We find the flat on the third floor of the second block. Current occupants know nothing about anything. Decision made to split up: I work left, Vermeer goes right. We’re both armed with a blow-up picture of Rein Benner which is mostly met with blank stares. On the fifth, though, I get a result. A man in his late fifties opens the door. He’s wearing jeans and a loose woollen jumper which is untangling at the cuffs. He has a full head of white hair and a beard to match. Stick a cap on him, give him a rugged polo neck, jam a wooden pipe in his mouth and he could captain a shipping vessel in the North Sea. When I show him the photo and ask if he’d ever seen the man in it he nods.

‘What, Rein? Yeah, I knew him.’

I invite myself in and soon I’m sitting in his living room, which is surprisingly light, and looks out over well-tended gardens with tall trees and a large curving pond. Music’s playing quietly. I recognize it but it takes me a few moments to pin it down. Beethoven. Symphony. Can’t remember which one. The man invites me to sit and then eases himself into what looks like an original Eames chair, the tan leather worn and smooth. The walls are covered with tiny woodcuts, all the same size, and they all seem to be of the same scene, which looks familiar, though I can’t work out what it actually is.

‘The National Monument,’ he says, catching me looking at them. ‘Been cutting it for twenty-five years. One per day. And I’ve only missed four days since I started, and that was because I was in hospital. Those four missing days still bug me.’

‘That’s a lot of days,’ I say, looking at all the works. I find myself wondering why anyone would want to make images, even if they are overly impressionistic, of the most ugly monument in Amsterdam? I mean, Rembrandt did his own face over and over again, but still.

‘This is nothing. I’ve got a lock-up I rent down the road. I keep them there. Every day I take the oldest one down and drop it off on the way to work. Then the new one goes up in its place. Helps give me a sense of progression.’

‘You don’t sell any of them?’

The man seems to contract. It almost looks like disgust.

‘Sell? I’m not selling these. That’s not the point. I work mornings stacking shelves at the Albert Heijn on Stadionweg, have done for the past seventeen years. Badly paid and tough work, but it gives me the afternoons to do this. I don’t have a lot of money, but I worked out early on that time is so much more important. At least it is to me.’