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On a rough, unlit path that runs alongside the River Dee, a bunch of tulips still fresh in their wrapping stand out among the mangled beer cans and strewn litter.
The simple bouquet is addressed to Eliza and Henrietta Huszti, 32-year-old sisters, originally from Hungary but living in Aberdeen for about a decade, who vanished from this spot in subzero temperatures in the early hours of 7 January.
The accompanying card reads: “Never met you both but will always remember. You look gentle souls,” and is signed by two women who identify themselves as twin sisters.
The expression of sisterly support is especially poignant – Eliza and Henrietta are part of a set of triplets. Their disappearance has sparked a hunt across the city and its surrounding areas, leaving local people baffled as to what may have happened to the siblings, said by their triplet sister, Edit, to be so close that Eliza and Henrietta did most things as a pair.
Edit is said to have spoken to them on a video call from Hungary on New Year’s Eve, and described them as appearing happy and cheerful. It has now been ten days since they were last seen on CCTV at 2.12am, walking from their city-centre flat down Market Street, past the container ships in the harbour and across Victoria Bridge.
Then police believe the sisters turned right along the path, which backs on to industrial units and garages, in the direction of Aberdeen boat club, where they vanished. The area has repeatedly been searched by specialist teams including marine divers and police dogs.
On Friday, police released new CCTV footage that showed the sisters making an earlier visit to the footpath, at about 2.50pm on 6 January. Officers are appealing for anyone who saw them to come forward.
George Meldrum walks the same path regularly with his dog Kasima, and describes it as “horribly” icy and snowy underfoot during a fierce spell of wintry conditions, which hit the north-east of the country around the turn of the year.
“I don’t understand it,” says Meldrum. “There’s no reason to be walking this path at that time of the night.” The Huszti family have described the sisters as “cautious”, and are perplexed by their uncharacteristic late-night excursion.
“It doesn’t lead to anywhere that would be open,” Meldrum says, indicating to the lifeless boat house buildings. “Then the path just comes to a stop at the next bridge.”
The area is known to be a CCTV blind spot, he adds nodding to the deprived neighbourhood of Torry, next to the riverbank.
Meldrum recalls occasional youthful dips in the river himself, but those happened in summertime. “If you were to fall in now it would be freezing and a real shock – you’re not far from the North Sea and it’s been a cold winter.,” he says.
While police confirmed their main theory is that the women entered the water, and have found no evidence of criminality, there is a concerned curiosity among local residents about the circumstances of the sisters’ disappearance, as well as acknowledgement of the family’s call for people to refrain from “spreading fake news”.
“It’s the fact that they have completely disappeared that doesn’t make sense,” says Ronald Henderson, chatting to a friend outside the Bon Accord shopping centre at the top of Market Street, where one of the sisters is believed to have worked. “It’s so random.”
Henderson points out that Aberdeen is bounded by two rivers – the Don to the north and the Dee to the south – and suggests that city residents are more mindful of water safety. “There are a lot of footpaths that people walk along both rivers, some are better maintained than others, depending on the season and the weather,” he adds.
Jozsef Huszti, the sisters’ older brother, speaking to the BBC from his home in Budapest this week, said the pair were working hard to save up enough to buy a flat of their own.
In the meantime, the sisters were renting a flat in a neatly maintained granite block accessed through a secluded courtyard, a little further north from the shopping precinct.
Police revealed that the alarm had been raised by their landlady, after she received a text message from Henrietta’s mobile phone at 2.12am on 7 January, from the area of Victoria Bridge, indicating the sisters would not be returning to the flat. The phone was then disconnected from the network and has not been active since.
Supt Davie Howieson, who is leading the search, had previously said that nothing was found in their flat to indicate the women intended to harm themselves.
At the Little Hungary grocery shop, off Market Street, Claudia Simon explains that, while there was a significant Hungarian population in Aberdeen before Brexit, it has since diminished. There are two popular Hungarian-langauge Facebook pages for those living in the city, and people have been posting news updates there as well as good wishes for the Huszti family.
The few fellow Hungarians who had encountered the sisters described them as “quiet”, Simon says. “They [the sister] kept their distance.”
Daniella Vancsa, a sales assistant at the Authentic Romanian shop, a few minutes walk from the sisters’ flat, recalls they occasionally came in to buy her stock of Hungarian cooking ingredients, including sausages and goulash paste. “They weren’t regular customers, but I recognised the photograph. The last time I saw them was before Christmas,” she says.
“There are a lot of rumours but really this story is a sad one,” Vancsa adds, shaking her head.
