You climbed up the hill from the motorway and turned left. Vicky Hamilton’s house lay ahead, on a corner in the middle of the council estate, with a garden on three sides. Sixteen years ago, as now, the Redding area of Falkirk was a sturdy, respectable place, a former mining village that was close enough to Edinburgh to have survived as a prosperous commuter destination.

It was late 1991, at least six months after Vicky’s disappearance, and her mother Janette Hamilton had agreed to talk about her daughter in the hope that a fresh appeal for information would help to find her.

I can remember knocking on the front door with the familiar knot of private dread in my stomach: that advance knowledge that I was about to take a long wooden spoon, as it were, and deliberately stir up someone’s grief until tasty snippets of emotion surfaced. Journalism: the eternal art of living with the fact that you are a heel.

Janette Hamilton was a large shell of a woman who had been emptied out by pain. Her complexion was dark with ill-health. She looked as if she spent most of her time sitting in front of the television, smoking cigarettes and trying to shut out reality. Which, I suspect, is what she did.

She struggled to articulate her feelings, not from lack of intelligence – she was a bright woman – but because there was so little left to say. You had the impression she had gone over it in her head so many times that she had worn out the facts. One day her happy, ordinary 15-year-old daughter had gone out for the day and never come home. Finish. It had been reduced to a hopelessly tiny event; there was a mundanity to it. The more she thought about it, the fewer answers there were. Nothing else had changed. And she still sat in her living room, a brooding presence, waiting for something that was never going to happen.

I remember being aware that, calm as she was on the surface, she was suffering dreadfully. She couldn’t cope. “It’s not knowing” she kept saying. “It’s not knowing.” She stopped at one point and looked at me, willing me to understand. “I’m her mum,” she said. And the reason I remember her words down the dim tunnel of 16 years is because I was then a new mother myself. And because, years later, I was to feel the same anguish when I heard Kate McCann on television cry out in anguish: “I’m Madeleine’s mummy.”

Janette Hamilton was 39 or 40 years old, but she looked 20 years older. She had been divorced from Vicky’s father and was bringing up 15-year-old Vicky and her six-year-old twin sisters alone.

She told me that since Vicky had vanished she did not leave the house very often – partly because she didn’t want to face people; but more likely, I guessed, in case Vicky turned up at the door and she wasn’t there for her. She said she felt guilty and she said she prayed a lot. She said she had difficulty talking about it. She didn’t think Vicky had run away, because she was too sensible for that, but believing that she had was better than believing someone had abducted her.

Mrs Hamilton had been tortured almost from the start by fresh leads and false hopes, for in the first few months after the disappearance there were all kinds of hoaxes and mistaken sightings. We must not forget that, at the time, Vicky Hamilton was indeed Scotland’s Madeleine McCann. It was a huge story and Janette Hamilton was at the heart of it, stricken with the belief that somehow, deep down, it was her fault. And so she sat, a big, kind, gentle, harmless woman, trapped in her own grief.

Shockingly, 18 months later, just before the second anniversary of Vicky’s disappearance, she died aged 41 of heart failure. Her elder daughter, Sharon, who took her twin sisters to live with her, believed her mother had genuinely died of a broken heart. Sitting and thinking about Vicky every day, she said, had killed her; and it was only with death that she would get any peace.

Is it possible to begin to imagine what it must feel like to lose a child into thin air, and never to see her again? And then wait 16 years for an answer? I doubt it. As journalists, we dance with the facts, the thrilling sensation of such stories, but we don’t appreciate what it really means. Nobody does who hasn’t actually been in that situation. The reality is that losing a child in abrupt, unexplained circumstances dismantles you as a person; and we only need to see Kate McCann’s face to know the truth of this.

The length of time that you are left not knowing, I suspect, is immaterial. Last Thursday, at Linlithgow Sheriff Court, Vicky Hamilton’s father, Michael, let loose the contained emotion of 16 years. He too suffers significant ill-health as a result of what he has been though. All the anger, confusion, guilt, frustration; those years of fruitless visits to the police station; the successive generations of polite young CID officers who had never heard of Vicky and asked him the same questions again and again; that sense, eventually, that he was being defined by his own sadness.

First, Mr Hamilton expressed it in a spine-tingling, dignified walk in front of the prison van carrying the man accused with Vicky’s murder into court. And then, after the hearing, his control broke and he attempted to force his way through the police cordon, his face distorted with bottled-up rage.

We are hopelessly callous, we the public – and I include journalists – who watch these slow-motion tragedies of lost children unfold as if for our amusement. We who judge the parents for the way they look and the amount of pain they can articulate. But grief is not a television sport; and there is no external measurement for the way in which it kills people, both mentally and physically. Poor Janette Hamilton just died a bit quicker than most, that was all.

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