The message that they had been finally cleared, after overy a year of putting up with hurtful, ludicrous allegations, was also getting through to the millions of supporters thar they had all over the world. Hundreds of e-mails and letters had poured in to them since the Portugues Attorney-General had made his historic pronouncement that he was ordering the case to be closed.

The only people not totally and unreserevedly satisfied about his and Kate’s total inocence in this affair were those persistent, malicious bloggers and Interet forum members who carried on their relentless and hate-filled campaign of vilification – against all the evidence. A good job, he mused, that at a high level of the British government, they were already looking at how to crack down on free speech on the Internet. It was simply intolerable that people should be allowed to express their opinion about a claim of abduction. To think that ordianry people should be allowed to question what a pair of Doctors said about their daughter being abducted. Such matters should be strictly left to the police and the proper authorities and people must not be allowed to speculate about them, still less commit innumereable foul libels. Thank goodness that Express Newspapers had had the good sens eto pay out £390,000 to each of his ‘Tapas 9’ friends, though that was a pathetic sum in relation to all the distress they had suffered and the fact that, post-Madeleine, their lives would never be the same again. He pondered a moment; £550,000 libel damages for him and Kate, £390,000 for Dave, Matt and Russ and their families…£940,000 in total…not even a million. Still, it all helped to pay the bills of Metodo 3 and Oakley International, even though these organisations couldn’t say who took Madeleine, where they took her, and whether she was still alive or not.

However, it was a complex investigation – and it was good news that, as a recent ‘Sunday Express’ article had put it:

“Millionaire businessman Brian Kennedy, the McCanns’ financial backer, is seeking a former high-ranking police detective to mastermind the private investigation. He has interviewed several candidates and will see more in the coming weeks. Whoever takes on the job faces the mammoth task of assessing information gathered by many private detectives since Madeleine vanished 18 months ago. The investigator will also have to read thousands of pages of Portuguese police files released in August and painstakingly translated”.

That should keep the ‘high-ranking’ detective with plenty to occupy him during the coming dark winter months, mused Gerry.

Gerry’s mood improved still further as he dwelt on all that might come to him and Kate in the future. People were still donating to the Helping to Find Madeleine Fund. Now cleared, he and Kate could look forward to more work – all expenses covered – in promoting organisations like the Amber Alert, the Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, and other groups concerend with missing, abducted and exploited children.

Some good could come from Madeleine’s disappearance after all, perhaps.

Just then, his mobile ’phone, which he’d placed on the table top near to the now-empty bottle of wine, rang loudly and disturbed the silence. As he woke up suddenly from his reverie, or his sleep, whichever it had been, he noticed that the clouds had now become very dark and that and a squally, gusty wind was now whipping up the leaves and dust around the table and the back of his villa.

He glanced at the caller number on his cellphone.

Clarence!

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT

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

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

QUOTE from ‘Daily Mail’: I checked on the children around 9pm. I saw the angle of their door had changed and it was open around 45 degrees. I thought perhaps Madeleine had woken up and left the room. Out of the corner of my eye I looked in our room and couldn’t see her. Then I opened the children’s door 60 degrees and looked to the left and saw Maddie sleeping with her head on the pillow on the right hand side of the bed. She was breathing softly and I thought how beautiful she looked. I thought it was quite hot and I didn’t need to cover her up”. UNQUOTE

This in turn jogged Gerry’s memory as he now recalled the way David Smith of ‘the Times’ had described his last sight of Madeleine. It had run as follows:

QUOTE from ‘The Times’: When he entered the apartment, Gerry immediately saw that the children’s bedroom door, which they always left just ajar, was now open to 45 degrees. He thought that was odd, and glanced in his own bedroom to see if Madeleine had gone into her parents’ bed. But no, she and the twins were all still fast asleep.

Gerry paused over Madeleine, who – a typical doctor’s observation, this – was lying almost in ‘the recovery position’ with Cuddle Cat, the toy her godfather, John Corner, had bought her, and her comfort blanket up near her head, and Gerry thought how gorgeous, how lovely-looking she was and how lucky he was. Putting the door back to five degrees, he went to the loo and left to return to the restaurant. That, of course, was the last time he would see his daughter. UNQUOTE

Yes, that was how it was. And then, of course, he’d bumped into Jeremy Wilkins ‘ ‘Jes’, as he called him – on his way back to the Tapas bar. They’d talked about child care arrangements and tennis for some 10 to 15 minutes. Then he’d rejoined his friends in the Taaps bar.

Well,.he’d thought it was about 10 to 15 minutes he’d been talking to Jes. Yet Jes had told the police that he’d met Gerry McCann by the ‘shutters’ and that they’d only talked for ‘no more than three minues’. What was the matter with people, he mused, irritatedly. Could he not remember them talking for up to 15 minues? Or where they had been talking?

