Bringing his mind back to the precise sequence of events that evening, he recalled how, barely a couple of minutes after he had returning to the Tapas bar at around 9.25pm, Matthew Oldfield was setting off to check on his own children. Just as he was leaving, Matthew had leaned over to him and said: “Gerry, it’s about time for my half-hourly check. Do you want me to check on your children as well? I’ll be going right past your door”.

Gerry had thought this was very odd at the time. He had come back to the table just two minutes ago, had barely resumed his seat and hardly had time to take a swig of white wine, when Matthew was offering to do another check! “Well, if you don’t mind, that woud be nice, yes”, he remembered saying. He had been taken aback. After all. They’d all been individually checking on their own children. Now Oldfield – six days into the holiday – had come up with the stunning idea that one for them could check more than one apartment at once. Strange that not one of them had come up with that idea before!

Oldfied had even offered to check on the Payne’s children as well. Quite why none of them had thought of this – one person checking all four apartments at one go – during the previous six days, given that they were all highly qualified doctors with degrees, Ph. D.s and various other initials after their name, was a complete mystery to him. Even doctors had occasional ‘blind spots’, mused Gerry. Matthew, of course, did not have a key to Apartment 5a.

Had he given Matthew a key so that he could check on Madeleine, Sean and Amelie. Gerry racked his brains and realised there was a problem.

His original story was that the shutters had been jemmied open from the outside, because the doors were locked and the abductor had had to break in through the shutters and the closed window.

Then, when it turned out that there was absolutley no sign of forced entry through the shutters, he had come up with the admittedly rather convoluted explanation that the abductor had calmly walked in through the unlocked patio door and then left by opening the window and shutters to the children’s room and then climbing out of the window. Gerry didn’t like to dwell on this theory too much. He recognised instinctively that it was highly unlikley, though of course he and Kate could never admit that publicly.

So, back to Matthew, what had Gerry said to Matthew at around 9.30pm? Matthew had explained how he’d visited the apartment, poked his head round the door of the children’s room, seen the twins fast asleep, but somehow, agonisingly, surprisingly, mysteriously, failed to notice if Madeleine was still in her bed or not. Yet he had noticed that ‘the apartment seemed a little lighter than before’.

The idiot! He’d noticed that the apartment was ‘a little lighter than before’, yet couldn’t crane his neck round a few more inches to see if Madeleine was there. If only he’d noticed definitley that Madeleine was missing, they could have raised the alarm at least half-an-hour earlier. He was unrelaible, that Oldfield. No wonder the General Medical Council was investigating his incompetence on another matter.

But back to the question at hand. Had he given Matthew the key to his apartment at 9.30pm? Or not? Yes, that was the question. The key? Or not the key?

If, at 9.30pm, he had believed his apartment was locked, he would have had to have said to Matthew: “Here, you’d better have the key so you can get in and check”. But now he and Kate had told the police they always left the patio door open. In case of fire. Yes, that was it, in case of fire,. Though Madeleiene never woke up once she went to sleep.

So, the patio door was unlocked. That was the story they had settled on. So, then, he must have said to Matthew: “Patio door’s unlocked, Matt. You can walk in through there”. He must have whispered it. After all, it was hardly the thing to have shouted out in the midst of a busy Tapas bar.

Gerry recalled how the timelines in the British press had described Matthew Oldfield’s visit:

QUOTE: “At 9.30 p.m., it was the time for another friend, Matthew Oldfield, to go to the McCanns’ apartment to check on the children, but he only saw the twins, given the fact that he did not enter the room. In order to see Madeleine’s bed, he would have to go inside. He detected nothing out of the ordinary”. UNQUOTE

Around 9.35pm Matthew had returned to the Tapas bar table. “All O.K.”, Matthew had said. “I heard nothing”.

Gerry was well aware that Matthew Oldfield’s unlikely story of seeing the twins but not Madeleine had been thoroughly ridiculed on various Madeleine blogs and Internet forums.

There was another problem with Matthew’s account. An integral part of it was that the apartment ‘seemed lighter than before’. The bloggers had asked themselves: how did Matthew Oldfield know that the apartment ‘looked lighter than before’ if had had not been in it earlier that evening? Besides that, of course, there was the obvious problem that at 9.30pm it was really dark, whereas when they all arrrived at the Tapas bar at around 8.45pm, it had still been twilight.

The problem was, of course, that Matthew, on his own account, had not been in the apartment earlier. There had been several references made by Matthew and his ‘Tapas 9’ friends to his check at around 9.00pm. For example, he recalled, one newspaper timeline had Matthew Oldfield making some kind of check on the children at 8.55pm. The timeline had read:

“20.55: Oldfield went near the outside of the window of the bedroom where Madeleine was sleeping – a window that was closed – in order to verify if there was any noise in the inside”. Other reports confirmed that when Matthew carried out this ‘check’, he had definitely seen the shutters firmly closed.

Unfortunately, it was not clear from this what Oldfield was supposed to be doing outside their apartment at 8.55pm. Looking at the face of this comment, he could have been (a) just passing by on his way to join them at the ‘Tapas bar’ or (b) gone back at around 8.55pm to check on his children and Gerry’s. Neither made sense, though when Russell O’Brien’s draft timeline had been revealed by the Portuguese police in August last year, he had referred to the ‘Tapas 9’ ‘assembling at 8.45pm and then Russell going off to do a check at 9.00pm.

Well, clearly Matt had done a check around 8.55pm/9.00pm as well as one at 9.30pm. But since he hadn’t been inside the apartment during his 9.00pm check – indeed, he’d said that he had seen the shutters closed, how could he say, later, that the apartment seemed ‘lighter than before’?

Oldfield’s claim of not seeing Madeleine during his check at 9.30pm but at the same time noticing that the room seemed ‘lighter than before’ was fraught with problems. But at least it reinforced the theory that the abductor had struck sometime between Gerry’s check at 9.05pm/9.10pm and Matt’s check at 9.30pm. And that was the time Gerry and Kate had settled on. When they had their 6-month and annual occasions to mark Madeleine’s disappearance, usually with a church service, they were timed to include a minute’s silence at 9.30pm – the official time that Madeleine was abducted on 3rd May.

Gerry sighed. Gazing up, he noticed that the stratocumulus clouds he had noticed earlier were now covering most of the sky, and that a large anvil-shaped cloud had built up from the lenticular cloud he had seen earlier. It was growing quickly in size, and was dark grey, almost black at the bottom. At the top of the cloud, what remained of the afternoon sun lit up its towering peak brighter that Dulux ‘Brilliant White’ emulsion, he thought. The weather often turned cloudy during summer Mediterranean afternoons. As he pondered the assortment of clouds now nearly covering the sky, he mused: “Every cloud has a silver lining”.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT