Two barking labradors come bounding up the driveway as a car approaches the home of Michael and Bernadette Jacob near Newbridge in Co Kildare.
Inside the entrance gate is the spot where someone fitting the description of their eldest daughter was last seen, before she stepped out of their lives and into the land of cliches and column inches.
All the couple know for sure is that their daughter now makes headlines because she vanished off the face of the earth, went missing without trace, disappeared into thin air some time around 3 p.m. on a summer day last year. No one knows whether anything occurred to set the dogs barking back then.
Most of us recognise the name Deirdre Jacob and her picture with her shiny dark-haired bob, her greeny-grey eyes, her warm smile. We know she was in Newbridge posting letters and a bank draft on July 28th, the day she went missing. She was carrying a black bag with a yellow CAT logo as she walked the mile home.
She was spotted five times on her way down the Newbridge/Roseberry road, but police believe more people who saw her have yet to come forward.
In recent weeks a middle-aged man has been arrested for wasting police time, for claiming he gave Deirdre a lift to Co Monaghan on the day she went missing.
This morning the investigation moves away from the Northern counties - the Jacobs have travelled across the Border every weekend since September searching for Deirdre - and back closer to Newbridge. Inside the cosy Jacob family bungalow in Roseberry, photographs show Deirdre at school, with her granny and Mum and Dad and sister Ciara.
As her parents talk, a picture of a bubbly, methodical, conscientious young woman emerges. "Neither of us are that organised, but Deirdre was," says Bernadette. "She would plan everything, making lists and ticking things off."
"She loved the chat and the crack," says Michael.
Forensic experts have sifted through most of Deirdre's possessions in the last six months, items such as her text books, her neatly laid-out college files and more personal belongings like the bundles of letters she kept carefully tied up with ribbon or string. She was home from Strawberry Hill College in Surrey for the summer holidays. She had wanted to work with children ever since she became a volunteer with a local children's choir group.
As it turned out, Deirdre was to spend much of the first college year at home, 10 days in October, a few weeks at Christmas, three weeks at Easter when she did her teacher practice at a local primary school. There is a photograph of her in the classroom with her young charges. On one wall simple phrases are printed on cards. Two words, displayed innocuously on a board to the right of where Deirdre stands seem poignant now. Help. Me.
Deirdre had a close-knit group of around five friends at the college that included boyfriend Charlie, a fellow student. She went to a wedding in England with him in the spring and another photograph shows them sitting happily together.
She is wearing a gold cardigan that Bernadette remembers buying with her daughter: "We walked all around Dublin to find that outfit," she says. "She was always so well groomed," adds Michael.
When Deirdre returned home last year for the summer holidays, the refurbishment of the family home and Kildare's progress in the football tournament provided the main distractions. The weekend before she went missing she had gone to visit friends in Cavan, and was due to start work the following Friday as a temporary receptionist with the Eastern Health Board at the office where her mother works. She came home on the Sunday evening chatting about the visit.
"She said she was tired and went to bed early but she lay on the bed for a while writing letters to her friends," says Bernadette. Mother and daughter had a chat. Bernadette had planned to pick up a sterling bank draft to cover Deirdre's accommodation fees for the next term at college. "I asked her would she mind picking it up," says Bernadette.
Deirdre wasn't home when Bernadette arrived back from work at around 6.45 p.m. on Monday, July 28th. "The first alarm bell rang in my head then," she says. "Deirdre would always call and say if she was spending time with friends."
The search got under way directly, locals rallying round to help find one of their own. The Jacobs have only the highest of praise for the gardai and although the latest development has provided a setback they are still confident - because there is still no evidence to prove otherwise - that Deirdre is alive.
"We are convinced that there is someone who has an extra piece of information, someone who knows something. We are appealing so strongly to those people that if there is anyone who was on that road or in the surrounding area between 1 and 6 p.m. on the 28th of July to let us know. They might be able to recall a tiny, tiny fragment of information that helps us understand this mystery . . . No one vanishes without trace."
Except that they do and they have, as the names of the young women whose cases are being investigated as part of Operation Trace so starkly prove. So too do the faces of Michael and Bernadette Jacob, etched with an anguish that most of us never have to know. They haven't slept properly for six months: "We are always so anxious," says Bernadette. "There is such a pressure on us as a family all the time."
"What makes me angry," says Michael Jacob, "is our general attitude to crime and it is wrong that we find it easy to accept horrendous crimes and that they might only take up an inch in a newspaper column. "Not to give the guards every piece of information we have . . . " he says, with the urgency of a father who has spent every day of the past six months searching for his daughter, "is a crime against humanity."