He thought back to David Smith’s account in ‘The Times’ and continued to ponder. A few other problems and thoughts circled round and round in his mind. Did the kids actually have a ‘snack’ with Kate along with her reading them a story? Kate had said they had only just returned from having ‘high tea’ with the nannies. Perhaps they had all still been hungry despite the ‘high tea’. David Smith had said: “They put them to bed after a last story”. David Smith had unfortunately missed out the important detail about Kate washing Madeleine’s hair that night and carefully removing the bead that had been seen on Madeleine’s ‘last photo’. It was a pity he’d omitted that, because that little detail simply clinched the proof that the last ‘photo’ was genuinely taken on 3rd May. It was surely enough to nail the imaginations of those nasty bloggers who claimed that the last photo of Madeleine had been ‘photoshopped’.

But plenty of other papers had recorded the detail about the bead, so it didn’t really matter that much. Some observers had thought that the bead was simply an elastic band tied twice round Madeleine’s hair. But it wasn’t. It was a bead. And Kate’s clear recollection of carefully removing that bead had become that vital confirmation that the ‘last photo’, taken at 2.29pm on May 3rd, was genuine.

Gerry remembered that he and Kate, when on holiday, usually liked to crack open a bottle of wine before ambling down to join their friends in the Tapas bar. It had been no different that night.

Showered and dressed for their evening of wining and dining, and with the children ‘put down’ to sleep for the night, he recalled how he had popped the cork, and how the cooled white wine had gurgled haphazardly into their two wine glasses. Gerry had said: ‘Cheers!’, Kate had replied: ‘Down the Hatch’, and they’d clinked glasses together – they always did that – and momentarily gazed into each other’s eyes.

“What about the checking tonight, Gerry?”, Kate had asked. “Remember Madeleine and Sean said they were crying last night. That might have been while we were out”. Actually, Gerry recalled that he had actually clean forgotten about that, but he’d replied: “We’ll check every half-hour. On the dot. I’ll do the first check after the first half hour’, and then we can take it in turns”.

Kate had eagerly gulped down her first glass of wine. “O.K., sounds good to me”, she had said.

But just as Gerry thought he had accurately recalled the sequence of events between 7.00pm and 8.30pm, as set out so fully by David Smith in ‘The Times’, his memory intervened. All of a sudden, an earlier article in the ‘Daily Mail’, which he had also committed to memory, sprung to mind.

It had said:

QUOTE from ‘Daily Mail’: “When I arrived at the apartment, I was surprised to see that Kate had taken care of the children and had even had a shower. I sat down with the children and I read them a bedtime story. At 7.15pm we put them to sleep. At 7.30pm we were sat in the living room and relaxing, Kate with a wine and me with a beer. We talked about what a nice week we’d had and what an ideal holiday it had been. Just before 8pm I went to shower and change. We had just a little time, so I had another wine while I was watching TV then we went out.” UNQUOTE

Gerry paused and pondererd that ‘Mail’ report. He compared and contrasted it with the David Smith article. He had to concede that there were rather too many discrepancies between the two articles for comfort. He listed them all in his mind:

(a) Mail: Kate had had a shower before I arrived at the apartment. Times: Kate and I showered between 7.30pm and 8.00pm before having a glass of wine together
(b) Mail: I read them a bedtime story. Times: Kate read them a bedtime story
(c) Mail: By 7.30pm Kate and I were in the living room relaxing, Kate with a wine and me with a beer. Times: Kate and I sat down just after 8pm to have a quiet glass of the Montana sauvignon blanc
(d) Mail: I went to shower on my own just before 8pm. Times: Kate and Gerry showered and changed ‘at about 7.30pm’.

Gerry let out an audible sigh. O.K., there were some discrepancies, and those hateful, witch-hunting bloggers would no doubt claim that this proved that they were fabricating their stories. When he stopped to think about it, though, these were just minor inconsistencies. Memories played tricks on you, especially concerning such an emotional and life-changing evening. What did it really matter who had read bedtime stories to the children? Did it matter if one account said he’d has a beer and another one said he’d drunk wine? Did it matter that Kate had showered twice in an hour in one account, and just once in another account? No. Let the bloggers waste their time on raking over these insignificant discrepancies.

It had probably been just after 8.30pm that night that they had closed the door to their apartment and set off for the Tapas bar. They had always locked the door for the obvious reason that in their apartment were their passports, money and travellers’ checks and various valuables such as Kate’s jewellery. But Gerry had thought almost from the moment that Madeleine had disappeared that maybe, for some totally inexplicable reason, they had left the apartment door unlocked that evening. That was because now, looking back, it seemed obvious to him that the abductor must have walked in through the unlocked patio door – obvious, that is, after his claim that the shutters had been jemmied open had been quickly disproved by Mark Warners and the Portuguese police. Thank goodness the abductor had not walked off with their money and jewellery.