Then Gerry’s mind rapidly went to yet another article that had been written about his visit to check on the children at around 9.00pm. It had been written by Jes’s partner, the lovely Bridget O’Donnell, in ‘The Guardian’. This is how Bridget had put it:

QUOTE from Bridget O’Donnell in ‘The Guardian’: “Our baby would not sleep, and at about 8.30pm, Jes took him out for a walk in the buggy to settle him. Gerry was on his way back from checking on his children and the two men stopped to have a chat. They talked about daughters, fathers, families. Gerry was relaxed and friendly. They discussed the babysitting dilemmas at the resort and Gerry said that he and Kate would have stayed in too, if they had not been on holiday in a group. Jes returned to our apartment just before 9.30pm. We ate, drank wine, watched a DVD and then went to bed. On the ground floor, a completely catastrophic event was taking place. On the fourth floor of the next block, we were completely oblivious”. UNQUOTE

That was better. Bridget confirmed that he was walking back to the Tapas bar, not ‘by the shutters’. And she said thatt hey had a chat avbout ‘daughers, fathers, families’. As if they could have done that within 3 minutes! The idea was ridiculous. He would have to speak to Jes about it next time he saw him.

Looking back, it was so odd that neither Jeremy Wilkins nor he had seen Jane Tanner on her way to check her two children at around 9.15pm. Jane, of course, had been walking up the narrow lane where he and Wilkins had been chatting, when she had seen someone, possibly carrying a child, walking purposefully towards the beach.
Or was it the other way? No matter.

Wilkins had had a baby with him in a pushchair. Jane Tanner said she had seen them both talking. When she had drawn a plan for the Portuguese police, she had drawn herself walking on the same side of the street as he and Wilkins. But when she had appeared on the prestigious Panorama programme, on 19 November last year, she had distinctly said she was on the opposite side of the road from them, and that Gerry McCann had crossed over the road to talk to him. What a mixed-up kid that Jane Tanner could be sometimes. She could be dreadfully vague. It had taken her over 24 hours to talk to him about what she had seen. When she did so, she gave a very generalised description of what she said was a man of normal build and average height who might have been carrying a bundle, and might have been wearing a dark jacket and light trousers. It really wasn’t very helpful.

The clouds in the sky thickened all the time. The breeze grew stronger. The temperature dropped. Still no sign of Kate. What was she doing?

It had of course been vital to get Jane to give a more accurate recollection of what she had seen. Gerry remembered how he and his team of advisers had spared no effort to track down someone who could help Jane’s tentative memory. After weeks and weeks of searching, he’d found someone called a ‘cognitive therapist’, an Amercian lady. She apparently had an awesome reputation for helping people to remember what they had forgotten. It was amazing. For months, Jane had not realised that she had really seen Madeleine, yet after several, expensive, sessions of this cognitive therapy, she had emerged to announce that she definitely remembered seeing a blond-hairde girl with pink pyjamas on, exactly the same as those that Madelenie had been wearing when she was snatched.

But, even better, Jane had now recalled much more clearly what the abductor looked like. Now he was about 5’ 7”, had sleek longish black hair – not ‘short’ any more – a bit shiny or greasy, yes, he’d worn a dark jacket and light trousers, but she’d remembered that he wasn’t white, after all, but had looked a bit eastern Mediterranean, perhaps, Near Eastern or maybe north African. And certainly, definitely ‘swarthy’. You simply couldn’t trust swarthy folk, noted Gerry.

Even more astonihing was that Jane Tanner had remembered all of this despite only seeing the man from the side, only for a maximum of 3-4 seconds, and in the dark. This brilliant lady, Gerry realised, had given him and Kate great hope, at a very difficult time. At last they could confidently give out a description of what the abductor looked like. Admittedy the Portuguese police did not share their view that Jane Tanner’s truly stunning new recollections amounted to good evidnce of what the abductor looked like, nor in fact did that incompetent bunch of malicious fools even entertain the idea that there really was an abductor any more.

Gerry had to concede that, released nearly 6 months after the event, the new sketch that they released of Jane Tanner’s ‘rediscovered’ abductor did not hold out much promise of finding this abductor, in the absence of any other credible sighting of him and without any other ancillary leads. Even if by some miracle they now traced him, the chances of finding Madeleine alive with him must be diminishing rapidly.

Despite the sheer brilliance of the cognitive therapist, Gerry still could never quite understand why Jane Tanner could remember having seen Madeleine in her pyjamas, carried by a sleek black-haired swarthy abductor, after 5 months – but not after 5 minutes, nor after 24 hours. Jane Tanner was sometimes very hard to figure out. So were most women, come to think of it.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT

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

“Gerry was in his apartment – Apartment 5a on the ground floor of Block 5 of the Waterside Village Gardens at the Ocean Club – at 7pm. He had a glass of water, then a beer, while the children sat with Kate on the couch having stories with a snack. The children were clearly shattered – the last thing any of them needed was a sedative and, anyway, it was not something the McCanns ever did. They put them to bed after a last story. The twins were asleep virtually the moment they lay down, Madeleine not far behind them. The three children were asleep in the front bedroom overlooking the car park and, beyond it, the street. Madeleine was in the single bed nearest the door. There was an empty bed against the opposite wall, beneath the window. Between the two beds were two travel cots containing the twins: Sean and Amelie.

These days it was rare for Madeleine to wake up at all once she was in bed. If she did, she’d normally wander into her parents’ bed, whether they were there or not. At home in Rothley, sometime earlier, they had begun a star chart for Madeleine staying in her own bed. The chart, still on display in the kitchen, was full of stars. At about 7.30pm, Kate and Gerry showered and changed and sat down just after 8pm to have a quiet glass of the Montana sauvignon blanc that Gerry had bought at the Baptista supermarket, 200 yards down the hill. They had lived and worked in New Zealand for a year and that particular bottle, Montana sauvignon blanc, was their favourite.

