Hour Of Darkness

Forty

I confess that I couldn’t see further than my own embarrassment and wounded pride after Detective Inspector Mann’s phone call had updated me on the David Mackenzie situation.

Although she and Provan were helping out in what was a confidential Edinburgh inquiry, I wasn’t going to be kept out of the loop. At the same time, I didn’t want to be seen to be leaning on my former colleagues, hence my instruction, no, my informal request, that everything she reported to Ray Wilding should come to me as well.

I thought back to my first meeting with the officer then known as Bandit, a DI at the time, in North Lanarkshire. He’d run away with the idea that Ruth, my then secretary, now Mrs DI Sammy Pye, might have murdered her uncle.

In the course of an interview during which, as Ruth described it, he had ‘sprayed the room with testosterone’, he’d made some unfortunate remarks about me, off tape. They might have been true, but they were unfortunate for him, as Ruth had her own recorder running, and they found their way back to me.

I paid him a private visit, and gave him what I will describe only as ‘a good talking to’. I had the power, then, to finish him in CID, forever, but I didn’t because a good friend who knew him and had worked with him gave him a half decent reference. In fact, Willie Haggerty described him as the cockiest, most conceited bastard he had ever met but added that he had the potential to become a great detective officer.

Of course, yours truly, the great Bob Skinner, who could probably have outdone Mackenzie in the conceit department any day of the week, I decided that I was the man to straighten him out and release that potential. So I poached him from Strathclyde, never once wondering why Jock Govan, his chief constable, took it so well, and I put him in charge of our drugs squad.

He was pretty good in that role; with hindsight I should have left him there, but I didn’t. Instead I promoted him into a division. It was unfamiliar territory, and his manner didn’t go down well. Soon afterwards, he found himself with a gun in his hand and in a situation where his courage was tested. It failed, and I had a problem on my hands.

To paraphrase something Lennie Plenderleith said, there’s nothing worse for a tough guy than the realisation that he isn’t actually all that tough. Bandit took it hard; in fact, he stopped being Bandit altogether and became a candidate for early retirement on health grounds. If I had left the decision to Sir James Proud, the chief, or even to the ACC, Brian Mackie, he’d have been gone, but I didn’t.

No, I couldn’t face up to my own flawed judgement, so I stuck him in a uniform and made him Command Corridor exec. In that role he managed to piss off most people in his circle, even getting himself into Mario McGuire’s bad books. That’s very hard to do, but if you succeed, you find that it’s not a place anyone would want to be.

As I sat in my office contemplating Lottie Mann’s briefing, I was forced to face up to a few truths. It wasn’t that I’d misjudged Mackenzie; I’d always seen him as a mix of intelligence, arrogance, and aggression. He’d displayed the last two of those traits in his confrontation with Ruth. I’d thought I’d knocked the aggression out of him when I’d sorted him out, but as I looked at the situation Edinburgh was facing, it seemed likely that it had only gone into hiding, to re-emerge with a vengeance.

I thought more deeply about the man. His intelligence; that would always be there. His arrogance? From what I’d heard, Mario had put him in his place, well and truly, forcing him into a fairly public climbdown, a serious loss of face for a person to whom front was all-important. Would that have been enough to make him potentially violent? Possibly.

Christ, Skinner, I asked myself, what have you done?

I’d have given myself a more severe mental kicking but for one thing. Mackenzie’s back story had been complete news to me.

When Lottie told me of Father Donnelly’s remark about Mackenzie’s troubled childhood, it was only the priest’s name that convinced me to follow it up. In my own teenage years he’d been quite a famous man in Lanarkshire for his progressive work with young people, in a diocese that was on the right of conservative.

If he’d been Mackenzie’s mentor, well, it fitted what I’d read about the man back then, a dog collar who took no nonsense, a bit like my friend Archbishop Gainer, only he’d been a rough diamond himself in his younger days.

It wasn’t difficult to come up with his phone number; it couldn’t have been because it took Sandra Bulloch all of ninety seconds to find him.

I dialled him myself, before realising that he might still be on the boat that Mann had told me about. I was about to hang up when my call was transferred to a mobile number. As the retired cleric answered, I could hear seabirds in the background.

‘Father Donnelly,’ I began, ‘my name’s Bob Skinner. You’ve just had a visit from two of my officers.’

