Skinner's Mission

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?’

‘Yes,’ he said, quietly now, but just as angrily, and with a cruelty which Sarah had never seen before. ‘Yes, she bloody was.’

‘Yeah, I guessed she must have been, because eighteen years on she still has you by the cock!’ She began to sob, and to punch him, hard, on the chest, with both fists, until he seized her by the wrists.

‘I thought it was guilt-driven at first, this crusade of yours,’ she said. ‘That you were chewed up by remorse because it should have been you in that car, not her. Then I realised that it was more, that when she was alive you were completely in her power, and that somehow Kevin O’Malley had awakened not just your memory of her death, but of the hold she had over you.’

She looked up at him, tears streaking her face. ‘Now it won’t leave you, Bob, not until you have the strength to will it away. But you don’t, you bastard. You don’t want to. You’re wallowing in your memory of her. You’re putting our marriage and our future to one side, because of a ghost.

‘That was why I used Jimmy, to have you sent away, in the hope that over those thirty days you would come to your senses, and would start missing me, not her. But the minute you walked through that door, when I saw the Chanel Number Five that you had brought back for Alex, I realised that nothing had changed.

‘In fact, it’s worse than ever.’

She drew the back of her hand across her eyes and squared her shoulders. ‘Straight choice, Bob. Her or me. Dead or alive. Past or present. Stay or go.’

As he looked down at her, he felt his anger leave him. But it was replaced by something else. During the years of his widowhood, there had always been Alex as the focus, the pivotal point of his life. Yet he knew that with a strong mother there to rear him, Jazz would never need him in the same way.

Until that moment, he had never felt real desolation, never realised that it was palpable, never realised that it could consume the soul, not until that very moment as it engulfed his.

‘How can I stay, Sarah?’ he said, quietly. ‘When my life is built on trust, and when you’ve proved to me that I can’t trust you any more?

‘You say Myra had a hold over me, but that’s absolute crap. You don’t know anything about how it was between the two of us.

‘You look at me and you say I’m obsessed. Sure I am: with justice. I always have been, and I always will. But from where I’m standing, you’re obsessed too: with blind, irrational jealousy, so much so that you’ve resorted to deceiving Jimmy Proud, my friend, so you could manipulate me and control my actions and my life.’

Suddenly he smiled, but it was full of sadness. ‘Forget the rights and wrongs. The fact is that now, when each of us looks at the other, neither of us is seeing the person we married. You agree?’

She looked him in the eye, and nodded.

‘So tell me, Sarah, my wife,’ he said. ‘How can I stay?’