Doors Open

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 Joh

‘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 Gle

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 Gle

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…

With these thoughts ru

‘This is Mr Allison,’ Hate said, emerging from the kitchen. He was eating a banana from the fruit bowl.

‘I know.’

‘Of course you do. You worked him over first time round, didn’t you?’

Chib stabbed a finger in Hate’s direction. ‘Nobody,’ he said quietly, ‘does this to me. Nobody comes into my house, making all sorts of mess…’

‘I don’t think we’ve made a mess,’ Hate replied calmly. He then dropped the banana skin on the floor and ground it into the carpet – Liz’s carpet – with the heel of a black cowboy boot.

‘You’re tangling with the wrong man,’ Chib warned him, breathing hard, stoking himself up. Hate ignored him, concentrating instead on Jimmy Allison. The man flinched as Hate’s hands reached towards him, but all Hate did was peel the length of silver tape from his mouth.

‘You know the rules, Mr Allison,’ Hate reminded him. Then he turned his attention to Chib, while resting the palm of his hand against the crown of Allison’s head.

‘Mr Allison here, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a curator at the National Gallery of Scotland. His expertise is in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish art. He has a soft spot for McTaggart, so he tells me, and also Samuel Bough.’ Hate bent down a little so his face was level with the curator’s. ‘Is my pronunciation adequate, Mr Allison?’

With eyes screwed shut in fear, Allison nodded his agreement that it was.

‘It is perhaps an irony,’ Hate continued, straightening up again, ‘that Mr Allison should suffer such similar mishaps in so short a space of time. The perils of the World Wide Web, I’m afraid. His name materialized as someone in the area who might be able to tell me a little more about the painter Samuel Utterson. Our conversation – when we finally got round to it – was illuminating. So much so, that I decided Mr Allison should inspect Dusk on Ra