The two big coppers at the door, I noticed, had unclasped their hands. Inspector Morgan put his face close to mine, exhaling foul smoke and cheap food. I felt my back sweating like a cellar wall.

‘So, Mr Sy-monds, what do you know about a break-in last year at the Jewish synagogue on Abbey Road?’

‘What?’ I exclaimed, my chest pounding.

‘Somebody,’ said the inspector, raising his voice, ‘nipped in one dark night and made away with antique pieces of silver, insured for ten thousand pounds. Whoever it was knew the building pretty well, set off no alarms. Couldn’t be your friend, could it, Mr Sy-monds? He must have known that synagogue, being a Jewish gentleman like yourself. Was he laying up a little nest-egg for when he ran away from home? Did he let you in on the job, eh?’

‘That’s preposterous,’ I interjected.

‘Does he have a little hidey-hole somewhere you can take us where we’re going to find the missing silver, and maybe the lad himself?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I retorted, roused by righteous anger. ‘The last time Mr Rapoport set foot in synagogue was on his barmitzvah, eight years ago this month. The alarm, I happen to know, was installed only the year before last. Anyway, he would never defile sacred objects. He is too . . . superstitious . . . for that. Is that the best you can come up with, Inspector, a Jewish inside job?’

‘Just a theory,’ said the inspector softly, rising to let me go.

Angry as I was, I was also unsettled. A seed of doubt had been planted in a field of misery. I raced home to search the drawer where Dovidl kept his bombsite loot, in search of silver Torah bells and pointers. Nothing there, just the trinkets he had kept from the Blitz. They seemed worthless now, without him. After dark, I cycled down to Elgin Avenue to examine our secret tree-hole. Nothing there, either. Suspicion, though, is a persistent rash. I could not purge my friend’s memory of its itch.

I extended my enquiries worldwide. I wrote to my supervisor from Cambridge who had gone to teach at the University of Western Australia, asking him to check the Perth telephone directory for a Derek and Florence Mitchell and, failing that, to search the register of births for a baby Mitchell born in the last quarter of 1948 when Florrie would have been due. What if Dovidl had noticed Florrie’s pregnancy and, having no living relatives, felt an urge to be united with his child, if it was his, in Australia? Far-fetched, I realised, but worth eliminating.

The word from Perth was grimmer than I had feared. There were no Mitchell births in the period stipulated, my friend replied, but the register of deaths contained a Florence Mitchell who had died in October 1948 of septicaemia, after suffering a miscarriage. Her husband, Derek, had remarried and was running a petrol station in Adelaide, did I require his address?