How will it feel to look at them now?

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Dec 08, 2007 

A grim and devastating story consumed the UK media last month. In a small red-brick house in Margate, on the south-east Kent coast, the remains of two long-missing teenage girls were discovered buried in shallow graves.

Fifteen-year-old Vicky Hamilton and 18-year-old Dinah McNicol went missing - at different times and in different places - in 1991. For 16 long years their families were forced to live in darkness, with no idea of what happened to them or where they were.

And now they know. It's hard to imagine how it feels to take comfort from this news but the families have said they have. Meanwhile, in the papers and on television, Vicky and Dinah's last smiles beam out at us - amused, feisty, optimistic. And a man who lived in the house briefly in 1991 has been charged with murder.

There are two parts to this terrible story. First, and hardest to think about, is the girls. We know little but imagination fills the gaps with distressing efficiency. And then there's the house. Though it's the girls and their families that you shudder for, it's still hard not to think too of the ordinary and innocent family who have lived there all these long years - 12 years of happy family life in what they imagined was an ordinary happy home. And then the police come to their door and, in the space of a night and a day, it's all over. They're sent away, their home broken up, literally, with diggers and drills.

They can never live there again and would not want to. And, though their trauma and disruption is nothing compared with what Vicky and Dinah's families have suffered, still you can't help wondering about the long shadow cast over their whole lives by these events. Because nothing can ever be the same again. The photo albums crammed with snapshots of birthdays and Christmases in this house - how will it feel to look at them now? And it's not just the pictures but the memories too. Not only has this family's present and future been crashed into but its past is also somehow indelibly stained by these shocking discoveries.

The pictures on the TV and in the newspapers drew us in, whether we wanted to be drawn or not - the neat paved back garden with its ordinary wooden shed and fan-shaped trellis on the wall, the patio dug up and reduced to mud, the sinister blue tent a reminder of precisely why. There, peeping happily over the plain wooden fence, was next door's spiky little yucca and, on the other neighbour's side, some mature shrubs and a small greenhouse, a honeysuckle twining itself over the fence.

Looking at these spaces, I thought of ordinary fun - barbecues in the summer, laughter and paddling pools, friends and grandparents, kids running in and out with crisps and drinks. And then the bleak routine of winter - the chairs brought inside, the leaves swept, root-bound plants in plastic pots left to droop and die, the cold back garden view cheered up only by the approach of Christmas and, ultimately, spring. And all this time two bodies were lying there just beneath the concrete surface, waiting to be found.

The father of one of the girls visited the house - a frail old man with a corduroy winter hat on, a man who told the waiting press he would do his crying later, on his own. The photo of him, in dignified profile, anorak on and scarf tightly wound, walking to the house, was hard to look at. On TV, trembling slightly, he was so anxious to be polite to the reporters. Gently, the police officer led him away. It was heartbreaking.

And part of me thought: "Why go there. Why put yourself through that? What on earth's to be gained when your child's body's already been removed and this grim and muddy site can give you nothing but pain?" But another part of me knew very well why he would go. Everything and nothing's to be gained and certainly nothing can be changed. And yet the need of a parent to confront, to see, to know, to accompany their child even on this most brutal of journeys, is paramount. The reason Dinah's father went, the reason I would go, is that it simply isn't possible not to.

In 1991, when those young girls went missing, my own daughter had just been born - a round, blonde baby with the greyest eyes I'd ever seen. I remember the easy euphoria of her birth - second child, faster labour - and the warm safety of that first winter, her first winter, the far off impossibility of the idea that she would ever have to leave my arms.

Now, at almost 17, she's ready for the world. The only fights we have are about how late it's safe for her to come home at night. Some days now I feel very old and other days I feel young and small, as if I've barely begun. I looked at that sad, dug-up garden on the news and I wondered what would happen to it. And then I thought about that bereft old man struggling to put his loss to rest and I didn't know what I felt any more. Confusion, anxiety, humility?