Doors Open

  Making them complicit.

  Making them accessories.

  Which meant one of them might just squeal. Ransome hadn’t had a proper talk with Gissing yet. From what he’d seen so far of the old man, he thought he knew the type. Probably marched against the bomb in the fifties. Liked the idea of a student riot in ’68 but couldn’t get anyone else in Edinburgh to agree with him. Typical trendy leftie grown old, still anti-police and unlikely to cooperate as a result.

  Leaving the banker, Allan Cruikshank. Ransome intended letting him stew another day, max, before a second visit, trusting the man didn’t have an aneurysm in the interim. But now that the detective had started to consider the professor, he realised there might be some fun to be had there, too. Before that, though, he had to pass these four new names around, get a minion to run a check. He’d managed to shift a further half-inch in depth from his in-tray.

  ‘Time for a break,’ he persuaded himself, tearing the page from the notebook.

  Mike had spent a fruitless half-hour at the art college. Gissing’s secretary wasn’t around, and neither was he. The door to his outer office was open, but the inner sanctum was locked tight. There was paperwork on the secretary’s desk and her phone was ringing. Mike was tempted to pick up, just in case it was Gissing himself, but instead he placed his hand against the coffee mug next to the telephone. There was some residual warmth, meaning the secretary couldn’t be far off - unless she’d clocked off early. In the end, he scribbled a note and slid it under Gissing’s door. Just the three words - NEED TO MEET - and his initials. Heading back downstairs, he decided to visit Westie. The basement was labyrinthine. Plenty of students were at work, but no one had seen Westie. Eventually, a bearded and bespectacled man - somewhat older than the undergraduate norm and standing in a studio half filled with hay bales - told him that Westie was in the next room along. Except that he wasn’t there. His door was ajar, and inside there were signs of recent activity. Seven paintings, framed and prepped. A couple were waiting for hooks to be hammered into the wall against which they rested. The hooks were on the floor next to them, as was a small hammer. Mike hoped that Westie was on the hunt for Alice. He hoped he wasn’t hunched on the sofa in his flat, getting stoned and maudlin.

  ‘You a dealer?’ It was the beard from the next studio along. He was wiping his hands down the front of his overalls. It took Mike a moment to realise he probably meant art dealer rather than any other kind. Mike shook his head.

  ‘There was a guy here yesterday,’ the man continued, ‘looked like a bouncer. I asked Westie afterwards who he was. Said he was a dealer. Takes all sorts, I suppose . . .’ The man was shuffling back towards his work.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mike called to him. ‘Is Westie’s stuff any good, do you think?’

  ‘Define “good”,’ the man said, moving out of view.

  Mike thought about this and decided that he couldn’t. He headed upstairs again and pulled open the door to the outside world. Someone else was coming in, so he took a step back. The man made to pass him with a nod of thanks, then stopped in his tracks. Mike realised who it was: Ransome. He stared at the floor, but too late.

  ‘You’re Michael Mackenzie,’ the detective said.

  Mike pretended to look surprised. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Do we know one another?’

  ‘Has your good friend Chib Calloway not mentioned me to you? Or Allan Cruikshank, come to that?’ Ransome was holding out his hand, waiting for Mike to reciprocate. Mike shook it.

  ‘Allan?’ he asked. ‘No, I don’t think he has. Do you work with him?’

  Ransome laughed. Some students wanted to get past, so that the two men had to move back inside the reception area. ‘I’m a police officer, Mr Mackenzie. Surely Mr Cruikshank must have said something to you about me?’

  ‘Why should he?’

  ‘Because I’m investigating your friend Chib Calloway.’

  ‘You keep calling him that, but I wouldn’t class him a “friend”.’

  ‘What, then? An associate - would that be nearer the mark?’

  ‘We were at school together, Tynecastle High . . . bumped into one another again recently.’

  ‘And found that you share an interest in fine art,’ Ransome mused. ‘Does that explain your trip here today, Mr Mackenzie?’

  ‘I’m a bit of a collector.’ Mike offered a shrug. ‘Degree show’s coming up and I was hoping for a sneak preview.’

  Ransome nodded along with this, but looked far from convinced. ‘So you weren’t just warning Professor Robert Gissing not to speak to me?’

  Mike managed a laugh. ‘Why in God’s name would I do that?’ He cut the end of the sentence off with a little cough. He’d been about to add the word ‘Inspector’ but couldn’t remember if Ransome had identified himself as such. He’d already slipped up with Laura; couldn’t have it happen again.

  ‘You don’t deny you’re friends with Professor Gissing?’

  ‘I certainly know him a damned sight better than I do Chib Calloway.’

  ‘You’ll know where I can find him, then.’

  ‘He has an office on the top floor. I can’t say for certain he’ll be there.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try anyway.’ Ransome smiled and made to move past Mike.

  ‘What’s this all about? First Allan Cruikshank and now Professor Gissing . . . you seem to be talking to half my friends.’ Mike was trying for levity, but Ransome’s stare was steely.

