LONDON -- One week British citizens were worrying over whether we were going to war against Iraq and I was phoning all the antiwar organizations to find out what preparations they were making; the next, Britain was plunged into a collective horror of abducted children, citizenship had been washed away and journalism was sucked into a frantic scramble, led by the tabloids, to play the leading role in hunting for two missing girls.

Fear, disgust, prurience, sympathy, avidity, all these emotions and many more washed through the population as we followed hour by hour the search for the two 10-year-old girls, the arrest of two suspects, the discovery of the bodies, the identification of the decomposed bodies as those of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman -- the small girls who suddenly disappeared from the streets of Soham, a small town in Cambridgeshire one Sunday night in August.

The peak of this crisis has passed. A local man, the caretaker at the girls' school has been charged with murder, and is now held in a high security hospital under the mental health act. His girlfriend has been charged with perverting the course of justice -- that is, not of being involved in the abduction and murder of the girl, but of knowing enough to mislead the police. She has been arraigned before magistrates -- and driven away from a crowd of screaming women, men and tiny children, in a police convoy.