Dawn was breaking on 23 May 2017 when Stuart and Figen Murray turned up at the Etihad Stadium to register their son, Martyn Hett, as missing in the Manchester Arena attack. They were the first relatives to arrive at Manchester City’s ground, the muster point for those seeking loved ones who had been at the Ariana Grande concert the night before.
With no confirmed death toll from the suicide bomb that exploded after Grande’s finale, Stuart, Martyn’s stepdad, feared what might await them: “I just thought, ‘bloody hell, they must have hundreds of bodies laid out on the football pitch. Are we going to have to walk around these bodies to see if one of them is Martyn?’ At the same time, it was still early. I was thinking, he’s probably just gone awol. Martyn, when he went out, traditionally went astray. He once phoned us saying ‘I’ve fallen asleep on the train home to Stockport and woken up in Nottingham, what should I do?’. He was always losing his phone.”