‘Hello, Mr Skinner,’ he replied. His voice was younger than I’d been expecting. ‘I know who you are. As a matter if fact, I’ve known for years. I kent your faither, as we say in Scotland. I was involved in a youth initiative in Motherwell way back when, and he was one of my financial backers.’

‘That surprises me,’ I said. ‘My father wasn’t Catholic.’

‘No, but he was a good man. He told me that if I could prevent kids from growing up to be defended in court by the likes of him then he was happy to help me take the burden off the legal aid system.’

Fucking hell, Bob! Another entry in the long list of things you never knew about your dad.

‘You must have been around ten then. I remember him talking about you. He said you were a very quiet, withdrawn boy. You seem to have got over that.’

‘With the help of a good woman; no,’ I corrected myself, ‘two good women. Did he ever mention my brother, Michael?’

‘Not really; I remember him saying that he was a bit of a mystery in his own way too, but that’s all. Now, young Bob, what’s all this about? Are you checking up on your subordinates?’

‘Check up on DI Mann? How brave do you think I am?’

‘No, maybe not. What can I do for you then?’

‘I want to ask to you some more about David Mackenzie. How did you come across him?’

‘Is this important, Mr Skinner?’ he asked.

‘Yes it is, Father. And please call me Bob.’

‘Thank you, Bob. How much do you know about David?’

‘As a police officer,’ I replied, ‘everything. As a man, very little.’

‘Ahh well,’ he sighed. ‘In that case I’d better tell you the full story. I had assumed that it was known within the police service, at senior level, at least. I’m more than a little surprised that it isn’t.’

There was something in his voice that made me grip the phone a little harder.

‘David Mackenzie, the boy David,’ he began, ‘spent half his childhood in a children’s home in East Kilbride. His father was a long-distance lorry driver who put his truck down a mountainside in Italy when David was only four years old. His mother never got over it and took an overdose a year later.’ He paused. ‘This is all news to you?’

‘Completely,’ I said, flabbergasted. ‘He was orphaned?’

‘Yes, but it got worse.’ Father Donnelly continued. ‘The child was taken in for a while by an aunt, his mother’s sister, but her husband turned out to be a very bad lot.

‘He abused the boy violently; he thrashed him mercilessly for every small infraction, while all the time he was spoiling his own kids. The social workers should have spotted it during the supervision process that followed his mother’s suicide, but they must have been asleep on the job.

‘They woke up when David, then aged nine, threw the contents of a bubbling chip pan over his uncle, as he was taking off his belt to lash the kid again.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I couldn’t stop myself from whispering.

‘There may have been metaphorical chips in it,’ the priest said, ‘for one of them stuck to the boy’s shoulder, and permanently.

‘In those days, the age of criminal responsibility was only eight, but when the investigating officers saw the scars on his back and buttocks. . for the man drew blood most times. . and a couple of old rib fractures on X-rays, things got turned around.

‘The uncle recovered well enough from his burns to go to jail for a couple of years. The aunt was prosecuted too, but she only got probation. Young David got the children’s home.’

‘That’s tragic,’ I exclaimed in my astonishment. ‘How did he get on there?’

‘That depends on the measurement you apply, Bob. He was a bright boy, so he did well academically, but he was never out of bother. He was always fighting, in and out of the home. He’d a real hair-trigger temper, and it got him in trouble a couple of times in his early to mid teens.

‘The most serious thing he did landed him in front of the Children’s Panel. He chucked a brick at a kid who’d been razzing him, outside the school. He was lucky, for it caught the boy on the forehead and didn’t do any more than superficial damage. Even at that, he might well have wound up in a secure unit if the chair of the Children’s Panel hadn’t been persuaded to take another line.’

‘How did they straighten his act up?’ I asked.

‘That’s where I come in,’ the priest told me. ‘I’d been chaplain at the home for a while. The Panel chair made him enrol in a local inter-denominational youth club that I ran at the time, not unlike the one in Motherwell, and made me responsible for his care.

‘I took no crap from him, mind, but I challenged him intellectually rather than physically, and started him using his brain rather than his fists. I made him buckle down at school too, so well that he left with a good group of Highers.

‘By that time he had moved out of the home and was living with me in the chapter house. When he left I found him a clerking job, and I got him set up in a flat of his own.’

‘And you kept in touch after that?’

