‘They’re potential clients, Ransome. There’s
every
reason I shouldn’t tell you anything.’
‘Christ, Laura, you’re not a priest or a clap-doctor.’ Ransome gave a heavy sigh. ‘I’m a detective, remember. I could stop them in the street if I liked and make them tell me. I could haul them down to the station.’ He gave this a moment to sink in. ‘And I’m sure you’re right - they’ve got nothing to do with Calloway. But this is me being nice, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. If you give me their names, I can do a quick background check without them ever knowing. Much better all round, don’t you think?’
Laura considered this. ‘I suppose so,’ she eventually conceded, winning a conciliatory smile from Ransome.
‘We’re agreed then?’ he checked. ‘This is going to be kept between us?’ As she nodded, he stood with pen poised against his notebook, and at the same time asked her how she’d been keeping of late . . .
6
Gissing seemed in no hurry to tell his story. He was swilling the malt around in its glass, nosing it now and then as if reluctant to take that first fragrant sip. It was too early in the day for Mike, and Allan was due back at the office, having lied about meeting a client for coffee. He was stirring the froth that covered his cappuccino and making regular checks of his watch and mobile phone.
‘Well?’ Mike said, for the third or fourth time. His own drink was a double espresso. It had come with a little almond biscuit, which he’d placed to one side. The Shining Star was near empty - just a couple of women taking a break from their shopping. They were at the other end of the room, well out of earshot, purchases at their feet. Electronic music was playing through the speakers, but kept just audible.
Gissing reached across and placed his fingers around the biscuit, proceeding to dunk it in the whisky. He started sucking on it, eyes gleaming with humour.
‘I’d better get back,’ Allan started to say, shifting in his seat. They were at the same booth as a week ago. Same waitress, too, though she hadn’t seemed to remember them.
Gissing took Allan’s hint. ‘It’s actually pretty simple,’ he began, a few crumbs flying from the corners of his mouth. ‘But you head off if you like, Allan, while I tell Mike here how to steal a painting without really trying.’
Allan decided he could manage a few more minutes. Gissing, having finished the biscuit, tipped the glass to his mouth and drained it with a satisfied smack.
‘We’re listening,’ Mike told the professor.
‘All the galleries and museums in this fair city of ours . . .’ Gissing leaned over the table, resting his elbows on its surface. ‘They don’t have room to display even a tenth of their collections. Not even a
tenth
.’ He paused to let this sink in.
‘With you so far,’ Mike commented drily.
‘And those sad artefacts sit unloved in the dark . . . they sit there for
years
, Michael, and no one ever sees them.’ Gissing started to count on his fingers. ‘Paintings, drawings, etchings, jewellery, statuary, vases, pottery, carpets, books - from the Bronze Age onwards. Hundreds of thousands of items.’
‘And you’re saying we can walk off with a few of them?’
Gissing lowered his voice still further. ‘They’re stored in a huge warehouse on the waterfront at Granton. I’ve been there on several occasions, and the place is a bloody treasure trove!’
‘An itemised, inventoried treasure trove?’ Allan speculated.
‘I’ve known stuff get wrongly shelved - it can take months to track a piece down.’
‘And it’s a warehouse?’ Mike watched Gissing nod. ‘With guards, CCTV, maybe a few German Shepherds and some razor wire . . . ?’
‘It’s secure enough,’ Gissing admitted.
Mike smiled - he was enjoying this little game. The old man seemed to be enjoying it, too, and even Allan was looking intrigued.
‘So what do we do?’ Allan asked. ‘Dress up as commandos and storm the compound?’
It was Gissing’s turn to smile. ‘I think we can deploy a soupçon more subtlety, Allan, dear boy.’
Mike leaned back and folded his arms. ‘Okay, you’re the one who knows this place - how would someone get in? And even if they did, how come nothing would be noticed as having walked out with them afterwards?’
‘Two excellent questions,’ Gissing appeared to concede. ‘To answer the first - they would walk in through the front door. More than that, they would have been
invited
.’
‘And the second?’
Gissing held his hands out, palms showing. ‘Nothing would
be
missing.’
‘The one thing “missing” from all of this is any notion of reality,’ Allan complained. Gissing looked at him.
‘Tell me, Allan, does First Caledonian ever take part in Doors Open Day?’
