PHYSICALLY, Marilyn Rynn was slight just 5 feet 5 inches and very slim but spiritually, by any account, she was a well rounded human being.

She combined gentleness and strength, a loving, loyal nature with spirited independence, fearlessness with sensitivity, conscientiousness with sterling support for the good times. If there was a dark side to her, it has remained one of Dublin's best kept secrets.

As her 76 year old mother, Christine, reminisced about the precious daughter she had just laid to rest in Palmerston Cemetery 18 days after her disappearance, there was one significant consolation "Marilyn had a happy life. She couldn't have asked for better."

In the same dignified way in which she and the Rynn family conducted themselves at the funeral ceremonies, she conveys the image of an enduring mother daughter closeness that was never invasive.

She recalls the time when she and Marilyn were away separately on a weekend and Marilyn drove up from Ennis just to say hello to her mother in Lisdoonvarna how they went for meals together with a grandchild or two if Christine was in town after Marilyn's working day how Marilyn chose to go to Mass in St Matthew's in Ballyfermot because her mother sang in the choir.

She still remembers the name of the personnel officer to whom Marilyn replied more than 20 years ago, turning down a career with the Bank of Ireland in favour of the Civil Service.

And she, like everyone else, draws a vivid picture of a bright and easy companion, one who liked to mingle and chat "Marilyn had no temper. If you said black was white, she'd agree with you rather than get involved in an argument."

It may have been this quality that made her such an appealing aunt as well. Her sense of family was evident in where she chose to live for the past 10 years literally around the corner from her brother Stephen and his wife, Catherine, in Blanchardstown's Brookhaven estate.

"Catherine and Marilyn were great pals", says Stephen. They kept an eye out for a house nearby and that was where Marilyn settled. Their proximity lent an additional dimension to the lives of everyone involved as Marilyn's house became a second home for Stephen's three children.

"Five nights out of seven", says Stephen, "David, my 17 year old would nip around the corner to her for a 10 minute chat and a cup of tea. Karen, too." Even Claire, the 11 year old would routinely take the key and go round to Marilyn's.

In the departments within the Civil Service where she worked for more than 20 years, she left nothing but good memories of a dedicated, witty and light hearted colleague. "She was a great friend and colleague inside and outside of work", said friends at the Central Statistics Office.

Richard Evers, her immediate boss for the past 18 months at the National Roads Authority in Ballsbridge, recalls a model worker efficient, reliable, dedicated who was prepared to work early or late when required, who was never known to have a sick day and who was capable not only of handling the awesome complexities of the European Reconstruction Development Funds, but even of seeing the lighter side of it.

WHEN she rechristened the Cohesion Funds the Confusion Funds, it stuck. Dev's dream of dancing at the crossroads, she reckoned, should now be known as dancing at the grade separated interchange, in deference to the new motorway jargon.

And to quell the wrath of the toll threatened motorist, she mirthfully suggested Tobin Tokens (after the NRA's chief executive) for toll payers, which would be exchangeable for gifts.

Marilyn knocked a lot of fun out of life. Amid aerobics and keep fit classes (often on consecutive nights in Corduff's Resource Centre), pottery and gardening, helping Catherine with the local Girl Guides and quiet times immersed in a Catherine Cookson novel or a newspaper, there were long weekends with girlfriends at jazz festivals and fleadhs, annual holidays in different countries, the (recent) joys of following the Dubs, line dancing and a pint or two of Heineken after work in the pubs around Leeson and Baggot Streets.

"She certainly never had a problem with alcohol", says a colleague, "but she could drink pints with the best of them. She was just a great character." There had been boyfriends but, like her younger sister, Rosaleen, she wasn't married.

"She had relationships with fellows", says her mother, "and chucked most of them. She could still have met Mr Right she looked younger than her years."

As a 41 year old civil servant with few commitments earning about £20,000 at the top end of, the executive officer salary scale, she was very comfortable. Her mortgage on the meticulously maintained house at Brookhaven freshly painted with new double glazing, patio door, and well tended front and back gardens was paid up, and she did not run a car.

Clearly she was not frivolous about money, but neither did she engage in false economies, as wash initially suggested by her decision to get a taxi from the office party in Raheny into the city centre and the NiteLink bus home to Blanchardstown on the night of her murder. Nor was there even a temporary cash shortage the handbag found close to her body still contained £200 in cash.

The most puzzling question for many is why she chose to go into the city at all in the early hours rather than ask the taxi driver to take her directly home to Blanchardstown.

The driver who might be able to cast some light on this has yet to come forward, and colleagues are left to speculate that he or she might have compromised himself in some way, perhaps by doing what some taxi drivers are wont to do at that hour of the night at that time of year, such as insisting that different fares share a taxi, with the city centre as the destination on offer.

