Are we closer to discovering Claudia's fate?

IT'S six years ago this week that Peter Lawrence got a call from his daughter Claudia's best friend Suzy. 

Not only had Claudia, who worked as a chef at the University of York, stood her up at the pub the night before but she wasn't responding to text messages. 

Given that the two girls lived in each other's pockets Peter immediately suspected something was wrong.

"I contacted her place of work at the university who told me that she'd not been into work on the Friday," he recalls in an interview with the Daily Express. "Nor had she been at work on the Thursday - but nobody had alerted anybody about that. As she'd not been there for two days and I know that she was very conscientious I was worried."

Peter, 69, a commercial property lawyer, left his home in the village of Slingsby, got into his car and drove the 20 miles to York.

Without bothering to ring the doorbell of 35-year-old Claudia's two-bedroom cottage in the Heworth area of the city he let himself in with a spare key because "I was fairly certain that if she was there she'd be lying on the floor".

In fact not only was there no body but no sign of any disturbance whatsoever. Peter says: "The house was exactly as she would have left it right down to her slippers by the front door where she would have put her boots on to walk to work."

He immediately called the police to report her missing - opening one of the most lengthy and baffling missing-person cases in recent history.

Hundreds of police officers have interviewed thousands of people. There have been poster campaigns, television appeals, Crimewatch reconstructions, even the offer of a £10,000 Crimestoppers reward.

But despite a number of supposed "sightings" the original £750,000 investigation under North Yorkshire Police's Det Supt Ray Galloway yielded no arrests, with the exception of a hoaxer jailed for 18 months in 2011 for wasting police time.

This week, however, came a development that offered new hope for Peter, Claudia's mother Joan, 71 (the couple divorced in 1999) and her older sister Ali, 44.

The Yorkshire force's newly formed Major Crime Unit that took over the inquiry in 2013 screened some previously unseen CCTV footage which shows two people walking near Claudia's home at what the police say is a "potentially significant" time.

Senior investigating officer Det Supt Dai Malyn says the person seen walking down Heworth Place, which leads to the back of Claudia's house, is of particular interest to the investigation.

He says: "The person goes out of camera shot but reappears just over a minute later. They appear to be carrying a bag over their shoulder. As the person heads back towards Heworth Road they suddenly stop when another unknown person walks past."

The release of the new video evidence coincided with the press conference to mark the sixth anniversary of Claudia's disappearance on Wednesday.

"In the months since we started our review we have made very significant progress," says Malyn.

"We have arrested and interviewed two men about Claudia's disappearance. One remains on bail while our inquiries in relation to him continue. In the coming weeks and months we may make additional arrests as we continue to develop our lines of inquiry.

"In the light of information that has only recently come to the fore we are actively pursuing what are rightly described as new leads. Last month we focused our attention on the alleyway leading to the back of Claudia's house. This was based on specific information that this review discovered causing me and the team to believe that the alleyway had potential significance in explaining what happened to her."

The first phase of the police investigation has been criticised in the past by Claudia's mother for focusing on her supposedly "mysterious and complex" love life, which is believed to have included affairs with a number of married men. But today Peter is reluctant to apportion blame.

"Physically the initial investigation was very thorough. There were hundreds of officers from various forces combing the place," he says. "But after that we were left with no crime scene and no absolute knowledge of what happened.

"We now discover that there were things that they missed but, as I've always said, if somebody reviews one of my files they will find something that I didn't spot. Perhaps they did make mistakes but there was an awful lot of information coming in all at once and they had to decide what was important.

"The fact that the Chief Constable assured me that this new Major Crime Unit would have very experienced major crime officers and that they would do whatever they could to resolve it was obviously a confi-dence boost.

"I can't say, 'Oh I think this lot are going to solve it', but they are being very active."

The passage of time has clearly done nothing to blunt the pain of Claudia's disappearance for Peter. The rawness of his grief and sense of loss come through in his voice, which often seems to quaver, and he seems on the edge of tears.

Peter says: "It's the not knowing that has been the worst thing for six years. If you know someone has died or been killed it's bad enough for heaven's sake but at least you know. Here we don't know what happened.

"If I go out for walks I look around and say, 'The sky's blue - are you seeing this, Claudia?' I've done that regularly. It's very difficult to imagine where she might be but we've seen cases where people have been taken and it's been 10 years before anything's happened.

"I hope it's not that long in our case but people have been 'recovered' as it were. The police are fairly convinced she was murdered but I always used to say to Ray Galloway, 'You and I are working along parallel lines. We're both trying to find her but you believe she's dead and I hope she's alive'."

His tireless efforts to find his daughter and help other families in a similar situation to his own continued yesterday with an event called Everything Stops For Tea.

A national network of fundraising tea parties - including one for 100 people in York - it was organised by the Missing People charity in a bid to raise £10,000 to keep open its 116 000 helpline.

Meanwhile Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, continues to be very supportive. A candle burns for Claudia in Dr Sentamu's private chapel, as it has done ever since she went missing. Tomorrow a member of the congregation will say a prayer for Claudia as someone has done every single day since her disappearance.

That adds up to 2,192 prayers in all. If ever a case deserves divine intervention it is this one.