Holly and Jessica - we'll never know

As Ian Huntley begins his double life sentence, we are left with a multitude of questions surrounding a crime that appalled the nation. In a compelling account, Nicci Gerrard, who attended the Old Bailey trial, attempts to get inside the mind of an unrepentant killer
Guilty of the murder of Jessica Chapman, said the jury. Guilty of the murder of Holly Wells. Life, said the judge; life for the man who took life and showed 'no mercy and no regret'; whose only tears were shed for himself.

And so Ian Huntley, who for years has stalked the young and vulnerable, and who for six wretched weeks, for 16 months, has stalked our imaginations, is walked from the dock, face expressionless, and vanishes from public view. Now he will just become a ghostly name among all those other names that, when we think of them, send a frisson down the spine.

Remember him? In the dock, he looked like a tense-shouldered Russell Crowe, but with doughy, prison-pallid skin; duller eyes. He once had a slender girlfriend with a mop of hair and a crooked, pale, nearly pretty face. He once was the caretaker; the paedophile, the predator, the rapist, the murderer. The man who had for years been molesting and raping girls and young women, and who had fallen through all the cracks in the criminal justice system. The man who, one wet evening in August 2002, killed two 10-year-old girls. We know the story's end at last; the curtain's fallen on the long, heartbreaking drama. We now know too much, defiled by details, yet still we don't know. At the inky heart of the case, in that ghastly little hole in time, the silence remains. 'Take him away,' said the judge.

Justice Moses, turning to the parents, said their daughters had been 'bright and life-enhancing'. Their glowing young faces have haunted this trial. In their red football shirts, with their eager gaze, they stand under a clock that says it is four minutes past five, and we all know how that clock will tick away the short time that leads them out of the door, down the street, round the small town, into the house where they died. On the CCTV cameras, with its curious boiled-sweet colours and spasmodic, freeze-frame motion, they walk together along the wet roads; close together, shoulders touching, arms sometimes linked, giggling. It's 18.28 and 30 seconds; there they are. It's 18.28 and 41 seconds, and they're jerked forward, out of the frame - vanished, and the screen is empty, just lights shining on puddles.

Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, sucked out of their familiarly happy present into the unfathomable black hole at the heart of this story. A few minutes later they were murdered by Ian Huntley, and then their bodies were rolled down a muddy ditch, limbs tangled, and they lay there among the nettles and the mud, and they didn't have a happy present or a mysterious future anymore, just a past. Forever 10.

Many of the murder cases that have gripped the nation in recent years possess the horror of the strange; the spooky dread of the unknown. Two 10-year-old boys snatch a toddler from outside a shop, walk him to a railway line and kill him there; a 'good' doctor gives lethal injections to dozens, hundreds, of his patients, and it's impossible to comprehend the mind that took pleasure in these blank and bureaucratic crimes; a couple sexually torture lost young women and their own children, then murder them and bury them vertically under the floor of their terraced slaughterhouse; a little girl, running home across fields, is snatched by a stranger in a van, like a nasty modern fairy tale (many of us probably don't even recall Roy Whiting's name - rather than being an individual for us, he became the wicked wolf, the fictive bogeyman).

And Huntley exploded into view, in a violent transformation from an apparently sensible and steady young man to brutal killer. That he was dangerous and sick we now all know, a time bomb waiting to explode. On 4 August random events combined and touched off the fuse. A predator not a loner; a moment not a plan.

But in this case we have been gripped as well by the familiar, and that is why we care so much about them (and often so little about other murders). In the summer of last year, when Jessica and Holly first went missing, it was - to borrow one of the many clichés that filled the newspapers - 'every parent's nightmare'. They lived in the kind of village where, as residents said, 'these things just don't happen'; they went to the local school; they'd spent much of their last day playing computer games and going out to buy sweets (a half-eaten pack of Polos was found with their scorched clothes); they'd just had one of those very English BBQs, cooked under shelter and eaten in the kitchen. They were wearing Manchester United football shirts, trainers (Nike), tracksuit trousers (Umbro), underwear from Marks & Spencer and Tesco. They were well-behaved and popular at school, and liked their 'cool' young teaching assistant, Miss Carr. They were close to their parents, loyal to their friends (and one of them must have watched the other being killed). They seemed like a template for a proper, decent, safe and well-protected childhood - the way young girls, on the brink of adolescence but not yet there, should be; the way we'd like our own children to be.

