A young off-duty police constable was found dead in his fume-filled car yesterday.

The discovery was made in a secluded corner of a car park on the outskirts of Inverness by a gardener going to work in the early morning. People at the scene said a hose pipe led from the exhaust into the car.

The area at Inverness Retail and Business Park, off the Inverness to Nairn road, was cordoned off while colleagues carried out an investigation.

Northern Constabulary made no official comment but it was confirmed that the dead officer was Mr Gary Skinner, a married man in his early 30s.

Mr Skinner was stationed in Nairn and his wife recently gave birth to their first child. They lived at Culloden, not far from the retail park.

Colleagues said they did not know what drove Mr Skinner, an Englishman, to take his life, but said he had been off work with depression since early December.

He was keen on keeping fit and did aerobics, and on a recent occasion he considered leaving the police to be an aerobics instructor.

''There was no question of him being by-passed for promotion or anything like that, because he was not long enough in the force to be considering moving up,'' said one policeman. ''He like to look after himself but he was very distant and hard to get to know. He did not seem to be fitting in.''

He joined the Highland force about four or five years ago from RAF Kinloss where he was a driver in the Motor Transport section and saw service in the Gulf War.

He was also involved in helicopter rescue co-ordination with the base's mountain rescue team and went out on the hills with the team on occasions.

A police spokesperson said a post-mortem examination would be held and a report would be submitted to the procurator-fiscal, but there appeared to be no suspicious circumstances.