But apart from her suggestion that perhaps five years of counselling would have been required before the mother could achieve that level of emotional detachment, there were no concrete clues in her analysis, nothing to take me any closer to the writer of the letter.

10

Apart from my friend who had found the bottle, I knew three other people who lived in Kent: a doctor, a lawyer and a businessman who was a voluntary lifeboat man on the Isle of Sheppey. I decided to renew my friendship with the lifeboat volunteer.

From: Karen Liebreich

To: David

Subject: Letter in a bottle

Dear David,

Sorry to keep missing you. Are you still doing voluntary shifts on the local lifeboat? I am very interested in the tides on the beach at Warden Bay. Do you remember, I mentioned a bottle we found there? I need to find out where it might have come from.

I have spoken to my friend, who says the closest she can work out about the tide that day is as follows:

It was Sunday 31 March 2002, late morning, about 11 am that she found the bottle. It was up at the high water mark.

I know this isn’t as precise as you would like, but that’s about as good as it gets. Hope you are well.

Karen

Within a few weeks David had arranged a meeting with the local lifeboat skipper, so I rang my friend the dog-walker and she agreed to come with me. She had only read the letter once, when I sent her the rough translation. When I rang her and asked her opinion on various phrases she would never look at the letter in its entirety, so unwilling was she to torture her emotions by rereading it. But a day out at the lifeboat station was another matter.

The Isle of Sheppey is a place of marshes, dockyards, pubs and bitter self-mockery about inbreeding and strange island customs. Fifty miles from London, Sheppey lies at the mouth of the Thames, at its junction with the Medway, in north-east Kent. Separated from the mainland by the Swale, a tributary of the Thames, the island is some nine miles long and half as wide. Its north shore faces the North Sea.

As my friend and I approached Sheerness dockyard the flat light reflected from the windscreens of thousands of parked cars, laid out like jewels on a tray, awaiting transportation to dealers across the rest of the country. Most of Britain’s imported cars enter the country via Sheerness. The security guards looked only mildly interested that we intended to visit the lifeboat station and raised the barrier with some bawdy comments.

A body in a dry suit was slumped over the handrail by the entrance to the boathouse. Was this a failed rescue attempt? Or was this how they hung up their equipment for speedy access in case of life or death? Later we were introduced to Dead Fred, an old suit now retained purely for decorative purposes. It certainly set the atmosphere.