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Drops a business card on top. Nods, and walks away. The barmaid traces his every step with her eyes.

Rufus feels his phone vibrate in his pocket. He does as he’s bid. Starts to read.

At closing time, he buys a bottle of Glenfiddich and two packets of crisps. Goes to his car, and climbs into the back seat. Drinks, and cries, and falls into a sleep full of leering skulls.

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF LUKE ASHLEY

By CrymeReport.com staff

February 11, 2012

In the time it takes you to read this article, three children will have gone missing from home. More than 300,000 children go missing in the UK every year. Not all return home. Some are never seen again. Others disappear for years at a time. For some families, the search for answers ends in grief. And for others, there are no answers at all.

Susan Westoby, 49, has spent the last six years hoping that her ‘perfect son’, Phillip, walks back through the door with an innocent explanation for where he has been since leaving the family home early one Sunday morning in June, 2007.

‘I remember the last evening we spent together as a proper family unit. We were all together in the living room: me, his dad, his big brother and little sister, and it was one of those warm, nice nights where you have the window open and you can small the barbecue smells wafting in from other people’s gardens. Phillip was sitting by the stereo with his headphones on, reading a graphic novel. I had my magazine. Dad and the other two were watching DVDs. It was a normal, pleasant evening. The next day everything changed. Our lives have never been the same since.’

Phillip is described as ‘clever and kind’ by those who knew him. A pupil at his local comprehensive in Carlisle, he was thought of by teachers as a pupil with the potential to reach one of the Oxbridge universities and he completed two GCSEs – in music and information technology – three years before his peers will sit exams, having been placed on a Gifted Student fast-track education scheme.

Since his disappearance, Susan has worked with charity organization Missing People to raise awareness of the number of young people who vanish without trace each year.

She believes that while many cases make headlines, others are quietly ignored by the media or dismissed by police as ‘problem children’ and ‘troubled runaways’.

Police have been unable to piece together any sort of log of Phillip’s movements on the day of his disappearance. Susan has turned detective in her effort to find witnesses.

‘He was never the most popular kid in the class, but he had friends, or at least people he was friendly with. A neighbour saw him leaving the house and told us he seemed to be going to an effort not to make any noise, but that would be just like him on a normal day – frightened to wake his dad, who was going through awful problems with his back. After that, we have a vague sighting from an older boy who thinks he may have seen him hanging around by the phone box on the row of shops at the bottom of Chances Park.

‘Phillip did have a mobile phone of his own but he was forever losing it, so whether he had it with him, we don’t know. Certainly it hasn’t been used. We’ve managed to get into his computer and talk with some of the friends he played games with through some sort of internet link-up, but it all goes over my head and the important thing is that nobody could offer any sort of help. One gamer he used to chat with suggested that he’d been going into a private chatroom online in recent weeks, but didn’t know the name of it. The police were no help at all.’

Susan believes the charity has been a lifeline these past years. She said: ‘They have volunteers and paid staff but everybody connected to it is completely focused on doing everything they can to help people like me. And there are so many people like me. Too many.’

The charity has helped Susan connect with the mother and father of Bronwen Roberts, who vanished from her home in rural Lincolnshire in 1998.

She said: ‘That family has been through so much. It’s the waiting – the not knowing: the hoping for answers but the terror at what those answers might be.’

There is at least a little ray of hope for the Roberts family. A website set up to keep Bronwen’s memory alive was recently contacted by an anonymous source claiming that Bronwen had been involved in a secret relationship with a family friend in the weeks before her disappearance.

Police initially dismissed the accusation as a cruel hoax by an attention seeker, but after the story was publicized in a national newspaper, a friend of Bronwen’s confirmed that the ‘clever, gifted and inquisitive’ teen had indeed been secretly seeing a friend of her older brother – a student at the University of Hertfordshire.

A spokeswoman for Missing People said: ‘We can’t talk about that particular development but suffice to say that the family are struggling with some very conflicting emotions.’

A website set up by Susan Westoby was closed down last year when it became a target for vile internet trolls who taunted the family. The internet is awash with forums and noticeboards where users share theories and dissect his disappearance, along with so many others. There is a growing theory that some of the teens listed as missing in the UK were all victims of the same perpetrator or perpetrators, though police have been quick to deny any suggestion that there is an active serial killer at work targeting bright and naïve UK teens.

The spokeswoman for the charity said: ‘That kind of gossip only hampers us and causes harm to those already under an obscene amount of stress and pain. We will continue to work with families and the police and do what