[At about 8.30pm], they had walked down to the Tapas bar and were first to the table at the restaurant at 8.35pm. They spent some minutes talking to a couple from Hertfordshire – two more tennis players – at the next table, who were eating with their young children. As they chatted, Gerry thought how lucky he was, his children asleep nearby, he and Kate free to come and enjoy some adult time at the restaurant and not have to sit with their children, as this couple were.

The McCanns sat down after a few minutes and then ordered some wine. The Oldfields were next to arrive, then Russell O’Brien and Jane Tanner and, finally, always last, Dave and Fiona Payne with Dianne Webster”.

UNQUOTE.

Gerry reflected. Yes, that was a good account by David Smith. Mind you, he had left out one very important bit, and that was the moment when Madeleine had blurted out to Kate: “Mummy, I’m having so much fun. This is the best day of my life ever”. Madeleine probably said that as Kate was reading her stories.

It was a shame he’d omitted that, because that truly was a clear illustration of just how much the children had enjoyed spending 5½ hours a day in the ‘Kid’s Club’, away from their parents. They had each thrived on it. In fact, he’d felt so reassured about how much the chidren were enjoying themselves that he had no qualms about spending another evening away from the children on the Tapas bar. By tea-time on 3rd May, Madeleine’s query at breakfast-time that morning – about why he and Kate had not been there for her and Sean the previous night whilst they were crying – had become no more than a distant memory. She had probably made it up about her and Sean crying the night before. Children – Madeleine especially – were always doing things to try to get attention.

Gerry now recalled what he was reported on Spanish TV to have told the Portuguese police. Their report had gone:

“Gerry told police: ‘When I arrived at the apartment [around 7pm], 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’. At about 7.30pm, Kate and Gerry showered and changed and sat down to have a quiet glass of the sauvignon blanc. They were first to the table at the restaurant at 8.35 and spent some minutes talking to a couple from Hertfordshire – two more tennis players – at the next table, who were eating with their young children”.

Now Gerry really had to think. He drew himself forward and rested his handsome – but furrowed – face on his firm pair of hands. Still no sign of Kate joining him. And the increasing cloud cover matched his mood as he struggled ever harder to reconcile all these conflicting reports – a task made more difficult by the alcohol he had consumed in the restaurant and the bottle of wine he had nearly finished downing after lunch. He sighed as he reflected on further confusion about the facts.

According to David Smith’s account in ‘The Times’, he had ‘hung around on the tennis courts’ waiting for Kate to collect the children from the Kid’s Club and creche and then bring the children on to him afterwards. The report on Spanish TV had said he returned to the apartment at around 7pm and that he was ‘surprised’ to find that Kate had already returned and got the children ready for bed. He felt a touch embarrassed, though that was a strange feeling for him ever to experience. Generally speaking, Gerry didn’t do embarrassment.

He was embarrassed because it all made it look like he and Kate had had a major misunderstanding that day. On the one hand, he claimed to have been hanging around on the tennis courts, nursing his Achilles tendon injury, waiting for Kate to return with the kids. By contrast, the reports on Spanish TV – and which had been recycled in various British newspapers – made it look as though there had been a complete misunderstanding between them, and that Kate had just decided, off her own back, to collect the children, take them back to the apartment, fed them, bath them, change them into their pyjamas ready for bed, and have a shower, all without telling him.

He had to admit it looked bad. And he had to get this exactly right if he was challenged about this discrepancey on one of their forthcoming TV interviews. He tried hard to recall what might have happened.

Suddenly, he had a ‘Eureka!’ moment. Of course! At 4.30pm, Kate had gone off jogging, possibly in a slight huff as maybe she’d got fed up watching him play tennis. That was it! She’d rushed off, and they had, between them, failed to agree about collecting the kids. He had thought she would return to the tennis courts after her jog, and they would then go to the Paraiso as usual and meet up with their friends. Clearly Kate had gone off with a different plan. She had probably gone off for her jog, returned to the apartment, showered, collected the children from the Kid’s Club and creche, gone and had ‘high tea’ somewhere with the nanny, then back to the apartment again, and swiftly got all the children ready for bed by 7.00pm. All without telling him. Perhaps, he thought, she had shouted out something about collecting the kids herself as she rushed off for her jog.

Another possibility was that she had simply forgotten that she was supposed to bring the kids to the tennis court after collecting them from the Kid’s Club and creche. Perhaps she was tired after her jog. Anyway, he realised, that was how to reconcile the two accounts. There had been a simple misundertsanding. Or else Kate had simply forgot.

But as soon as he had solved that problem, another one reared up in his mind. Neither in David Smith’s account, nor in the Spanish TV account, was there any mention of David Payne dropping by the tennis courts at about 6.20pm/6.30pm. There was no mention of his conversation with David, when he had asked him to go to the apartment and see Kate. There was no mention of David having gone to the apartment. Why had this detail been omitted, he wondered? Sometimes even he could forget things, it seemed.

Then again, had he told David to vist Kate to ‘check that she was all right’, or had he simply asked David to ask if Kate and the children were coming down to join him on the tennis court?

