Retracing the last steps of Holly and Jessica - part 2

By COLE MORTON, part 2

Holly and Jessica crossed the Lode, the river that runs beneath Sand Street, and turned back up towards Gidney Lane, where they turned right, said Mr Latham last week.

The whoosh of the traffic dropped away suddenly as I followed their footsteps into the Lane, where a sign promised closed circuit television was in operation "recording for the purpose of crime prevention and public safety".

The security cameras caught Holly and Jessica crossing a car park to the door of the Ross Peers sports centre, where they rang the bell and asked to be let in to buy sweets from a vending machine. It was 6.30pm. Two minutes later they were seen on College Road, arms linked, heading back in the direction from which they had, presumably, just come. Back towards the tied house in which Ian Huntley lived.

Maxine Carr was in Grimsby with her parents, 100 miles away, and only returned to Soham when Mr Huntley went to fetch her two days after the disappearance of the girls.

At first she told the police she was in the house. But after her arrest Ms Carr began to change her story, said Mr Latham in court.

In telephone calls to Mr Huntley's mother from Holloway prison she admitted the couple had discussed telling lies. The caretaker had told her that the girls had indeed been in his house, and he had sent them to the upstairs bathroom because Jessica had a nosebleed.

"It follows she was aware from the very outset, before she saw Huntley after the Sunday evening, that he was much more seriously implicated than she was to admit, even in interview," said Mr Latham.

On Monday August 5 2002, as hundreds of Soham residents gathered at the school across the road to take part in the search for Holly and Jessica, Ian Huntley was seen vaccuming his 11-year-old Fiesta.

That morning someone had paid £100 for four new tyres from a garage in Ely and paid the mechanic £10 to enter a fictitious registration number on the invoice. The same brand and size of tyre was found on the Fiesta, said Mr Latham, who suggested a worried Mr Huntley was subjecting his house and car to "the ultimate spring clean".

The day after they see the house, and walk the streets that Holly and Jessica walked, the jury will be taken to the edge of Lakenheath airfield, half an hour's drive from Soham, where the bodies were found.

As darkness fell there on Friday it was hard to imagine why people would go walking among the ditches, scrubby fields and woodlands in that flat, windswept landscape.

There is a raw, melancholy beauty to that isolated place, but the presence of the American military machine is intimidating. Only the farmer who owned the land and the people who worked for him were likely to go there, the jury was told last week.

Ian Huntley knew the area because his grandmother lived nearby, and this was where he brought the bodies in darkness on the stormy night of August 4, suggested Mr Latham.

"Whoever it was dumped the bodies would not have set off down that track in the dark unless they knew where they were going or what they would find."

There was silence as photographs of this spot were projected onto plasma screens in the packed courtroom at the Old Bailey on Thursday.

As Ian Huntley heaved her lifeless body from the boot of his Ford Fiesta and pushed into woodland Jessica's hair caught on the branch of a tree, where it would later be found and identified, said Mr Latham.

Then the murderer laid the girls side by side in a ditch used to irrigate the field by the copse, he suggested. Their clothes were cut off, piece by piece, until they were wearing nothing but their favourite necklaces.

Despite Mr Huntley's best efforts, traces of chalk and earth were found on the underside of his car that matched the soil on the track near the bodies, said the prosecutor. Pollen at the scene was the same as that found on the pedals and in the footwell of the car, and on the red petrol can in the boot. Fibres from the football shirts were found in the car, in the caretaker's cottage and on his clothes.

"You may now appreciate why it is unlikely to be disputed that these two girls went into the house," said Mr Latham.

The defence may suggest it had been some kind of ghastly accident that led to the death of the girls in the house, he said. "Ten-year-old girls do not tend to drop dead."

On the Wednesday after Holly and Jessica died - the same day the police released pictures of the kinds of clothes they had been wearing - Mr Huntley went back to the remote spot and set fire to their bodies using petrol, the prosecuting counsel suggested. The flames went out before the bodies were consumed.

On that same day Maxine Carr was allegedly seen scrubbing the wall tiles at their house so hard that she complained some of the paint was coming off, said Mr Latham.

Burnt clothing would later be found in a bin at the school, including scorched training shoes, underpants, and the little bra worn by Holly. The two red shirts had been cut in half and there were slight burns on the one that had been Jessica's.

The clothes were discovered under a black bin bag in a hangar at Soham Village College on August 16. Mr Huntley's fingerprints were all over the bin bag. The caretaker was arrested within hours.

Coincidentally, the bodies of the dead girls were found on the same day. They were lying on their backs in the ditch, their legs entwined. The smell of them alerted a gamekeeper, who saw bodies covered in maggots.

Holly and Jessica were identified by dental records and DNA profiles. A Home Office pathologist concluded they must have been dumped before rigor mortis had set in. Asphyxia was the most likely cause of death.

Standing close to that spot on Friday evening, with the road distant and the shadows lengthening, it was obvious their discovery had been very unlikely.

Holly and Jessica's parents would have been left to wonder, and to hope, against the odds, for the rest of their lives.

"Had they not been discovered at that stage, the state of the decomposition was such that they might never have been found," said Richard Latham, who was concluding his opening speech on Friday as I returned to the warmth of the car.

"They were very, very close to almost having wholly disappeared to becoming just like skeletons."

The trial continues.

Retracing the last steps - part 1

- INDEPENDENT