REPORTER Lucy Clark remembers remembers talking to the family.

I will never forget nervously driving to meet Melanie Hall's parents for the first time. It was November 1996 about two months after I'd started work as a reporter on the Wiltshire Times.

Pat was ironing in the kitchen when I arrived. Steve showed me through to the lounge and I recall thinking how beautiful their house was. They later told me that they didn't get the same enjoyment from the place any more.

It was difficult to know what to say at first; here was I, a complete stranger, asking the same questions about their daughter that they'd heard from journalists a million times before. I felt as if I was intruding on the grief of two people that I was powerless to help.

'Do you still rush to the door expecting to see Melanie if the doorbell goes?' I remember asking. Pat shook her head and said no; they'd accepted from a very early stage that something had probably happened to their daughter. She would have rung, scribbled a note, left a message with a work colleague she wouldn't have just disappeared and left them in limbo.

She said the rain would prompt thoughts of Melanie, out there, somewhere, on her own. Steve told me that he could have passed someone in the street with knowledge of his daughter's disappearance without even knowing it. They got up in the morning and kept going because they had to, they said. No-one was going to do it for them.

Whenever I rang them or attended a police press conference I somehow felt torn between my role as a journalist and that of someone who just wanted to be there to listen and express sympathy.

Meeting Pat and Steve Hall was a very humbling experience of how unfair it was that the lives of two such lovely people had been shattered by a continuing nightmare.