I still dream of the people in my first book, The Missing. I still see them, the children who returned home and those who did not, the lost who haunted us for a week, a few months, or sometimes for years rolling up to the present day, the disappeared whose vulnerability I wished to highlight three decades ago when I wrote that little book.
It all started for me in 1973, when a child on a neighbouring housing estate in Scotland, a boy called Sandy Davidson, simply vanished one day. At first, it didn’t seem possible that a child could go missing in broad daylight, but we learnt that it happened quite often, and Sandy became a symbol for us of something unknowable, a twilight world of social fragmentation or victimhood, a fear I never forgot.
