The first error I had made had been the date when Sioux found the bottle. She had found it on the beach, kept it for a few weeks, then sent it to me; I had kept it for a few weeks before translating it. Later, when I realised I was on a serious trail looking for the author, we had tried to remember the date that Sioux found it – and we had made a mistake, originally thinking the bottle had been found in February. In fact, the mother had only thrown it into the sea in March – she showed me the ferry tickets that she had carefully kept – and we had found the bottle barely a few days later. This was my first, and most glaring error. The lifeguard had been right in his favoured assumption – that it had been thrown from a cross-Channel ferry. That meant that all those who had ‘seen’ the mother on the cliffs, hurling the bottle, such as the tarot reader, were wrong.

My search for statistical information on the deaths of thirteen year-olds had been misguided too, as I had partially realized after a few weeks, because Maurice had not drowned. At the time they had been living in central France, although she had later moved to a town along the northern French shore. The watery imagery had been used only because the mother had always loved the sea, and because of its poetic associations.

All my days spent hunting through the death notices of the local newspapers had been in vain. The experts had suggested at least five years mourning for a child, but in fact it had taken her a massive twenty-one years to write the letter. The ‘dawn of summer’ was just a lyrical expression, perhaps (as one reader suggested to me) indicating that he was leaving childhood and entering adulthood, and my searches through the months of May and June (quite apart from being sixteen years too late) were also wasted, since Maurice had died in August.

The name ‘Maurice’ itself contained no clues. ‘I didn’t choose the name Maurice’, she told me. ‘At the maternity hospital I called him Emmanuel, and my husband went to register him; the maternity nurse came bursting in a few days later saying, “How can you do this to your little wife, who has been in labour for three days.” He had named him Maurice, after his own father. In my heart he remained Emmanuel.’