By around 8.45pm, all of his ‘Tapas 9’ friends had assembled at the ‘Tapas bar’, as Russell O’Brien had out it in his hastily-scribbled note written an hour or so after Madeleine was reported ‘missing’. Drinks and tapas had been ordered. Around 9.00pm, Gerry recalled that he’d just eaten his first Tapas course and had had a sip or two of wine. Five minutes later, he’d said to Kate “Right, we’ve been here half an hour. I’d better go and check the children. See you shortly”.

It took just over a minute for him to reach the apartment.

Gerry had returned to the apartment and entered by the main apartment door. He couldn’t really explain why he chose that entrance rather than the nearer, patio door. He must have therefore entered the apartment at around 9.06pm/9.07pm. He went straight, of course, to the children’s room. The children were all fast asleep. He gazed down briefly at the twins, in their cot. Then he walked a step or to across to Madeleine’s bed. He paused there for a period. Something about the cute way her head was laid on the pillow, and the shape of her body was arranged, with her arms spread out beside her over the duvet , caught his attention. She looked truly beautiful, lovely in every way. And there was her favourite pink soft toy, Cuddle Cat, nestled between Madeleine and the duvet. At that very moment, and it must by now have been around 9.07pm to 9.08pm, he thought to himself: “How very lucky I am to have such a beautiful daughter”. Yet, as he now knew, within just 5 minutes, she would be gone. As Kate had so graphically put it on that Panorama programme, ‘She was gone. Whoosh! Clunk’. His mind wandered to that Panorama programme, to the moment when she had described how Madeleine had simply vanished. She had waved her arm in a rapid movement to indicate how Madeleine must have been swept away by the abductor Then that was followed by a loud ‘click’ noise made from deep in her throat, a sound she’d apparently learnt in her childhood days in Liverpool. Yes, ‘Whoosh, clunk’ was about right, he reflected. It must all have happened in a flash. The moment he had left the apartment at about 9.10pm, the abductor must have raced in to the apartment through the open patio door, picked up Madeleine, opened the window and shutters, and then leapt out of the window, down the steps and along the road, to be seen by Jane Tanner barely 5 minutes later. Yes, ‘whoosh’ was an appropriate word for it.

It was quite remarkable how Kate had kept her emotions in check as she described in her Panorama interview the moment the discovered that Madeleine had been abducted. She made her ‘whoosh’ gesture followed by her ‘clunk’ sound without a trace of any distress. What a woman! Less women would have broken down and cried at the moment they were asked to recall how they first learnt that their precious first child was gone. But not his Kate. No, she had the mental resolve and determination not to show any trace of emotion, so as not to gratify any abductor who might be holding her. Just as the Portuguese police had advised.

But as Gerry now recollected that precious last moment that he had seen his daughter Madeleine alive, he could almost feel a tear welling up in his eye.

And that emotional reaction was strengthened when he brought to mind how he had noticed, at the time, how the door to the children’s door seemed to be much further open than it had been left earlier in the evening. He and Kate always left the door to the children’s room ajar – about 5 degrees open. After all, darkness would fall soon after they left for the Tapas bar each evening. And they had always on that holiday kept the shutters, the window and the curtains completely closed. A ‘Daily Mail’ article had pointed out that Kate had told the Portuguese police: “The windows were closed, the shutters were down and the curtains were always drawn in the children’s bedroom throughout their stay in Portugal”.

A tiny bit of outside light would reach the children’s room if they left the door ajar, though they never left any lights on in the apartment when they went out. Besides that, although it was rare, one of the children might wake up. Madeleine, who was potty-trained, might want to go to the loo, or one of the children might wake up and want a drink, something like that. To leave the door ajar, instead of shut, when they went out for the evening, was just one of those things that caring and responsible parents would do for their children.

When he’d left for the Tapas bar with Kate, he had, as usual, left the door to the children’s room open – about 5 degrees. Now, on his 9.05pm check, the door to the room was open at an angle of about 45 degrees. Certainly not less than 40 degrees, he could be sure of that. He’d got a grade A in ‘A’ level Maths and had always been very good at angles – and at degrees, come to that. And the door was definitely no more than 50 degrees open.

The door had opened by about 40 degrees or so in less than an hour. What could it mean?

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT