Two months after Lisa Dorrian's disappearance, her family believes she has been murdered by loyalist drug dealers, writes Susan McKay

Lisa Dorrian has become one of the disappeared. Eight weeks ago, the 25-year-old set off for a weekend party at a caravan park at Ballyhalbert on the Ards peninsula in Co Down. However it's not clear if she ever arrived. Some of the people at the party have told her family she left at five on the Monday morning and "got lost in the dark". The police believe she was murdered.

It is widely believed that loyalist paramilitary drug dealers were responsible.

This past weekend, her family has been trying to gather up enough money to appeal to her killers or those who know them. "We just want Lisa's body back," says her mother, Pat. "It means everything to us. She's my first child." A huge police operation appears to have yielded little hard evidence. "There's definitely a fear factor," says Pat.

Lisa had no fear. "She was happy-go-lucky," says her younger sister, Joanne, a college student. "She lived for partying and fashion. She was really friendly and very romantic. She was naïve - she never saw bad in people." Having broken up with her long-term boyfriend last year, she had taken up with a new crowd.

According to local people, it included young people like Lisa, who just liked a good time, but also others who were sinister. They included several men linked to the Loyalist Volunteer Force and deeply involved in violence and drug dealing. One of these men had been wooing Lisa. She seems to have had no idea that she was completely out of her depth.

The family is Catholic, but Pat, who works in an old people's home, says they never had any sectarian trouble in unionist Bangor. Lisa was born in England but had lived in the North since she was four. She went to Catholic schools but always mixed with Protestants.

Her family has stacks of photos - Lisa as a little gap-toothed girl, Lisa with a bucket and spade on the beach at Donaghadee; Lisa as a teenager in sleek white boots; Lisa as a young woman striking a pose in a swimming pool on Ibiza; Lisa in a shocking pink dress; Lisa with her arms round her girlfriends at party after party. Lisa with her long, blonde hair, her bright eyes and her big smile.

"She was about to come into a big compensation payment after she had an accident on an escalator," says Pat. "She wanted to open a water sports business, or buy property."

Lisa at one stage wanted to be an air hostess. She'd done secretarial courses and was a receptionist for a while.

Since last September, she had been working part-time in a little sandwich shop in Bangor. The shop's owner, John McLaghlan, says she was popular.

"She was a blonde, happy girl," he says. "She was friendly and bubbly, very loyal to her friends. She was young for her age. She was quite prepared to burn the candle at both ends and maybe in the middle, too, but she never came in here with her head hurting so much she couldn't work. She was intelligent. She could have done well for herself." In early January, she stopped coming to work, he says. "She rang a few weeks later and said she was sorry and she wanted to come back. I said, come in and we'll talk. The customers missed her. But she never came back. People are really shocked about this. It is like a limbo situation."

The sign says "Ballyhalbert Holiday Park - it's a whole new way of life". Across the rocky beach and the choppy North Sea, the hills of Scotland can be seen. The caravans are laid out on a bleak disused wartime airfield.

There are plastic swans, leprechauns and potted palms around some. There's a diner, advertising Ulster fries and chip butties, but it's closed. A sign in the window of the reception area notifies passers-by of Sunday School in the recreation hall.

A man comes out of a caravan and says that no, he won't talk about Lisa Dorrian, and nor will anyone else. "There'll be no comment," he says, and closes the door.

A middle-aged woman sits in her caravan listening to country music while her parrot scratches around in its cage. "You'd think they'd have some word by now about that poor wee girl," she says. "It did scare me. I come here on my own and it has never bothered me before this. I like it. It's quiet. I used to go to Millisle, but that was rough."

Millisle, a few miles up the Ards Peninsula, is known to the snootier residents of north Down as "Shankill-sur-mer". Ballyhalbert is a tiny village. A string of low houses along the seafront leads to Burr Point, "the most easterly point in Northern Ireland". If there are any of the PSNI posters of Lisa around, they aren't obvious.

There are plenty of election posters though, mostly for the DUP. There's a gospel hall with "Christ died for our sins" painted on the gable wall, and a shop with a poster in the window urging people to join the Territorial Army and "get your hands on a piece of the action". The red, white and blue paint on the kerbs is fading. There is hardly anyone about.

"It was the talk of the village, obviously," says a woman, shuddering. "Everyone is appalled. No one heard or saw a thing." On the walls of houses at the small Moatlands estate, graffiti appeared within days of Lisa's disappearance: "PSNI - Ask the LVF where Lisa is." When Joanne heard from Lisa's housemate that she hadn't come home after the weekend, she started phoning people Lisa was meant to be with.

"I got the feeling from them that something was seriously wrong," she says. She went to the dilapidated caravan and found some of her sister's belongings - her hair straightener, clothes, makeup. By the Thursday morning, the police had sniffer dogs out. They also launched air, sea and underwater searches. Within days, they told the family this had become a murder inquiry.

"It seems they got intelligence," says Pat.

"We are following a number of definite lines of inquiry," says Det Chief Insp Mark Dornan. "I appeal to anyone who knows anything at all to come forward. No family should have to go through what this family is going through."

PUP leader David Ervine also urged people to make statements. "I don't believe any paramilitary group would defend any of its members being involved in the likes of this - even the LVF," he says. The MP for North Down, Lady Sylvia Hermon, says the family is in agony. "It is getting increasingly harrowing for them as time passes," she says.

The family told eight-year-old Ceara that her big sister got lost in the woods in the dark and died of the cold.

"She got all the toys Lisa had bought her and she lay down on top of them and cried her wee heart out," says Joanne.

Her father, John, a driving instructor, cannot sit still.

"She can't just have disappeared off the face of the earth," he cries out. "Have these people no conscience?"

"It's very hard," says Joanne slowly, "to know we'll never see Lisa again."