‘Of course I did. We’ve never lost touch. David joined the church when he was eighteen, his own choice, not at my request. I married him and Cheryl, and I baptised both their children, Alice and Zach, the younger one just before I retired.’

‘How did you know,’ I asked, ‘about this chip-pan attack, if you only met David as a teenager?’

‘Initially, from the manager of the home; she told me about it and showed me the boy’s file. Not that there was much detail, mind; all it mentioned was a violent response to abuse. I didn’t know the full circumstances until Max Allan told me about it.’

‘Max? As in ACC Allan, recently retired from the service?’

‘Yes. Max and I drank in the same pub, the Hoolet’s in High Blantyre, for the same reason, basically: we both wanted a place away from our day job. He had heard about the Children’s Panel reference at work. He was stationed in East Kilbride then, and he’d been in Uddingston when the blow-up with the abusive foster parents happened.’

‘Foster parents, you say?’

‘Yes, David was never formally adopted.’

‘And Max told you the full story?’

‘Yes. He was the investigating officer. He said that he first learned about it from the hospital, when the uncle was admitted. As I remember. . it’s a long time since I heard this, mind. . he told me David’s aunt claimed that it had been an accident. The uncle wasn’t in a position to say anything at that point. The A amp;E doctor didn’t believe her for a moment. He assumed that she’d done it herself, and he called the police.

‘Max thought the same thing. . until he spoke to David. He assumed that he’d confirm the unanimous conclusion, but instead, this nine-year-old boy looked him dead in the eye, and said, “She never done it, it was me. He was going to leather me again. She would have let him, like she did every other time. If there had been two chip pans she’d have got the other one.”

‘He was proud of himself, too, so Max said. He got the doctor to examine the boy there and then, and he found those scars from beatings, inflicted over a period of years, and three fractures to his ribs that clearly had never been treated, or reported, according to his medical records.’

‘And David was definitely nine years old?’ I said.

‘Yes. He was nearly ten when he was placed in the home; I recall that from his file.’

‘That means he was old enough to have been charged with serious assault, yet he never was.’

‘No. Max told me that when he started to recover, the uncle wanted him prosecuted, but that he talked him out of it.’

Knowing Max, I could imagine how he did that. ‘What sort of a kid was he in the children’s home, Father?’ I asked.

‘He was one among quite a few troubled kids in that place. The manager was a sincere woman but, to be frank, I don’t believe she was up to the job. She never had any real control: that was evident to me, although not to my fellow chaplain, from the Church of Scotland; he was as weak as her.’

‘There were two of you?’ I was surprised; I’d assumed that it was a Catholic home.

‘Yes, there were. David was really his “client” in that he’d been baptised as a Protestant, but he had no influence over him and when the assault thing happened, he washed his hands of him. So did the manager; Mrs Meek, her name was. Ironic, eh?

‘The Children’s Panel hearing took place in the home. She said that he was beyond her control, and my clerical colleague agreed with her. I was there, you see. I went, because I was afraid the lad would wind up in a secure unit and that would be the end of him.

‘When the Meek woman said what she did, I’m afraid I lost my temper. I told her that she’d never bloody tried to control him or influence him in any way, and that her only interests were in feeding him, and getting him to school on time.

‘The Children’s Panel chair asked me if I’d like to have a go with him, and I said I would. So she made him enrol in my youth group and made me responsible for his behaviour, from then on.’

‘How did you get on?’ I asked him.

‘It wasn’t too difficult, actually; I won his respect. Nobody had ever done that before; they’d only gained his suspicion and resentment.

‘As soon as he turned sixteen, he came to live with me in the chapter house. In this day and age that wouldn’t be possible; the bishop would foul his trousers at the very idea. Back then, though, it worked.

‘David never really had a proper parental relationship, you see, or quasi-parental, and he seemed to appreciate it. He really was formidably clever as a young man, and that helped.’

I was amazed by what I was being told. ‘Did he ever flare up?’ I wondered.

‘With me, no; I was a proper authority figure to him. But he wasn’t with me twenty-four seven; I’m sure that he did, from time to time. He’d learned that chucking bricks at other people was not a clever thing to do, but he still had an air of self-confidence about him, and that could be provocative.

‘He annoyed one or two of my parishioners, I admit. By that time, though, Cheryl was around and she may have been a moderating influence on him.’

I was surprised. ‘They go back that far? I had no idea.’

