Inquiry turns full circle as police focus on schools

Detectives search Soham home and question school caretaker and his partner as parents talk of their desperate hours

Britain's biggest missing persons inquiry went full circle last night when the search for the 10-year-olds returned to the girls' home town of Soham and to the man who first reported seeing them walking unaccompanied.

Only 10 minutes after Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells had slipped out for a stroll, they came upon Ian Huntley, a school caretaker, who knew the youngsters, washing his dog outside his house. "They were as happy as Larry. They haven't run away. They didn't have a care in the world," he later told police.

An hour later, a further four reported sightings of the girls placed them near the town's war memorial. Since that fateful Sunday evening, nearly two weeks ago, Jessica and Holly have not been seen.

Police announced yesterday afternoon that Mr Huntley and his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, 25, who was a teaching assistant in Holly's and Jessica's class at St Andrew's Primary School, were being questioned about the children's disappearance. The couple's home, the secondary school next to it and the primary school grounds were being searched last night by dozens of officers.

Mr Huntley appeared on television only yesterday morning to say he felt "gutted" that the girls were still missing.

"It doesn't help the fact that I was one of the last people to speak to them, if not the last person to speak to them," he said. "I keep reliving that conversation and thinking perhaps something different could have been said, perhaps kept them here a little longer and maybe changed events."

The possible breakthrough came as a surprise. As the hours and days have gone by, the scale of the police inquiry and torment for the children's families have grown. By yesterday, there were 21 police forces and about 450 officers working on the case.

Despite the huge workforce and 14,000 reports from the public, the investigation, dogged by a series of false leads and alarms, seemed to have run out of steam. All clues and hopes of a breakthrough appeared to be slipping away as the criticism of the police inquiry started to build.

Then the police apparently switched tactics and returned to the most obvious source of any abduction – home.

The police went to great lengths to emphasise at a public meeting on Thursday night that they believed the answer to the mystery lay in Soham or near by. They urged the 9,000 townspeople to look into their hearts and think if their neighbours had been acting strangely, and to search out buildings and undergrowth.

This shift in approach seemed to many to be a desperate move. But the police kept emphasising they were hopeful and that they had good lines of inquiry to follow up.

This is not the first time hopes have been raised – and then dashed – in the days since 8.30pm on 4 August, when Holly's parents, Nicola and Kevin Wells, realised the girls were missing.

The possibility that the girls had run off as a lark was raised when a woman living about eight miles away reported seeing two happy-looking girls walk past her house the day after they disappeared. But this proved almost certainly to be a false sighting.

The next alarm came when police revealed on 12 August that a taxi driver reported seeing a motorist driving erratically away from Soham with two children in his car, at the time the girls disappeared.

The following day the police announced that a jogger had found two piles of earth on heathland about 10 miles from Soham. The suspected graves turned out to be badger setts.

This false alarm was followed by the disclosure that the taxi driver had given the wrong time of seeing the suspect vehicle – the girls were still in Soham when he reported seeing the car with the children being driven away.

In what appeared to be almost the last throw of the dice, the police made the extraordinary decision to appeal directly to the abductor to telephone the senior investigating officer and set a midnight deadline, which passed without any contact on Thursday night.

News that a 28-strong squad of officers from Scotland Yard was brought in to review the inquiry to check for missed clues added to the impression that it was going nowhere.

Then came the hurried press conference yesterday afternoon when it was announced that two people had been taken to separate undisclosed police stations to be questioned and that their home was being searched.

Mr Huntley, who works as a site officer at Soham Village College, the town's secondary school, had been one of the few people who gave a positive sighting of the girls to the police. He said he was washing his German shepherd dog, Sadie, near the front door of his house when he saw them.

"They said, 'How's Miss Carr?' I said 'She's not very good, she didn't get the job'. She had been a teaching assistant and had applied for a job full-time but didn't get it," he said.

Last week, Ms Carr, who said she was very close to both girls, spoke fondly of Holly when she told reporters: "On the last day of school, Holly gave me a card with a smiley face on the front and a poem inside. She was crying because I didn't get the job." The card was signed "C Ya, Miss Ya, Luv Holly". She added: "I think they felt they could talk to me because I am a bit younger than the other teachers. I think they thought I was more on their level, like a big sister."

The couple, who are understood to have met in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, moved to Soham at the beginning of the year, when Mr Huntley started work at the school. He changed his surname two or three months ago to Nixon – his mother's maiden name – "for family reasons", according to Bob Pearson of Cambridgeshire County Council.

Mr Pearson added: "In one of his interview questions [for the job], he was asked what his reaction would be if a young girl became too familiar with him. His answer was spot on. All the necessary police checks and references were carried out and we are satisfied we had no concerns about either of them."

He had not worked as a caretaker before but had held a number of jobs, mostly in the Lincolnshire area. He was appointed as the residential senior site officer, in charge of a team of three others. His father is a caretaker who works in Littleport, near Soham.

In Grimsby, Mr Huntley had worked in a bar. A former neighbour said: "He was quite quiet and did not have many friends. We used to see him coming home from the Long Ship pub. He used to live with two women, but moved out about a year ago."

Ms Carr, who is also thought to have changed her name, from Capp, first began work at St Andrew's Primary School, as a volunteer, in February.

She continued until Easter when she was awarded a short-term contract as a teaching assistant. She worked in two classes, 11 and 12. Holly and Jessica were both in class 12. Ms Carr had recently been working as a nanny.

Speaking after the community meeting on Thursday night, Mr Huntley was asked if he still had hope for the girls. He replied: "Yes, yes."

One of the couple's neighbours, Lorraine Barnes, 30, said yesterday: "They've only lived here a couple of months and they seem very nice and genuine people."

Last night, police officers were searching the couple's detached two-storey house in the grounds of the secondary school. In the window, as in most houses in Soham, was a poster with the pictures of the smiling faces of Jessica and Holly and an appeal for help in finding them.