The search for Shannon

The people of Dewsbury Moor gathered at the Community Centre at 6.30pm. They had flashlights, sticks, food, warm clothing, posters, flasks - anything they could get their hands on.

They are searching for missing schoolgirl Shannon Matthews who dissappeared on Tuesday and hasn't been seen since. Her mother, Karen, says it's out of character and is desperate for her to return.

There are police everywhere - 250 officers, 60 detectives, new recruits from the nearby training school, community support officers.

It's a search which has been described as massive and extensive - but no one is sure why she's gone missing and the police aren't being drawn on theories: "We're not excluding any possibilities," Detective Superintendant Andy Brennan of West Yorkshire Police told us in a briefing early on Thursday morning.

It means they can't be sure whether she's been abducted or whether she ran away from home of her own free will or any possible combination in the middle. But her friends told police that she said she was intending to run away.

But to where, to who, just isn't clear. On the night she dissappeared temperatures dropped to -9 degrees and the search is an urgent one; if she did run away, she chose the coldest night of the year to do it.

We've spent the day with officers as they work door to door, from back gardens to back lanes, lifting up the lids of wheeled bins, peering inside before moving on. It's been like this for two days now and still no sign of Shannon.

We've set up in the street where Shannon's family lives. It's a recently regenerated part of Dewsbury, set up on a hill with views of the small valley in which most of the town sits.

The residents are close knit here - they move from each others' homes, many fixed to the televisions and radios for news of Shannon.

But so far all we've been able to report is that she's missing, she might have been seen in various locations - the last apparent sighting was at 9.15am on Wednesday morning just a few streets from her school and home - at the same time that the police search was well underway.

At the moment there is little more than than. On the face of it, she has simply vanished. We also know that the police have spoken to all known sex offenders in the area, that they're trying to trace Shannon's mobile phone, and that her relatives have been reinterviewed today - in case the police may have missed anything which could be of use.

I've just come from a public meeting in the Community Centre. The police are treading a fine line between encouraging the residents to do what they can to help in the search, whilst at the same time urging them not to put themselves in danger as they trawl wasteland, building sites and the like.

Some nodded as if to take heed, others didn't: "We can't just sit here and do nothing," a man shouted from the back of the meeting. It's a view many agreed with.

There are posters everywhere now. On lamposts, on car windscreens and in shop windows: "Have you seen Shannon?" is the headline on it, with her picture and police contact details below. But noone has, and the search for Shannon continues.

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