Free Doors Open by Ian Rankin

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