The image of the letter-writer stopping to buy a bottle of water in the crowded Paris underground and suddenly being overwhelmed by the urge to write a letter in a bottle evaporated.

I spoke to the distribution manager for Metro Calais, a huge warehouse depot on the outskirts of the city. I explained that Evian had sent out a consignment of Millennium bottles some time shortly after 24 October 2001 and asked whether there was any way of tracking to which Metro store they would have been dispatched. If I had the receipt for the bottle, he said, he could tell me. If I had the receipt for the bottle, I felt like snapping, I would not need to talk to you now. The store and its address would presumably be written on the receipt.

But he was friendly, so I told him the story so far, and he was helpful in the same kind of discouraging way as nearly everyone else whose interest had been caught by it. He assured me that given his knowledge of the Channel currents – acquired at the back of the warehouse, unloading supermarket deliveries – it was likely to have been his store that sold the bottle.

In a curious fashion I was again beginning to enjoy the letter-in-a-bottle quest. The story I told each new person had an emotional kick, and although I often sighed inwardly as I began to recount the tale again, I was not yet tired of telling of the distraught mother and her dead son, and of my efforts to track her down. For the first time the thought occurred to me that it was a way of making new acquaintances. How else would I have had the chance to meet secret policemen, warehouse distributors, high-flying public relations executives, private investigators, forensic detectives? Perhaps this whole quest was simply a way of filling a lonely day while the children were at school and my partner at work? Or a way of embarking on a study of human nature by private correspondence, rather than by signing up for a course at evening school. It was certainly true that I was learning a great deal about a variety of esoteric subjects, but perhaps I was also learning more about myself. I had been shocked at the speed and shallowness of my powers of logic, and slightly worried by the obsessive nature of my desire to find the mother. I had been forced to touch on the idea of death and had seen how unwilling my mind was to confront its possibility in direct relation to myself or to those I loved.

I had also realized the limitations of my French. Metro proved to be yet another red herring. Whether the supermarket chain or the underground system, it carried me no further forward. The time had come to publicize my search, to follow the advice of the follicologist and the private investigator. I decided to put my toe in the water gradually.

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