Never-ending ordeal for families

Watching those two little girls in their red football shirts on Saturday was a choking experience, packed with pain and pity.

They were chosen from a drama school for their height and build, similar to those of the missing girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the manner - carefree and happy - they had to invent for themselves. But for us, they carried a burden far greater than resemblance, for they represented the pressing terror of mystery, the empty fate towards which Jessica and Holly were innocently marching.

They appeared in the distance, so conspicuous in red that it seemed impossible they should not be noticed. They were noticed, of course, but not by everyone; we do not look with active alert eyes at everyday events. Now we were looking very carefully indeed. They strode merrily and purposefully down towards the War Memorial which dominates the centre of Soham, and which sits on a triangle of pavement on the main road running through the village (and which virtually is the village). The busy Red Lion pub, with its thatched roof, is on the corner, and on the opposite corner, across the main road, is Sergio's Italian restaurant. Holly and Jessica were seen at various times up to 6.45pm at the War Memorial, and, finally, at 7.20pm, outside the restaurant. Somebody in the restaurant, who knows one of them well, made a firm identification. Then, nothing. As if an eagle had swooped down and snatched them away.

The image of those two girls, pretty, diminutive, fragile, unsuspecting, and moreover ticking with life before our eyes, juxtaposed with the knowledge that they have, in very truth, vanished into thin air, is not one that I think I shall ever forget.

In 1989, also in the month of August, the Welsh school teacher Fiona Jones disappeared on an utterly quiet country road near CompiËgne in north-eastern France. While her husband was in town for a business meeting, she borrowed a bicycle from the hotel and went out for a ride. She was never seen again.

I went to France at that time for the Evening Standard, and lived for several days with the palpable anguish of Fiona's parents, brother and husband. At such times, one's duty is to imagine, for when information is sparse, only imagination remains as a possible route towards the truth. Yet imagination can be foul and tormenting, and both the Chapman and Wells families must, at present, try to keep theirs clean from thoughts which lie too deep for comfort. They must not think the worst, or they will disintegrate.

In France, we hoped that Fiona had been abducted by a harmless lunatic, who wanted to keep her as a trophy for a while. In fact, we were wrong. She had been murdered by a hospital attendant, by chance passing in his car, by chance fed up with his girlfriend, by chance moved by an impulse to harm; he had knocked her off her bicycle and strangled her, then dragged her away from the road into a field. Two hours later he returned. Fiona had, with the last ounces of breath left within her, struggled back to the side of the road, crawling, to hail a passing motorist. The first car to come by on that deserted stretch was her murderer's. He despatched her.

Fiona's mother, who has remained a good friend, tells me that, since then, "everybody else has been able to get on with their lives, except me. I am still there, in France, waiting".

There are obvious differences. Fiona was alone, adult, and immensely vulnerable with not a house in sight. Holly and Jessica were together, tiny, and right in the middle of town, with people and cars passing, and windows looking down on them from all sides. There are benches on the pavement, where the young (though not as young as these two), often gather to chat and pass the time. It had been a stormy afternoon that Sunday, with a downpour at 4.00 pm. Yet there were still people about. It is difficult to picture anything dramatic occurring in silence. No, not difficult; impossible.

A man who lives on the High Street, a few yards from Sergio's Italian restaurant, walked home at 7.05, when Holly and Jessica were about on the street. His daughter had passed by the same place at 6.30 pm, when the girls were also there. Neither he nor his daughter spotted them. "You don't notice anyone unless they're doing something unusual", he told me. Well, being hauled into a stranger's car is unusual enough. For myself, I cannot envisage it.

Besides which, not all kidnappings, if such it was, need end in the final tragedy. There are plenty of cases where the victims have been retrieved and returned to their families, simply because the kidnapper's purpose is not murder, but possession. The period of captivity may be quite short, a matter of days, or it may be agonisingly prolonged and accompanied by manic humiliation. The abductor is not only morally unsound, but mentally unstable. He (or indeed she) wants, like a child, to satisfy needs. If those needs include keeping some living person as a plaything, a private toy, then so be it. They cannot see why it should arouse such anger.

John Fowles' novel The Collector, made into a chilling fiIm with Terence Stamp, depicted one such person who could at one and the same time treat his "possession" with cruel indifference to her corroding anxiety, and singular attention to her little comforts. The point is, it was he who chose as well as bestowed those comforts. Her own demands were never met, for her own demands were irrelevant to his purpose. It must be he who was the giver, not she the extractor of a gift. One must hope that, if indeed Holly and Jessica have fallen into the hands of a madman like this, then he is idiotic rather than evil, and that their fear will come to an end and leave them relatively unscarred.

