Retracing the last steps of Holly and Jessica

By COLE MORTON, part 1

The house in which Holly and Jessica died has been gutted. The gardens have been dug up, the fixtures, fittings and furniture taken away in pursuit of evidence, so the caretaker's cottage looks like a bare-boned new build.

The steel cladding that hid the interior of the house from dark tourists has been removed and replaced with perspex sheeting, so you can see right into the empty rooms. The only decoration is black and yellow police tape.

Tomorrow the seven women and five men whose job it is to decide whether Ian Huntley is a murderer will come to this spot, as they retrace the last steps of the two 10-year-old friends.

Boys were chasing a football in the playground of Soham Village School on Friday, a short miskick from the stripped, detached house, but the former schoolmates will be given the day off tomorrow. Many locals will be getting out of town.

"We've had enough," said a businessman. "Especially the children."

I first walked through the village of Soham in August last year, six days after the girls disappeared, when the whole country seemed to be looking, and worrying, for them. Holly and Jessica were missing and we all so wanted them to be found.

It was a case that chilled the heart of every parent: two 10-year-olds slip out of the house during a barbecue, take a walk, buy some sweets, and are never seen again. The parents made tearful appeals, the police sought to speak directly to their "abductor" through the television cameras, there were press conferences every day at the school.

Now we know their bodies were lying in a ditch - and the school caretaker is the man accused of murdering them.

So on Friday I retraced that fateful route as Ian Huntley stood trial in an oak-panelled court room seventy miles away at the Old Bailey in London. He was not there. Mr Huntley, who says he is not guilty, was ill on Friday. His former girlfriend Maxine Carr was left alone in the dock as the prosecution counsel, Richard Latham QC, concluded his opening speech.

Ms Carr has denied two counts of assisting an offender and one of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. "Standing by your man is no lawful authority or reasonable excuse," said Mr Latham.

As the case continued in London a police officer sat in a patrol car outside Mr Huntley's old house in Soham reading the newspaper. Not the coverage of the trial, but the sports pages. The shouts of the boys in the playground drifted on the wind that ruffled a weeping willow in the staff car park; but the only other sound was their surprisingly quiet moan of an American air force transporter jet rising into the sky from one of the bases nearby. Soham was getting on with its life. What else was it supposed to do?

The house where Kevin and Nicola Wells lived with their daughter Holly was in a quiet cul-de-sac in a quiet part of a quiet community. After a meal on August 4 Holly and her friend Jessica Chapman went upstairs to play, and at about 6.15pm Kevin Wells heard the floorboards in Holly's bedroom creak. The girls left the house unnoticed some time after that, and walked away from Red House Gardens, the court heard last week.

The blue and white van that stood in the drive of number four on Friday was familiar from all those newspaper photographs and television reports of the time, shot from a respectful distance as the families waited inside for news and the minutes and hours and weeks went by. As the time lengthened the hopes of getting them back diminished.

The alleyway leading to Tanner's Lane is short but to the girls the dark-stained wooden fence must have appeared high. They crossed the road and walked down along the side of Sand Street, the main traffic route through town, with its speed restrictions and sleeping policemen, the sort of kerbside at which parents hold their children's hands a little more tightly to keep them safe.

Holly and Jessica were dressed in matching Manchester United shirts with the name of the star player on both backs.

"Look, two little Beckhams," said a passing motorist to his companion, the court heard.

When I was last there a clutch of press photographers stood at one end of Sand Street to capture the sight of two young actresses from a theatre school walking the same route as the girls, dressed in the same red shirts, wearing the same kind of jewellery, their hair having been cut at the same salon in the same style.

Half the village had gathered below, by the war memorial, to watch. People came out of the Red Lion in their dozens or craned their necks from outside Derek's Home Furnishings to look past some of the 300 police officers and Japanese camera crews and see a family support officer put her hand on the shoulder of one of the little actresses, who had clearly been affected by the performance.

Officers in boiler suits were six days into their search, going from door to door asking questions.

Ian Huntley was giving interviews to the press and television, expressing his hope that the girls would be found. He was in the crowd when the parents made a tearful appeal. He expressed his support for Mr Wells and called him "Kev".

All of this was mentioned by Richard Latham last week as he set out the direction the prosecution would take.

Back in August 2002 all people could do was wonder. Had the girls been abducted? Had they run away? Had they fallen in the streams that run along the edge of Soham, swollen by storms on the Sunday?

We may now be moving towards the moment when we know exactly what happened. The trial is expected to last until January.

Retracing the last steps - part 2

- INDEPENDENT