At the end of the phone there was a stunned silence. ‘Never mind how you found the concerto,’ Myra said eventually, decisive. ‘That’s not important. The question is: what happens now that you have? And, it would seem, now that they have too?’

‘Alec thinks the German government owns the rights, because it has been in the state library for such a long time – and I don’t know what to do.’

‘I don’t think there’s much you can do.’

‘It ought to be mine to play first,’ Jelly insisted. ‘Nobody would have known it existed if I hadn’t had that message.’

‘Do you have anything official in writing from someone who holds rights in the piece, declaring that you must play it first? Beyond your sister’s, er, transcripts?’

‘If only… No, of course I don’t. And I know that in the end it’s…’

Jelly wanted to say, ‘It’s only a piece of music.’ Not land, or an inflammatory political text, or a shipment of arms. Only a piece of music. And yet… It brought to mind other images of those she could not begin to rescue: first Sep, then Tom – and now, trapped in Nazi Germany, Ulli too. ‘Honestly, Myra, if I lose it now… I don’t know what I’ll do.’

Chapter 11

‘That’s outrageous,’ said Donald Tovey.

‘You’re telling me,’ said Ulli. ‘Did you see the footnote?’

‘Georg Kulenkampff is to give the premiere in Berlin? And he wants a year of exclusivity? It’s… outrageous.’

‘And it is to be published by Breitkopf und Härtel. Nobody would ever have known where to find it if it wasn’t for our efforts and yours.’

‘Then it is in your interests as well as mine to put a stop to this,’ said the professor, the lengthy telephone line crackling between Edinburgh and Mainz. ‘Why have you let all these months go by, Ulli? Why did nobody send me this article sooner? I had no idea whatsoever. You can’t have been entirely preoccupied with your Olympic Games?’

Ulli hesitated. People outside Germany had very little inkling, he realised, of the pressures that now faced him and his colleagues under the Third Reich. ‘Herr Sir Doktor Professor,’ he faltered, for Tovey, in that strange British system, had recently been knighted, ‘we are up against some – well, interesting – situations here… ’

‘And is that a reason not to keep me informed?’

‘Why is it in your interests to put a stop to it?’ Ulli ventured. ‘Because of our beautiful Hungarian?’

‘“Our” beautiful Hungarian?’

Ulli stayed quiet.