Caretaker helped at police briefings and public meeting

As caretaker of the village secondary school, Ian Huntley, the 28-year-old arrested yesterday on suspicion of abduction and murder, had played a walk-on part in the drama unfolding in Soham.

On Thursday, he was busy fitting extra chairs into the school hall, as scores of villagers squeezed in to hear detectives speak about the case. He mumbled greetings to his neighbours, sharing their distress at the grim wait for news about Holly and Jessica.

It was a familiar role. Every day, Mr Huntley had helped out at the regular media briefings in Soham Village College secondary school hall. "I must have been one of the last people to see them alive," he regularly remarked to the press. He had been cleaning his Alsatian, Sadie, as the girls walked past his home on the evening of Sunday 4 August.

His 25-year-old girlfriend, Michelle Carr, a teaching assistant at the adjacent primary school, who was arrested yesterday on suspicion of murder, also played a supporting role.

On Thursday 8 August, she appeared before the media and cameras to join the public appeals for the girls' return. She posed with a card that Holly had drawn for her on the last day of term, to commiserate because Ms Carr had failed to get a teaching job.

The couple became accomplished TV interviewees, even though they had only moved to the small Cambridgeshire village late last year, when Mr Huntley secured his job as "residential senior site officer" at the secondary school. On Friday morning he appeared on GMTV to say how upset he was that the girls had not yet been found.

About nine months ago, before applying for the job, he took his mother's maiden name Nixon for "family reasons". He had references and was police checked, and was appointed to head a team of three caretakers overseeing the secondary school, outbuildings and extensive grounds. Some weeks ago, he changed his name back to Huntley.

Before arriving in Soham, he had held a number of jobs in the Lincolnshire area. Although his father, Kevin, is a caretaker in the nearby village of Littleport, it was Mr Huntley's first job of that type.

In Grimsby, he had worked in the Long Ship pub and won a reputation as a quiet neighbour. It is there that he apparently met Ms Carr.

A former nanny, Ms Carr is believed to have changed her name from Capp. After volunteering at the school in February, she secured a short contract as a part-time teaching assistant, working in Class 11 and Class 12 –Holly and Jessica's class.

Mr Huntley's parents, Kevin and Lynda, told reporters that the couple had been partners for about five years. They had been hoping to get married and start a family.