Before throwing myself wholeheartedly into the search for the unknown author, I thought I would start by looking at the statistics. Exactly how big was this haystack in which I thought to search for my needle? Given that Maurice travelled ‘for a long time . . . between two waters, between two lights’ and ‘reached harbour again, on a faraway shore, close to the rising sun’, I was clearly looking for a boy who had died by drowning, perhaps in a stretch of water such as the English Channel with lighthouses at each coast. A harbour on the eastern shore narrowed down the location still further.

I reasoned that probably only a few children drowned each year, and the details of each would be kept on a special file in some government office somewhere. The internet, ever-helpful, suggested that INED, the French National Institute for Demographic Studies, held the answers. Its switchboard operator was unhelpful.

‘You want to find out what? How many boys aged thirteen drowned during the last twenty years?’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed uncertainly, suddenly struck by the hopelessness of the task. During the telling pause that followed I could see clearly in my mind’s eye the first of what were to be many Gallic shrugs and upward eye-rolls. Then the receptionist’s voice, emotionless apart from a small quaver of disbelief, asked me to wait a moment. I was rapidly transferred, presumably to her least favourite department.

I put my question to a new woman, and was met by the same discouraging silence, followed by a very definite, ‘No, we wouldn’t have any details like that.’ I realized I had to keep her on the line. It was my first call, and I had to draw it out beyond this curt rejection or I might never have the courage to try again. I quickly told her how my friend had found a bottle containing a very sad letter and we wanted to trace the author. In spite of herself the lady began to sound interested, although not optimistic. ‘Oh, la la la la la la,’ she trilled discouragingly. ‘You will never find her.’ I told her a little more, about the lock of hair, the boy drifting towards the rising sun. In spite of herself the woman, who sounded young, was intrigued. I told her all I knew, and she began to warm to the challenge. She promised to see if she could find any useful information for me.

Within three hours I received a two-page email and a six-page fax from her about further sources of information. She had even spent some time surfing the internet in search of any references in the press but, like me, had not found anything. Nevertheless I felt I had made some progress.

The official information was potentially useful. She had checked the Statistics for Medical Causes of Death by Drowning. According to the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases (CIM), drowning is a disease and the code for this method of dying is e984. Unfortunately her data only went up to 1996 but the total number of boys drowned in France between the ages of ten and fourteen years, for this and the previous five years, was as follows: