It was important he get the facts right in case any journalist asked embarrassing questions about Mrs Pamela Fenns’s damning allegations. He and Kate had been out eating and drinking at the Tapas bar as usual.

There had been a quiz that night, as apparently there was every Tuesday, organised by the buxom quizmistress Najova Chekaya who, as coincidence would have it, lived in the village of Flitwick, Bedfordshire, just a few miles away from Mrs Dianne Webster, Fiona Payne’s mother, who had joined them for their holiday in Praia da Luz and lived in the nearby town of Bedford.

Just before 11.00pm, they’d returned to their apartment. They could hear that Madeleine was awake and seemed a trifle upset. Maybe she had had a nightmare, something like that. She soon went back to sleep.

Their neighbour, Mrs Pamela Fenn, had surely been exaggerating when she claimed that Madeleine had been sobbing her heart out for 75 minutes before they arrived back home from the Tapas bar. Mrs Fenn had said that Madeleine was crying out ‘Daddy, Daddy’. That wasn’t like Madeleine at all, maybe it was someone else’s child that she’d heard? She was an old lady. Maybe she’d just imagined it. Old people sometimes did things like that.

The following day, Wednesday 2 May, was unremarkable. The children had woken up around 7.00am as usual. They’d got the children dressed, had breakfast, then taken them off to the crèche for about 9.15am, as usual. How the twins and Madeleine loved to be taken to the crèche. There was always so much to do there. He couldn’t quite remember what he and Kate had done that morning. Maybe they’d sauntered around Praia da Luz that morning, and had a coffee at a beach cafe. Maybe they’d had a swim. Or maybe Gerry had gone off to play tennis.

Then, of course, they’d collected the children at 12.30pm, as usual, and returned them to the crèche at 2.30pm. Then they’d picked them up at around 5.00pm and taken them straight over to the Paraiso restaurant for tea with their friends. He couldn’t quite remember what they’d done in the afternoon, either. Possibly some more tennis while Kate chilled out somewhere or went for a jog. She wasn’t that keen on tennis as it happened. It was all a bit hazy in his memory.

But, as the sound of a passing tractor suddenly made him look toewards the winding, dusty lane that led to their villa, he brought to mind that helpful article by Bridget O’Donnell, the partner of journalist Jeremy (call me ‘Jes’) Wilkins, who had timed her article to appear just before Christmas.

Once again, he recalled it word for word. This was what Ms O’Donnell had written:

“The Mark Warner nannies brought the children to the Tapas restaurant to have tea at the end of each day. It was a friendly gathering. The parents would stand and chat by the pool. We talked about the children, about what we did at home. We were hopeful about a change in the weather. We eyed our children as they played. We didn’t see anyone watching. Some of the parents were in a larger group. Most of them worked for the NHS and had met many years before in Leicestershire.

“Now they lived in different parts of the UK, and this holiday was their opportunity to catch up, to introduce their children, to reunite. They booked a large table every night in the Tapas. We called them ‘The Doctors’. Sometimes we would sit out on our balcony and their laughter would float up around us. One man was the joker. He had a loud Glaswegian accent. He was Gerry McCann. He played tennis with Jes”.

Yes, thought Gerry, she was right. He had been rightly portrayed as ‘the life and soul of the party’. He liked the bit about the sound of the Doctors’ laughter ‘floating’ up to the apartment where O’Donnell and Wilkins were staying. Why, all of the apartments surrounding the Ocean Club complex must have similarly been entertained by the happy sound of the Doctors’ group guffawing loudly until midnight. He was pleased to have been able to generate such laughter. And once again, O’Donnell’s article showed just how much he was the centre of attention.