  ‘You can’t be that short of friends, Mr Mackenzie, surely.’ He seemed about to leave it at that but then paused. ‘I’ve just been to see a man called Jimmy Allison - too much to expect that you know him, too?’ Ransome watched Mike shake his head. ‘He was the victim of a mugging, night before the Granton warehouse heist. You’ll have heard something about that, Mr Mackenzie?’

  ‘The heist? Sure,’ Mike agreed.

  ‘Well, this curator . . . expert in his field . . . he lives just a short hike from here, one of those newish blocks of flats by the canal.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Only he wasn’t there. His wife’s up to high doh - called the police even, only no one thought to tell me. He’s gone missing, you see. Since yesterday. She’s worried he’s got concussion.’

  Christ, first Alice, and now this . . .

  ‘Could have fallen in the canal,’ Mike eventually commented.

  ‘Is that what you think, Mr Mackenzie?’ Ransome’s jaw was jutting. ‘Thing about Mr Allison is, he knows Professor Gissing.’

  ‘Half of Edinburgh knows Robert Gissing.’ Mike paused. ‘You can’t think that the professor had anything to do with . . . ?’

  Ransome responded with a twitch of the mouth. ‘Only bit of good news I’ve got for you, Mr Mackenzie, is that having spoken to you, I don’t think it’s your voice on the tape. But pretty soon now, I’m going to know who made that call.’

  ‘What call?’

  ‘Ask your friend Allan.’ Ransome gave a little bow as he moved away. Mike watched him disappear into the building, then made good his escape, breathing hard. Allison was missing: what the hell was that about? Maybe concussion was the truth of it. Poor sod could have ended up in the canal. A tap on the head was all that had been requested and required, but Mike should have been there to make sure.

  Maybe Allan was right - maybe the best thing to do was ditch the paintings and phone in a tip-off. Problem was, Hate still had his hands on one of them. Plus the forgeries might be traceable back to Westie, once identified as such. And Mike would need to convince Westie and Gissing to give their paintings back.

  You wanted this, Mike, he told himself . . .

  ‘Oh, Christ, Gissing!’ Mike slapped at his forehead. Say the secretary had returned. Say she unlocked the door. The detective would find Mike’s note lying there . . . He slapped himself a couple more times for luck, then noticed that passing students, portfolios tucked under their arms, were staring at him.

  ‘Performance art,’ he explained, striding towards another of his
favourite thinking places: the Meadows.

  By six o’clock, the offices of First Caledonian were closed and Allan Cruikshank felt it safe to start answering his home telephone. Checking his messages, he discovered that the half-dozen calls he’d ignored during the course of the day had all been from his secretary, wondering where he was, asking if he was ill, telling him she was cancelling all his meetings. There was nothing from Mike or Robert Gissing, and nothing from the detective. Allan had turned off his mobile phone, and felt little compunction to switch it on again. He had the feeling that the first person he spoke to, he’d end up telling them everything. Had he been a religious man, he might have headed up Leith Walk to the Catholic cathedral, where confessionals doubtless awaited. He’d even considered Margot, but she would scold him and maybe even laugh at his plight, relieved to have rid herself of such an idiotic specimen.

  Allan’s stomach had been growling since mid-morning, but he lacked an appetite. He’d sipped eight or nine glasses of tap water, but still felt unquenched. Daytime TV had proved little solace. One chat show aimed at housewives had contained a lengthy discussion about the international trade in stolen art. And at the top of every hour there’d been a news update, which Allan always switched off before the heist could be mentioned. He was shaved and dressed in his work suit, having woken up from a brittle, short-lived sleep determined to go into the office as usual. His resolve had lasted as far as the front door. With his hand ready to turn the lock, he’d frozen. There was a whole terrifying world out there. This flat was his only refuge. Most of the rest of the day he’d stayed by his window, wondering if Ransome or some other authority figure would exit the police station and take the short walk to the tenement, pressing the bell marked CRUIKSHANK. There were no signs of any media interest. Patrol cars came and went. Plainclothes officers ambled outdoors for cigarettes and conversation. With his window open, ears straining, all Allan could ever hear were birds in the trees and the rumble of buses on Leith Walk.

  He could take one of those buses and lose himself elsewhere. Or a train south. An aeroplane headed overseas. He had a passport, and a couple of credit cards, only one of them nearing its spending limit. What was stopping him? Did he want to get caught? Ransome’s card was in his wallet, giving off some kind of weak radiation so that he was always aware of it. An eleven-digit phone number was all that stood between him and a kind of atonement. What was he so afraid of? Letting Mike and Robert Gissing down? Or the wrath of Chib Calloway? Seeing himself in the newspapers and the dock? Or slopping out with the other inmates? Seated on his living room floor, his back to the wall, he raised his knees and wrapped his arms around them. His secretary would have left for the evening. There’d be no more phone calls from work. If he could get through the rest of the evening, maybe things would start to look a little brighter. Maybe tomorrow would be better.

  Maybe things would turn out all right.