‘Sure we do.’
‘And what can you tell me about it?’
Allan shrugged. ‘It’s exactly what it sounds like - one day a year, a lot of institutions open their doors to the general public so they can take a look around. Last year, I went to the observatory . . . year before that I think it was Freemasons’ Hall.’
‘Very good,’ Gissing said, as if to a prize pupil. Then, to Mike: ‘You’ve heard of it, too?’
‘Vaguely,’ Mike conceded.
‘Well, the Granton warehouse is another participant - I’m assured they’ll be throwing their doors open again to the masses at the end of this month . . .’
‘Okay,’ Mike said, ‘so we can just walk in as members of the public. Walking out again might be the problem.’
‘That’s true,’ Gissing agreed. ‘And I’m afraid such things as guardrooms and CCTV are outwith my area of expertise. But here’s the rub - nothing’s going to be missing. Everything will appear to be just the way it was.’
‘See, you’ve lost me again,’ Allan said, fiddling with his watch strap and starting to text his secretary.
‘There’s a painter . . .’ Gissing began, breaking off as a shadow loomed over the three of them.
‘Getting to be a regular occurrence,’ Chib Calloway said to the silenced table. When he stretched out a hand for Mike to shake, Allan visibly flinched, as though a punch were about to be thrown. ‘Has Mike here told you we were at the same school?’ Calloway had slapped a hand down on Mike’s shoulder. ‘We did some catching up the other day - didn’t see you at the sale, Mike . . .’
‘I was standing at the back.’
‘Should’ve come and said howdy - might’ve saved me making a prick of myself by heading up shit creek without the necessary paddle.’ The gangster laughed at his own joke. ‘What’s your poison, gents? This one’s on me.’
‘We’re fine,’ Gissing snapped. ‘Just trying to have a
private
conversation. ’
Calloway returned the stare. ‘That’s not very friendly now, is it?’
‘We’re fine, Chib,’ Mike said, trying to defuse whatever was threatening to start. ‘Robert’s just . . . well, he was in the middle of telling me something.’
‘So it’s sort of a business meeting?’ Calloway nodded slowly to himself and straightened up. ‘Well, head over to the bar when you’re finished, Mike. I want to pick your brains about the auction. I did try asking that tasty auctioneer, but she was too busy counting the shekels . . .’ He turned to go, but then paused. ‘And I hope the business you’re discussing is all above board - walls have ears, remember.’
He returned to the bar and his two bodyguards.
‘Mike,’ Allan said warningly, ‘suddenly you and him are buddies?’
‘Never mind about Chib,’ Mike replied quietly, eyes on Robert Gissing. ‘Tell me more about this painter.’
‘Before I do . . .’ Gissing reached into his jacket pocket for a folded sheet of paper. ‘Here’s something I thought you might like.’ Mike opened it up while Gissing spoke. It was a page torn from a catalogue. ‘Last year at the National?’ Gissing was reminding him. ‘The Monboddo exhibition - that’s where Allan introduced us, if you remember.’
‘I remember you bending my ear about Monboddo’s strengths and weaknesses.’ Mike stopped talking as he realised what he was holding.
‘This was your favourite, wasn’t it?’ Gissing was saying. Mike just nodded. It was a portrait of the artist’s wife, painted with such passion and tenderness . . . and looking uncannily like Laura Stanton. (Someone else he’d met for the first time that night.) Mike had thought he might never lay eyes on it again.
‘This is in that warehouse?’ he asked.
‘Indeed it is. Went straight back there after the retrospective. What does it measure? No more than eighteen inches by twelve, yet they can’t find regular room for it on their walls. And such an exquisite piece. You start to see what I mean, Michael? We’d be freeing them, not stealing them. We’d be doing it out of love.’
‘I really do have to get going,’ Allan said, getting to his feet. ‘Mike . . . Calloway’s part of your past, remember, and probably best kept there.’ He glanced in the direction of the bar.
‘I can look after myself, Allan.’
‘I’ve a parting gift for you, too,’ Gissing interrupted. Another page from a different catalogue was handed over. Allan Cruikshank’s mouth fell open.
‘Better than any of the Coultons in your own bank’s portfolio,’ Gissing said, reading Allan’s mind. ‘I know you’re a massive fan - and there are half a dozen others to choose from, if these don’t suit.’
