Next, a clipping from a Paris newspaper, crisp and brown as a dead leaf. I’m afraid to open it out, but I can already see that it concerns the disappearance of a young child, a Sylviane Caillou, snatched from her car seat more than thirty years ago. Next, a more recent clipping, an account of a freak tornado in Les Laveuses, a tiny village on the Loire. Strangely trivial things, you might think, but important enough to Vianne Rocher for her to bring them with her all this way, over so many years, and to hide them in this little box – untouched for some time, or so I’d guess from the layer of dust . . .

So these are your ghosts, Vianne Rocher. Strange, how very modest they seem. My own are more impressive; but then again, I find that modesty is a very second-rate virtue. You could have done so much better, Vianne. With my help, perhaps you still can.

I sat at my laptop for hours last night, drinking coffee, watching the neon lights from outside and going over the question again and again. Nothing more on Les Laveuses; nothing more on Lansquenet. I was beginning to believe Vianne Rocher as elusive a creature as myself, a castaway on the rock of Montmartre; without a past; impregnable.

Absurd, of course. Nothing’s impregnable. But with all the direct lines of enquiry exhausted, only one avenue remained, and this was what kept me wondering until late into the night.

It’s not that I was afraid, of course. But these things can be so unreliable, raising more questions than they answer – and if Vianne suspected what I’d done, then any chance I had of getting close to her was gone.

Still, taking risks is part of the game. It’s been a long time since I did any scrying – my System relies more on practical methods than bell, book and candle, and nine times out of ten you get quicker results from the internet. But this is a time for creativity.

A dose of cactus root, dried and powdered and infused in hot water, helps to achieve the required state of mind. This is pulque, the divine intoxicant of the Aztecs, reinvented a little for my own purpose. Then comes the sign of the Smoking Mirror, scrawled on the dusty floor at my feet. I sit down cross-legged with my laptop in front of me, turn on the screensaver to a suitably abstract theme, and wait for illumination.

My mother certainly wouldn’t have approved. She always favoured the traditional crystal ball in divination, though at a pinch she would accept the cheaper alternatives – magic mirrors or Tarot cards. Then again, she would – she stocked the things, after all – and if she ever experienced a genuine revelation from any of them, then I certainly never heard anything about it.