“Ok! Let’s have a gander at some of your paintings then Daniel.”

 Swept along by these events, Judith found herself following the men downstairs and climbing into the back of Baxter’s beige Jaguar with Danny, who gave directions for the Southside. After a few miles, Danny said, here, and they pulled up next to some garages, behind a concrete high-rise apartment block, as wide as a football pitch is long. Everybody climbed out and huddled in the drizzle, while Danny lifted one of the rusty metal doors, revealing at least a hundred paintings, leaning against one another like unwanted deck chairs. Bob immediately strode across to a six-foot high, seven foot wide canvas propped up against the back wall. Painted in a classical style, it was a study of Ingrid, lying asleep in a white silk nightgown, on top of a bed.

 “You’re welcome to everything except the sleeping scene,” Danny shouted, urgently.

 “No, that’s the best one. I’m having it in honour of our deal,” Bob countered, triumphantly.

 “Oh no…I’m not letting you steal everything from me!”

 Bob affected a perplexed look. “How’s seven hundred and sixty thousand pounds theft?”

 “I shouldn’t be giving you anything…I’m already sparing your liberty!”

 “Can’t you see I’m giving you an opportunity to get out of all this with your dignity intact? Danny, you’re a good man, and I don’t want to see that destroyed. If people like you turn out bad, what hope is there for the rest of us? You’re not a blackmailer, you’re a painter. Now sell me some friggin’ paintings!” Bob smiled slyly.

 “Take it...take anything you want.”

 Danny handed Bob the garage key and marched off. Judith thought it best to leave him be and pottered about for a couple of minutes, until the others were distracted enough for her to slip away unnoticed — she certainly had no intention of getting into a car alone with them.

 

CHAPTER: 10

 When Judith arrived back at the apartment, Fin had just returned from the clinic, where he’d provided his fourth consecutive, opiate negative urine sample. But there was no Danny as yet. It wasn’t until well past six that he eventually came home, carrying a large pile of property agent’s print-outs. Among these he found the location for his college — a semi-derelict, granite-stone crofter’s house, up on the west coast, near Gairloch. Situated in the shadow of a mountain, the dwelling was of modest size, but there were ten acres of land on which to place mobile classrooms, and, a spacious byre (cowshed) that could easily be renovated to shelter students. More importantly, it was going for just one-hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds, leaving plenty of cash to make the overall project viable.

 By December, Danny had regained weight and looked a lot healthier, so the White’s rented a trailer home up at Gairloch, where, together with some of their unemployed friends, they renovated the cottage and transformed the byre into comfortable accommodation for twelve people. At weekends they returned to Glasgow. Here, Judith joined them, distributing leaflets to tracksuited gangs on concrete housing schemes, which were in the process of being demolished and replaced with a mixture of privately owned and socially rented beige brick houses, similar to those popping up in Danny’s old neighbourhood. They were usually subjected to drunken sarcastic remarks for their trouble, often downright abuse and, just once, outright aggression. The most intimidating experience, though, was the night a black Range Rover with tinted windows kept appearing, cruising slowly behind them. It turned out that the occupants were foot soldiers of Rex McLeod, the most feared man in the city. They’d obviously had reports of three strangers approaching youths on housing schemes and so naturally assumed they were either drug dealers, trying to establish new patches, or undercover police officers. Fortunately, Danny knew their boss – having painted portraits for him – and so managed to reassure these bull necked, shaven headed characters that they were neither.

 Danny reckoned that Rex McLeod was a “paternalistic, communitarian gangster”. Known as The Big Man, he’d made his money robbing banks in the Sixties and Seventies, but nowadays relied mainly on other people doing truck heists for him — truck heists which provided cheap goods for folk who couldn’t afford them otherwise. If Danny, Fin and Judith had been dealers, they’d have been punished not because they were competitors, but because Rex detested drugs and lamented the damage they’d done to his city. Truth be told, when he wasn’t raising money for drugs charities, he’d be either informing on pushers or having their legs broken.

 The following May — the same day Bob and Herman were finally officially acquitted of Carina Curran’s attempted murder — Danny delivered a presentation to a dozen teenagers, on the top floor of an old textiles mill which had been converted into artist’s studios. While herding them in off the stairs, where they’d been hanging about diffidently, he’d been shocked to discover a particularly nasty character among their number. Wearing a white Lacoste tracksuit and checked Burberry baseball cap, he had a gaunt, embittered face with a thick, purple line of scar tissue beginning below his right ear and running just above his jaw line to the corner of his mouth. One night, during a recruitment walkabout on the schemes, his gang had heckled Danny and co so venomously that they’d deemed it wise to leave.

 After a drink and nibble from the Mediterranean buffet, which degenerated into a full on olive and feta-cheese fight, Danny sat everybody round him in a semi-circle of orange, plastic chairs. While trying to explain his vision he was constantly interrupted by ‘Scar Face’ much to the amusement of the girls present. However, a raven haired beauty called Belinda became embroiled in an argument with Scar Face, causing Danny to have to intervene and ask the lad what he hoped to derive from the course, should he embark upon it.

 “What’s it to you?” He stared through Danny as if challenging him to a fight.

 “Well, I’m here to help you.”

 “Oh is that right big man? What do you want me to do, kiss your butt or something?” His audience roared with laughter.

 “No, I…”

 “Aye you do. This isn’t about helping us. It’s all about your middle class ego. We shouldn’t be in a position where we’re beholden to ‘charitable’ individuals like you.”

 “I quite agree,” Danny concurred. “But we’re here to facilitate and develop whatever interests you may have in art?”

 “Listen, I couldn’t paint ma shoes and I never want to.”

 “Ah, so you want to learn about writers?”

 “Learn? Listen pal, there’s nothing you and your ilk can teach me about ‘literature’. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Hardy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, Carver, Kundera, they’re the only existence I’ve ever been able to afford. I don’t need to be taught how to read, I need to be enabled to write.”

 Danny’s eyes dwelled on the lad a moment, as if identifying something there that nobody else could.

 “How can we enable you to write then?”

 “By getting me out of that hell hole I live in and allowing me some peace. They reckoned that J.K Rowling wrote in crowded cafes. Well, I’d like to see her even write a note to the milkman at our place, with my sister’s kids running about the apartment and my dad watching the TV at full blast, night and day.”

 “Tell me about it. I had to share with a brother and four sisters”

 “Yeah, in a nice big house I bet?”

 “No. Possil.”

 “You’re from Possil? Get away.”

 “What made you think I came from a big house?”

 “I don’t know, the way you talk — all bourgeois like.”