The Bramleys, both aged 35, who took Jade Bennett, five, and Hannah, three, from their home in Ramsey - a sleepy Fenland town - face an uncertain future after 17 weeks in hiding.
In the short-term the couple know that a fresh application to adopt the children will be heard by the courts, possibly today.
Cambridgeshire Police said last night: 'We just cannot speculate on what the situation will be until we have a chance to question them. This has been an almost 18-week-long inquiry where we have, and continue to work closely with social services. We will need to talk to the family before a decision can be made.'
The Bramleys fled the day before the council's social services were to take the girls away. They had already rejected the Bramleys adoption application, saying they did not have sufficient parenting skills.
The Official Solicitor will offer independent representation for the girls to ensure that their voices are heard.
The couple, once unremarkable, are set to become celebrities: the couple who loved their foster kids so much they kidnapped them. Social workers, police, tabloid hacks and photographers and publicists were all lining up tonight as a welcoming committee.
Max Clifford, the public relations supremo, is rumoured to be advising the couple on media handling, and offers of £100,000 are in the air for their story. Neither the police nor Cambridgeshire Social Services expect them to remain silent.
The Bramleys have become the decade's Bonnie and Clyde, winning the support of the British public against the apparently bureaucratic, controlling state.
When they first disappeared, leaving tricycles tipped in their garden sand-pit, there was a small flurry of stories, then silence. There was no sighting until the end of December, when their blue Honda Concerto car was found in York, and then they were spotted on the North Yorkshire steam railway.
Since then the couple have run down their £5,000 savings and fired off letters from the heart to the press. A crescendo of interest over the last fortnight had been building up to last night's finale, and has thrown a spotlight on the UK's creaking, patchy and bewildering adoption system.
As they prepared for their return last night, Mrs Bramley sent a 1,000-word letter to three tabloid newspapers, as well as to her local paper and television station. The letter, guaranteed to make front-page news, was addressed to 'News Desks', suggesting a high level of media awareness: usually those untrained in the intricacies of spin write to 'the editor'.
It was not a complete surprise then when news of Clifford's involvement was leaked to the press yesterday. He admits he has been in contact 'with a close friend of the couple'.
'I have had a few conversations with that person over the last eight or nine days,' he said. 'All I have done is give some guidance to get their message across and hopefully to get public support for their situation. I am certainly not negotiating with anyone on their behalf for any money.'
The letter, describing what Mrs Bramley called 'the plight of a family that loves each other and wishes to stay together', helped to swing public opinion still further behind the couple.
Then the social services department allowed a fact about Mr Bramley to trickle out: that he had lied on his adoption form and had spent some time in care himself when young. The PR battle was joined with a vengeance.
Other dramatis personae have entered the stage, namely Jackie Bennett, the natural mother of three-year-old Hannah and five-year-old Jade - who publicly backed the couple's attempt to keep her children - and Paul Duckett, Jade's father, who has pledged to take legal action to get custody of his daughter.
The drama has highlighted the problems of adoption faced by thousands of couples. The Bramleys fled last September after social workers had concluded they lacked 'the special parenting skills needed'.
One social work source said: 'When the couple get home we will tell you the real reasons why we had to take the girls away. It wasn't a snap decision or anything like that. Six weeks or so after the girls moved in with the Bramleys it became clear that things weren't going to work out. They stayed with the couple for another six months, so there was plenty of time either to resolve the situation or prepare for the handover.'
A series of small issues, say Cambridgeshire, added up to a potential problem.
The Bramleys refused to let the girls have any contact with their previous foster parents; they insisted on being called mummy and daddy from day one; they refused to let the elder child have a glass of water beside her bed, as she was used to doing, and they insisted on spoon-feeding both children.
The official conclusion: 'They wanted to keep the children as children rather than let them grow up.'
There are many more apparently bizarre rejections of potential foster parents on record.
Stuart and Julie Meadwell were turned down because of Stuart's weight - he was 6ft 2ins tall and weighed 26 stone. The same council, Norfolk, refused a mixed-race couple on the grounds that, because they said they had not experienced racial abuse, they were 'racially naive'.
Stories abound of people denied adoption because they were too old, too young, too clever, because they smoked, because they refused to use contraception, because of their opposition to pop music, and so on. The list is endless.
Given the demand for adoptive parents, the standards applied often seem harsh: There are 33,000 children in foster homes in the UK, and a further 6,000 in care homes. But only 2,300 children are adopted each year - down from 21,000 a year in the mid-Seventies.
Last year, the Government acted to remove the automatic bar on trans-racial adoption in an effort to ease the situation.
But there remains a huge variation between different social services departments, resulting in a 'baby lottery'. Some councils place one in 10 of the children in their care into adoptive homes - others virtually none.
'There is clearly something going wrong when we see variations like this,' says Felicity Collier, director of the British Agencies for Adotion and Fostering (BAAF).
She says that some social workers try for too long to rehabilitate a child back into the home of the natural parents, well past the point where it is good for the child.
'Social workers need to realise more quickly when rehabilitation is not working,' she says. At present, it takes an average of two years to get a child into an home which later becomes an adoptive one.'
But over-zealous social services departments are not the only culprits. 'The law in this area is out of date,' Collier says.
'If a natural parent objects to adoption - and they often do, whatever their circumstances - it is very difficult for a court to give approval. They can only approve adoption if it can be shown that the natural parent is unreasonably witholding consent.'
This adds to the delay, and further reduces the chances of successful adoption; half of children up for adoption are over the age of five.
None the less a balance needs to be struck, says Collier. In three out of four cases, children who spend time with a foster parent return to their biological mother or father.
'It may have been that a break was needed for therapy or treatment for mental health problems,' she says. 'It is a temporary situation.'
'There is a big difference between a foster family and an adoptive one, a "forever" family,' Collier says. 'These children could be violent, refuse to eat, not sleep, play up at school. We have to remember that in one in five cases, adoption is not successful. It is not, emphatically not, like having your own child.'
What is known, however, is that the state makes a lousy parent. A quarter of adults in prison were in residential care at the age of 16. Children leaving care homes are four times more likely to be unemployed than others in their age group - and 60 times more likely to be living rough on the streets.
In the United States, the distinction between foster and adoptive parents has been weakened in an effort to cope with the demand for adoptive homes.
A new system, dubbed 'concurrent planning' - which explicitly encourages people to foster with a view to adopting - was introduced in Seattle in the early Eighties and was then rapidly copied across the United States.
Nine out of 10 children in the US scheme stay with the first placement family, and the time taken up till adoption has fallen to nine months.
A similar scheme is now being put on trial by the Manchester Adoption Service. Peter Connor, chair of Salford community and social services committee, said at the launch of the scheme: 'The project offers children the chance for care and security without the many changes of carer that sometimes happen.'
Cambridgeshire County Council clearly felt that its attempts to out-spin the Bramleys had failed, and on Friday made an extraordinary announcement. Officials offered the family a chance of keeping the children by allowing them to make a formal adoption request before a court.
Previously the Bramleys had appealed to the local county court against the council's decision to end the foster placement but had been turned down.
Whether a court would find in favour of a couple who had been refused adoption, and then abducted the children involved, remains to be seen.
Glenn Thwaite, a Cambridge County Council spokesman, said: 'If there is no evidence of any harm to the children then the Bramleys will, after an initial court hearing, be allowed to keep the children until the adoption proceedings start.
'Of course we will then be backing our original decision to get the children placed with another foster family.'
