The little ticks along the top of the letter represented seagulls. ‘I’ve always loved seagulls, to me they symbolise freedom. And the sign of infinity, means something special to me. It’s a link with my family background.’ But apart from that she reserved particular scorn for the graphologist’s analysis. “A lack of imagination [absolutely not, on the contrary it is overflowing], a relatively high level of education [absolutely not, I’m an auto-didact], not disorientated by sickness or medication [at that time I was taking medication, so she’s wrong there], a feeling for numbers . . . probably an accountant [on the contrary, I absolutely hate numbers], this is not someone who would grab her rucksack [on the contrary, I just did a pilgrimage to Compostela].” I queried the pilgrimage and she explained that she had walked 850km, 25km a day for thirty-three days, to say farewell to her father. ‘My father came from the Pays Basque, so I wanted to walk to the land of my father. For my son I achieved closure by sending the bottle; for my father I did this long walk. There was nothing Catholic about it, I just love walking. So the graphologist was wrong there. And she says I have a masculine side – I absolutely don’t agree with that, I think I’m very feminine.’ And indeed, looking at her, with her pretty face and mannerisms, her attractive clothing and shoes, and her adoring companion, I had to agree.

We looked at one another, and suddenly the surreal aspect hit us both – there we were, two women who had barely met, two quite private women, sitting together discussing the most intimate elements of one of their lives, based on a private tragedy and a private action, as analysed by a faraway graphologist. So were the graphologist’s findings ‘the ramblings of a well-meaning amateur’ as I had postulated, or a convincing description of the unknown woman? I have to say it seems to me that they were both. There was a lot of rubbish in the analysis, but there was some that both the mother and I conceded was true. For instance, ‘The sense of a thick, almost suffocating layer of control, plastered over an emotional cauldron’ seemed spot on. But overall the hit rate of accuracy for the graphologist was barely an unimpressive 50 per cent.

We continued to look through the analyses in the book. I had investigated the possibility of DNA testing. ‘I was so shocked by that,’ said the mother. The DNA results could only have provided an identity to the boy if he had had a criminal record. ‘Maurice never had any problems with the police. That really shocked me, that made me feel quite ill. He was a healthy boy, there were never any problems like that.’