It was this sentimental identification that filled the media, prompted the national outpouring of grief, and seemed to be trying to flood the great gap between those who knew the girls, and the strangers who spuriously felt they knew them. Yet, as Justice Moses sternly said, what the parents must feel cannot be imagined and cannot be shared. There is no emotional equivalent. They are alone with their grief and we cannot join them.

Tragedy usually happens when we're looking the other way - by the time the agonised and prolonged search had started, the little girls were two hours dead and dumped in that ditch (alder and birch, said the scientist who specialised in plants; common heather, yarrow, mudwort, meadow sweet...); Ian Huntley, after a drab Sunday (telly, a walk with the dog, a squabble by phone with Maxine Carr), entered a world of gothic violence, luring Holly and Jessica out of their ordinary Sunday evening and killing them, driving them to Lakenheath, returning to a village that had been transformed utterly in his absence. Kevin Wells stood by a field and called out their names, over and over again. Police arrived, with their vans and their dogs. Residents flocked to help and Ian Huntley joined in the hunt. Soham quickly became the centre of the biggest search this country has ever known, and it also became a media circus and a national shrine to which strangers flocked to lay their offerings ('Sweet dreams... We will miss you'), a glut of sorrow-lite next to the granite sadness of the family. Sniffer dogs, satellite dishes, a decaying mountain of flowers and cards. Detective story, horror story, easy tear-jerker, poignantly scripted tale of the way we live now and of the fears that we all hold.

And this case has been all about stories. The 11 days during which the girls were missing had us in the fist of its despairing mystery. There were all the classic ingredients: the small town; the cast of characters, including the tormented parents appealing to the world for help and the man who would eventually be charged with their murder; the search through the first grim night and on into the subsequent weeks; the misdirections, rumours, false hopes, scatter of clues, tattered hopes. It's a story that has become achingly familiar, an instant myth of the man-next-door, of if-we're-not-safe-here-then we're-not-safe-anywhere, as if in this world in which we live there's also a looming shadow world that can suddenly break into terrifying view.

Inserted in this larger, emblematic tale were the stand-alone, false stories told by the rather good-looking young caretaker who was the last one to see the girls before they vanished, and his girlfriend, the teaching assistant. We saw them, day after day, on our screens and in newspapers. They were such a well-matched double-act, so media savvy - their lies became more accomplished with practice; they gave the public what they wanted, and became, for a grossly ironic few days, a celebrity couple who both hated and courted the press, and were suspected and courted by them. Huntley liked to talk about 'the glimmer of hope' everyone should still feel. He spoke, with apparent sincerity, about how he was probably the last 'friendly face' that the girls had seen (and in court, pressed on this grotesquerie, he repeated it - 'I was,' he said, as if meaning it).

In the public imagination the pair became linked together, but Carr was in Grimsby when the girls died. He acted alone, and she was on the margin of the story. In the court they sat in the glass-sided dock and never looked at each other, not even when he edged past her on his way to the witness box. She was tipped away from him, her head slewed to the side and sometimes leaning for ward so her hair hid her face. He stared ahead. His expression never wavered, although once or twice he looked downwards, fiddled with a button on his jacket, tightened his knuckles.

'Psychopath,' some journalists said. 'Look at that brow.' How can you ever tell from a face what lies behind? The parents of Jessica and Holly also sat in court, day after day, week after week, and maintained a dignified demeanour even when Huntley told how he crammed the girls' bodies into his car boot. If there are lessons from this trial, one must be how much is concealed under the implacable surface and how hidden most people are from each other.

Paedophiles don't always look like the 73-year-old Arnold Hartley, battered to death in his house last month, who had a stubbly, jowly face and an eye-patch, like a down-at-heel bandit on a peeling 'Wanted' poster. They look like Huntley, too (but 'I know him,' cried Carr when she heard from the police that the man she had hoped to marry was charged with the murder); they look like us. This is one of the dreads of the case: that we keep so much of our strangeness and our turmoil secret, each of us unknowing and unknown. That you cannot protect your children because kindness and great cruelty often wear the same face.

