‘Missing?’ Rhys-Smith said when I told him about Jo-Jo. I had wondered. He’s a generous boy for one so young.’

Rhys-Smith looked at my missing arm. ‘The young are not often generous, Mr Fortune. Generosity requires some suffering.’

I was not in the mood to tell the story of my arm. Not any of the stories of my arm. So I watched Rhys-Smith. He fitted his name if not his present location. Cecil Rhys-Smith is not a name heard often in Chelsea.

He was a small man, slender and wiry, with the light skin and ruddy complexion of the British Isles. His moustache was thin and pale, and his hair was thin and had once been pale. The hair was grey now, and it looked like he cut it himself. His clothes had once been good tweed. He looked like a man who had once been someone. Not someone important, just someone. He had been a man who had something to do and a place in the world. Now he was no one, and what had happened was as obvious as the shaking of his hands when he tried to sip, not gulp, his free whiskey. Somewhere in his life his way out had become a monster on his back, and he had ended in a cheap bar a long way from home.

‘Talk to me,’ I said, ‘and there’ll be more.’

He was not all the way down yet. ‘I would talk about my friend Jo-Jo without it, Mr Fortune. I will also take every dram you care to offer.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘It’s a simple life. Only one problem to think about every day, and a good chance that the problem will not last long. But tell me about Jo-Jo?’

‘He seems to have vanished. His family say he’s just on a trip. Peter Vitanza thinks different.’

‘His family, yes,’ Rhys-Smith said. ‘I never met them. There is some trouble there, Mr Fortune. Jo-Jo was disturbed about his family. I would say that he hated them, and yet, well, he loved them, you see? He is a close-mouthed boy.’