Enough to make a parent's heart bleed: last steps of Holly and Jessica re-enacted

The small town of Soham came to a standstill yesterday. People held their breath, looking on in awed silence or simply uttering a prayer as two young actresses in replica David Beckham shirts performed the reconstruction that the police hope might just jog someone's memory and lead to a breakthrough and the safe return of the vanished girls.

The two girls came by van, in the company of police officers. They were not Holly and Jessica, sadly, but enough of a likeness to make a parent's heart bleed. They were girls of the same age, dressed in exactly the same clothes, their hair cut by the same hairdresser, presumably with shaking hands.

As the reconstruction of Jessica Chapman and Holly Well's last known movements was taking place police were questioning two men about their disappearance, although detectives immediately played down the significance of the arrests. They were hoping they would not distract from their attempts to jog people's memories about the events of last Sunday evening, when the 10-year-old girls were last seen.

The search for the girls will be extended to within a three-mile then five-mile radius of the town today, after intense searches of Soham failed to yield further clues.

Police have ruled out the line of enquiry that the girls had used a chatroom shortly before they disappeared. Analysis of CCTV footage of two girls at a Q8 garage last Sunday has also proved negative. They have now appealed for help in finding Jessica's mobile telephone, a blue Nokia 5110. Meanwhile, all eyes were on the reconstruction.

"Looks just like Holly, doesn't it?" said Julie Mann quietly. She was standing in Tanners Lane a few yards from the home of Holly Wells, from which the girls slipped away last Sunday evening during a family barbecue. "Must be awful for Kevin," said David Mann, a builder who knew the Wells family. "Surely they didn't just look out the window at that."

The girls disappeared into an alleyway and Tanners Lane became silent. David and Julie stood by their own front gate with their daughter and son.

"There are usually kids everywhere out here, on bikes and skateboards, but they've gone," David said. "Being kept in I suppose."

Some had gone away to relatives, sent by parents fearful that one of their neighbours in the small town of Soham was a pervert. In place of the kids had come television reporters and cameramen. And 300 police.

The girls in the reconstruction were aged nine and 10, and came from a drama group in Cambridge called Whizz Kids. Their red replica football shirts had been supplied by Manchester United, whose star player David Beckham appealed for the girls to come home on Tuesday. His name was on the back of both Holly's and Jessica's shirts. But time was slipping by and police had already begun to suspect the girls had been abducted.

Detectives made a direct appeal to the abductor based on psychological profiles, and when that did not work they staged yesterday's event. They just wanted to jog memories. "Clearly there are people in the community who may not realise they saw something last Sunday, or may not understand the significance of what they saw,'' said Chief Superintendent Andy Hebb.

So the two young actresses slipped out of the alleyway from Redhouse Gardens, a neat close of modern houses. A rainstorm had created puddles, but nothing like those of last Sunday, when several days of storms had flooded the gutters. At first the police thought the girls may have fallen in to one of the swollen waterways, but searches drew found nothing.

Yesterday, on a hot, humid afternoon, the girls walked slowly down Sand Street. Traffic is calmer there since the bypass was built. They walked past St Andrew's primary school which was locked for the holidays. The church after which it is named was open yesterday and people came in to pray.

"What are we doing?" asked the little girl as she sat down with her mother in a pew, shopping bags rustling. "Just saying a little prayer, darling." They held hands, had a moment's silence, and then left.

In Red Lion Square, people had gathered by the war memorial to watch as the two little girls who were the spitting images of Holly and Jessica arrived. The crowd fell silent to see these two girls, walking shoulder to shoulder as if leaning on each other. They passed the Flamingo steak and kebab shop on the corner where the girls were last seen, and then a policeman guided them into the back of a police van. As they went, a woman laid her hand, gently, on the shoulder of one of the girls.

Offender profiling

By David Randall

It's not 'Cracker' – but it does work sometimes

The use of offender or psychological profilers, at least five of which are working with Cambridgeshire Police, is now a routine part of many murder or suspected serious sex crime investigations, despite having produced some spectacular mis-hits in the past.

In the case of the Boston Strangler, a profiler said the offender was a male homosexual schoolteacher living alone. The man eventually convicted, Albert de Salvo, was a heterosexual construction worker living with his family.

But despite some highly publicised errors, profiling has a good track record of delivering valuable leads and occasionally uncanny matches with the perpetrator.

One of the most striking was the case of Adrian Babb. Between January 1986 and March 1988 seven elderly women were raped in tower blocks in Birmingham. The crimes followed a set pattern. The offender was said to be athletic, at ease with the elderly, and without body odours.

Profiler David Canter – one of a number of experts who have tried to move profiling onto a more statistical, less intuitive basis – suggested the rapist had a solitary sports interest such as weightlifting or swimming, was obsessive, had no previous record, and regularly dealt with old people. When caught, Adrian Babb proved to have, among other matching features, a job as a swimming pool attendant and regularly handled sessions with pensioners.

Profiling is most useful when there are scene-of-crime details to work with. Profilers are looking for pattern and the kind of detail (the way a ligature is tied, the kind of articles a murderer takes from the victim) that may appear trivial yet have a fetishistic significance for the offender.

A classic example of this was when two Leicestershire women were found murdered in the early 1980s. Both had been knifed and there were ritualistic aspects at the scenes. Paul Britton, a psychologist who subsequently wrote a book about his crime-solving career, gave the police a 19-point profile of a young, isolated man obsessed with black magic who probably worked with knives. Police arrested Paul Bostock, a loner of 19 who was a meat factory worker whose house contained black magic items. After Britton suggested a line of questioning based on the suspect's likely fantasies, Bostock was charged, tried and convicted.