After three months, the inspector called to say he was closing the file. Mother was spending more time in a nursing-home than out, and Father was staring blankly at his towering pile of correspondence. I was finally free to mourn, in the few months until Father died.

I made one last concerted effort to pick up Dovidl’s trace shortly after Father’s death, when I became head of the family. Through one of those seedy fellow travellers who thronged the fringes of concert life and contributed occasional reviews to the Morning Star, I made contact with a person in authority at the Polish embassy – not the ambassador, but an intelligence officer listed as the junior commercial attaché. The Poles were starved of hard currency. I needed cheap scores. I ordered from them two hundred thousand paperbacks at sixpence apiece, a total of five thousand pounds, which I paid from a pre-war Swiss account that my father had discreetly set up.

This was the riskiest thing I have ever done. British citizens were forbidden at the time to spend more than fifty pounds abroad without Treasury consent; their foreign accounts were supposed to be held under Treasury supervision. If discovered, I would have faced prosecution and a prison sentence of up to three years. Like every illegal act, it exposed me to the possibility of blackmail. My Polish contact knew that I was evading currency controls: he could betray me to the British authorities or pressure me to perform other services for the Poles. I knew the depth of my exposure and took steps to contain it. I slipped the Polish attaché a thousand-pound sweetener, which did the trick.

The scores, obtained at a fraction of union-inflated UK printing costs, paid off instantly and for decades to come. They gave me a competitive advantage in music sales that lasted as long as the demand for my product. Forty years later, I was down to my last ten dozen Polish-pressed scores, falsely stamped ‘Printed in the British Empire’ and selling at six pounds each, two hundred and forty times their manufacturing cost, bribes included.

The Communists in Warsaw were delighted at the deal, so much so that they promoted my embassy contact to Berlin, world capital of Cold War dirty deals. But leather-jacketed Jaček did not leave without fulfilling his part of our bargain, which was to procure me a trip to Warsaw – ostensibly to sign the contract and raise toasts for world peace, actually to see for myself what remained of Dovidl’s world, and if he was to be found anywhere within it.

To ease my conscience and cover my back, I told the Foreign Office that I was crossing the Iron Curtain in search of musical talent and offered my services as a contact and courier. Independent travellers were rare in those days between London and Warsaw. Under the Official Secrets Act, I am unable to discuss the operational aspects of my trip.