Emily had given him another hand signal, this one more urgent than the last.

He’d ignored her and continued talking to the couple.

Then Emily had given him yet another signal.

He’d shaken his hand free, but she’d grabbed it again, insistently. She was starting to really piss him off.

‘What did he say about Belsen?’ Clarissa asked.

‘He said that after all this time he could still remember the smell. He said he wakes at least three times a week, in the middle of the night, with the smell in his nostrils.’

At that moment, another couple had come over, friends of Clarissa and her husband, and interrupted them with hugs and greetings.

Emily had seized the opportunity. ‘Look!’ she’d hissed at Jason and pointed at the walls.

It took him a few seconds to register what she was so excited about. Then his heart had flipped. The red dots. The traditional art gallery marking next to a painting that had been sold.

There were eighteen of them.

Later, back home, Jason and Emily had stayed awake all night, too wired with excitement to sleep. They just kept counting up and then counting up again how much profit they had made.

Almost twenty thousand pounds.

‘Shall we have supper about eight?’ Emily’s voice took him out of his reverie.

‘Sure, whenever, are you OK doing it tonight?’

‘Yes, it’s all prepared, I just have to bung it in the oven.’

Back in the lounge, he picked up his glass before climbing the stairs to the first floor, where he entered the bathroom and washed his hands for several minutes, examining them carefully each time he dried them for anything he might have picked up from the sofa. Then he decided he needed to shower again.

After an unusually short time in the cubicle, he dried and dressed, retrieved his glass and climbed on up and into his studio.

It looked a total mess and he needed to tidy it up, quickly. Against one wall was a battered but comfortable couch, on which were stacked a number of his as-yet-unsold works. Two large packing cases, containing some of his painting materials, stood on the floor. Several tins of white paint from Homebase were lined up on a shelf – the only orderly arrangement so far in the room. In the middle of the floor was his easel – he hadn’t yet decided where in the room to place it permanently.

He put his glass down on the trestle table that had long served him as his work surface, picked up the Stanley knife that was part of his essential toolkit for painting and set to work on the first packing case.

As he did so, he suddenly became aware of a light on in an upstairs room of the house across the road. He looked out and saw a woman in her thirties, with long fair hair, a man of a similar age, with a shaven head and glasses, and two young children – a boy and a girl – all staring across at him.