He begins, crumbling a biscuit between his tentacular fingers, twenty-four hours before his disappearance. Leaving the general rehearsal at the underground studio in Kingsway Hall, Holborn, on 2 May – ‘a doddle, so easy the music hardly touched the sides’ – he was at a loose end for amusement. He rode back to the office with the conductor to cash an expenses chit and, while there, got flirting with Rosalyn, my deeply reserved desk-mate. Rosalyn had been given the afternoon off and, it being sunny, accepted his invitation to a sandwich and a stroll in Regent’s Park. They discovered a common aptitude for higher calculus and a shared disdain for western liberalism. Dovidl suggested that since they were having such a good time, why not carry on chatting over tea at our place, which he knew to be empty all afternoon. He was a practised seducer and she, innocently or knowingly, acquiesced.

‘Were you aware that I was going out with her?’ I interject, with an unbidden growl of sexual jealousy.

‘I suppose so,’ he grunts. ‘I think she may have mentioned something about a date with you.’

‘And?’

‘And what? You were a student. I was a full-grown artist. I had certain physical and emotional needs. I am not proud of it, but that’s how I was. Can we move on?’

‘You deceived me, you took my girl-friend––’

‘Whatever I took,’ he replies acidly, ‘you would have given me, had I bothered to ask for it.’

This assertion is so cuttingly accurate that I decide to ignore it.

‘Was she worth it?’ I demand.

‘Is anything?’ he shrugs.

With Rosalyn dressed and gone, he moped around the house in a state of post-coital ennui.

‘Not your type, then?’ I persist.

‘It was myself I didn’t much care for.’

‘You preferred the more motherly sort . . .’

He winces from the depths of his shaggy beard at the reminiscence of his tarts. I proceed to wreak further vengeance, revealing the wretched fate of Florrie, his domestic comforter. He betrays no emotion. ‘She was very good to us,’ he murmurs collegially, as if to regain common ground. ‘Can we move on?’

That evening, he wandered down to his usual haunts but found few distractions. Heeding my father’s injunction for once, he was in bed by midnight but tossed and turned until daybreak. When he finally fell asleep, he had a fleeting dream about his mother and awoke to the sound of the doorbell, feeling blessed. Keeping the taxi waiting, he showered and consumed half a grapefruit before grabbing a slice of toast and his fiddle and rushing out. ‘I had never felt so calm in my life,’ he murmurs. ‘It was as if my mother had told me in the dream, “Everything’s going to be all right.” ’