Adam had a personal insight into megalomaniac taste. A Jewish refugee from Germany, he had seen the Nazis make life impossible for his father, the owner of a sports-goods store in Berlin. His sets for James Bond villains – the shark-tanks, the hollow volcanoes – were his way of demonstrating the vulgarity of the dictatorial mind. 

He was always philosophical about the inevitable destruction of all his hard work. When the historian Christopher Frayling asked him about the fate of his fake Goya, he replied: “Lost in Pinewood somewhere, I think.”

Adam was always at pains to point out, however, that it wasn’t his idea to put the painting in the lair. The joke belonged to Johanna Harwood, the screenwriter charged with reworking the film. 

Harwood understood Bond. In 1959 she’d written a short story for Nursery World about the young 007 playing snap, Casino Royale-style, with his nanny. Ian Fleming wrote her a complimentary note. Terence Young, however, was rudely dismissive of her talent. “We gave her script credit,” he once said, “and she became a fairly well-known writer for about one year until they found out she was not really a writer.” The film historian Melanie Williams is on her case. “We don’t know the full extent of her work on the Bond films,” she says, “but I suspect it is substantial and there are a lot of credit-grabbers after the fact once it’s a hit franchise.”

Not all art theft, it seems, carries a sentence.Harwood is still with us. Now in her nineties, she lives quietly on the French Riviera. If that painting was lost in Pinewood, I hope she found it, and put it on her wall.