  30

  It was nearly eleven that night by the time Chib Calloway got home. He’d decided to have a word with his young team after all. A phone call wouldn’t do it - had to be face to face. You looked someone in the eye, you pretty much knew if they were lying to you. He got the distinct feeling Mike hadn’t been lying. Whoever had snatched the daubs, it hadn’t been him. That still left plenty of suspects, but then the four kids hadn’t seemed like they were lying either.

  ‘We did just what we were told to, no more, no less,’ Bellboy had stated, acting as the group’s spokesman. Missing half his teeth but still eloquent. Well, compared to his comrades he was.

  The rest of the day had been about meetings. There was a lap-dancing club on Lothian Road, lease expiring and current management thinking of shifting their sphere of operations elsewhere. Chib had been asked if he wanted to take the place on as a going concern. Problem was, he got the feeling the best girls would be moving on with their old employers, and it would be tough finding the talent to replace them. Plus there’d have to be a refit, and he’d been quoted seventy-five to a hundred K ‘for a really outstanding job, something to get the VIPs in’. Who was kidding who? You always stuck ‘VIP’ on the windows and the adverts, but your clients were sleazebags and stag groups. Chib had done the clever thing, asked Johnno who the regular doormen were, then given one of them a buzz. As a result of which, he learned that the place had been dying on its feet for the past three months.

  ‘Wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole, Mr Calloway.’

  End of story.

  Chib had been waiting for other calls - from Hate; from Edvard. Kept checking his phone, but nothing so far. At day’s end, he had dispensed with the services of Glenn and Johnno, dropping them at one of his own pubs but declining their offer of a ‘swift one’. On the drive home, he’d listened to a bit of Dire Straits, always seemed to make the world a better place. He parked the BMW in the driveway - the garage belonged to the Bentley - and stood for a moment, staring up at the night sky’s orange glow. He’d bought a telescope once from a place on the Royal Mile but hadn’t had much success with it. Light pollution, he’d been told, all the city’s street-lamps … So he’d made the shop take it back with a full refund. Turned out later, they’d given him twenty quid too much, which hadn’t bothered Chib in the least.

  Some of his men wondered why he chose to live on a new-build estate when he could have practically any house in Edinburgh. But those four- and five-storey Georgian piles in the New Town, they just didn’t do it for him. Too finicky and formal. Nor did he want rolling acres and stables and all of that, which would have entailed leaving the city behind. He was an Edinburgh boy, born and bred. Not too many could say the same: whole streets filled with English accents, not to mention the students - tens of thousands of them. But this was still Chib’s city, and sometimes he couldn’t help but love it to bits.

  The house - corner plot, detached, ex-show home - was in darkness. A neighbour had warned him he should keep a light burning in the upstairs hall, just to deter the thieves. Chib hadn’t bothered pointing out that thieves weren’t quite that stupid. Did the neighbour think they skulked around the place wondering why whole families congregated on the upstairs landing? Thinking of it now, Chib had another chuckle to himself. The neighbours were okay, though - never minded when he turned the volume up a bit or had some of the lads and a few girls round for a party. His wife, Liz … the house had been her idea. They’d hardly been there a year when the cancer had started to eat away at her. She’d always got on with the neighbours, and most of them had paid their respects at the funeral. That might have been their first inkling that Liz’s husband was a man of substance. The cortege had been vast, consisting mainly of large gentlemen in dark glasses, their movements choreographed by Glenn and Johnno.

  Little wonder the neighbours never complained about the noise.

  He had yet another little chuckle, then walked up to the door and slid the key into the lock. Another thing about the house: ten-year warranty. And the builders had thrown in an alarm system free of charge … Not that he ever used it. Once he had closed the door behind him, he felt a sense of contentment. This was where he could relax, unwind, forget all his worries. A couple of whiskies and some trash TV. The local Indian restaurant would deliver. So would his favourite pizza place. And if he fancied fish and chips instead, well, the guy there would hop on to his moped, too - just because Chib was Chib. But tonight all he wanted was the whisky - maybe three or four of them, to be honest, just to shut out any lingering memories of Mackenzie, Ransome and Hate. It was the amateurs he was most wary of. People like Hate and Edvard - and even Ransome - they knew how the game was played. Mackenzie and his crew were another matter entirely, and that meant things could go wrong, spectacularly wrong. Of course, Chib himself had been no more than peripheral. If the cops came sniffing, what was there to find? He didn’t give a toss if Mackenzie, the banker and the prof all went to jail. What skin would it be off his nose? Then again, it would be a blow, no doubt about it, if Westie went with them …

  W
ith these thoughts running through his head, he couldn’t be anything but surprised to walk into the living room, flick on the lights, and see that someone was waiting for him there - though not exactly of his own accord. The man was bruised and battered, bound and gagged. He was seated on one of Chib’s dining chairs. It had been dragged away from the table and placed in such a way that it would be the first thing Chib saw when he walked through the door. The man’s eyes seemed to be pleading, even though one of them was swollen shut and the other reduced to little more than a slit. There was a crust of blood below the nose, others either side of his mouth and trailing down into the top of his stained shirt from his left ear. Sweat was drying in what hair he had left to him, and his shirt and trousers were torn.