The danger is always that the ordeal will endure so long that it becomes a problem. Then the abductor might resort to violence to get rid of the problem. Murder becomes not the intention, but the solution. That is why the police are anxious to mollify him with unthreatening public announcements and make contact while there is still time.

Another possibility is that the girls have gone with a woman who is disturbed because she has herself lost a daughter, or is divorced and lonely, or is barren, or jealous of other people's happiness and needs to have her resentment heard and heeded, even if it be only by children unable to improve her lot.

Which leads one to the notion that they may have gone to somebody they recognised, somebody they know, perhaps even somebody in Soham. That alone would explain the absence of any noise as they vanished. They were last seen outside Sergio's Restaurant. Behind that is a Chinese take-away, then some bungalows in a quiet cul-de-sac, then fields.

The obvious place to look is in this immediate neighbourhood, close to where Holly and Jessica were standing. The police searched sheds and outhouses, but they were hampered by procedural rules which prevent their ploughing through people's houses unless a specific complaint has been made or something suspicious observed. This is still a "missing persons" case, not a crime. On Saturday, six days after the disappearance, police were searching houses on the High Street with, I was told, "the owners' consent". It cannot be otherwise.

If indeed the girls accompanied somebody they knew, there was always the possibility that they were other children, or local teenagers, but with the passage of time this grows increasingly improbable; teenagers bent on a lark or a dare, even with a nefarious twist, would not have known how to keep going after a day or two and would have surrendered.

The alarm last week about the girls' use of the internet has now been largely dispelled. They were not exchanging messages in a chat-room, not sending or receiving emails. There is no evidence they had any appointment to keep. The fact that they left Holly's house without telling her parents was wholly and distressingly out of character, it is true; their friends have insisted that they always asked permission to go out, and had done so only the day before. They are good girls, jolly and responsible, not spoilt, not rebellious, not recalcitrant. They did not announce their departure from the house simply, it seems, to show a tiny bit of independence for once.

The worst of all nightmares is the one which, despite all improbability, looms larger with every painful hour, that a dangerous sexual sadist has captured them. One only has to reflect upon the evidence against the Belgian monster Dutroux, who took girls in pairs and has still not been sent to trial for it, to shudder at the scenarios which flicker unbidden behind the eyes. It would serve no purpose here, save a delight in wickedness, to offer details of what Dutroux's victims suffered, and one must hope with all one's strength that there is no parallel in this case. Besides, we do not have to go so far to know of what the sadist is capable. It is more or less certain that Frederick West kept at least one of his victims imprisoned for up to two weeks. The journalists gathered in Soham all share this hope for the girls' well-being, There is a sense in which everybody sent to write about this sad story feels, without presumption, an affection for Holly and Jessica. This is not mere reporting, it is involvement. Every journalist knows where the Wells family lives, but not one has, or will, knock on the door. What, anyway, could they possibly ask without crass intrusion? Journalists, normally despised (so we are told) have their respects and their reticences. Photographers with long experience, who have in their time elbowed pedestrians aside to get their pictures, had visible tears in their eyes at the harrowing press conference given, on police request, by the Chapman and Wells parents last week.

It is perhaps strange, but the most upsetting aspect of all this is not to know what happened, even if what happened is unbearable. Fiona Jones's mother made this graphically clear to me twelve years ago in France. At her request I accompanied her and her family to the trial of her daughter's killer, so that I could translate the proceedings for her as we went along. I wrote furiously on large sheets of white paper which I then passed along the table for her to read. At one point I faltered and stopped. The murderer was telling exactly how he had killed Fiona when he went back to find her still alive. I felt unable to make Pat "hear" this. She noticed. "Why have you stopped writing?" she said. "You mustn't, please ... I need to know, however awful it is. Don't you see? If I don't know, then she is no longer mine, for me to share her suffering. She is his. Don't do that to me." I then made sure that she knew.

It sometimes feels as if the whole of Soham is willing this knowledge to come forward. Everybody here hates the uncertainty, and everybody wants to help. Jessica had been wearing an African rope necklace made of Ghanaian beads, which she had bought in a local shop on the High Street. The shopowner made up as near an identical necklace as he could manage for the little girl to wear on Saturday in the reconstruction. It was, he said, his contribution, and he was glad that he could do something, however minor.

People are also trying to cling on to their sense of proportion. Only last week it was said that playing tag in the school playground had to be forbidden lest a child fall down and be hurt. (Surfing the internet for perverts, meanwhile, is still not preventable). Are our children to be so protected that they are deprived of the fun of childhood itself? The chances of a ten year-old girl being abducted by a stranger in the centre of town on a late Sunday afternoon are less than those of being felled by lightning or struck by a piece of meteoric dust. It is, let us not forget, extremely rare.

And yet two little girls disappeared after 7:20pm last Sunday, and nobody yet knows how or why. The impossible sometimes occurs.