The motif of clearing up and of cleaning away - Maxine was the spring- cleaner of all time, wielding her Flash, her bleach, her Mr Sheen, washing those curtains, scraping at the tiles until the paint flaked, desperately trying to erase the nasty stains of life - has as its shadow version in the motif of dirt and ghastly disorder. Huntley, narcissistically clean in person, was a domestic slob and couch potato; he lay on his sofa, drinking lager and scattering crumbs. He didn't know how to use the washing machine (though he mysteriously managed to cram an entire duvet inside its tub). He left dishes in the sink, laundry in a heap. And then, in a nightmarish psychological version of squalor, he broke the bath, flooded the dining room, killed two little girls, vomited on the carpet, dragged their bodies through his house and into his car. Inner and outer worlds had all of a sudden collided like mucky breakers crashing over the sea walls, carrying with it the great sucking undertow.

In the story the trial told, conflicting versions jostled. The blizzard of details the prosecution produced was meticulous and almost irrelevant, because we knew from the start that the two girls had died in Huntley's house, and he had dumped their bodies. In a sense, the evidence provided the bricks and mortar of the case; Huntley had threaded his thin and frantic line of defence around their incontestability. Never mind the laminated maps, mobile-phone beacons, car tracks on the lonely lane in Lakenheath, fingerprints on the black bin bag; never mind the solid edifice of clues and circumstances - what dominated the trial was the hissing black hole at its centre. Which is still there now.

What always mattered was the tale that Huntley would tell and then how the prosecution would make him un-tell it, undoing the story, looking at the slippages through which truth might seep. The Huntley we glimpsed during other witnesses' brief statements was a fragile, weakly defended man, with few inner resources. He could be a bully (self-righteously chucking journalists out of the school where they were writing their copy), but was thin-skinned too. He stood stolidly enough in the dock, but in life he lost his temper, cried easily - cried in front of the vice-principal of the school where he worked; cried in front of the police when they came to ask questions.

Carr, in her garrulous original statements to the police, insisted that her boyfriend, even if he had killed the girls, would have broken down at once. He was an anxious, even depressive person (anxiety is one of the dominant impressions of him in photographs - tense, with a tight, vigilant smile) and had a prickly sense of his status - he was quick to insist that he was not a caretaker but a site manager, or even a 'senior site manager'.

What grabs you are the details - those sinister fissures through which the 'real' Huntley could be seen. When he was being led through his story by Stephen Coward, QC, he was calm and articulate. If you set aside the stunning ludicrousness of an account in which two fit girls both died because he panicked, the strangest aspect was his repeated use of the present tense when he talked about his life in Soham, with Maxine - 'We do this... we do that... we have a television in the kitchen.'

And he eerily repeated this under cross-examination, as if his domestic routine and his relationship was still going on and soon enough he would walk back into it in his chinos and his trainers, hair stiff and straight, and be senior site manager, couch potato and Maxine's boyfriend once again. (Later, during her testimony, Carr shoved Huntley firmly into the past tense, and while he called her 'Maxine' she referred to him as 'Mr Huntley', 'that man', and once, flinging out her hand towards the dock, even 'that thing'.)

But under cross examination the story cracked open and so, every so often, did he. Smooth talk stalled into silence, into 'I don't know', 'I can't recall'. The dog-ate-my-homework excuse for the two deaths became a series of admissions: 'I killed Jessica...' 'She would have struggled...' 'It was inexcusable...' He lost his temper once, when pressed on the irrationality of his lie, and at times he seemed genuinely aggrieved with the prosecution, as if part of him believed his own unbelievable story.

'You've already made up your mind,' he snapped, bitterly. Self-pity has been one of the ugliest motifs of this trial; a gross narcissism that leaves no room for the sufferings of others. Pity - pity for the girls whose lives were blotted out; pity for the parents and family who sat day after day listening to this bleakest tale - was absent. Yet he said, with a Kafkaesque sanctimoniousness, that he had promised his mother he would make it through to this trial so that he could tell the truth to the parents about their daughters' deaths.

