To which Allan had just shrugged and given a smile.

Allan was somewhere in the saleroom right now, catalogue open as he perused potential purchases. Not that he could afford much – not on a banking salary. But he had a passion for art and a good eye, and would become wistful on the day of the actual auction as he watched paintings he coveted being bought by people he didn’t know. Those paintings, he’d told Mike, might disappear from public view for a generation or more.

‘Worst case, they’re bought as investments and placed in a vault for safe keeping – no more meaning to their buyer than compound interest.’

‘You’re saying I shouldn’t buy anything?’

‘Not as an investment – you should buy whatever pleases you…’

As a result of which, the walls of Mike’s apartment were replete with art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – most of it Scottish. He had eclectic tastes, so that cubism sat alongside pastoral, portraiture beside collage. For the most part, Allan approved. The two had first met a year ago at a party at the bank’s investment arm HQ on George Street. The First Caledonian Bank – ‘First Caly’ as it was more usually called – owned an impressive corporate art collection. Large Fairbairn abstracts flanked the entrance lobby, with a Coulton triptych behind the reception desk. First Caly employed its own curator, whose job it was to discover new talent – often from degree shows – then sell when the price was right and replenish the collection. Mike had mistaken Allan for the curator, and they’d struck up a conversation.

‘Allan Cruikshank,’ Allan had said, shaking Mike’s hand. ‘And of course I already know who you are.’

‘Sorry about the mix-up,’ Mike had apologised with an embarrassed grin. ‘It’s just that we seem to be the only people interested in what’s on the walls…’

Allan Cruikshank was in his late forties and, as he put it, ‘expensively divorced’, with two teenage sons and a daughter in her twenties. He dealt with HNWs – High Net Worth individuals – but had assured Mike that he wasn’t angling for business. Instead, in the absence of the curator, he’d shown Mike as much of the collection as was open for general viewing.