‘A couple of bad nights at the wheel. Either I miscalculated the method, or someone rigged the mechanism. Can’t quite work it out. I had a suspicion once that my drink had been spiked; I couldn’t concentrate. Maybe someone thought I had been winning too much.’

‘How much?’

‘Oh, I’ve got four thousand tucked away. But I owe six to the Maltese boys and the interest is wicked, fifty per cent a month. They are being reasonable for the time being, but I wouldn’t want to try their patience. I’ll pay the Maltesers a thou here and there, as if I’m winning again, until I can earn a few quid on the fiddle, or my method comes good again at the table.’

The colloquialisms that tumbled from his lips were as alarming as the situation he described. Who were these Maltesers, and how could he talk casually about a ‘thou’, enough to buy a racing car? I felt excluded and clueless. The underside of him had gained an ominous ascendance.

‘You could get out of it,’ I suggested.

‘How?’ he scoffed.

‘Go to Israel: the Maltesers will never pursue you there.’

‘Forget it,’ said Dovidl. ‘That’s off. The last thing they need in a Jewish state is an extra fiddle-player to feed. I’d also be no bloody use to them as the next Einstein if I can’t make simple probability theory work on a bent roulette wheel. No, I’m back in training and I need your help mugging up my scores. Ever tried the Sibelius?’

He had not yet looked me in the eye and his pallor was suspiciously grey.

‘That’s not all, is it?’ I persisted.

He coughed twice and lit another Turkish cigarette.

‘Go on,’ I urged.

‘Last week,’ said Dovidl, ‘I had to go to a research laboratory in Epsom to observe a fission experiment. As I left, I remembered that Josef Hassid was in a Polish hospital somewhere nearby. I had not seen him since we were introduced at Flesch’s and I thought he might like to see a friendly face, a Landsman. His father, I heard, had sadly died of cancer. So I found the hospital and asked to see him. The blonde at Reception gave me a weird look, but a few words of street Polish got me into the ward.

‘I don’t know what I had expected. I had this vivid recollection of a solemn prodigy who had the lot: warmth and clarity, lightness and gravity, technical mastery and natural poise, the whole shooting match on the bloody fiddle. He could outplay Kreisler, Heifetz, Ida, any of us. And then he went off his head, beat up his dad and wound up all alone in a hellhole where they give him electric shocks and insulin comas before breakfast.

‘He was sitting, Mottl, in a whitewashed room with an iron bed and bars on the window. Oh, yes, and a crucifix on the wall, no other visual relief. He was rocking to and fro, gabbling syllables, his wonder-working fingers struggling uselessly with a button on his pyjama jacket.