gone out of control over the New Mexican desert during a
test flight.
Ron had been no more than a name to her until her college days; she had
seen him around, but Jake had never introduced them, and being in
different grades in a large school their paths had never crossed. It
had taken Ian Walker to bring them together, at a party in his
apartment towards the end of Sarah's freshman year, and after she and
Ian had moved on from each other. The attraction was instant, and it
had taken no more than a couple of hours for it to translate to
action.
They were at different colleges, since Ron was a law major and she was