Missing People, the charity that helps both the disappeared and those left behind, told us that 250,000 missing persons reports each year ? more than 30,000 higher than any previous total ? is "probably an underestimate"; others put the total nearer 275,000. This, the equivalent of the entire population of Plymouth being spirited away, means that, across the country, one person goes missing every two minutes. The vast majority are swiftly found, or return of their own volition, but many don't. Some disappear for decades, and sources, including some inside the police, say the number of people in Britain who have been missing from family, friends and usual haunts for more than a year is at least 16,000 and could be as many as 20,000.Among them are people like Melanie Hall, last seen in a Bathclub nightclub in 1996, whose parents had to endure 13 years of waiting and wondering before her remains were found, a week ago, beside the M5. She had been murdered. Nor does death always bring closure. At any one time, there are an estimated 1,000 unidentified bodies lying in the country's mortuaries and hospitals. Many have been there for years ? unknown, unclaimed citizens.
The long-term missing inhabit a looking-over-their-shoulder world of false names, cash-in-hand jobs, hostels and short lets. For their families, they leave behind not only trauma, grief, guilt, anger and despair, but also, if they are breadwinners, more practical problems. Missing people are deemed neither dead nor properly alive, so salaries are stopped, insurance companies won't pay out, bills can't be paid and corporate "helplines" won't discuss the disappeared's affairs because of the Data Protection Act. But, most of all, the long-term missing leave behind an aching sense of mystery: what has become of them, and why did they go?
This is the story of Britain's long-term disappeared ? of people such as Joyce Wells, Alan Hobbs and Janet Cowley; of those as young as seven-year-old Daniel Entwhistle, missing from his Great Yarmouth home since May 2003, or as elderly as 88-year-old Mary Ferns, missing from West Lothian for 16 months now. All an agonising riddle. Why did the Gloucester librarian Angela Bradley leave her spectacles in her car, the keys in the ignition, and walk away one January day in 1995? What happened last November to Quentin Adams, a 40-year-old father of three from Banchory, Aberdeenshire? He popped out to buy cigarettes and has not been seen since. And where on earth is the 14-year-old Doncaster schoolboy Andrew Gosden?
Some 93 per cent of the children who go missing do not live in a two-parent household, and single children are more likely to run away than those with brothers and sisters. Andrew fell into neither category, happily living, according to testimony from his caring family, with his mother, father and elder sister, Charlie. He was doing well at school, and no one had noticed him behaving in any way that would set alarm bells ringing. And yet, one day two Septembers ago, he left for school, waited for his parents to go to their work as speech therapists, returned to the house, changed his clothes, went to a cash machine, withdrew £200 of his savings, and boarded a train to London. We know this because he was seen on CCTV arriving at King's Cross, a slight figure dressed in black jeans and T-shirt. No one has seen him since. The despair, the not knowing, hit his father, Kevin, like a truck. He tried to commit suicide, hanging himself from the banisters, and his life was saved only because the vicar ? who had a key to the house ? arrived at that moment.
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