The heartbreaking question that no one bothered asking

It's 30 years since Andrew O'Hagan wrote 'The Missing', but he has never forgotten the desperate people he met. It's why, today, he is backing The Independent's SafeCall campaign

-  Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Less than 20 years later, as a young writer in London, I began looking for the stories of missing persons. At night in Soho, I would spend hours with runaways and loners, then I would travel up and down the country, talking anonymously to young people who were missing from home.

I can still see one of them, Angel, crouched in a doorway at the end of a long and harassing day. She wanted to be famous; she also yearned to be normal, but a few things had gone wrong in her life, and she was compelled by the notion that she couldn’t go home again. She wished she could phone them, but she didn’t know how. The connection was hard to make.