‘Of course I do,’ he replies, in the know-all way of journalists. ‘Wrote about it not long ago. Her father, Arnold, was concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, married Mahler’s sister, wound up penniless in London after the Anschluss. Alma went back to Holland in pursuit of a no-good Austrian boyfriend. She was trapped by the invasion, tried to escape and was deported to Auschwitz, where she formed a women’s orchestra and was murdered.’

‘And what happened to her violin?’

‘One day in 1946, according to reports, two nuns turned up on her old father’s doorstep in Blackheath, presented him wordlessly with Alma’s fiddle and vanished into thin air.’

‘A Guadagnini, if I am not mistaken?’

‘That’s right. What’s all this about?’ he demands.

‘Any idea how that instrument got from Auschwitz to south London?’ I persist.

‘No one knows.’

‘Well something of the sort has just happened to me. Does the name Eli Rapoport mean anything to you?’

‘The prodigy who vanished on the day of his début?’

‘That’s the one. Disappeared with his Guadagnini, never seen again. Last week, two rabbis turned up at my office after dark, handed me the Guadagnini and, without a word, scuttled into a waiting taxi. Rapoport was my boyhood friend, almost a brother. I don’t know what became of him, but I want you to have the story, see what you can track down. Interested?’

The journalist sips his wine, strokes his chin, directs a volley of quickfire questions. ‘It’ll take months of investigation,’ he eventually warns. ‘I’ll need unfettered access to company and family documents and any contacts you can provide. I cannot promise where it will lead. I may turn up things you won’t want to see in print, but once they are in my hands I can’t ignore them. Are you sure this is what you want?’

‘Do what you have to do,’ I tell him softly. ‘It’s your story.’

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