Skinner's Rules Read Online Free PDF

to provide more living space. A big wooden hut stood in a comer of the garden.
    On the drive out, he had talked about his life; his Glasgow up-bringing, his education at a modest fee-paying school, his decision to join the police force, taken out of a desire for an ordered life. Then his tale seemed to become one of growing loneliness, as he spoke of the illness and death of his father, a lawyer like Sarah’s, of the more recent death of his mother, and finally, painfully, of the loss of his wife Myra sixteen years earlier in a car crash.
    ‘It was just here,’ he said. They were taking a long left-handed curve between the villages of Aberlady and Gullane. ‘We had just moved out here. I had just made Detective Sergeant, and Myra was teaching. We were comfortable and very happy. She had this Hillman Imp. It hit a patch of black ice, then a tree. Broke her neck.
    ‘So that was me left with two jobs in life — policeman and single parent.’
    And when he had opened the door, there she had been. Alex, at nineteen. Bob Skinner’s secret, the daughter he had brought up alone, in the country, shielded from the reality of his work. Since his first days in the Edinburgh police, Skinner had kept a barrier between his work and his home life. He had always been seen by his colleagues as a private man, with an inner driving force. Very few colleagues knew what that force was; even fewer had met Alex.
    The girl was stunning. She was taller than Sarah, and as slim. Long dark hair fell in ordered confusion on to broad shoulders, framing a perfectly oval face, which was lit by huge, soft blue eyes.
    ‘Hi,’ Alex had said with a sudden smile, putting her at her ease with an outstretched hand. They had shaken, formally, and then the jumble of words which was Alex’s trademark had come pouring out.
    ‘You’re really a doctor, then. And a New Yorker. That’s great. Pops thinks that Glasgow is on the other side of the universe. I’m at university there, doing Law, did he tell you? My greatest threat to him is that when I graduate I’m going to join the Strathclyde Force and set up in opposition.’
    ‘The hell you will!’ Skinner had snorted in a John Wayne drawl. Sarah had realised just then that she had never seen a man look so alive.
    And so by that introduction to Bob’s other life, their relationship had been put on a formal footing. It had blossomed at once. Sarah had found out from Alex the things which Bob hadn’t said, and which she could not ask. She had found out that since his wife’s death he had never had a long-term relationship. ‘A few dates, that’s all. You’re the first girlfriend who’s ever been in this house.’
    Alex had returned to Glasgow that evening in her silver Metro, pleading study. And Sarah had come into Bob’s bed without a word of it being said. He was big, but he was gentle, and when they made love for the first time, Sarah had felt him explode inside her with the force of a bursting dam as if the years of loneliness were flooding away. She had drifted out of her own mind for a time, on the crest of the deepest physical sensation she had ever known. And afterwards, when they had returned to the present, she had nibbled his ear and said: ‘Now, that’s the way I’ve always thought it should be.’
    From that moment on, their relationship, new though it was, had fitted around them like a well-worn pair of good leather gloves, and soon it had seemed as if it had always been. As it had developed, they had discovered the bonuses. They both loved movies, and shared a secret enjoyment of TV soap operas. Their tastes in music were wide and complementary. They played squash well together, and Sarah’s golf was competent enough for them to reach the quarter-finals of the Golf Club mixed four-somes. But best of all the plusses for Sarah had been the friendship she had developed with Alex. There was nothing step-parental in tone about it. Alex was a mature lady for her years, and they had become