EVERY YEAR more than 200,000 people go missing in Britain. Can you picture one of them? Perhaps you may not want to. The stereotype is a junkie or wino eyeing you at the cash machine from a mess of smelly blankets.

This is very opposite of the Piano Man — the most prominent missing person today. This “mysterious”, “enigmatic” young man, who cannot or will not speak, was found wandering near a Kent beach more than seven weeks ago.

His story was back in the headlines this week after a Czech musician, whose friends were convinced that he was the Piano Man, appeared on television to clarify that he is not currently being cared for by West Kent NHS Trust.

Given the amount of coverage, it is not surprising that we are so familiar with the minutiae of his case. We know that he was found wearing a sodden dinner suit with the labels cut out; that he has musical talent, and that he sketched a grand piano. We probably know more about him than our own neighbours.

With his haunting photograph, the Piano Man is the acceptable face of those who go missing, the proof that there exists a hierarchy of the disappeared.

Yet surely our fixation on his musical ability is a distraction from the more shocking fact that not a single person in the entire world has come forward as a friend or relative. We seem unwilling or unable to comprehend the sheer scale of those who go missing. People who vanish reveal something deeply painful about the nature of our relationships.

That, surely, is why no one seemed interested when the National Missing Persons Helpline said in March that it was facing “a national disaster” unless the Home Office stepped in with emergency funding. The charity is the only one of its kind in Europe not to be properly funded by government. This is stupid and wrong when the organisation is pivotal to the policework on 150,000 cases every year and helps to solve 70 per cent of them. But that leaves thousands unsolved.

Recall the case of “Victim 115” of the King’s Cross fire, so called because of the mortuary tag attached to him. It was 16 years before he was identified.

The Piano Man’s plight has had global publicity yet his identity still remains unknown. It is frighteningly easy to fall unnoticed through society’s net.