I asked her how old she thought the letter-writer might be. ‘It is not a juvenile handwriting. She is certainly not adolescent, but I would not have thought she was very old either. It is a conventional script. Her writing shows a certain vitality,’ she continued. ‘She is not disorientated by sickness or medication. There is a healthy tension in the writing.

‘She is intelligent, precise, rigorous. She seems to have a feeling for numbers, perhaps she is an accountant. There is a sense of accomplishment. There is no amateurism here. She is not a superficial person. She depends on her past experience. She is a woman of today, but she needs her points of reference. I see no sign of the nomad – this is not someone who would grab her rucksack and go off round the world. She needs her everyday security. She needs some kind of solid structure in her life.’

By now the graphologist was well and truly in her stride. ‘She seems nice at first, very gentle, but I think she could be authoritarian if you lived with her. She is not easy to influence. She is basically sensitive, but also – it seems to me – quite touchy, on her dignity. The writing perhaps shows a failure to listen enough. There is an anal dimension to her, in the Freudian sense, and also quite a masculine side to her. It seems to me that the style of writing is rather masculine. There are not many signs of femininity here.

‘She is brave, dignified, faithful. Not great fun, but you can rely on her. Her writing reveals a certain presence, but she is sometimes awkward, not at ease with her space, there is not a great deal of comfort in the writing.’

The graphologist kept returning to the one overriding impression, the sense of a thick, almost suffocating layer of control, plastered over an emotional cauldron. But unless I found the letter-writer, how would I know whether this was a convincing description of a precise, well-organized, obsessive, repressed, sensitive, serious, faithful, courageous woman or just the ramblings of a well-meaning amateur?

We re-twirled the hair into its nest within the letter, scrolled the paper carefully just the way it was and repacked everything into the bottle among the perfumed sandalwood shavings. The graphologist was almost reluctant to let me go. Like many others whose I advice I had asked, she had somehow been touched by the unknown woman’s plight, and she wanted to know the end of the story.

I moved on to the next contact on the orange notelet, the follicologist, the ‘bulbologue’. The three contacts from the artist – graphologist, follicologist and tarot reader – had been offered in a secluded garden in the outskirts of Paris on what had turned out to be a special evening. In French, graphologue, bulbologue, tarologue . . . the list had seemed to offer an alluring magic spell that would solve the mystery without resorting to the vulgarity of an appeal in the media.