O’Donnell had also in her article explained so well the agonising choices they faced over babysitting arrangements at Praia da Luz. They’d discussed all of this on that Wednesday evening – May 2nd. This was how she’d explained it to ‘Guardian’ readers:

“In the evenings, babysitting at the resort was a dilemma. ‘Sit-in’ babysitters were available but were expensive and in demand, and the Mark Warner blurb advised us to book well in advance. The other option was the babysitting service at the kiddie club, which was a 10-minute walk from the apartment. The children would watch a cartoon together and then be put to bed. You would then wake them, carry them back and put them to bed again in the apartment. After taking our children to dinner a couple of times, we decided on the Wednesday night to try the service at the club.

“We had booked a table for two at Tapas and were placed next to the Doctors’ regular table. One by one, they started to arrive. The men came first. Gerry McCann started chatting across to Jes about tennis. Gerry was outgoing, a wisecracker, but considerate and kind, and he invited us to join them.

“We discussed the children. He told us they were leaving theirs sleeping in the apartments. While they chatted on, I ruminated on the pros and cons of this. I admired them, in a way, for not being paranoid parents, but I decided that our apartment was too far off even to contemplate it. Our baby was too young and I would worry about them waking up.

“My ’phone rang as our food arrived; our baby had woken up. I walked the round trip to collect him from the kiddie club, then back to the restaurant. He kept crying and eventually we left our meal unfinished and walked back again to the club to fetch our sleeping daughter. Jes carried her home in a blanket. The next night we stayed in. It was Thursday, May 3”.

Gerry ran through those adjectives again in his mind: “Outgoing, wisecracker, considerate, kind”. A sort of combination of Bernard Manning and Mother Teresa, perhaps. He was comfortable with that thought.

And yes, the ‘sit-in’ baby-sitters’ were so expensive, just as Ms O’Donnell had pointed out . How they expected cardiologists and the like to afford them was just beyond him. Why, the cost of one evening alone was nearly two bottles of wine from the Tapas bar. If they’d arranged for the children to have sitters every day of the holiday, that would have been, er, two times seven…fourteen. Now then, multiply that by the four couples who were holidaying together, and that would mean the baby-sitters would have cost…fourteen times four…fifty-six bottles of wine. Fifty-six!! Nearly 60 bottles of wine. It was daylight robbery. Had they no idea they were just ordinary public servants employed by the cash-strapped National Health Service?

And of course, dear Bridget had been absolutely right about the waiting-list for bbay-sitters. That was right, Mark Warners had advised them to ‘book early’, the baby-sitters were very much in demand, apparently. It would have been pointless even asking to book a baby-sitter.

Gerry and Kate had been greatly touched, during those heartbreaking days before Christmas 2007, to read how Bridget O’Donnell and ‘Jes’ had ‘admired’ them for choosing to wine and dine while leaving their three young children over a minute’s walk away for the entire evening. She said that she had admired them for ‘not being paranoid parents’.

Dead right! The majority of parents seemed to be scared witless that, if they left children aged two or three on their own for the evening, they might wake up. He’d heard them say ridiculous things like: ‘there might be a fire’, ‘they might be frightened’, ‘they might be sick’, ‘they might mistake pills for sweets’. Honestly! The chances of any of these things happening was one in a million! That was half the trouble with many of today’s parents; they were hugely over-protective.

It was such a shame that Bridget and Jes’s evening had been ruined by their baby waking up. As Bridget had told her admiring ‘Guardian’ readers, her mobile ’phone had rung to say their baby – under a year old – had woken up crying. She’d then had to get up from the table, do the round trop to and from the crèche, and bring him back to the Tapas bar. The little blighter had carried on crying – so much that in the end they’d been forced to abandon the meal they’d paid for, and go back to their apartment. Gerry winced. Couldn’t they devise better systems of chid care than that? Did they really have to interrupt poor old Bridget and Jes right in the middle of a meal? It had completely spoilt their evening.

The thought that the poor baby might have woken up hungry and perhaps severely distressed at waking up to complete strangers did not cross his mind. These were not the sort of thoughts that ever crossed his mind.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT