‘In the kitchen,’ I answered. ‘He’d hidden it in a sugar sifter.’ We both gazed at the object on my palm: the figure of an old Japanese man, exquisitely carved, carrying a staff, his bald head slightly elongated, a rippling beard flowing down his front. ‘Ivory netsuke, eighteenth century, signed by Shugetsu,’ I said slowly, ‘current value at auction between fifty and fifty-five thousand pounds. I’ve been doing my homework.’ I smiled sadly. ‘I never asked you if you’d found the one you lost. It is yours, isn’t it?’

Paul couldn’t take his eyes off the little figure, but he nodded, slowly picking it up in his fingers and holding it reverently. ‘I bought it in an auction, in a box of bric-a-brac.’ He shook his head with the irony of it. ‘The whole box cost me five pounds. I only bought it because there were a few brass drawer handles that I thought might be useful. I didn’t realise this was in there, left the box lying around for months before I sorted through it.’

‘Did you realise how valuable it was?’ I asked.

‘Not then. I hadn’t heard of Shugetsu, I thought it might be worth about fifty quid.’

‘So what happened?’

He rolled the netsuke gently in his palm. It was a few moments before he spoke. ‘I’d told Nick about my netsuke collection. He said he’d like to see it − just out of interest. So, one evening I took them around to him, all wrapped in tissue paper, in my shoebox. We spent an hour or so, looking at them, studying the marks, trying to put a value on each one. I don’t remember what he said about this one, he certainly didn’t say it was valuable. But when I got home, I found it was missing.’