The young, red-haired man in the cupboard

If this had a third act it would make a superb film, for the cast list is virtually a re-run of Front Page, with Richard Addis, formerly of the Daily Express, now, magically, of the Canadian Globe and Mail, as the hard-bitten editor Walter Burns, and Stephanie Nolen, a young and eager reporter on the paper, as Hildy Johnson. It starts with an editorial conference, which, if you are unfamiliar with such things, is a sort of daily re-enactment of a high command meeting underground with tanks in the suburbs of their capital. In our time it is a scene made for black comedy.

With faltering advertising revenues and failing circulation shadowing their industry, newspaper executives in solemn conclave try to think of something, anything, that will fill their columns between the lonely hearts ads and the cures for incontinence, and allow them, and their paper, to survive another day. Respectable family men and women, they dream . . . of what? Of wonder drugs, or, wistfully, of murder (with any luck, of, or by, a celebrity), or, possibly in the case of Mr Addis, an ex-monk, of divine intervention. Which, on a May morning in 2001, duly came to him in Toronto.

For it was then at an editorial conference that Stephanie Nolen suddenly remembered something her mother had told her on the phone a week before. A neighbour of theirs in Ottawa, a chap called Sullivan who drove a school-bus, had a portrait of William Shakespeare, or was it by Shakespeare? Mrs Nolen wasn’t sure, but the bus-driver had mentioned in passing that it was worth a million dollars.

Her Canadian colleagues, Stephanie Nolen recalls, were not impressed; an intellectual amongst them pronounced that Shakespeare couldn’t paint, another muttered that the bus-driver had probably seen too many episodes of The Antiques Roadshow.