Within London, it is perfectly possible that a runaway could go missing from one borough, turn up in quite another, while holding down a job in a third.
Customs officers, policemen, coastguards and Receivers of Wreck were not generally welcome – the island had no police force – and the islanders let it be understood that unfortunate things could happen to the boats of unwanted visitors: "Police boats could go missing, develop an unexpected leak or spontaneously combust".
The mystery prompted calls to review aircraft tracking and a pledge from airlines to ensure no plane could go missing again.
The camp – home to around 1,300 unaccompanied minors – is expected to be closed later this month, with charities warning that hundreds could go missing, many taken by traffickers.
What many found hard to believe was that a plane could go missing with so little trace in an age of electronic communications.
As I write this, daytime TV chat shows normally given over to house decorating and the latest reality TV gossip are literally up in arms about how two computer disks containing the identity details of 25 million people in the UK – many of them children – could go missing in the postal system.
Two companies have come up with some creative new devices that use Bluetooth to keep track of things like pets, bikes, mobile devices or anything else that could go missing.
Caine was allowed to keep his script for Interstellar, but each page of every copy of the script bore his name, so it could be traced back were it to go missing.
"It just seems so suspicious that something so important could just go missing," Barry Dickens said.
Instead, however, as provisional figures highlighted by Labour today revealed, as many as a million extra voters could now go missing from the system.
Before bar codes were used, important pieces of evidence could occasionally go missing, "despite extensive search efforts by the N.Y.P.D.," according to the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to using DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.
