Better the dullness of routine and the security of being needed. Better that than the creaking absence of a part of oneself.

I was now beginning to attract sympathetic yawns from my friends when I said I had a few remaining leads to follow up (‘Found her yet? What, not still looking, are you?’). But I continued to feel that I had not explored all the potential clues that the bottle might hold. Surely there must be some kind of recall code somewhere on the bottle, some way for Evian to trace their product if there were ever to be a problem. Once more I rang my contact at Evian headquarters. She was reluctant to reopen a subject that she considered she had covered in depth, especially since she had been the one to suggest a link between the letter and the Message in a Bottle film. She was also very busy and it took me several weeks to catch her between marketing trips to China and Peru. Initially, however, she continued to deny that there might ever be a problem requiring the factory to track their bottles.

‘But if there were a glass splinter or something . . .’ I began, but she cut in. Clearly the possibility of glass splinters was not going down well on the public relations front. I tried again. ‘Look, there is a number 46 on the base, and down the side of the bottle, parallel to the seam along the glass, it says 3 06832 0011516. Why don’t I fly over and show you?’

‘I won’t be here. There is nothing further to discover from the bottle – it would be a complete waste of your time,’ she replied firmly. ‘Wait, I’ll go and get my bottle.’

A few moments later she returned to the phone. ‘What was the number?’ I repeated it. ‘No, that’s just the bar code, my bottle has exactly the same number.’

‘There must be some way . . .’ I couldn’t bear to hang up after finally getting hold of her. ‘Normally there is a sort of plastic label around the neck,’ she offered. ‘But I don’t suppose that it is still there?’

‘No,’ I replied sadly. ‘And inside the lid of the bottle it just says PP. What’s PP?’

‘Polypropylene.’ I could hear the tsk at my stupidity. ‘And the code on the metal lid only tells you when it was bottled.’

‘What metal lid?’

‘Well, for instance on my lid, I can tell you that this water was bottled at 16.15 on the . . .’

‘Mine hasn’t got a metal lid, just some white tape and sticky stuff.’

Impatiently and with the deliberate clarity of one talking to a foreigner or a less intelligent person, she talked me through: ‘First you have a blue plastic pointed cap . . . take it off . . . then underneath is the metal lid . . . well, on the side of that top is the factory code and production details.’