And how long had David Payne been at the apartment. One version, fro mdavid himself, was that he had satayed there for up to half-an-hour or so, and had seen Kate getting the children ready for bed, all dressed in their white pyjamas and ‘looking like angels’. Then there was another completely contradictory version that David Payne had called at the apartment, only to find Kate in the middle of showering, with nothing but a towel around her – after which he had quickly left.

These discrepancies were irritating, as it gave material for those dirty, hate-filled blogggers to circulate their libellous theories that none of them were telling the truth about the events of that afternoon and evening.

He couldn’t fully remember why he had asked David Payne to visit the apartment. As for what had happened when David Payne had visited the apartment, perhaps David Payne had simply forgotten what had happened. Perhaps he had a form of amnesia about the events of that afternoon and evening. And maybe the same was true of Kate. After all, in her retrospective diary entry for 3rd May, she had not even mentioned David Payne coming to visit the apartment, let alone whether he’d knocked on the apartment door whilst she was showering, or had stayed for half-an-hour. Yes, that was it, they had all forgotten the details of that day. And now, they couldn’t remember. Yes, he thought to himself more cheerfully, that should do it. If there are any awkward discrepancies, we’ll say we ‘can’t remember’.

There was one other thing about that Spanish TV report, which papers like the Daily Mail had recycled. He was quoted as saying: “At 7.15pm we put them to sleep”. Had he really said that? Put them to sleep? Why, it made it sound as if…as if… Gerry could scarcely bring himself to think about what those words of his could mean. He also recalled that on another occasion, Kate had spoken about ‘putting the children down’ for the night. ‘Put them to sleep’, he decided, must clearly have been a gross mis-translation of what he had actually said on Spanish TV. And, disgracefully, papers like the Daily Mail had negligently recycled this appalling mis-translation.

Gerry’s mind, still focussed on covering every possible contradiction, discrepancy, or ‘minor inconsistencies’ as he liked to call them, wondered why Kate had showered twice. He was quoted as saying that “I was surprised to see that Kate had taken care of the children and had even had a shower”, and then the article had continued: “At about 7.30pm, Kate and Gerry showered…” And in one of his versions, David Payne had said he had interrupted Kate whilst she was taking a shower. Did Kate have two showers, or only one? It was so hard to remember after all this time. Why would Kate need to take two showers in less than an hour or so? Perhaps, he thought, he had got it wrong again. Perhaps it was only he that showered at 7.30pm? Yes, let’s say that, he concluded.

He tried to move forward in his mind to the moment when he and Kate had got themselves ready for the Tapas bar at around 8.30pm, and had locked their apartment door – or left it unlocked, as the case may be – and taken their 90-second stroll down to the Ocean Club.

But he was still troubled by some of those ‘minor inconsistencies’. For example, one version of events said that Kate had read the children their bedtime stories. In anotner version, it was him. His brow furrowed once again as his mind wrestled and grappled and contorted in a vain effort to recall which of them had read those bedtime stories. Or perhaps neither of them had?

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT

He remembered how he’d kept on looking at his watch. Quarter to six, ten to six, five to six, six o’clock, five past six. Maybe she had just taken the kids straight back to the apartment without telling him? He hadn’t bothered to take the 2-minute walk to the apartment to check. Nor had he gone to the Paraiso to see if Kate was there with all his other ‘Tapas 9’ mates. Looking back, it was a bit of a mystery why he had remained rooted to the tennis court. Maybe it had been his painful Achilles tendon?

The tennis coach, Dan, had arrived, promptly, at 6.00pm. Gerry had told him to wait until his ‘Tapas 9’ friends turned up for their scheduled ‘social tennis event’. It was a full twenty minutes later, around 6.20pm, that David Payne had sauntered cheerily by, with still no sign of Kate.

“Gerry, how’s it going? Sorry we’re late. We were down the Paraiso. Where were you and Kate? They didn’t get the food on the table for the kids until gone half past five, so we were a bit late getting away. We’ll all be with you in a couple of ticks. I’m just going to get changed. Russell and Matt have gone to get changed as well”.

Gerry had said: “Dave, sorry, I won’t be able to join you. My Achilles tendon is really playing up”. Gerry’s worries about Kate had by now crystallised. He said to David Payne: “Look, Dave, I’m a bit concerned about Kate. She went off jogging nearly two hours ago and I’ve not seen her or the kids since. While you’re up there changing, would you mind just popping up to see if Kate’s O.K.? Ask her if she’s coming down and bringing the kids to watch us”.

“O.K., mate”, David had said. He always did as Gerry asked, even though it had crossed his mind as to why Gerry himself shouldn’t go up and see how his own wife was, if he was that worried. “Let you know in a few minutes, then. Shall I bring something to drink? You look worn out”.

“No, it’s O.K. I’ll wait till you tell me how Kate is”, replied Gerry.

Payne furrowed his brow. As he did as Gerry had asked, and wandered up to Apartment 5, pondered Payne, why does Gerry want her to bring the children down to the tennis court and watch him, if he’s unfit to play? If he had an injury, why didn’t he go back to his apartment and put his feet up and rest his ankle?