It seems plausible that Huntley's version of that Sunday evening was a relic of the truth he would not tell. The dog was probably dirty. Holly probably had a nosebleed. The girls wanted to know how 'Miss Carr' was. In some way he panicked. He didn't set out to commit murder, but having killed one he had to kill the other. He vomited on the carpet outside the bathroom. Maybe he actually did black out, as he claimed. An extraordinary 40 per cent of homicides cannot remember the moment of murder. The body revolts; the mind shuts down in horror at itself. 'I do not know' means 'I will not know'; 'I cannot recall' means 'I must not remember'.

Bit by bit, from Huntley's inadequate version, another story emerged, one which could never be wholly spoken aloud during the trial but which lurked in the margins and between the lines. The great why? Why did they die?

Paedophiles, says Cleo van Velsen, a consultant psychiatrist in forensic psychotherapy who works a secure unit, are most usually age-specific, but Huntley's sexuality had unravelled into an undiscriminating compulsion to humiliate and control. Since 1995 he had been accused of nine sexual offences, including a string of rapes, an indecent assault of an 11-year-old girl, and unlawful sexual intercourse with four young girls. Who knows how many more unreported cases there were?

Now he has been convicted, the anecdotes and personal testimonies stream out, so that reading the papers the following day felt pornographically squalid and terrifying. He was a serial rapist, a despoiler of the young and vulnerable. He was consistently violent, controlling and abusive. He kept a girlfriend prisoner. He kicked a girlfriend in the stomach so she miscarried. He half-strangled another. He hit another down the stairs... The pattern gives terrifying evidence of a brutalising sexuality.

And then, on that August evening, he had an argument on the phone with Maxine about her going out that evening (she could, he said, get 'flirty' when she had too much to drink - and pictures after the verdict show him to be right there, for she was certainly on the razzle that particular night) and she sent him a curt text message at 18.31. Seconds later, Jessica and Holly came down the road. Somehow he lured them into his house - by saying Carr was there? He took them upstairs. At 18.46, if we are to follow the evidence of Jessica's mobile being turned off then, they were dead. We do not know what happened in those 13 or 14 minutes. We know they were in the bathroom, in the bedroom. We know he cut their clothes off their bodies, removed their underwear, tried to wash the duvet and cover.

While preparing to dump the bodies - collecting bin bags, rubber gloves, the petrol can to douse them and set them alight - Huntley changed out of his smart 'brushers' and into his trainers. Why? Because, he said, as if there was nothing odd about personal vanity in the middle of brutal double murder , he only wore his 'brushers' in the house; he didn't want to get them messy.

When, during the subsequent days of lying, he approached Kevin Wells, it was to say to him that he was very sorry, he hadn't known it 'was your daughter'. Under cross-examination, he denied this was playing with the emotions of the father. He had been speaking the truth: he hadn't known and he was sorry. This was mocked by Latham and used as evidence of his ruthlessness, used again in the judge's impassioned closing speech, but it had the eerie ring of truth. Huntley was, in this own way, apologising. 'Kev', he called him then. 'Kev', he called him again in court: 'Kev' - to the man whose daughter he'd killed. This is a psychopathic apology, emptied of sorrow and replaced instead with self - the same self that he paraded in his TV interviews, talking of the glimmer of hope and being the last 'friendly face', that felt self-righteously misunderstood by the prosecuting counsel, that changed out of his smart boots so as not to dirty them when dumping the little girls.

Is Huntley a psychopath then? We quickly rush to such labels, for our culture is fascinated by murders committed by emotionally perverted individuals driven by hidden inner compulsions. Crime is seen as the inevitable outcome of pathology - and then we can call some individuals evil and have done with it. It's so easy. Evil psychopath; bring back capital punishment (or, as one man who lived near Soham said to me: they shouldn't send him to prison; just set him down in the centre of the town and see what happens to him). The mourning crowd who laid flowers for the dead can too easily become the vengeful lynch mob.

The Hare psychopathy checklist (developed by Robert Hare, and originating in a book by Hervey Cleckley called The Mask of Sanity) has among the traits listed: glibness and superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, cunning and manipulation, lack of remorse or guilt, lack of empathy, short-term relationships, criminal versatility. At first glance Huntley seems to fit almost too neatly. Cleo van Velsen agrees his behaviour falls into psychopathy - particularly his ability to compartmentalise. 'Not to be connected with what you're doing,' she says. 'Not to be overwhelmed by horror or guilt.' Psychopaths, she says, have a real capacity to seem sane and normal.

