One of my French friends had mentioned a friend who was a police superintendent in Rouen. After the bad experience with the secret police chief in Paris who had promised so much and achieved nothing, I was not expecting a warm welcome. But I got one. His friend had prepared him and he had been waiting for me to call. On the telephone I explained the background and awaited his analysis. It came by email within the hour:

I think we could be dealing with an adolescent suicide. It’s not a certainty, but an impression given by the expressions used by the mother.

He made other suggestions, all of which I had already followed up. He also strongly denied that there was any secret national database, as the police chief had hinted, that would collect all the births, deaths and marriages held by the town halls. He could offer no concrete assistance, only his opinion. It seemed that there really was no clever computer search engine that could reveal the death of Maurice by typing in ‘Maurice, aged thirteen’. It had turned out to be a figment of my wishful imagination, encouraged into existence by the unreliable secret policeman.

The last uncontacted number in my notes was that of a radiesthesist, a pendulum swinger. The tarot reader I had consulted months ago had seen one, and this had triggered her search for her own mother – the search that the tarot reader had spent two decades completing. The pendulum had directed her to a small village in south-west France, and had reassured her that her mother was indeed still alive and would welcome a call. The geography and the welcome had apparently both been accurately predicted by the pendulum.

Pendulum swinging, radiesthesy, dowsing using a moving pendulum, is carried out by a person with an unusual sensitivity using a rod or pendulum to amplify the message. Usually the pendulum is a small ball attached to a thin string on the end of a stick. The string is made of a non-woven material, such as nylon, so that no extraneous forces are introduced. The swinger must also be very careful not to allow any of his own movements or muscle-twitching to influence the activity of the pendulum. It can be used to locate missing objects, and for medical diagnosis. The term radiesthésie was coined in 1930 by Abbé Bouly in France when the pendulum took preference over the rod as the instrument of choice. L’Association des amis de la radiesthésie was established in 1930 and the British Society of Dowsers three years later.

When asked a question, a clockwise rotation is a yes, an anticlockwise one a no. A more sophisticated version is teleradiesthesia or superpendulism, when the sensitive person is presented with a map. ‘After placing the pendulum on the map,’ says an informative website, ‘he can tell the enquirer the information he wants to know.’ The pendulum seemed to be my last resort.