Depressed by my first ventures into the archives of death, and entranced by the new avenues of research I saw opening up before me, I purchased a painting from the artist. It depicted a mysterious golden globe made up of tiny question marks, afloat in a deep blue sky that stretched back into the textured infinity of the canvas.

As we drove home from the artist’s house, my host told me that she too had recently gone to a follicle specialist. He had run his hands through her hair, stopping at certain tufts to exclaim that this strand showed she had been divorced, this thinner patch showed problems at work, and this area above her temple showed that she had lacked a father in her childhood. After this analysis, the accuracy of which had completely amazed and convinced her, he had taken a razor blade and, holding handfuls of her hair firmly outwards from the scalp, had sliced through the taut strands upwards from shoulders to crown, using the tension of the extended hair to dictate the cut. The vibrations caused by this process at the root of each hair, he told her, would liberate her from past traumas. It was, she assured me, excruciatingly painful, and as tears of agony welled in her eyes, the specialist announced that the experiences that blocked her psyche had been cleansed away. The follicles were now purified and reinvigorated, and she would be able to face life afresh.

She recounted the tale with self-deprecating humour, but she – and many of her friends, all university-educated intellectuals teaching at schools or universities or working in the upper levels of the French civil and diplomatic services – paid good money to visit this man and took his predictions and diagnoses seriously. I told myself that while I would be convinced by DNA and scientific analysis of any chemical residues in the hair, I was not going to subject the lock of hair from the letter in the bottle to this kind of psycho-tuft treatment.

9

I returned to England with my new painting under one arm and a folder full of notes on the French regional newspapers under the other. The librarian’s comments had stung me and I resolved to continue my research in a more methodical way. Firstly I would reread the letter, check my translation, and try to get some medical opinions about the mental health of the writer. I would also endeavour to find out more about the tide patterns and attempt to identify the point of origin of the bottle. I had had such high hopes of the local papers that I had thought the mystery would be solved by now, without my having to continue with any further research. If necessary, I would then follow up the contact numbers that the artist had given: the follicologist, the graphologist and the tarot reader.

I invited a translator friend to dinner, pointing out that she would have to spend several hours earning her meal by checking my version of the letter. We resolved some ambiguities, although because they were real ambiguities, we simply prioritized one version over the other. For instance, we decided that ‘s’est dérobé à la vie dans un trop plein de désirs’ – ‘he slipped away from/shed/escaped from his life in an overflow/surplus/excess of desires’ – could best be translated as ‘he slipped away from life in an excess of desires’; ‘pour tenter d’éteindre infatigablement le repos de ses deux bras tendus’ lost all reference to extinguishing indefatigably the rest of his outstretched arms and became ‘trying tirelessly to use up the strength in his outstretched arms’, although we were not entirely happy with translating ‘repos’ (rest) as strength.