That evening I read the letter again and I wept again. The next morning, with a final burst of renewed determination, I went back through all the notes I had kept as I talked to people on the telephone. There were still a couple of loose ends . . . I would just follow those up, I thought. One last police contact and one final ‘New Age’ lead. And then I would be free.

One of my French friends had mentioned a friend who was a police superintendent in Rouen. After the bad experience with the secret police chief in Paris who had promised so much and achieved nothing, I was not expecting a warm welcome. But I got one. His friend had prepared him and he had been waiting for me to call. On the telephone I explained the background and awaited his analysis. It came by email within the hour:

I think we could be dealing with an adolescent suicide. It’s not a certainty, but an impression given by the expressions used by the mother.

He made other suggestions, all of which I had already followed up. He also strongly denied that there was any secret national database, as the police chief had hinted, that would collect all the births, deaths and marriages held by the town halls. He could offer no concrete assistance, only his opinion. It seemed that there really was no clever computer search engine that could reveal the death of Maurice by typing in ‘Maurice, aged thirteen’. It had turned out to be a figment of my wishful imagination, encouraged into existence by the unreliable secret policeman.

The last uncontacted number in my notes was that of a radiesthesist, a pendulum swinger. The tarot reader I had consulted months ago had seen one, and this had triggered her search for her own mother – the search that the tarot reader had spent two decades completing. The pendulum had directed her to a small village in south-west France, and had reassured her that her mother was indeed still alive and would welcome a call. The geography and the welcome had apparently both been accurately predicted by the pendulum.