Suzy Lamplugh's body has never been found. In family photographs and in those small black and white pictures that newspapers use to illustrate a story, a fleeting memory of her life remains. The 25-year-old estate agent from Putney, west London, smiles out from the familiar published photographs, but it's hard to escape the feeling that Suzy's is a life long gone.
Years after the investigation into her disappearance on July 28th, 1986, was closed, detectives are again searching remote areas of southern England for her body. This week, officers went to a specific part of the Quantock Hills in Somerset where they said they had "good reasons" to look.
With their sniffer dogs, the detectives will search an area known as Dead Woman's Ditch for Suzy's remains, with the knowledge that 15 years after she went missing even a small breakthrough brings fresh hope.
The search for Suzy, whose story has become embedded in London history, began at the Sturgis estate agents in Putney. Suzy left the office in her white Ford Fiesta at 12.40 p.m. to keep an appointment with a man described in her filofax as "Mr Kipper".
She was due to show him around a £130,000 house in Shorrolds Road nearby, but when she failed to return to the office by 7 p.m. her colleagues telephoned the police.
Her car was found less than a mile away, but Mr Kipper, the man who was described by witnesses as smartly dressed and carrying a bottle of champagne, has never been identified. Sightings of Suzy in Saudi Arabia, Belgium and Greece proved groundless and the investigation was closed in 1987. She was officially declared dead in 1994.
Another five years passed and no one heard very much from Suzy's parents, Diana and Paul, who founded a charitable trust in their daughter's name to advise young women on personal safety. Recollections of details from her story were fading, but then in May last year new evidence emerged and the case was reopened.
A witness came forward to say that he or she had seen Suzy with more than one person in her car 80 minutes after the last known sighting at her office. The statement was significant because until then police had believed that if he was involved in her disappearance, Mr Kipper had acted alone.
When the new information came to light, Det Supt Shaun Sawyer, who is leading the case, said he was "extremely hopeful, extremely confident" his officers would make a breakthrough.
Police also acknowledged that some of their suspects were serving prison sentences for violent crimes.
One of the suspects interviewed on three occasions before the case was reopened was John Cannan, who was sentenced to life in 1989 for the rape and murder of Shirley Banks, a Bristol sales manager. He has denied any involvement, but his former girlfriend, Gilly Paige, told the Lamplughs that he had intimated that he raped and murdered Suzy at a disused army barracks near Worcester. Information that appeared independently to corroborate Paige's evidence emerged in 1999, but a search of the army barracks yielded nothing.
The trail to discover the identities of the other people in Lamplugh's car has gone cold.
In his book, The Missing, the author and journalist, Andrew O'Hagan, wrote about how "people get lost, their life-stories disappear, and the lingering detail is all we know of them". It is the same with the story of Suzy Lamplugh, as she appears frozen in 1986. He also wrote of a childhood fear of sporadic wickedness invading his Scottish housing estate. "It was the threat of something taking me away", he wrote, "stopping my presence, making me disappear".
O'Hagan's childhood fear lives on into adulthood for many people and echoes down through the lives and memories of Diana and Paul Lamplugh. "I'm a mother, part of my body has been murdered and that of course makes me angry as well as making me deeply sad", Diana Lamplugh told the Guardian last year as she acknowledged that her daughter's body might never be found. "The main thing is that it doesn't happen again. If the person was in prison and not coming out it's not the same as someone waiting round the corner to kill again."
Hopes have been raised and dashed on many occasions. But maybe this week's search in the Quantock Hills will yield the breakthrough that will allow Diana and Paul Lamplugh finally to bury their daughter.