At a drinks party for affluent London bankers to which my partner and I had been invited because our sons were friendly, I talked to a glamorous woman about my search. ‘What a wonderful idea,’ she cried. It was as though I had declared my intention to take up embroidery or charity work. ‘But it’s really very simple. My husband is a stockbroker and he has access to a wonderful database of all the news in the world.’ She obviously believed that her husband solved the problems of world finance at the touch of a keyboard, well before the FTSE 100 even opened each day. ‘You can just type your clues in and he will find the result for you in no time at all.’

My first reaction was one of irritation at her calm assumption of her husband’s superiority – or the superiority of his technology over my more pedestrian research methods. Then I decided instead to be delighted. If I took advantage of the offer, my search would very soon be over. I could draw a line under this increasingly ridiculous episode, and get on with my life once again. The questions that had begun to niggle at me whenever I tried to do something else, like irritating mosquito bites that must be scratched, would be assuaged. I would know who the mother was and how the boy had died. I supplied the stockbroker’s wife with the scarce details: the boy was called Maurice and he was thirteen when he drowned at the dawn of summer. Her immaculate smile became a little strained when she realized quite how sparse the information was, but she gamely noted it down in a tiny mother-of-pearl notebook to pass on to her husband at a more appropriate time.

Two weeks later, I received a brief email from her. ‘Unfortunately, my husband’s research yielded rubbish. A little more information is necessary.’ Despite my disappointment, I somehow felt relieved that the secrets could not be extracted at the press of an internet button. The world’s search engines and its financial, commercial and legal databases could not just spit out the answer in an insulting fraction of a second.

I spent several days composing an eloquent email to convince the spokesperson at Evian to talk to me. I finally sent it on a Friday evening, hoping that on Monday morning she would read it and find it irresistible. But all that weekend I watched news coverage of the G8 meeting in Evian and the anti-globalization campaigners rioting in the streets of the nearby towns. Even if Madame had managed to get to work unruffled, she would probably be feeling unsympathetic towards Anglo-Saxon time-wasters.

To my astonishment she rang first thing on Monday and left a message in English. It turned out that she spoke it perfectly. I was thrilled. I rang back and we had a long chat about the development of bottle design. This particular bottle, the ‘Evian Millennium 2002’, had been in production from October 2001. My friend the dog-walker had found the bottle in March 2002, some four months later. Finally I had a real fact to grasp in an ocean of conjecture and supposition. The bottle had been cast into the sea between October 2001 and 31 March 2002.