Skinner's Rules Read Online Free PDF Page A

done well, and she knew it. Skinner had been polite, even complimentary. And, Sarah thought, to her great surprise, a bit tasty for a Detective Chief Superintendent.
    When he had telephoned a week later to invite her to dinner, she had been astonished. But she had said yes, pausing only so that she did not sound too eager, yet answering, she thought afterwards, more quickly than she should have. ‘I didn’t even ask if he was single,’ she said to herself, but then she recalled the story. Skinner, widowed at twenty-seven by a road accident, was married to the job.
    He had taken her to Skippers, ostensibly a dockside pub, but in reality, Edinburgh’s finest seafood restaurant. The meal was relaxed; Skinner was charming, suddenly younger than he appeared at work. Her preconceptions of the man had been obliterated from the moment she opened the door of her Stockbridge flat, as Skinner had arrived to collect her. The copper’s overcoat had been nowhere in sight. Instead, he had stood there, tall, lean and shining, flowers in hand, dressed in calf-skin moccasins, tan slacks and a soft brown leather jacket, with the collar of a blue and white striped Dior shirt, worn open-necked, spread wide on the shoulders. His only jewellery was an eighteen-carat gold rope neck chain.
    Over their first meal together, Skinner, skilled and subtle interrogator that he was, had found out almost all there was to know about Sarah.
    She had been born in Buffalo, New York, to a prosperous forty-year-old lawyer and his twenty-eight-year-old teacher wife. She had been brought up in a fine house with a pool and educated at the finest schools and colleges, where she had always achieved good grades and had been an enthusiastic member of the tennis squads. She had graduated from medical school six years earlier and had shocked her parents by turning down the local internship which her father had arranged for her, through what he called the ‘Buffalo Magic Circle’, in favour of a job in the wildest hospital in the Bronx.
    Her first experience of what she soon learned to call the ‘real world’ had changed her life. She had remained on the staff of the hospital after her initial contract was over, and had undertaken post-graduate studies of scene of crime’work. She had given her time voluntarily to clinics offering free medical care to New York’s thousands of poor families, mostly black or Hispanic.
    She explained that her move to Scotland had been prompted not by job dissatisfaction, but by the break-up of her three-year relationship with, and six month engagement to, a very earnest young Wall Street fund manager.
    ‘What happened?’ Skinner asked.
    ‘I just realised that having my pants bored off wasn’t necessarily the best way.’ She had answered him naturally, without thinking, then had realised what she had said. Her mouth had dropped open, she had gasped, flushed and then they both had laughed. To her surprise, she had noticed Skinner blush slightly.
    Before the evening was over, Skinner had known the story of the twenty-nine years of Sarah Grace, all the way up to her decision to find out what the world outside New York State was like, beginning with Edinburgh. It was only after he had dropped her off at home, declining her offer of coffee, and unknown to him, maybe more, that Sarah had realised that she still knew little or nothing about him.
    That had changed four days later, on a bright spring Saturday. As arranged, Bob had picked her up at 1.00 p.m. When he had made the date he had said something vague about a football match, Motherwell versus Rangers. Great! Sarah had thought; just what I want — a sports freak.
    But instead of joining the flow of football traffic, he had headed east-wards out of Edinburgh towards the East Lothian coast. They had stopped in Gullane, pulling up outside a grey stone cottage, set in what looked like half an acre of ground. In recent years the house had been extended, to the rear and into the attic,