A breakdown of what happened to the eyewitness account from a taxi-driver who may have seen Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman being ferried away by an abductor shows how easily a potentially golden nugget of information can be lost in a huge inquiry.
There will also be a focus on why there was no immediate follow-up to reports made on August 6th - Tuesday of last week - from a man who heard screaming in a wooded area the previous Sunday night, immediately after the girls disappeared. The same man - who had been walking his dog the first night - returned jogging yesterday and found the disturbed earth. After he again went to the police, this became the focus of last night's search.
While Cambridgeshire police wish the statement of the taxi-driver, Mr Ian Webster, had been processed more quickly, officers admitted yesterday that the scale of the inquiry made immediate action on all but the most specific leads extremely difficult.
The potential for confusion was there from the start. Mr Webster (56) did not ring the incident room number, but approached police in Brecon, Dyfed Powys, where he was staying at the time, when he realised that the swerving car he saw on the night the girls disappeared might be a vital clue.
He gave a statement last Wednesday - he claimed he had tried the day before but there was no Criminal Investigation Department officer available - and the details were forwarded to Cambridgeshire, which received them at 10.46 a.m.
The message was processed with thousands of others and was not marked for immediate action when it was vetted by desk sergeants in the major operations room. The inquiry is assessing hundreds of sightings of girls in cars and vans, and Mr Webster's was not considered extraordinary.
Instead the statement was passed to a "grading office", where it was tagged high priority. An officer reviewing the messages marked Mr Webster's statement to be "actioned" by police and it was put in a separate queue, awaiting allocation to detectives. Last Friday, two days after the statement was received, a team of eight officers was given the task of interviewing the taxi driver, but the unit also had a further 30 leads to pursue.
Back home in Newmarket, and fed up with not having been seen, Mr Webster went to the local police station on Friday and spoke to a mobile police unit on Saturday evening to ask what was happening. He was called on Sunday morning and eventually seen at 1 p.m.
On Monday, the incident room received 1,800 calls, bringing the total in the past 10 days to 10,000. - (Guardian Service)