Thursday Legends Read online

  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

  again.

  "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,
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  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