Staff see a counsellor every 2wks

heart-rending cases involved murdered teenager Alice Gross, 14.

The schoolgirl’ss mother Ros Hodgkisss told how she turnedd to the hotline in her er darkest hours before her daughter’s body was found.ound.

Alice vanished in August 2014 and her body wasas fo foundnd in a river near her West London home the following month. Prime suspect Arnis Zalkalns, 41, who had earlier murdered his wife in his native Latvia, hanged himself before police could arrest him.

Ros said: “My life is completely dominated by losing Alice and I don’t think I’ll ever get closure. Things have changed fundamentally. You wake up every day and think of curling up into a duvet yet you have to go on as much as you can.

“But Missing People were amazing when Alice was missing. They really helped us.

“In the middle of the night when we woke up, or when we were not able to get to sleep, we all used the phone line to talk to somebody who understood so something of what we w were going through.”

Every day Kate M McCann, like all the o other parents in her p position, hopes that so someone will call the Lon London-based hotline with vital in information. “At the start I didn’t want to m meet tn any f familiesmi of other missing children,” she said. “I wasn’t ready. You don’t want to think you’ll be without your child in a month, or a year, or ten years.

“But as the years go by and you’re still in that category, it becomes a comfort.

“Hope keeps us motivated. No one has the right to take away that hope. There are many examples of cases where children have been found after decades.

“You don’t want to be living with false hope but what is false hope? The hope that one day you will be united is what keeps you going.”

An offshoot of the hotline is the child rescue alert, now issued in cases such as those of Alice and Madeleine via the charity at the request of the police.

Members of the public can sign up to receive information on missing children in the immediate aftermath of their disappearance, when officers feel timing is critical to finding the child safe and well.

Heightened awareness increases the likelihood of police receiving vital intelligence which could help locate them.

Kate said: “The first three hours are very important. You may have seen something innocuous but if you’ve had an alert things could fall into place. It could make the difference in finding a child.

“In conversation I do suggest people sign up to the child rescue alert, as you could have that piece of the jigsaw the police need. Little bits of information may direct them to where they need to be.”