TRAINED police forensic teams working on the Melanie Hall inquiry could finish their pain-staking search within days.

Fingertip searches of two earth mounds in desolate fields near Bath continued this week in a bid to find the 25 year-old who went missing almost seven years ago.

But scenes-of-crime officers could complete their investigation within days.

When Operation Raphael was launched two weeks ago, senior detectives said searches of fields close to Beaufort Farm in Inglesbatch could take weeks.

But as time moves on, it seems police are no closer to unveiling the final resting place of the former hospital worker from Bradford Leigh.

Detectives working on the inquiry said an incident room set up to field calls from the public is still receiving a trickle of calls in relation to Melanie's disappearance.

Searches of buildings at Beaufort Farm in Ingles-batch and a charity shop in Bath's bohemian Walcot Street, which was a taxi rank in 1996 when Melanie went missing, have been wound-up.

Melanie's parents Steve and Pat Hall are being kept up-to-date with every development.

An Avon and Somerset police spokesman said: "Originally we were talking about the searches lasting weeks.

"This estimate has been scaled down and we could be looking at days.

"When we first put out an appeal there were quite a few calls.

"Those calls have started to tail off, which is what you would expect in an inquiry going back seven years."

Operation Raphael, (the name is an alphabetical one the last operation had a Q prefix) was sparked when Avon and Somerset police were given new information about the possible whereabouts of Melanie's body.

Two men were arrested and released on police bail and members of the public were asked to cast their minds back to the autumn of 1996 when 25-year-old Melanie went missing.

She had been on a night-out in Cadillacs nightclub with friends and her new boyfriend Philip Kurl-baum.

If the searches of fields in the tiny Bath village prove fruitless it will be the latest in a long-line of false alarms in one of the west's most infamous cases.

Five years ago detectives interviewed convicted murderer John Cannon about Melanie's disappearance.

Cannon is currently serving a life-sentence for the murder of Bristol woman Shirley Banks in 1987.

Two years later convicted murderer Mark Shillibier was also investigated after claims he bragged to a friend about killing Melanie.

Up to 40 police officers are still working on the case with the incident room in Kingswood, Bristol, fielding all calls in connection with the operation.