As he walked up to Apartment 5a, Payne reflected that Gerry could sometimes by mysterious and very unpredictable, was Gerry. But you didn’t argue with him

Meanwhile, Gerry had chatted animatedly to Dan, who was waiting patiently for all Gerry’s ‘Tapas 9’ friends to arrive for their tennis session. When Russell and Matt arrived at the tennis court, Gerry had explained that he was unable to play:

“Look, sorry I can’t play, my Achilles tendon is really playing up”.

“Where’s David?”, Matt Oldfield had asked.

“Er, he’s gone up to our apartment to check that Kate is O.K…erm, no, he’s gone up to ask Kate to come down with the kids and watch us’, Gerry had mumbled.

“Is Kate O.K.?, Russell O’Brien had asked.

“Yes. No…er, well, I’m not sure, it’s just that I’ve not seen her since she went off jogging nearly two hour ago. Anyway, David’ll be back in a moment or two, I expect”.

He couldn’t remember what time David had returned to the tennis court. It must have been nearly seven-ish, as best as he could now remember. Matt and Russell were in play with Dan.

David had swung open the door to the tennis court and marched up to Gerry. By now he had changed into his tennis gear.

“Kate’s fine”, he had reported. “She took the kids of somewhere for a ‘high tea’ with a couple of the nannies, then she went back to the apartment to put the children to bed. I saw the kids, all ready for bed. Oh, they were all tired after a hard day, but they did look so angelic, you lucky man. Kate looks a bit exhausted, though, she said could you go up now and help to bath them and perhaps read them a bed-time story”.

“O.K., Gerry had replied. “I’ll go up and see her. Sorry about my Achilles injury. Maybe you can get someone else to play in my place, one of the other guests, perhaps?”

“See you at the Tapas, then”, said David.

“O.K. – ‘bout half eight as usual”

When Gerry had got back to his apartment, it was just they way Dave had described it. The children were already changed and were in their night clothes. Kate had already got the kids in their pyjamas by 6.30pm. She looked a bit tired. But she wasn’t in a mood, anyway. “How do your match with Julian go?”, she’d asked.

“Had to abandon it shortly after you went for your jog. My Achilles tendon was really playing me up. I couldn’t get around the court. So we finished it at one set all. Maybe I’ll finish it tomorrow. Where’s that tube of ‘Deep Heat’?”.

“In the bottom drawer, along with our passports”.

Gerry was now remembering the moments just after he returned to his apartment. Once again, he recalled how David Smith had covered the events between then and 8.30pm, when he and Kate had gone off to the Tapas bar.

Smith may have skated over quite a few details in his account of the afternoon’s and early evening’s events. But as to what happened after 7.00pm, Gerry had obviously given David Smith a much fuller account. Once again, he recalled what Smith had said, word for word:

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT

Around 4.30pm, Kate, who had been watching with her usual rapt attention and admiration for her husband’s skills, suddenly said: ‘I’m going for a jog’, and headed for the beach. Gerry had shouted out: ‘Will you collect the kids?”

Kate had replied: “Yeah, I’ll see to it. See ya later”. There had been something niggling him about Kate’s manner. When she had said: “I’m going for a jog”, he detected a hint of anger. She was always so keen to watch him play tennis. Could she have been bored watching him play tennis day after day? – he wondered.

No, of course not. He and Kate never rowed about anything. They were so perfect as a couple. Perhaps it was the heat? No. it was early May and not yet that hot on the Portuguese Atlantic coast. It preyed on his mind as he carried on playing tennis with Julian. But soon his niggling Achilles tendon began to really hurt. At 3-0 down in the deciding 3rd set, Gerry spoke to Julian as they changed ends. “Look, Julian. my Achilles tendon is really playing up. I’m going to have to stop. It’s your match”.

Julian had been very sporting. “No, Gerry. Let’s say it’s still one set all. We’ll have the decider another day, when your Achilles tendon’s cleared up”. The two had parted. Julian had said: “Good game. See you down the Tapas bar later?” “Yep”, Gerry had replied. “Be there around 8.30pm after we’ve put the kids down”.

Gerry, more than a touch dejected that this Achilles injury had flared up again on holiday, decided to sit down on the tennis court and just wait for Kate and the kids to come back from the Kid’s Club.

At this point, Gerry recalled that he had given a rather different version of events to one David James Smith, a journalist for ‘The Times’. The Editor of ‘The Times’ had even boasted that Smith’s article was ‘the most in-depth investigation into the case so far’. Gerry thought back to the words used in the article. As usual, he had an almost photographic recall of the article, which by now he’d re-read 37 times in an effort to memorise it. The part that covered the afternoon and early evening had run as follows:

QUOTE from ‘The Times’:

“Gerry had knocked up at the start of the 4.30pm tennis-drills session, but had decided not to exacerbate an injury to his Achilles tendon, so had dropped out and waited around by the courts until the children came back from the kids’ clubs at 5pm for tea. That had been one of the most enjoyable times of the holiday, all the children together for tea, then the adults playing with them afterwards. That had been one of the most enjoyable times of the holiday, all the children together for tea, then the adults playing with them afterwards.

UNQUOTE

On reflection, he pondered, he had summarised a bit too much of his recollections of 3rd May for ‘The Times’ journalist who, anxious to make a name for himself, had not asked any penetrating questions at all. Indeed, reflected Gery, he had seemed almost in awe of him as he scribbled down whatever he’d said. Why had he given David Smith the impression that he’d started to play tennis at 4.30pm and had to give up before they’d finished ‘knocking up’?

