It was a low-ceilinged, windowless basement with mahogany slats on the walls and brown leather furnishings. In the past, Gissing had complained that it felt like being in a well-upholstered coffin.

After private viewings and the auctions themselves, it had become their custom to drop into the Shining Star for what Gissing called ‘post-match analysis’. Tonight, the place was half full – students by the look of it, albeit of the well-heeled variety.

‘Living in daddy’s Stockbridge pied-à-terre,’ Gissing muttered.

‘But still your bread and butter,’ Allan teased him.

They found an empty booth and waited for the staff to take their order – whisky for Gissing and Mike, the house champagne for Allan.

‘Need a glass of the real McCoy to wash away the memory,’ he explained.

‘I mean it, you know,’ Gissing was saying, rubbing his hands together as if soaping them. ‘About all those paintings in purdah… meant every bloody word.’

‘We know,’ Allan told him. ‘But you’re preaching to the converted. ’

Robert Gissing was head of the city’s College of Art, but not for much longer. Retirement was only a month or two away – at the end of the summer term. It seemed, however, that he was determined to argue his various points to the very last.

‘I can’t believe it’s what the artists themselves would have wanted,’ Gissing persisted.

‘In the past,’ Mike felt obliged to ask, ‘didn’t they all crave patrons?’

‘Those same patrons often loaned out important works,’ Gissing shot back, ‘to the national collections and elsewhere.’

‘First Caly does the same,’ Mike argued, looking to Allan for support.