Coroner’s officers, many of them retired policemen, seem to run the system, ensuring that the relevant paperwork is available for cases to be settled efficiently. I was shown into a nondescript office in central London by the officer I had come to meet, who fitted the image of a coroner perfectly. He pulled out a large atlas; I took out a translation of the letter in the bottle. The document itself was too florally written for his taste, and I could see his eyes glaze over while he was still perusing the first paragraph. But he was clearly intrigued by my quest. Standing over a map of the Kent coast and the English Channel, the officer wondered aloud how a bottle could wash up on such an unlikely beach, not directly opposite France and sheltered from the main tidal sweep. ‘Of all the deaths I’ve had to deal with all over the world,’ he said, ‘this is the most puzzling.’ Usually he had to assess police files and medical reports. All I had was a naked letter, unsupported by a body or any official apparatus. Perhaps it was the sheer hopelessness that was attractive to a professional used to organizing proper quantities of evidence and facts.

The case he was dealing with at that moment involved a road accident in France. A couple on a motorbike had been hit by someone speeding on the motorway. The woman had been killed, her husband had been thrown clear and was only slightly injured. The story of the driver who had collided with them conflicted with the versions provided by all the other witnesses, while the poor husband had seen nothing until the car hit him and his wife from the rear. Searching through the file, trying to look only for useful information, I nevertheless found myself caught up in their tragedy. A bright summer’s day, the promise of a holiday, a moment of stupidity by a young man they had never met, and lives shattered.

In France, the officer explained, the police prepared a dossier about a death and sent it to the Public Prosecutor, Monsieur le Procureur de la République, who decided on the basis of the evidence whether to proceed with a full investigation, or whether to permit a death certificate to be sent on to the Mayor’s office. This confirmed what the French undertaker had told me.

But I had no idea whether Maurice’s death had been judged worthy of further investigation.

6

I had never had occasion to use the services of a private detective, although I had often seen their adverts in local papers. I had even thought of it as a possible career avenue, a kind of natural progression from the kind of academic research I did for a living. Once an American company had asked me to check out one of their employees in London and I had speedily discovered that not only had he failed to direct the films and television programmes he listed on his CV, but he was not a director of the Natural History Museum as he claimed. Moreover, he was a bankrupt with two court judgements against him, and also a bigamist with a wife in Richmond, Surrey, and another in California. Ever since then I had thought that if I was short of work, I could probably turn my hand to private detecting.