The Secret at Silver Bay

The tide lets you in four days a fortnight. It does not care whether you are finished.

Lucy Marsh has been a locum vet for three years. Six weeks in Hereford, four months in Taunton, and now six weeks on the north Cornish coast — long enough to be useful, never long enough to belong. Her suitcase does not get unpacked.

Silver Bay has four fishing boats. It used to have thirty. Ask anyone over sixty what happened to the ground out past the head and you will get a different answer every time, and none of them will look at you while they give it.

Then a door that has been shut for eighty years is found standing open, and behind it, in a room the sea has never reached, there is a metal box.

Inside are twenty letters. They were written in 1978 by a fisherman called Thomas Reed, they were never sent, and they are addressed to a woman who is still alive.

Within a week, someone has taken them.