It could have been any mum, on any morning, walking the dog after dropping the children at school

It’s the mystery that’s obsessed the nation. Here BARBARA DAVIES explains why Nicola’s story has touched so many...

Willow off her lead and sometimes removed her harness so she could swim in the river. But when Willow was found last Friday, she was said to be ‘bone dry’.

Just a few feet in front of the bench, the bank begins to slope steeply towards the water. According to a member of the village angling club, the water here is 20ft deep in places. But Nicola’s friends say she was well aware of the dangers of the bank, which can become perilously slippery in wet weather.

In November 2020 in nearby Garstang, two retired police officers pulled a 60-year-old man from the river after he fell in and nearly drowned trying to save his dog.

A friend, who has walked along that route with Nicola many times, says: ‘I know that river well, have walked it many times. I know where I can stand and where I can’t. She knew the same thing.’

The stretch of the river where Nicola went missing — about 200 yards upstream from the weir in the non-tidal length of water — is generally tranquil, but during heavy rain, it can become a raging torrent. The village has been dogged by flooding in recent years, most recently in 2021.

The river was calm and slowflowing when Nicola went missing, and it was a cold but clear day. But by the end of this week, Lancashire Police were focusing their search on the river itself.

On Thursday, a police diver scoured the water, combing the riverbed using underwater cameras and drones. At the same time a team from Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service used a boat and a trained dog to search downriver in the tidal stretch of the Wyre.

Meanwhile, dozens of locals have been meeting at the village tennis club every day, and splitting up into pairs to search the length of the river.

Superintendent Sally Riley has said that ‘parts of the riverbank are treacherous’.

But if Nicola did somehow fall into the river, why hasn’t she been found? Her family have expressed incredulity that such a thing could have happened.

‘She’s done this route a thousand times,’ her 73-year-old father, Ernie Bulley, said at a press conference on Thursday. ‘She parks her car every day and walks the dog through the field. It’s just routine. We are baffled by it.’

The woman who found Nicola’s phone on the bench says that first of all she recognised Willow but ‘suddenly couldn’t think whose dog it was’. It is testament to the closeness of this community that her daughter-in-law recognised Nicola from a photograph on her phone’s lock screen and called the school who, in turn, contacted Nicola’s partner, Paul. He alerted the police at around 10.30am.

Earlier this week, he described how his daughters had ‘cried their eyes out’ when he told them ‘Mummy is lost’. He also spoke of the ‘perpetual hell’ the family are suffering while they wait for news.

‘We are living through this, but it doesn’t feel real,’ he said.

For now the case remains a missing persons’ inquiry, with officers admitting they are ‘ extremely concerned’ for Nicola’s safety.

It can only be hoped that the answers her family so desperately need come soon.

For until Nicola Bulley is found, until we have answers to this agonising riddle, the grief of her disappearance is felt by all of us.