At five, I went home and called the police. It was too soon, they said, to report a missing person. I checked five hospitals; none had admitted a person of his description. I looked up the gaming club in the telephone directory, but it was unlisted. I heard Mother sobbing in her room. Across the hallway, Father dressed in silence, as if for the gallows. For any other cancellation, he would have been juggling telephones to find a replacement. At this concert, no surrogate would do. The expectations he had aroused were insatiable. People had come from all over the world to hear the next Kreisler: they would not settle for a Menuhin or a Stern.

The roads to the hall heaved with traffic. When we finally got through, I told the hall manager to post signs that the concert had been cancelled ‘due to the soloist’s indisposition’. Father went out to face the shimmering audience. He offered cash refunds at the box-office and a profound apology; backstage, he paid off the orchestra, the conductor and the hall’s eleven per cent commission. We lost ten thousand pounds that night, more than an entire year’s profit, but money was the least of our losses. Mortimer Simmonds had lost his good name. He had put his shirt on a spectacular non-runner; his judgement could not be trusted again. Friends avoided his eye; only the press pursued him, like sparrows at a corn-chandler’s wake.

Next morning, the fiasco filled the front pages. Inside, columnists crossed swords of speculation. Some suggested the débutant had been smitten by stage-fright or amnesia, others echoed police suspicions of abduction or assault. The headlines darkened next morning with news of ‘Nationwide Search for Musical Prodigy’ and ‘Mystery of Vanished Violinist’. Photographs of Eli Rapoport had been posted at rail termini, airports and harbours. Interpol had been alerted and a reward was being offered for information leading to the artist’s safe return. Antiques dealers were being asked to watch out for a 1742 Guadagnini violin, ‘worth in excess of three thousand pounds’.

The fiddle belonged, in title, to Mortimer Simmonds, but this was beneath his concern. More than financial loss, more even than professional failure, Father was tormented by fears for Dovidl’s safety. ‘It’s my fault,’ he moaned, ‘for not exercising closer supervision. I promised the father to look after the boy and I did my best, but I didn’t want to smother him. You can’t keep an artist under lock and key.’ Father never asked for my thoughts, sensitive to my pain and assuming that I would apprise him of any material information. I could not bring myself to discuss Dovidl with him: it crossed too many transgressions, his and mine. The breakfast room at Blenheim Terrace grew chill and lugubrious.