Seeming still in a daze, Allan found himself taking his seat again.
‘Now,’ Gissing continued, satisfied with this reaction, ‘the painter I was going to tell you about . . . a young fellow of my acquaintance. He goes by the name of Westwater . . .’
7
Hugh Westwater - ‘Westie’ to those who knew him well enough - was sitting comfortably amid the chaos of his top-floor tenement flat, smoking yet another joint. The bay-windowed living room had become his studio, grubby bedsheets draped over the old sofa and chair that Westie had claimed from a skip. Canvases rested against the skirting boards, newspaper cuttings and magazine photos were taped to the walls. Greasy pizza cartons and beer cans littered the floor, some of the cans torn in half to provide makeshift ashtrays. Wonder was, Westie thought, ‘they’ still let you smoke in the comfort of your own home. These days you couldn’t smoke in pubs, clubs or restaurants, or at your place of work or even in some bus shelters. When the Rolling Stones had played a stadium gig in Glasgow and Keith had lit one up onstage, ‘they’ had considered prosecution.
Westie always thought of the authorities as ‘they’.
One of his first portfolio pieces had been a manifesto, printed in black against a glossy blood-red backing.
They Are Out To Get You
They Know What You Do
They See You As Trouble . . .
At the very bottom of the canvas, the printing had switched to white-on-red for Westie’s coda: But I Am Better At Art Than Them.
His tutor had only just agreed, scoring him a ‘narrow pass’. The tutor was a big fan of Warhol, so Westie’s next piece had been calculation itself: a stylised Irn-Bru bottle against a custard-yellow background. The mark had been more favourable, sealing (though he couldn’t know it then, of course) Westie’s fate.
He was in his final year now and had almost completed the portfolio for his degree show. It had struck him only recently that there was something odd about the whole notion of a degree show: if you studied politics or philosophy, you didn’t attach your essays to the walls for strangers to read. If you were going to be a vet, you didn’t have the general public watching as you put some poor animal to the knife or stuck your arm up its backside. But every art and design college in the land expected its students to parade their shortcomings to the world. Was it attempted humiliation? Preparation for the harsh realities of life as an artist in twenty-first century philistine Britain? The space for Westie’s showcase had already been allocated - deep in the bowels of the college building on Lauriston Place, next to a sculptor who worked with straw and a ‘video installationist’ whose main claim to fame was a looped stop-motion animation of a slowly lactating breast.
‘I know my place,’ was all Westie had said.
Influenced (retrospectively) by Banksy, and spurred on by his experience with the Warholesque Irn-Bru bottle, Westie’s stock in trade was pastiche. He would copy in minute detail a Constable landscape, say, but then add just the tiniest idiosyncrasy - a crushed beer can or a used condom (almost his signature, according to the other students) or a scrap of wind-tossed rubbish such as a Tesco bag or crisp packet. A Stubbs portrait of a proud stallion might feature a jet fighter in the distant sky. In Westie’s version of Raeburn’s
The Reverend Walker Skating
, the only perceptible difference was that the man of the cloth now found himself sporting a black eye and stitches to a cut on his left cheek. One of his tutors had gone on at length about ‘anachronism in art’, seeming to think it a good thing, but others had accused him of simple copying - ‘which is by no means the same as art, merely capable draughtsmanship’.
All Westie knew was that he had a marketable-sounding nickname and only a few more weeks to go before the end of term. Which meant he should either be applying for postgraduate places or else looking for gainful employment. But he’d been up half the night working on a graffiti project: stencils of the muffled face of the artist Banksy with the words ‘Money In The Banksy’ and some dollar bills painted above and below. The stencils were anonymous. He was hoping the local media would pick up on the story and make ‘the Scottish Banksy’ a fixture in the public imagination. It hadn’t happened yet. His girlfriend Alice wanted him to become a ‘graphic artist’, meaning comic books. She worked front-of-house at an artsy cinema on Lothian Road and reckoned the way for Westie to become a top Hollywood director was for him to start drawing cartoons. He would then move into promo videos for indie rock bands and from there to the movies. The only problem with this - as he’d pointed out to her several times - was that he had no interest whatsoever in film directing . . .
she
was the one who wanted it.