I was lousy at the job. Nobody said so then, and nobody’s said so since, but I know it. As soon as I was properly away from it and could look back objectively I could see that I’d got almost everything wrong.
I made appointments on instinct, without proper consideration, decisions that my head of human resources would have advised me against had I bothered to consult her, as Jimmy Proud always did.
I allowed myself to get sucked into a battle with the politicians, my wife among them, over the creation of a single Scottish police service. It was a proposal by government that I was dead against, and the argument was public and divisive. Inevitably, with little or no political support I lost the fight and, with it, my marriage . . . not that the latter was worth saving.
My old mentor, Sir James, was as opposed to a single force as me, but he would never have tackled it as I did. He would have played its proponents quietly, identifying any divisions in their approach and exploiting them until they fell into line with his thinking without ever realising that they’d been steered in that direction.
But all that said, it wasn’t really the battle for the future of the service that derailed me as a chief constable. I’m a pragmatist; let others create the framework and I can work within it. No, my biggest problem was that when it came to the parts of the job that I loved, I could not delegate to save my life; I could not look at a major criminal investigation and stand aloof from it.
Don’t get me wrong when I say this, for Jimmy Proud, an Edinburgh toff by upbringing, made a point of getting to know every square yard of his territory, down to the very roughest, but he was always content to leave the messiest part of the job to those of us who were good at it. He had no CID background and he would only ever appear at the scene of a homicide if one of our own had fallen.
Me? I couldn’t keep away. When I became chief I had the best head of CID in the country and some of its best detectives, and yet I was all over them, looking over their shoulder in everything they did. I was rarely called to the scene of a major incident and yet I hardly missed one, not even the open-and-shut domestic homicide cases.
I should have known that my constant presence was undermining the people who were supposed to be in charge, but it didn’t occur to me. I’m sure they felt it, but they were my friends, not mere subordinates. If they found the situation difficult, they’d have been reluctant to say so.
All the same it might have come to that, if a sudden act of violence hadn’t catapulted me from Edinburgh to the place I’d said I’d never go, Glasgow, and into the chief constable’s office in the massive Strathclyde force. Unification was on the way, but Scotland’s largest constabulary needed a chief to see it out of existence. Sure, I could have turned that job down too, but the Skinner ego really was out of control by then.
It all came to an end when I found out about Ignacio, the Spanish-born teenage son I never knew I had. He’s the product of a one-night stand back in the nineties, with a woman named Mia Watson, who had a very shady family background. She had to leave Scotland in a hurry shortly after our encounter, and she didn’t come back until she was in even more trouble than she’d run away from. Unfortunately she landed Ignacio right in the middle of it, and that’s why he’s in prison now.
Ironically, his predicament was my salvation. I decided that it made my position as a chief constable untenable, and so I withdrew my name from candidacy for the leadership of the unified Scottish Police Service. I’d opposed its creation, but career-wise, it was the only show in town, and I wasn’t ready at that point to chuck it.
But for Ignacio I’d have gone through with my application and I’d have been appointed. I would have taken the post and been a disaster. It would have finished me.
There has been darkness in me from my earliest days, since my childhood, when I was abused and terrorised by my beast of an older brother. I survived that, and when I was ready