Little girls who go missing for 24 days very rarely turn up safe and well.

The reaction on the streets of Dewsbury yesterday to the news that Shannon Matthews had been found not only alive but, at first glance, unharmed, was of disbelief.

Last night the joy of her close family and friends was already tinged with an anger that the man suspected of being responsible for the nine-year-old’s abduction was one of their own.

It was no dark and mysterious stranger who descended on this troubled West Yorkshire mill town to sweep a child away to some distant part of the country.

Paul Drake, also known as Michael Donovan, the man who was under arrest last night on suspicion of abduction, lived only half a mile away from the Dewsbury Moor council estate that is Shannon’s home.

He is also the uncle of the little girl’s stepfather, Craig Meehan, 22.

That the answer to her disappearance lay so close to Shannon’s family will perpetuate, in some minds, an unfortunate image of the inhabitants of Dewsbury.

Perceptions of a feral white underclass will have been boosted yesterday afternoon by television pictures outside Shannon’s home, in which youths strutted the street, swigging from bottles of wine as they celebrated the missing girl’s return.

Dewsbury has its problems. Its large Asian community and majority white population’s fractured relationship with them was illustrated in the last general election, when the town recorded the highest number of votes for the British National Party of any constituency.

Shannon’s estate, where she lived with her mother, Karen, 32, her stepfather and three of her mother’s seven children, is predominantly white.

By contrast, the early 1960s terrace homes half a mile away in Lidgate Gardens, where Shannon was found yesterday, have a large South Asian population. In contrast to the drunken elation in Dewsbury, at Lidgate Gardens the mood was quiet. There was a sense of disbelief that the child should have spent 24 days hidden there.

For West Yorkshire Police, Shannon’s disappearance turned into the force’s biggest investigation since the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s. They have thrown huge resources into the inquiry since Day 1, when the child went missing at 3.15pm after walking out of her primary school.

Shannon had just returned to Westmoor Junior School with classmates after a swimming lesson and alarm bells started to ring very swiftly when she failed to arrive home.

From the start, the police faced the stiff challenge of presenting Shannon’s family and friends in a sympathetic light.

Tales soon emerged of the girl’s alleged unhappiness at home. There were suggestions that she had been wrongly blamed for stealing money from her mother’s purse, and that she had talked about running away to live with her natural father in the nearby town of Huddersfield.

Family fractures were also not slow to reveal themselves, with some of Mrs Matthews’s relatives eager to suggest that Mr Meehan had proved to be somewhat less than a gentle and loving father to his stepchildren.

It was also difficult for police to keep the image at the forefront of public view, as media events during which distraught relatives appealed for help — generally designed to raise publicity in a child abduction case — were not possible.

Despite considerable effort, it would appear that officers were unable to find anyone who was up to the task.

While most of the houses on Shannon's road carried a poster appealing for help to find the missing child in their front windows, attention was easily distracted by the rubbish-strewn gardens, the smashed windows, the discarded broken toys.

It was perhaps the perception of a dysfunctional family in an impoverished town that meant Shannon’s plight did not seem to grip the nation in the same way as have some earlier cases of missing children.

In 2000, when eight-year-old Sarah Payne was abducted near her grandparents’ home in West Sussex, her parents’ plight gripped the nation. It took 16 days before her naked body was found and for each of those days the story dominated the headlines. It was a similar story two years later when Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, vanished in the Cambridgeshire town of Soham.

On August 16, when they had been missing for 12 days, the girls’ names featured in more than 100 newspaper stories around the world. It was on the 13th day that Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr were arrested.

Yet within a week of her going missing, the hunt for Shannon was deemed less newsworthy than the most minor development in the search for Madeleine McCann, who disappeared more than nine months ago.

The police inquiry into Shannon’s disappearance was led by Detective Superintendent Andy Brennan, whose track record includes the capture in 2005 of the gunmen who murdered PC Sharon Beshenivsky.

He was able to call on national expertise in the fields of child psychology, behavioural and geographical profiling. Every investigative, scientific and technological tool available to a modern police force was utilised.

But it took a routine visit from detectives to Mr Drake’s first-floor flat — part of a search of more than 2000 homes in the area, their inhabitants all potentially linked to Shannon — for yesterday’s breakthrough to happen.

The 24-day search was over.

Shannon, to general amazement, had been found alive. She was under emergency police protection last night and had not yet been reunited with her parents.

Meanwhile a media that did not seem to care much when she was missing, will briefly celebrate a miracle.

Lost and found

Natascha Kampusch
Lived for 8 years in underground cell after being abducted in Vienna in 1998, aged 10. Her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, killed himself after she escaped

Sabine Dardenne
Abducted at the age of 12 in Belgium by the serial killer Marc Dutroux in 1996. She suffered abuse until her rescue 80 days later

Natasha Ryan
Ran away aged 14 from home in Rockhampton, Australia, in 1998. Leonard John Fraser was charged with her murder. During his trial in April 2003 she re-emerged — she had been living with a boyfriend

Danielle Cramer
Disappeared aged 15 in June 2006 in Connecticut. She was found a year later locked in a room in a family’s nearby home

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