I went off to help the police with their enquiries, of which there were two lines. Either the missing person had, as Inspector Roderic Morgan put it, ‘done a runner’ – in which case there was no cause for police involvement, unless we wanted to press charges for theft of a violin. Otherwise, someone must have snatched the young chap off the street, bundled him into a car and ‘done him a mischief ’, or was holding him to ransom. Did I, his friend, know of anyone who bore malice towards Mr Rapoport, or perhaps towards my family?

The inspector was an avuncular, overweight fellow whose methodical questions hinted at a propensity, perhaps an appetite, for physical violence. Beneath his bureaucratic Welsh burr I sensed an eagerness to leave his mark on flesh. We sat alone across a metal table in a basement room at Bow Street police station, around the corner from the club I had visited with Dovidl. Was he, I wondered, one of those coppers who were paid to turn a blind eye to such places? He stared at me through a prism of class and saw (I sensed) a child of privilege, a know-all Cambridge student, needs to be brought down a peg or two. I looked him back in the eye and said, truthfully enough, that I could not think of anyone who disliked my friend, let alone wished to harm him. As for kidnapping, he was a penniless refugee. His guardian, my father, was comfortable but not wealthy. No one would expect him to lay hands on a large ransom.

The inspector offered me a cheap Woodbine, lit one himself and asked me to recount, for the third time, Dovidl’s arrival at our house, his development and education, habits and relationships. ‘What does he do in his spare time? Any unsavoury friends I should know about? Any girl trouble?’

‘He likes a night on the town,’ I volunteered, ‘you know – a drink and a laugh. I don’t think he has ever had a steady girlfriend. He was always working so hard on his studies and his violin.’

I lied with an easy conscience. The last thing I needed was the police rummaging around his uncomfortably local night-life. If Morgan found out about his gambling habits and low-life company, he might leak word of them to the gutter press, destroying whatever chance Dovidl might have of returning safe and with dignity intact. Alive or dead, I had to protect him. If he was in trouble, I felt sure he would find some way to contact me. Here, we were merely going through the motions.

‘Are you quite sure, sir, that there is nothing more you know?’

Morgan tapped louringly on a bulletproof cigarette case. He was unconvinced. ‘Please understand, Inspector,’ I said, turning on the middle-class sincerity, ‘that my parents and I are at our wits’ end. We cannot think who might want to harm him, unless it is some madman or a Communist agent from his own country – but that’s absurd, isn’t it? If he was not attacked, he may have suffered some kind of mental breakdown – which has to be taken into account given the dreadful things that happened to his family in the war.