Finally, after walking along past closed shop after closed shop, selling furniture, light fittings, and interior décor, they’d seen the brightly illuminated gallery ahead. As they approached, his heart had sunk. There were just about forty people in there, holding glasses of champagne. In all his previous shows in Lewes, the gallery would have been rammed, with a good one hundred guests spilling out into the street. At those they’d invited all their friends, and asked them to bring along their friends, too.

He remembered looking at Emily, flooded with disappointment, and saying, ‘Shit. This is embarrassing. This is a fucking disaster. I sold my drum kit for this? Maybe we should turn around and go home.’

‘We have to go in,’ she had insisted.

Within moments of entering, and being hit by the smell of expensive perfume, a waitress had taken their coats, and another handed them each a glass. As they’d looked around, the gallery owner, Susan Burton, a middle-aged woman who had started the place with her property-developer husband, came over to them. ‘Jason, Emily, how wonderful to see you!’ she’d given them both air kisses, then announced loudly, ‘The artist himself, Jason Danes, is here, with his very charming wife, Emily!’

Almost everyone in the room had turned around.

Jason had wanted to hide.

But Susan had wheeled him, with Emily following in his wake, through the thin crowd to a couple – the handsome man, in his fifties and dressed in a loud chalk-striped suit, with the tan and demeanour of the super-rich, and his wife: a tall, elegant woman with a Chanel bag and classy bling.

‘Jason, I’d like you to meet my dear friends, Charles and Clarissa De Montfort-Montefiore. They are dying to meet you and they’ve just bought one of your paintings – can you tell them about it?’

‘Ah,’ Jason had said. ‘Well – thank you.’

Shit! He’d sold one!

‘It is just so divine!’ the woman had said, in a New York accent. ‘Like you see this old man looking at his pint of beer and you just wanna sit down on a bar stool next to him and talk to him. He looks so interesting – like he has really lived life!’

‘Well, thank you.’

‘How did you ever conjure him up?’

‘He’s real,’ Jason said. ‘I was drinking in a pub in Lewes – in Sussex – near where we live, and I thought the same as you. Who are you? What is your story? I actually sneaked a photo of him with my phone.’

‘You did? That’s awesome.’

He had felt a hand signal from Emily. Shooting a glance at her, not wanting to break eye contact with the one person here who was actually paying money for one of his paintings, he’d turned his attention back to Clarissa De Montfort-Montefiore. ‘Well, then I went up to him and just started chatting to him. I’ve always believed that everyone you ever meet in life has a story. Well, boy, this lovely old guy sure did. He told me he was one of the soldiers who liberated Belsen! He told me there was a senior female SS officer alongside the male Commandant, and just how scared he was of her, even though she was his prisoner. That she was just pure evil personified.’