Returning to his musings, once Matthew Oldfield had returned to the table, Gerry, Kate and the others munched their tapas and knocked back a few more gulps of white wine. Everything was going so well. Madeleine might have mentioned crying last night while they were out, but that must have been a mistake.

Madeleine had returned from the Kid’s Club saying, ‘Mummy, I’m having such fun, this is my best day ever’. All three children, happy and tired after another day away from their parents, had been tucked up in bed asleep in good time for them both to shower and crack open both a bottle of wine and a can of beer from the fridge before joining their friends at the Tapas bar. Jane had come back from her check and everything as fine apart from their baby being sick – and Russell was seeing to her. Matthew’s 9.30 check had come back ‘AOK’. All had seemed fine and perfectly normal for the next 30 minutes or so.

As the clock neared 10.00pm, Kate looked down at her watch. “Gosh, it’s nearly 10 o’clock. Time for my check on the kids”. Without hesitation, Kate had risen from the table and had strode off purposefully and called out ‘See you all in a mo’.

It was, of course, the only time she had got up from the table. Or was it? There had been rumours circulating that a man had been in the Tapas bar that night and had taken a series of photographs, including some of them at their table.

It was claimed on a blog owned by that maverick Portuguese journalist Paolo Reis that these photos showed that Kate had left the table and indeed had changed her clothes before coming back to the Tapas bar. Clarence Mitchell had once again been the master of his craft. “So what if she had?”, he’d told the press. Too right! So what! He was fed up with these bloggers examining all these irrelevant minutiae.

Gerry then reflected on one of the few mistakes that Clarence Mitchell had made during his otherwise impeccable PR handling of events following Madeleine’s disappearance. As the whole matter of the timelines was unravelling, with one timeline contradicting another, Clarence, in frustration, had told the newspapers: “They can’t remember exactly what time they were doing this, that and the other that night, because none of them were wearing watches”.

Unfortunately, for Clarence, every picture taken of the ‘Tapas 9’ who had been photographed in Praia da Luz that week had been wearing a watch, something Clarence should have realised before he opened his mouth. And of course the witch-hunting, hate-filled bloggers had excitedly jumped on this gaffe be pointing out: “If they weren’t wearing watches, how did they know when to do their checks on the children?” It was so obvious, really. Even those dunderhead, unemployed, loser bloggers coud sometimes see something that Clarence couldn’t. It was to Clarence’s credit that as soon as he realised his mistake – Gerry had been furious with him on the ’phone the following day – Clarence had issued one of his many ‘clarifications’.

It was brilliantly simple, really. Clarence had called all his media and press contacts three days later and said: “Some of them were wearing watches. Some of them weren’t”. Stunning! That was what the man was being paid £75,000 a year for. That, remembered Gerry, had satisfied all but those obsessive bloggers who, most unfairly, then accused Clarence of making it up as he went along.

Gerry’s thoughts then became much more disturbed as he then brought to mind those agonised shrieks of Kate which had pierced the quiet and lazy Praia da Luz night. “They’ve takn her. Madeleine’s gone. They’ve taken her, Madeleine’s gone”. As soon as Kate had been coherent enough to explain what she believed had happened, he’d dashed up to Apartment 5a to make absolutely sure that Kate wasn’t simply having hallucinations. The walk to the apartment from the Tapas bar normally took him about a minute-and-half. This time, swift to sense something bad had happened, he made it from Tapas table to patio door in just 40 seconds.

His reactions to discovering that Madeleine had indeed been abducted had been well summarised, thought Gerry, in a newspaper article, which had said:

QUOTE: “Later on in his statement, Gerry had said: ‘After Kate had rushed down to the Tapas bar and reported that Madeleine had been abducted, I returned to the children’s room and I tried to think what could have happened. To my surprise I realised I could lift up the window shutters without effort and almost without making noise. When I entered I realised that Maddie’s bed was almost intact. The corner of the outside of the sheets was turned a little. But the pillow, her Cuddle Cat and the blanket she had slept with were almost in the same place as I had seen them the last time’.” UNQUOTE

Gerry then brought to mind Kate’s statement, reported in another newspaper.

QUOTE: “In her police statement, Kate McCann told police: ‘While we were having breakfast, Maddie said, ‘Mummy, why didn’t you come when we were crying last night?’ Gerry and I spoke for a couple of minutes and agreed to keep a closer watch over the children. At 10.00pm, I saw the door of the children’s room wide open and noticed a current of air. The same current of air closed the door but the window in the other room that backed on to the patio was closed. When I went to look for Madeleine I realised she wasn’t there. I looked through the apartment and I went back to the children’s room and then saw the curtains moving towards me so it became clear the window shutters were wide open. I went to the window and opened the curtains to see if she had climbed out, but there was no sign of her. I don’t know if I closed the window at that moment’. Kate also told 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’.” UNQUOTE

Gerry had had to admit, when he and Clarence met the following day to review the day’s press and media coverage the day after Kate’s statement, that she had made things look rather bad. Kids on holiday in the Mediterranean with the shutters, the windows, and the curtains drawn closed through the entire holiday must have sounded, well, strange to many people, even sinister. But apart from that, it was an accurate enough statement of what had happened. The police had found Kate’s fingerprints on the window – but no other person’s fingerprints. So when Kate said, rather tentatively, ‘I don’t know if I closed the window at that moment’, she must have done, thought Gerry. How else could Kate’s fingerprints have got there. Strange that she couldn’t recollect that – though of course it was understandable given that she must have been utterly distraught the moment she realised Madeleine was missing.

Momentarily, Gerry’s heart filled with rage. He received regular updates on what the bloggers were saying about this and that aspect of the case. Some of them had had the nerve to suggest that he and Kate had fabricated the entire abduction scene and that the reason only Kate’s fingerprints were on the window was because she had been making last-minute alterations to the window and shutters to make it look like an abductor had broken in that way. Was there no limit to the wickedness of these bloggers?

He paused in his thinking to reconsider whether he and Kate could have or should have done anything differently that day.

No, he reassoned. It was reasonable to leave the kids alone for half-an-hour or more, if you thought they were asleep, that they wouldn’t wake up, and that you were no more than 100 yards or so away from them. And, after all, he had been told by that Social Services Manager – he could never remember his name – that what he and Kate had done was ‘well within the bounds of responsible parenting’. Actually, he really wasn’t quite sure now which official had said that to him. Maybe it had been someone from the N.S.P.C.C.?

The real blame for Madeleine having been abducted was of course the vile abductor, probably a member of an international paedophile gang who might well have stolen Madeleine to order. And the incompetent bunch of fools laughingly called the Portuguese ‘police’ had bungled the investigation so badly that they were now viewed in Britain as worse than the ‘Keystone cops’. They’d failed to follow up a series of valuable leads. They’d tried to pin the blame for Madeleine’s disappearance on him and Kate, wasting valuable police resources. He was bitter about the Portuguese police’s role. He was angry with them. His brow furrowed.

But Gerry’s mood improved as he focussed on how he and Kate had now been cleared.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT