A key witness in the hunt for the missing schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman yesterday told how he contacted police three times to report a sighting now being treated as a major line of inquiry before detectives finally interviewed him.
Mr Ian Webster, the taxi-driver who spotted a motorist struggling with two children as he drove just south of Soham at the time the girls vanished, gave the police the information last Wednesday, three days after the 10-year-olds went missing, and then badgered them about it on Friday and Saturday.
But it wasn't until Sunday August 11th - more than four days after the information was fed to Cambridgeshire police and a week after the girls vanished - that detectives arrived to question him.
Yesterday Mr Webster (56), a Newmarket-based taxi-driver, spoke of being "gobsmacked" by the delay and said the girls' parents deserved an explanation. "I feel incredulous that they did not react sooner. They may have had other priorities on their minds, but how could they lose four days when time is of the essence?" he said.
"I was cross that I didn't get a response after the second prompting and even more cross after the third. One would have thought that this was more of a priority than other pieces of paper. There was an unacceptable delay. I would think the parents of the children concerned - and the public - might want an explanation for it."
Mr Webster spotted the car just south of the girls' home town of Soham. He and his three passengers, whom he was ferrying from Ely, were so concerned by the driver's erratic behaviour that he had backed off - moving from 30 metres behind the car to 200.
However he could still see the driver of the metallic green saloon car, either a Peugeot 405 or Vauxhall Vectra, swerve so dramatically, at speeds of up to 55 m.p.h., that he hit both sides of the road. The driver's arms were flailing and the man - described as aged between 38 and 45 - repeatedly turned around to face the back seat, where Mr Webster saw a child with brown hair similar to Jessica's.
He presumed the driver was drunk and said that although he was concerned for the children, his main anxiety was not to be involved in an accident. "My immediate response when I saw the nature of the driving was to back off. It was wavering all across the road on both sides, hitting the banks on both sides of the road. It was suicidal."
Mr Webster heard of the girls' disappearance seven hours later on the radio, but he did not contact police since there was nothing to suggest they had vanished at the time he spotted the erratic driving.
He thought nothing of it later that day since detectives were claiming there had been a "credible" sighting of the girls at 6.45 a.m. that morning near Little Thetford, 13 miles from where he had seen the car, and suggested they had been the victims of an "adventure gone wrong", not an abduction.
But as soon as police began to discredit that information on the Tuesday, he went to the local station in Brecon, Powys, where he was told by a member of the public that it was likely to be unstaffed and he should return the next morning. When he did, at 10 a.m. on the Wednesday, he spent 45 minutes giving a "detailed outline" to a detective.
Mr Webster said he had then been called by the officer from the Welsh force on his mobile an hour later to be told the information had been passed on. When he had not heard from detectives by Friday, he complained to officers at the station in his home town of Newmarket, nine miles from Soham.
Cambridgeshire police - who had marked his information as high priority - decided detectives should visit him that day, but Mr Webster, hearing nothing, contacted police a third time on the Saturday night, and did not see detectives until 1 p.m. on Sunday. - (Guardian service)