WordPress loading non-existent CSS file

Hello,
I have been making frequent updates to my WordPress site’s child theme’s style.css file. I’m not sure if it’s today’s 3.8.2 update, but WordPress always now loads a non-existent CSS file. I can download my nice updated CSS file via ftp, look at it, update it, then re-upload it (overwriting the previous one) but when I reload a page of my site, it sees an old, non-existent CSS file. It’s looking for “style.css?ver=3.8.2”. Presumably this “?ver=3.8.2” bit is being read by some php somewhere and must be magically digging out an old CSS file from god-knows-where; it’s certainly not anywhere on my site – I’ve searched everywhere.

As you can imagine, having WordPress access a file which does not exist is rather annoying. I’ve cleared the caches of all my browsers, done numerous restarts on my Mac and PC, but they’re still seeing the old, deleted file. Chrome on a Mac sees the new CSS file properly, as does an iPad. So the new file is there, ready for any browser to use. If I ftp in, the old CSS file simply does not exist.

Any suggestions as to what on earth is going on would be very gratefully received!

– Paul