What lessons are there to be learnt from the case, apart from the gaping flaws in the system which allowed a man with a crowded history of violent, perverse sexual offences to end up as a school caretaker? Everything is simple in hindsight. We look at Huntley's life and see the signs of a murder that was bound to happen, as if the clock was always ticking forward to this moment. We can track back to see how we got here, but can't track forward to know where we're going.

Huntley grew up in Immingham, an industrial port for giant container ships where everything is looking away from the drab town centre towards the sea and where everything seems temporary; on its way somewhere else. Photographs show a boy with a pleasant face, a wide smile, but he was bullied at school (they called him 'Spadehead') and then became a vicious bully in his turn. He loved his mother (the same mother who has now said her son deserves to die), was jealous of his father (who says he will go on being there for him) and of younger brother Wayne (who, years later, would marry his brother's wife, Claire, after she left Huntley). His parents separated; he left school and drifted from job to job; he picked up girls; he had a temper that could flare suddenly.

All of this sounds wretched, but not psychopathic. Lots of children are bullied and are bullies, have complicated family relationships, come from broken homes. Yet this child became the man who molested, raped, killed, and yet wore a charming face.

He has shown no pity, nor admitted guilt; perhaps he doesn't feel it. Few killers take responsibility for what they have done: prisons are full of people who claim they are innocent. Huntley said it was an accident - and probably in his terms it was. Humans are infinitely good at blaming others and expressing their own emotional hurt (in the dock, Huntley was good at it too, charging his testimony twith bitterness, the sense of being misunderstood) and bad at confessing guilt or feeling moral responsibility. The mind has all sorts of mechanisms for refusing to admit the truth to itself, and for making the perpetrator into another victim. The language of victimhood and fake-therapy flooded the trial. Huntley talked about 'coping mechanisms' and 'closure'. In a grotesque displacement, the 'real' hidden self feels betrayed by its own actions.

Huntley probably feels he's not a 'pervert' - Carr said they both agreed that paedophiles ought to be castrated and shot, and plausibly Huntley did believe this. Paedophiles are other people; rapists are other people; murderers are other people. It's hard for the mind to know itself as wicked. It tells itself a different story, keeping the darkness at bay. Week after week, Huntley listened to what he had done and didn't collapse. An accident, he said. Not something he did, but something that happened. What would it mean for him to accept that what he has done is also what he is? How could he live with this knowledge? In prison (and Wakefield, where he will probably be sent in the New Year, is known as 'the monster mansion'), Huntley will be in solitary confinement and on suicide watch. The celebrity days are over; all the ghastly pleasure and the horror. He is alone with his mind. Whether he stays alive, or he kills himself, his future is deathly.

Not guilty of aiding an offender, said the jury of Carr, but guilty of perverting the course of justice. Three-and-a-half years, said Justice Moses, condemning her selfishness and glib lies that added to the torment of the family. Carr's name has been linked to Huntley's; her future, as her counsel Michael Hubbard said before the sentencing, has been 'blighted'. She has been hounded, vilified, called 'Myra Hindley Mark Two', not only by the inmates of Holloway where she has been kept since her arrest, but also by newspapers. Words used about her were the same ones used about Saddam Hussein. Yet on Wednesday she was convicted of lying, but not of complicity - of ignorance and misplaced loyalty, not of wickedness. 'How much did she know?' was always the question, but we'll never have the answer and now we should leave her alone rather than go baying after her.

In court she named herself Huntley's victim; her own self-pity makes it harder for us to pity her. She appeared clever, chatty, tough and childish - not like a 26-year-old, more like a girl with a shallow understanding of the larger world, a narrow focus of her own. She too had learned the language of blame and popular therapy: she said she had been forced into lying by Huntley and that it was only after she had been away from him for months, out of his control, that she was finally herself again, freed from him at last.

And we are free of him, too. After the frenzy and public grief, he's been taken away, into the shadow realm and into silence. The doors close on him and his dark story. But the family of the murdered girls are not free of him and nor will they ever be, because for the rest of their lives they live with the legacy of what he did, without their daughters beside them. There will always be another dream world for them, in which the clock ticked on, the girls came home, back into their sunny lives, and they are not 10 any more, but growing up. Jessica and Holly: the two little ghosts who've haunted the country and should now be left in peace.