Actually, of course, he’d been playing tennis from 3.30pm onwards, not 4.30pm. He didn’t know why he’d said that the ‘tennis-drills’ session had begun at 4.30pm .He’d played with Julian from 3.30pm until around 4.40pm, and then of course there had been that later ‘social tennis’ session beginning at 6.00pm, which he’d been unable to join. He now regretted having authorised his friends in Team McCann to have said, last September, that he and his ‘Tapas 9’ friends had been taking part in a ‘social tennis’ event between 5.30pm and 7.00pm. Maybe he had been a bit confused at the time with all those negative and untrue stories that the ‘Daily Express’ had been running that September.

Maybe he’d also got the times muddled up a bit when he was conversing with David Smith.

Gerry had told ‘The Times’ journalist that he ‘had knocked up at the start of the 4.30pm session…but had decided not to exacerbate an injury to his Achilles tendon, so had dropped out and waited around by the courts until the children came back from the kids’ clubs at 5pm for tea’.

He had to admit that he’d not explained himself very clearly here. He hadn’t mentioned palying for over an hour between 3.30pm and 4.40pm. He’d also given the impression that the children had indeed come back to the tennis courts from the ‘Kids Club’ for tea at 5.00pm when in fact they hadn’t. Kate and the children had apparently stopped off for ‘high tea’ with the nannies somewhere on the way back without telling him. Nor had he mentioned to David Smith that, in fact, he had been ‘hanging around the tennis courts’ for nearly 2½ hours, from 4.40pm to nearly 7.00pm – besides playing tennis with Julian. Yes, that must be right, he reflected, he must have been on the tennis courts for a full 3½ hours.

He had even forgotten to mention to David Smith that at about 6.20pm he’d asked David Payne to check on Kate to see if she was all right. Or, he wondered, had he asked David just to call on Kate and ask her to bring the children down to watch him play tennis, another version that had appeard in a different newspaper. Why would he have said that, he wondered, if in fact I had been unable to play any more tennis? Why would I ask Kate and the children to come down to watch me?

Oh dear! Yes, he had definitely played tennis. And he had certainly had had that Achilles tendon injury – though the ‘Deep Heat’ he’d rubbed on his ankle that night had miraculously helped his ankle to fully recover within hours, so that, the day after Madeleine had disappeared, he could go with Kate for a comforting jog.

These contradictory timings were beginning to do his head in. He gupled down another swig of wine, noticing briefly, as he did so, a large dark grey cloud above him, increasing steadily in size.

He then remembered one more thing. David Smith’s article had not even mentioned – namely, Kate going jogging between 4.30pm and 5.20pm. How on earth had he missed that bit out? – especially as he’d put it in his statement to the police, and so had most of his ‘Tapas 9’ friends, who claimed to have seen Kate jogging and to have waved to her at around 5.20/5.25pm. He just couldn’t understand it.

Still, he consoled himself with the thought that he must have given David Smith a brief summary which Smith must have thought was enough for his purposes, though he had to admit that the Smith article was very short on detail.

His thoughts returned to the moment Kate had gone off to go jogging – just after 4.30pm that fateful day.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT

By about ten past nine, the children were ready for the crèche. As usual, they went happily into the ‘Kid’s Club’, as it was called. First Gerry had taken Madeleine down to the club; then, 20 minutes later, Kate had gone down with the twins, who took longer to get ready.

‘See you later’, Kate and Gerry had said cheerily to the twins as they had sauntered off down to spend an hour or two on the beach. It was absolutely clear by now that Madeleine and Sean couldn’t have been upset by their spot of crying last night – if indeed they really had been crying. Perhaps they had even made it up, pondered Gerry. They had obviously forgotten all about it, anyway.

Gerry couldn’t recall what they’d done next. It had been quite a sunny day, though not that warm, so probably they had sat around in the sun, perhaps wandered into town to do some shopping and have a mid-morning coffee by the harbour somewhere. Or perhaps they’d played tennis? No, that was the afternoon.

Then he suddenly remembered. Of course! That nice Bridget O’Donnell had written it up in her fine article for ‘The Guardian’, just before Christmas. Now, what was it she’d said? Ah yes! He remembered. This was what she’d written:

“Earlier that day there had been tennis lessons for the children, with some of the parents watching proudly as their girls ran across the court chasing tennis balls. They took photos. Madeleine must have been there, but I couldn’t distinguish her from the others. They all looked the same – all blonde, all pink and pretty.

“Jes and Gerry were playing on the next court. Afterwards, we sat by the pool and Gerry and Kate talked enthusiastically to the tennis coach about the following day’s tournament. We watched them idly – they had a lot of time for people, they listened.

“Then Gerry stood up and began showing Kate his new tennis stroke. She looked at him and smiled. “You wouldn’t be interested if I talked about my tennis like that,” Jes said to me. We watched them some more. Kate was calm, still, quietly beautiful; Gerry was confident, proud, silly, strong. She watched his boyish demonstration with great seriousness and patience. That was the last time I saw them that day. Jes saw Gerry that night”.

