Hour Of Darkness (20 page)

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&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.