‘Oh yes. The Austin family moved to East Kilbride when Cheryl was about fourteen. She’s only a year younger than David; they met at school, and they were close from the start. Indeed, it may well be that she had more to do with him keeping out of trouble than I did. She may also have been why he was so keen to have his own flat at such a young age. He was only nineteen when he moved into a wee place I found for him.’

‘Was that when they got married?’

‘Oh no, they didn’t marry until a few years after that. Cheryl’s parents were sensible people. They never interfered with the relationship, but they did insist on her getting a qualification. She went to university in Glasgow and did her pharmacy degree, while David was making his way in the police. They finally tied the knot when they were twenty-five, and didn’t have children until they’d both turned thirty.’

‘Having been a couple for fifteen years?’ I observed. ‘That must have been a bit of a culture shock.’

‘I suppose. I’m not sure why they waited so long.’

Possibly because David liked being the centre of attention, I thought. I didn’t put that to the priest, for I wanted to get to what had been originally the reason for my call.

‘Father,’ I said, ‘I’d like to ask you about the time when he joined the police. Were you involved in that?’

‘Closely. As I said, David left school with a good group of Higher passes. They were enough to get him into university, but he didn’t want to go there, not straight away. He said that he wanted to work for a couple of years, to get some money behind him. He’d been left a small sum when his parents died, a few thousand, but his aunt and uncle had stolen it. When I asked the aunt about it she claimed they’d spent it on him. She was lying, of course, but there was nothing to be done about it.

‘I helped find him a clerical job with South Lanarkshire Council, and he got on fine there. He worked hard and his bosses couldn’t fault his performance, but the feedback I was getting was that he could be hard to manage, that he always knew better than them.

‘He and Cheryl had quite a combustible relationship too; when she started university he saw a lot less of her, and he didn’t like that. There were rows, and eventually an incident one Saturday when he found her with a group of fellow students in a café in Buchanan Street, and threatened one of the boys.

‘Eventually Cheryl asked me for help, and David and I had a heart-to-heart. I told him that he needed to work on his self-discipline or he was going to lose his girl and a hell of a lot more.

‘He must have been listening, because a week later, he came to see me, and he had a police application form with him. I helped him fill it in.’

That was what I wanted to hear. ‘You did?’ I said. ‘Can you remember any of the detail?’

‘Pretty much all of it.’

‘How much of his personal history did you include?’

‘That was the sensitive part,’ Father Donnelly replied. ‘I don’t have to tell you that applicants are expected to make full disclosure. I insisted that David do so, even though technically he needn’t have declared the chip-pan incident, and he might even have argued that the Children’s Panel hearing didn’t record a finding of guilt. We drew up a memorandum together and attached it to the application form. It set out his entire life history and we both signed it.’

‘Are you certain that he submitted it? I’d heard none of this until you told me.’

‘David didn’t submit it. I did. I posted his application myself. When he was accepted for the service, I assumed that it had been taken into account.’

‘It may have been,’ I admitted, ‘but I can find no record of it.’

‘What would you do, Bob,’ the priest asked me, casually, turning the tables, ‘if such an application landed on your desk today, with those same circumstances?’

I thought about that one, then gave him an honest answer. ‘I’d probably reject it. A police officer’s stability needs to be unquestionable. I know now that David’s never has been. At the very least, such an applicant would need a rigorous psychological evaluation.’

‘I see.’ All at once, Tom Donnelly sounded his age. ‘I thought I was doing the best I could, for everyone,’ he sighed. ‘For David, for Cheryl and for the police service.’

‘You did,’ I told him. ‘As you said, you made full disclosure, and obviously your name on the form was enough to overcome any doubts the people who handled it may have had. Any mistake was ours, not yours. Incidentally,’ I asked, casually, ‘when the application was made, did you mention it to Max Allan?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘Okay.’

I was about to thank him and hang up, when he broke into my thoughts. ‘Will you do one thing for me, Bob?’ he said. ‘During my visit from DI Mann and DS Provan, and during this discussion, nobody has actually told me what David is supposed to have done. There have been hints but nothing more. Can you tell me, straight out, in confidence. of course.’

And so I did. ‘David Mackenzie is missing. He’s suspected of having murdered Cheryl.’

I heard a huge sigh, right in my ear. ‘I thought you were heading in that direction,’ he murmured. ‘In that case, I can tell you, categorically, that he did not. I can’t tell you how I know this, but he didn’t.’