Gerry mused. Yes, all those young girls playing tennis, they had indeed all been ‘blonde, pink and pretty’. And, yes, O’Donnell, bless her, was right! She’d said: ‘They all looked the same”. How true that was. Yes, how very true that was. Perhaps, he reasoned, that was why, to date, a total of 5,783 people had reported seeing Madeleine in countries as far away as Spain, Belgium, Germany, Morocco, Malta and even Venezuela. Oh, and now he came to think of it, wasn’t there a ‘sighting’ in Brazil? And another in the U.S.A.? And Croatia, yes, and Bosnia. Or was it called Bosnia-Herzegovina? The cost had been phenomenal – millions of pounds of police time and efforts had been spent across the globe investigating these sightings of small, blonde girls. It was not something Gerry and Kate ever stopped to think about, however. There were, after all, much more important considerations, like which company would do the next TV interview or documentary and what their fee – which would of course be donated in full to the Helping to Find Madeleine Trust Fund – would be.

Dear old Bridget had really done them proud. His mind dwelt on and relished the compliments. “They had a lot of time for people, they listened”. It was almost like music in Gerry’s ears. ‘The listening couple’, he thought. ‘The couple who care enough to listen’. ‘The couple who always had time’. ‘The caring, listening couple’. He even softly whispered the words to himself: “They had a lot of time for people, they listened”. The sound comforted him, and obliterated any reminder of the fact that he hadn’t been there to hear Madeleine screaming and sobbing: ‘Daddy, Daddy’ for 75 minutes on the Tuesday evening. If, that is, that old bat Pamela Fenn really did hear what she claimed to have heard.

And Bridget had described Kate as “Calm, still, quietly beautiful”. He paused. ‘Calm’. ‘Still’. Yes, that was his Kate all right. The Portuguese police were obviously lying through their sardine-munching teeth when they had claimed that Kate had twice gone berserk, once when the police came to search their rented house in Praia da Luz and again when she was interviewed under caution in September. Lies, lies, lies. She was ‘calm, still’. And what about all those newspaper headlines: ‘Kate fury at this’, ‘Kate fury at that’? Just more lies.

And he visibly beamed as he recalled how Kate had practically drooled over his brilliant new tennis stroke. It had been the so-called ‘drop shot’. The technique of the drop shot, which had been perfected by the Spanish tennis ace Manuel Santana – or ‘Manolo’ as he was better known – in the 1960s, was to make your stroke look like a powerful backhand drive, but at the last minute you dropped the racquet slightly to produce heavy backspin on the ball. The result was that your opponent would anticipate a drive coming right down to the baseline, but instead, the heavy backspin would cause the ball to lob gently over the net and drop a few feet the other side of the net. The hapless opponent would be stranded the other side of the baseline, and would only be aware that it was a drop shot at the very last minute. The opponent would then make a mad dash to the net, hoping to reach the bal before it bounced twice. But it would be futile. The opponent had been deceived by the back spin.

Yes, drooled Gerry. Heavy back spin to deceive your opponent and make him look a fool, and win a valuable point. He loved it!

In fact, he thought, the principle of heavy back spin to deceive opponents could have quite a wide application.

And, quite rightly, Kate had smiled and admired, admired and smiled. Bridget had written that Jes had said to her: “You wouldn’t be interested if I talked about my tennis like that”. A shame, thought Gerry, that Jes wasn’t as brilliant as him and therefore Bridget was less admiring of her partner than Kate was of him. No wonder so many of their relatives and friends had described him and Kate s ‘the perfect couple’.

Back he went in his mind to collecting the children from the crèche, at about 12.30pm, as usual. They had taken them back to the apartment for a spot of lunch, and afterwards gone to the poolside to relax.

There was, of course, proof of their being by the poolside that lunch-time, namely the famous ‘last photo’ of Gerry with Amelie and Sean, taken at precisely 2.29pm. Well, the time on the photo actually showed 1.29pm, but allowing for summer time it was really taken at 2.29pm, European summer time.

Gerry brought that photograph clearly into focus in his mind. He had seen it ten thousand times, and knew every detail about it.

He was wearing sunglasses, looking at the camera, and appearing preoccupied and glum. Just as he had done on that ’bus trip to the plane, where his moodiness had been noted by one of his cheerful holiday friends. ‘Cheer up Gerry, we’re on ’oliday’, one of his Doctor friends had said, trying to liven him up.

The video of this ’bus trip had been posted on YouTube. The video camera, he recalled, had been held by Fiona Payne. But what had possessed her to put it up on YouTube? On the video, Gerry had been heard to reply to his Doctor friend: ‘F___ off’, or that’s certainly what it sounded like. It had miffed him greatly that one of his party had posted that clip up on to the Internet. It didn’t portray him in a very good light – moodily swearing in front of the ladies of the party and all the children.

Gerry couldn’t bring to mind why he’d been in such a bad mood at the airport, though he’d also been heard to say: “We’re not here to enjoy ourselves’. Nor could he remember why, at 2.29pm on Thursday 3rd May, he had also been staring glumly into the camera. Sean was sat beside him, looking ahead. Kate had taken the photograph, with Amelie beside her. And then there was Madeleine. How thoroughly happy and contented she looked on that last photo. She was clearly tickled pink by something amusing happening somewhere to her left. Her tongue was slightly sticking out, in that involuntary facial gesture which speaks of a child whose pleasure in something is so great that they cannot fully contain themselves. Her feet were dangling into the pool. Her hair had a bead in it, though some had mistakenly thought it was a large elastic band.