Other sources suggest, however, that Marilyn had arranged to meet some friends from the office party in Eddie Rockets. But if such an arrangement was made, this poses the question of why she would have, left the party, alone, to get a taxi.

Again, a colleague speculates that the people she had arranged to meet were junior to her in rank and she might have preferred to let them travel together.

One way or another, it wouldn't have cost the feisty, fit and independent Marilyn Rynn a thought to leave a party and travel home alone, whatever the hour. As a single woman, well accustomed to looking out for herself, she had made the same trip at all hours of the day and night hundreds of times, according to her brother.

"She felt no fear. Whether it was 10 a.m. or two in the morning, she would always take the NiteLink home, even that late, even if there was a taxi available. She'd think like myself I suppose why should she pay for a taxi when there was a bus?"

Neither is Stephen at all surprised that she opted for the badly lit "short cut" through the Tolka Valley. "To have taken any other route home would have put an extra half hour on the walk for her. They call it a lane and say it's a short cut but I would suggest it's the only route to Blanchardstown Village.

"It's a hard surface road, really, a main artery for Edgewood Lawn, Corduff and Brookhaven. I would certainly like to see better lighting but it would be very awkward if that lane way was closed down. You have children using it coming home from school, people going to the shops ...

But as he speaks, his mother shudders at the memory of a time when she took the same lane way at dusk and was so unnerved at one point that she asked a strange couple if she could walk alongside them.

In any case, the worst the area had seen was petty crimes such as purse snatching, while the worst that Marilyn had experienced in her 40 years was a surreptitiously stolen purse one day in town.

When she alighted from the bus probably around 3.30 on the morning of Friday, December 22nd, she had nearly a mile to cover. No one but the killer knows what happened next. Did he see her alone on the bus and follow her home? Was he on the laneway? So far only a handful of people of the 60 or so who were on the bus that night have come forward.

SOME friends say that because of her friendly nature, she would probably have chatted to anyone on the bus. Her boss, Richard Evers, says, however, that while she was friendly she was not stupid "I don't think she'd have started talking to someone at three in the morning."

The family began to feel small stabs of concern in the run up to Christmas. Her mother rang the house a few times on Friday and Saturday to check that the usual Christmas routine was in order "We used to go to nine o'clock Mass together in St Matthew's here in Ballyfermot on Christmas Eve. The normal thing was that she would contact me ...

By the Monday Christmas Day they became seriously concerned. Definite arrangements for the day had been made a week before, and although they would usually have been to Mass the night before, she always came back to St Matthew's for 11.30 a.m. Mass to hear her mother sing in the choir.

"We knew if she'd been held up, she'd have rung. But I put her dinner in the oven between two plates to keep it warm." They assured each other that maybe she had bumped into friends and though it would have been wildly out of character headed impulsively for Cork or somewhere like that.

Many friends proved to be uncontactable because of the seasonal scattering, but by St Stephen's Day a terrible fear had begun to take shape. That afternoon, after as much checking as they could do alone, Stephen went to the Garda station to report Marilyn as a missing person.

It was almost two weeks before gardai finally found her body, among the brambles off the short cut, virtually within sight of Stephen's house. The Rynns say they have found nothing but helpfulness and prompt attention from the Garda, which included twice daily calls and many visits.

They have taken a charitable attitude towards the delay in searching the most obvious place, reasoning that detectives were led astray by reports of sightings and alleged phone calls, that the time of year meant many friends could not be contacted, that the days leading up to Christmas "all seeming to be rolled into one" made memories unreliable.

What it meant, however, was nearly two weeks of a stomach churning wait, during which Christine found herself hardly able to sleep, but with the coming of dawn, wanting to pull the covers back over her head for fear of what the new day would bring.

No one went to work. They sat beside telephones, waiting as hope died while encouraging Marilyn's nieces and nephew to enjoy a normal Christmas with their friends.

Stephen and Catherine attempted to develop their own leads by having 6,000 leaflets photocopied with Marilyn's photograph and distributed by friends and contacts throughout buses, shops, offices and hospitals.

And they found the media to be helpful, polite and unintrusive. If there is any consolation to be gleaned, says Christine, it is that Marilyn's remains are known to be at rest. Cold comfort it may seem, but she was able to kiss her daughter's coffin as it left the church on Tuesday and take solace in her faith and the rituals of a Catholic funeral.

Their thoughts turn constantly to the parents and relatives of the missing women Annie McCarrick and Josephine Dollard, still waiting, hopes waning and flickering, denied the certainty that would help them move into the next stage of grieving.