circumspect in what I said and did, and if there was anything about the office politics I didn’t like, I made a mental note of it and stored it away, until the day when I was in a position to do something about it. And yes, my DS’s girlfriend was strictly off limits.
Myra and I were married by then, we were living in Gullane, my dad having given us the deposit on a nice cottage as a wedding present, and our first child had arrived. Our life was planned out; once Alex was of school age, we’d have another child, Myra would take another two- or three-year sabbatical from her teaching career, and our family would be complete. But Robert Burns was right, even if he did express the truism rather differently; all too often the most sensible of plans wind up being royally fucked up. Ours never came to be either; a very solid tree got in the way of her speeding car. . Myra didn’t do slow. . and thank God Alex wasn’t in the kiddie seat behind her mother at the time.
I’ve never said this before, but in a strange way, I reckon that Myra’s death helped my career. It brought me to the attention of a couple of people who hadn’t taken too much notice of me before, since I was a man of the West, and also, the rebellious kind who wasn’t a freemason. One of them was Alf Stein, the Brahma bull of our CID at the time; under his tutelage and, I admit, with the benefit of his patronage, I never looked back. He was kind to me, and exceptionally tolerant on a few occasions when I pushed my luck to a degree that might have been beyond another man’s limits. I rode the wave, and instead of being my father’s successor, I became Alf’s. As a matter of fact, in some ways I might have been closer to old Stein than to my dad. That’s something on which I don’t dwell, but I’m conscious of it. My father had a bad war, a secret war, and it marked him.
When Alf retired, Jimmy Proud became my mentor. Sir James was the last of the old breed of chief constables, the kind that were appointed for the duration, not for a fixed term, and who had extra power and influence because of it. Once, I heard some clown dismiss him as a career administrator, but he was more than that. Jimmy was a fixer supreme at many levels; he even fixed it for me to have a spell of outside duty that overcame the normal rule that prevents an officer being promoted to chief within his own force. For that’s how he saw me from an early stage, as the guy he had measured up for his uniform, and when Jimmy wanted something, he got it. In my case, he encouraged me to overcome my own doubts, not about my ability to do the job, but about the effect it would have on me. I’ve always been a front-line detective, even as assistant chief, then deputy.
‘I didn’t join the police to be weighed down by silver braid on my shoulder,’ I used to insist, when we spoke about it. I have never liked being in uniform and that’s the truth.
That’s the elephant under my arse. I will have no truck with the modern habit of making detectives wear the tunic unless they positively have to be in civvies for the purposes of the job. Beat officers have to be visible and recognisable as such, CID do not; end of story.
Jimmy would shrug at my objections, and tell me, ‘Then do it your way. Every chief puts his own stamp on his office.’
Eventually he wore me down, with the help of my third wife, Aileen, who was Scotland’s Justice Minister, and then briefly First Minister of its government in the devolved Holyrood Parliament, before Labour lost office. She made herself the exception to my inbuilt antipathy towards politicians. She came into my life at a pivotal moment. My second marriage was in a state of chaos and mutual recrimination, on the most jagged rocks you can imagine. Simultaneously something had happened at work, something up close and bloody, that I was having trouble handling on a personal level. Aileen was there for me to lean on; I came through it all. As soon as I had, before I knew it, she’d eased me into the chief constable’s office.
Mind you, I did consult my older daughter before I applied for the job. She knows me better than anyone else, and if she’d been against it, she’d have said so. As it was, Alex was neutral. ‘There’s part of me that would like you to walk away from it all now,’ she said, ‘and buy the boat that you fantasised about that time we went sailing on the Clyde. But the other part, the realist Alexis, not the romantic, would be afraid of what might happen to you if you did. Your call, Pops.’
Buy that boat or not, I’ll always be moored to Alex; I was there when she was born and she’ll be there when I die. I can’t say that with certainty about anyone else right now, no other adult, that is.
Once the decision to apply was made, and I’d been selected for the post, I took to it better than I thought I would. I kept the promise that I’d made to myself that I’d focus as much as I could on the crime-fighting and crime prevention aspects and delegate as much as I could of the public order side and the admin to my deputy, Brian Mackie, who’d been close to me for fifteen years and more. It wasn’t long before he was gone, to the chief constable post in Dundee, but I’d planned for that eventuality and was able to move Maggie Rose Steele, another of the group I think of as my ‘trusties’, into the vacancy.
It seemed that finally, after years of continuous adjustments and frequent upsets, both my professional and private lives were running smoothly; for sure, that was a first for me in almost twenty-five years. Everything seemed fine. My younger kids were settled and content, Alex seemed to have found balance in her life, and the electorate had freed my wife from the burden of executive politics, as she put it, by sending her party to the opposition benches. My golf handicap went down by a couple of shots, and Aileen even persuaded me to take up a new hobby, one that I had been planning to leave for my retirement. I wrote a memoir, and enjoyed the process so much that it will probably be the first of several.
I should have known that no millpond stays calm for ever.
I’d been happy with the aftermath of my divorce and with the agreement that Sarah, my ex, and I had reached about the children, in the light of her decision to move back to the USA. I told myself that it was a good thing for them to spend school holidays with their mother, that it would give them an understanding of the wider world, and would spare them from the unreality of being shuffled between parents every weekend. Yes, I was happy with it and I thought that Sarah was too.
I still don’t know for certain what prompted her to change her mind. She didn’t even tell me about it until the decision was made; I found out by accident from Andy Martin, who managed to stay friends with both of us. I have no doubt she’d have kept me in the dark for longer if he hadn’t let it slip. For sure, my ex-wife can hold her cards very close to her shapely chest, but I didn’t find that out until well into our marriage. Indeed, I’m still learning just how close they can be. Yes. . and I smile as I say this. . she is some machine, is Sarah.
Granted, I had not been in the best of humour since her sudden reappearance, but I don’t believe that had anything to do with the explosion with Aileen. Also, a major crisis had erupted within the force that very day, and a long-serving ranking officer had been arrested as a result. However I like to think that I’m good at leaving personnel troubles where they belong, in the office, and I’d done that, although it had been difficult. No, our confrontation would have happened regardless of anything.
I had hit the roof earlier, no two ways about that, when Mario told me what had happened with Inspector Varley. A surveillance blown by the deliberate act of a veteran officer, and with more than a hint of corruption as well, in the man Welsh’s recorded promise to the caller that he’d be ‘weighed in’. I ordered Varley’s arrest, and his niece Alice Cowan’s instant suspension. I came within a couple of words of suspending DC Montell as well, but I cooled down and decided that if pillow-talk was automatically sackable we were all gone, so I put his file in the hands of the tough but fair Maggie and told her to work out what would be best done with him in the circumstances. I had an idea, but I wanted to see whether she came up with the same solution.
That stuff was all over with; it wasn’t done and dusted, but neither was it hanging over the dinner table like a cloud that evening. However, there was one problem that I did bring home in my briefcase, and in my head. My last meeting of the afternoon had been with my fellow Scottish chief officers, a formal gathering of our association, ACPOS, in a committee room in St Andrews House, the big grey government building at the top of Waterloo Place, with Andy Martin in the chair, by rotation.
The only item on the agenda was consideration of a proposal by the Scottish government that all of Scotland’s eight police forces should be merged into one. The debate had been forthright, and fierce at times. Not at all to my surprise, the pro lobby had been led by Toni Field, my recently appointed opposite number in Strathclyde. Since her force covers half of the country as it is, it was predictable that she would want to take in the rest.
I sensed also that being new on the block, having parachuted into Scotland from Birmingham, she was out to assert herself as ‘Scotland’s top cop’, as one of her