It was scandalous that people thought he had photoshopped Madeleine into that photograph. Disgusting in fact. Yet, though he scratched his head and thought about it, he still could not account for why it had taken him three whole weeks to produce that photo to the Portuguese police – and only upon his return from a two-day trip to England. People had accused him of taking Kate’s digital camera, on which that last ’photo had been taken, back to England. Well, so he had. But not for the purpose of falsifying a photograph. Maybe he had just been too busy campaigning, arranging to visit the White House and the Pope, etc. to bother about the tiny detail of getting out a photo of Madeleine on the day she had been abducted.

He sighed as that last photographic image of Madeleine remained fixed in his mind. He reached over for his glass and hurriedly took another gulp before emptying some more win into it. As he did so, he noticed a bit of a change in the weather. The wispy cirrus clouds he had gazed at earlier were being replaced at quite a pace by a layer of much lower, strato-cumulus clouds, which made an attractive pattern against the western portion of sky. In the distance, he noted a grey-white lenticular-shaped cloud. He thought nothing of it; the sun was still shining brightly, and it was hot. There was still no sign of Kate.

They’d taken the children back to the crèche immediately after that last photo was taken, unusually arriving about 10 minutes late. They’d then gone back to the pool for a while, where they absorbed the heat of the day, before he and Kate had drifted across to the tennis court, where he was due to play tennis with Julian. He and Kate had arrived at the tennis court around half past three, and Julian had arrived shortly afterwards. Kate, as usual, had been happy to just sit and watch and simply admire his increasing prowess at tennis.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT

He and Kate and his ‘Tapas 9’ friends had been religiously checking that the children were O.K. every half-an-hour. Why hadn’t she put this in her article? Hadn’t she noticed?

Gerry recalled how, on 2nd May, they’d put the children to bed as usual about 7.00pm to 7.30pm – and then, in accordance with their normal holiday routine, off they had gone to the Tapas bar, as they had done every evening, at around 8.30pm. Once it was clear, of course, that the children were all soundly asleep.

They’d been with the children for two hours in the morning, two hours at lunch-time, and another two hours or so in the evening. It was Kate and Gerry’s holiday too. The evening was when the real holiday fun started.

And what an evening it had been, recalled Gerry. He had been at his riotous best, especially after they’d cracked open an extra 4 bottles of wine they’d ordered just after 11 o’clock. Gerry had had a very good evening indeed.

As usual he was the centre of attention and had made everyone laugh at his string of jokes, some of them on the blue side, as usual. It was just like Bridget O’Donnell had described him in the article in the ‘Guardian’ published just before Christmas: “confident, proud, silly, strong”. That sounded about right. But – ‘silly’?

They’d come back from the Tapas bar at midnight. The children were of course fast asleep – not that they ever bothered to check, it just wasn’t necessary, as they slept so soundly.

It was somewhat of a surprise for Gerry when he had learnt, later, that Kate and he were supposed to have had a disagreement that night. Apparently, Kate had told the Portuguese police that she was upset at being ignored that evening at the Tapas bar. So – apparently after he had fallen asleep – she had climbed into the empty bed in the children’s room, and not slept with him, as some kind of protest.

True, he had had a fair amount to drink that night. He couldn’t actually remember ignoring her. It must have been a storm in a tea-cup. He thought Kate had perhaps been unwise to mention it to the police as they just seized on everything. But then it helped to explain why there had been another made-up bed in the children’s room the night Madeleine disappeared – which looked as though it had been slept in. The police had apparently been asking questions about it.

Well, nothing had been wrong on the morning of May 3rd, he reflected, since, when he woke up, Kate was already getting the children ready for breakfast as usual. He hadn’t even been aware that his wife had slept in a separate bed that night.

It was around 8.30am, as far as he could remember, when he had sat down for his breakfast. Kate had made him a coffee with the jar she’d bought on Monday in the Baptista supermarket, and put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. Just as the two slices of toast jumped up from the toaster, Madeleine suddenly piped up:

“Mummy, Daddy. Why weren’t you there when me and Sean were crying last night?”

You could have knocked the pair of us down with a feather, thought Gerry. Crying? Last night? When? “What do you mean, crying?”, they had both asked Madeleine, almost in unison. But before Madeleine could answer, she had got herself down from the table, and skipped off happily to play with her toys. She didn’t seem at all bothered. She was just as happy as usual. Whatever it was about couldn’t have been that serious.

One other strange thing suddenly struck him. If she had been that upset about her and Sean being on their own and crying the previous night, why on earth had Madeleine waited until breakfast before mentioning it? Why hadn’t she spoken to Kate about it the moment she had woken up, if it was that important? ‘Oh, well,’ Gerry had thought at then time, ‘children are very hard to understand, sometimes’.

Nevertheless, as responsible parents, they discussed the matter together as they were clearing up together after breakfast.

“What does she mean, crying?’, Kate had asked Gerry. “When could that have happened?” “Perhaps it was when she was having a bath or something?”, Gerry had said.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT