D J Taylor: The shadow that hangs over each of our sons and daughters

The consequences of what happened to Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman will never leave us. And how are we to explain it to our own children?

Here in East Anglia the world of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman seems uncomfortably close to hand. In fact it can be glimpsed immediately beyond the front door: those long, somnolent village streets, mouldering in the shadow of the church tower and the community centre; the whole caught up and rendered insignificant by the flat terrain and the immense East of England sky. The characteristic sight, out walking in the Fenland backroads, is the solitary figure outlined against the horizon, framed by the sun, the water and the acres of grain, vanishing silently into the middle distance.

A single twitch on the thread, too, is enough to reawaken the spectres of one's own childhood. To anyone growing up in the eastern counties of this country 30 years ago the iconography of the missing child was everywhere. April Fabb was a Norfolk schoolgirl who vanished into thin air one afternoon leaving only a discarded bike. No trace of her was ever found, and her name, consequently, rang through my teenage years like a leper bell. Half a decade later I can remember walking in the deep woods near Cromer and finding a cast-off child's shoe in the undergrowth. Somebody's father instantly decided to take it to the nearest police station: that was April Fabb's legacy to Norfolk a quarter of a century ago.

It was impossible not to be reminded of the ghostly presence of April Fabb during the media feeding frenzy of the past 10 days: the TV camera stake-out beyond the cordoned-off wood in Newmarket where a jogger had heard screams and noted evidence of freshly turned soil; the fruitless quests for information cancelled out by time or by delay. Impossible not to be reminded, too, of the literature read in childhood and teendom: the M R James ghost story in which the purchaser of an antique print looks on, horrified, as a shadowy figure steals across its foreground to abduct a child from the country house behind; the scene in Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley in which a small girl is carried off and murdered on the Welsh mountainside (here primitive justice prevails – with the priest's connivance the guilty man is taken away and killed by the villagers.)

Before very long the Soham story had turned into a grand but infinitely sinister narrative, full of unexpected detours, plotlines that were never taken up, bit-parters shuffling on stage to deliver their cameos and then gracefully retire. The early witnesses who claimed to have seen the girls in the early hours of the morning following their disappearance, the taxi-driver alarmed by the green car, with its bobbing back-seat head, weaving erratical-ly before him – each in their own way moved the story on, carried it off into new and unimaginable territory, while leaving the underlying premise ominously unchanged.

A narrative, more to the point, in which we are all involved, whether we like it or not. Each day we felt drawn in a little more, as events unfurled, one by one. The disapperance, the pleas for help, the arrests, news of bodies found across the county border in another corner of East Anglia.

"What about the missing children?" my son Benjy, aged six, had wondered to his mother, before this discovery, at bedtime one night last week. Of all the things that one is regularly called upon to explain to one's children – the facts of life, suicide bombs in Jerusalem, aeroplanes falling out of the transatlantic sky – the revelation that there are certain adults stalking the planet with the sole aim of spiriting the defenceless away to hurt them is the one I am least anxious to impart. Carnage in a Middle Eastern marketplace, so-called holy wars – all this is somehow explicable in a way that the wall-eyed potential abductor brooding over the wheel of his car in some flyblown market town or on some back street corner is not. The psychology is too remote, too primordial: nothing to be grasped at; nothing tangible except the hurt.

At the same time, if the abduction of children does terrible things to children generally – bringing them up short before the fact that some adults are not authority figures or role models but simply evil – it does something yet more marked to the community that surrounds them and of which they are a part. The reactions that an event like the case of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells provokes in the people who observe it are difficult to separate out. How could they not be? On the one hand, a roster of generous impulses: police officers vowing to forswear their holidays until the case was solved; sympathy and solidarity; public figures appealing for information. On the other, the feeling of emotional ghouls crawling out of the woodwork on every side: the police, for example, reporting that 10,000 phone calls had been taken offering information (what on earth could 10,000 individual people have to say?); television reports of such asinine punctiliousness that one simply had to switch off; the usual tribe of people – this is, apparently, a feature of abduction cases – lining up to confess, mysteriously, to something that they didn't do.

Private horrors that are turned into public events by the media's transforming hand have a habit of bringing out the best and the worst in their onlookers, and the line between the two can be wafer-thin. How, one kept on wondering throughout the excavations and the wild goose chases, the rays of hope and the always returning gloom, were the Chapmans and the Wellses taking it? What, other than good nature, kept them from striking out at the next beetle-browed reporter or screaming at the next sonorous platitude? What did they say to one another over their cocoa after the media hordes had packed up and gone home? We shall never know, and if we have any decency we should not want to know.

At the heart of it all – and this perhaps explains the trouble we have in responding to it – lies something elemental: the parent, the child, the thing most precious wrenched away. Curiously, this is reinforced by the Fenland setting: that tight little world of closed communities, ingrown lives, familiar faces and – it turns out – something alien lurking at the core. It could be a novel by Dorothy L Sayers or PD James or a cancelled chapter from Graham Swift's Waterland.

Except that it is not being played out in fiction, but right here in front of an audience of millions. Rather than being invested with the glamour of the lone intelligence striking his way through a maze of clues to the story's core, its processes are simply prosaic, solvable through the painstaking sifting of evidence, teamwork, the vigilant face at the window.

Unlike fiction, too, its consequences, however indirectly or insidiously, will never leave us. Just as I can remember one part of my childhood in terms of things that were done to children – from the Aberfan mining disaster to the disappearance of April Fabb – so I suspect that Benjy, 30 years later, will find a small corner of his past occupied by Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. For him, and for a whole host of other children, the adult world – that scary highway of pretence, subterfuge and false smiles – starts here.