LONDON — As work crews battle rats and crumbling walls to reach the bombed-out train and remaining corpses at King's Cross Underground station, just above them beam the images of the men and women who are nowhere to be found.
Their faces are plastered on walls, fences, bus stops and Web sites: loving looks and sultry glances, ear-to-ear grins and naughty smirks. They represent the missing at the best of times, the only times when people bother to take photographs: Ojara Ikeagwu dons a graduation cap; Phil Beer wears a tuxedo; John Steadman unwraps presents; Christian Small beams at the camera; and Karolina Gluck, with her spiky blond hair, grins mischievously.
The heartache is revealed only below the image, where friends and families have scribbled their urgent pleas for help. "Karolina is still missing," says one, eerily reminiscent of the posters of the missing that blanketed New York City in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Two days after London was rocked by four explosions and at least 49 dead, some 20 to 50 people remain unaccounted for by hospitals, coroners, friends and relatives.
It is feared that some of them may have died on the King's Cross Underground, which took the hardest hit, or the double-decker bus that blew up nearby. Crews are still trying to reach the wreckage of the train carriage on the King's Cross line, but the police have said there are many bodies trapped in the rubble below. They can see them, but they cannot get to them.
Reflecting the diversity of London, many of the missing traveled long and far to arrive here. They are Polish and Turkish and American. They come from Mauritius, Germany and Australia. A few are Muslim, and they are almost all young. Gluck, for example, is a 29-year-old Polish immigrant.
"I've cried a lot," said Richard Deer, who is Gluck's boyfriend. "It's so up and down. But she would stand out. Her hair would stand out. She was honestly very special. I keep calling the police. I called them three times, and they said they had nothing new. I told them I would continue to call until I was blue in the face."
The family and friends of the missing are pressing the search, even as hope begins to ebb, if only slightly. They have scoured hospitals, handed out pictures to passers-by, contacted reporters and called the police. They double-back and double-check. Now, there is little to do but wait, and in some cases, talk.
Karolina Gluck left her North London apartment Thursday morning, visions of Paris swirling around her head.
After eight months together, she and her boyfriend were planning a cozy weekend trip to Paris. "A romantic holiday," Deer called it, just him and "Sunshine," as he calls Gluck.
Gluck arrived in London from Chorzow, in the south of Poland, almost four years ago. She was determined to master English and get a good job, Deer said. She accomplished both, starting as a receptionist at a student residence and working her way up deputy head of receptionists.
"See you later," Gluck called out to him. Then, he recalled, she walked away, dressed head-to-toe in black, her blond, spiky hair bobbing up and down as she headed for the Finsbury Park subway stop. Her stop was Russell Square, just near the spot where bombs blew up a subway train and a bus.
He tried to call her later that morning at work, at Goodenough College, where she works, but got bounced to her voice mail. He tried her cell phone, but got bounced to voice mail again. He resorted to e-mail, but never heard back.
"She was like a star," said Magda Gluck, Gluck's twin sister, slipping into the past tense.
Michael Matsushita, a 37-year-old from New York, is also among the missing. He had only just arrived in London, The New York Post reported. A former international travel guide, Matsushita had spent a career taking tourists to countries like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. He moved to be with his girlfriend, whom he planned to marry, a friend told The Post. He had just found his first job here, at a technology firm. It was his third day at work.
John Hyman, whose 32-year-old daughter, Miriam, is missing, knows a few things for certain: She was uninjured when she left the Underground. She was not on the bus because the bus exploded about the time he was on the phone with her. Soon after, she called her workplace and was told not to bother to come in. That was at 10 a.m., after the attacks, he said.
"I don't see how she could have got into the bus that exploded," he said. "And the route makes no sense, whether she's going to work or home." Her cell phone goes unanswered. Hyman's friends have papered the town with her image and raced to hospitals.
"I haven't got a plausible explanation," her father said. "She is the kind of person that if she was not going to get home in the evening, she would have told us and phoned home."
Hyman, a freelance photographer, moved back in with her parents a few years ago, daunted by London's sky-high property prices. Her parents never even saw her that morning. "She left the house before we got out of bed," her father said.
Monika Suchocka, 23, called her friend Tracy Purdon on Thursday morning to tell her about the mess at King's Cross: trains diverted, signal failures, lines closed down. She would take the bus to work instead, she said. Now Suchocka is one of the missing.
She arrived in London from Poland only two months ago. Like so many others in this expensive city, she shared an apartment, in her case, with two other Poles. She found a job right away in administration at a work-placement program called London First. She even joined a choir here and, when she could, she played the piano. "This was her first time in London, and she was really enjoying the excitement of it all," Purdon said.
Her parents are at a loss. They are in Poland and speak no English. But in grief, their reaction is universal. "They are devastated," Purdon said. Rachelle Chung For Yuen came to London from Mauritius five years ago to study and work. Falling in love with a man also from Mauritius was an unexpected bonus. The two were married last year on their native island, which also seemed the perfect place to honeymoon.
In her time off, Yuen played backgammon. She loved the movies but had no qualms about spending a quiet evening at home.
She left her North London apartment for work at 7:30 a.m., heading for the subway, the Piccadilly Line, as she always did. Then she vanished.