The picture was even more fragmented than I could have guessed. Not only does each part of Paris have its own mairie – so there is one for the 17th arrondissement, one for the 11th – and therefore its own register, but you also need individual official permissions from the Procureur Général to access the data. There were twenty town halls in Paris alone, requiring twenty such requests for permission and twenty individual searches for a partial entry that was statistically unlikely to be in that town hall. So the undertaker had told the truth about the 36,000 local mairies throughout France. The dead end was genuine.

Perhaps the administrative agent had seen my eyes light up at the sight of the dead Maurice; at any rate she suddenly took fright and spun the screen abruptly away from me, muttering that I must first produce the personal authorization from the Procureur Général that could be acquired at the Tribunal de Grande Instance. It would also apparently cover a few other town halls under that particular Pooh-Bah’s jurisdiction. She leaned forward and reached for my notes, scratching her name and phone number on my pad with such force that she damaged several sheets below. ‘You mustn’t use it,’ she whispered. I reassured her, but she had lost confidence and shooed me vigorously away from her desk.

The meeting had reached its conclusion. It seemed true beyond a shadow of doubt that the register of births, deaths and marriages was only accessible via the individual town halls and with special individual authorization.

11

My two best hands were played out, but I still had a few cards up my sleeve. I had not fully utilized the miracle of internet technology, and I had not yet been in touch with the New Age contacts supplied by the artist on her little orange notelet. I would save the alternative therapies for later, and try the high-tech solutions first.

After the failure of the corporate databases to resolve the issue early on in my search, I had occasionally spent idle moments rifling through search engines for Boolean combinations of ‘Maurice + noyé + treize’ (‘Maurice + drowned + thirteen’) but since my realizing that his death was not necessarily the result of drowning I had not dedicated an adequate amount of time to the matter. Now I set aside time to search all possible permutations and combinations.

I typed in ‘Maurice + mort’ and was rewarded by an article about a recently published children’s book entitled Maurice est mort. The reviewer liked it – she thought it helped children to see that there is nothing terrifying about death, and that the dead would be released from the trivia of everyday irritations. I ordered it, pleased by the coincidence of the name and wondering whether it had any relevance to my search. Perhaps the author had known Maurice?

It was horrid. Two little birds are playing and one shoots the other by mistake. The dead one, Maurice, is superficially inspected by a doctor who cannot stop thinking about his dinner, shown in bubbles above his head. Then the dead bird is nailed into a coffin and eaten by worms. The unpleasant coincidence of the dead bird’s name merely emphasized once again the horrible finality of Maurice’s fate. Thinking about a caricature bird nailed up in a little brightly coloured coffin instead of a dead child was no consolation.