Somebody loved this little girl once. And somebody knows who she is.

Someone loved her once.

UPDATE: South Australia police have been able to identify a jacket identical to the one found with the little girl whose remains were found by a road in South Australia. The identical jacket was for sale on an auction website and will now be used by police to find out who the manufacturer is and where it was sold. 

They loved her enough to make her a quilt. It’s the sort of gift you make and give from a place of peace – the result of planning and gathering, of deciding which piece fits with which and where, and then of hours of quiet stitching.

You give a child a home-made quilt as a gift of nurture – it says “I want to keep you warm, I want to wrap this around you when my arms cannot.”

You fill it with polyester because you know it will need to be washed, and often, you want it to survive, to be loved for a long time.

This quilt made it to the final resting place of a tiny girl we may never name. A little girl who no-one missed.

But someone loved her once.

Someone loved her enough to buy her the kind of clothes that little girls love. Sparkly ones, frilly ones, fluffy ones.

The kind of tutu dress that comes as a compromise – she wants fluro-pink, you want more tasteful black – the kind that little girls spin and dance in, that they cartwheel and climb in, that travels from extra-special Best to everyday playground wear in the hectic whirl of a few days.

Read more: SA Police release more images in hope of identifying body in suitcase.

Someone loved her enough to buy her a Dora The Explorer t-shirt, because little girls love Dora and grown-ups love that Dora feels like learning.

Someone loved her enough to make sure her slippers were pretty with butterflies, that her pyjamas would keep her cool in Summer, and that her sheepskin coat would last all Winter.

The clothes, the quilt, the extraordinarily ordinary things that clutter a family home, were found tipped out on the ground near to a suitcase that contained an unspeakable secret – a little girl.

Police say they can’t know for sure that they belong together – this little girl and the soiled, faded belongings. But they think they do. They think that these things might bring them some answers.

Answers to questions like, how can a little girl disappear without anyone noticing?

How does a life literally vanish, with no-one – not a parent, not a grandparent, not a teacher, or a doctor or and auntie, or a friend – questioning the space they’ve left behind?

Answers to questions like, why did motorists, flying past on this stretch of deserted highway, see a man, neatly dressed and clean-shaven, walking by the roadside, carrying a suitcase, just weeks ago, when this little girl has likely been lost for as many as seven years?

And answers to why were the contents of the case emptied out and rifled through, perhaps more than once, without anyone raising an alarm?

And answers to how – while we don’t know who this little girl is – we know who she is not. She is not Madeline McCann. And she is not one of the 32 children who have already been ruled out of the investigation.

She is not one of those children.

But someone loved her once. And somewhere, the person who made that quilt, and the person who packed those clothes, knows who she is. Somewhere, someone knows what happened to bring her to that desolate stretch of highway, what terrible thing occurs to turn a life of Dora and tutus and dancing slippers into a life that could be snuffed out so quietly nobody noticed it end.

Now, because a driver stopped, and looked, we know that this little girl is lost. We know that there’s a person out there who killed her, and a person who put her in a suitcase with her clothes, and a person who carried that case along a dusty road to tuck out of sight.

Now that we know that we can’t un-know it, we can’t forget her. We don’t know her name, but we can sketch her image. She was blonde, aged 2 or 3 or 4, just 95 centimetres tall, and we know she didn’t die by that highway.

Little children’s lives go so fast. They love hard, they use everything up, they laugh loudly and cry louder and run fast and eat in great greedy handfuls and hug intensely and fight with fury and they stretch the most out of minutes and hours and days.

And they wear tutus to the shops, and they sleep wrapped in quilts that their loved ones stitched for them.

And they deserve to be missed. They deserve to be mourned.

And they deserve our protection, even in death.

The desperately sad reality of this case is that it’s likely that the someone who loved this little girl once is also one of the people who know what happened to her.

And now they need to love her enough to speak the truth.

If you have any information that might help police solve this case, call Crimestoppers on 1800 333 000.

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