Madeleine (15 page)

With the new batch of incoming holidaymakers more of our relatives appeared: Gerry’s mum, Eileen, his brother John and sister Trisha, with her husband Sandy, plus Michael, my cousin Anne-Marie’s husband. Gerry had asked his youngest sister, Phil, to stay in Glasgow to be the focus in the UK for the family and inquiries from the media, who were already approaching friends, relations and more or less anyone to whom we’d ever said hello in the street for information and opinions.

Mark Warner had put two more apartments at our disposal to accommodate everyone who wanted to be there, and it felt good to be wrapped in this familiar blanket of support, although inevitably, the arrival of more family members unleashed a fresh wave of tears. It was particularly hard to bear the distress of our parents. Witnessing our mums being torn apart was absolutely heartbreaking, as was the sight of my dad, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, sobbing profusely, shaking violently, his condition exacerbated by his state of mind, and virtually collapsing on to the couch beside me. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve let you down. I’m so sorry, so sorry,’ he kept repeating. Of course he hadn’t let me down. He just felt utterly helpless, like the rest of us. The fact that our parents have had to endure such an ordeal at this stage of their lives is a crime in itself.

I remember slumping on one of the dining chairs in the apartment, looking out through the window over the sea. I had an overwhelming urge to swim out across the ocean, as hard and as fast as I could; to swim and swim and swim until I was so far out and so exhausted I could just allow the water to pull me under and relieve me of this torment. I wasn’t keeping that desire to myself, either. I was shouting it out to anyone who happened to be in the room. Both this urge and the expression of it were, I suppose, an outlet for the crucifying anguish.

I also felt a compulsion to run up to the top of the Rocha Negra. Somehow, inflicting physical pain on myself seemed to be the only possible way of escaping my internal pain. The other truly awful manifestation of what I was feeling was a macabre slideshow of vivid pictures in my brain that taunted me relentlessly. I was crying out that I could see Madeleine lying, cold and mottled, on a big grey stone slab. Looking back, seeing me like this must have been terrible for my friends and relatives, and particularly my parents, but I couldn’t help myself. And all this needed to come out. I dread to think what it might have done to me if it hadn’t.

As the sun set on another day and still there was no news, Gerry gave a further statement to the waiting press. Again I went outside and stood with him, my arm linked through his, but left him to read out our message. There wasn’t a great deal we could say: we thanked everyone in Portugal and the UK, said we were pleased that the FLOs were now working with the Portuguese police, appealed for any information that might lead to Madeleine’s safe return and thanked the media for respecting our privacy, especially Sean and Amelie’s.

That evening the local Catholic priest, Father José Manuel Pacheco, who had returned to Luz, came across to our apartment to introduce himself and offer his support. My first impression was of a very cheery chap. Nothing wrong with that, but at the time his smiling face seemed out of place in the grief-laden atmosphere of our apartment.

The next day, 6 May, was Sunday, and despite my fragility I was determined to go to Mass. The discovery that it was also Mothers’ Day in Portugal made it even more relevant and important. From the moment Madeleine had gone, I’d turned instinctively to God and to Mary, feeling a deep need to pray, and to get as many other people as possible to pray, too. I believed it would make a difference. Although in the early days I struggled to comprehend what had happened to Madeleine, and to us, I’ve never believed it was God’s fault, or that He ‘allowed’ it to happen. I was just confused that He had apparently not heeded the prayer I’d offered every night for my family: ‘Thank you God for bringing Gerry, Madeleine, Sean and Amelie into my life. Please keep them all safe, healthy and happy. Amen.’
Please keep them
all
safe.
It must be said that when I’d prayed for their safety I’d been thinking: please don’t let them fall off something and bang their heads, or please don’t let them be involved in a car accident. I’d never considered anything as horrific as my child being
stolen
. But I had kind of assumed my prayer would cover every eventuality. Now, in spite of not knowing where Madeleine was or who she was with, I tried to reassure myself that God was still keeping her safe.

We all, family and friends, went to Mass at the local church, Nossa Senhora da Luz, in the centre of the village. Given the state we were in, and with the waiting press primed to follow our every move, on this occasion we were taken down by car. Alex Woolfall, well aware that we were not going to be able to go anywhere without a huge media entourage, had decided he had better accompany us, too.

I felt desensitized to everything around me. Nothing except Madeleine seemed to matter any more. I could see, in an abstract way, that the simple church, painted yellow and white, was beautiful. That first Sunday its beauty didn’t reach my heart, but in the following weeks I would grow to love Nossa Senhora da Luz and it would become a precious sanctuary for me.

The little church was very full that day. Even though we were sitting at the front when Father José – or Padre Zé, as he was known locally – appeared, it took us a while to work out at which point the Mass actually started. One of the local ladies got up and adjusted his robes, giving him a bit of a dust-down, almost as if he was an untidy schoolboy. It was all quite different from Mass at home. I heard Michael comment, ‘This is pleasantly chaotic!’ There was something very human and loving about the lack of formality. Padre Zé, whose jolly demeanour had seemed so at odds with our distress the previous evening, was in his element here. He was certainly a character, full of life and passion. Recollections of Kenny Everett in the guise of his singing pastor, Brother Lee Love, would often spring to mind in the coming weeks.

Everybody prayed for Madeleine. A young Portuguese girl presented me with some flowers, as did many of the mums in the congregation. At the end of the Mass, every mother and child came to the front of the church to hug and kiss us. ‘She will be back,’ they told us. Three words were whispered to us over and over again and have remained with us to this day:
esperança
,
força
,
coragem
. Hope, strength, courage. It was incredibly emotional but so, so lovely. We felt totally enfolded and buoyed up by the warm and protective embrace of Nossa Senhora da Luz and her congregation.

Alex was keen for us to leave the church by the side door, where we could be escorted out quickly, past the media and the gathering crowd, but we were so overcome by the warmth shown to us by these people that we didn’t want to run away from them. Alex was to give us so much invaluable guidance, but on that occasion, I think we were probably right to walk out of the main door along with everybody else. At that moment I suddenly felt I wanted to speak to everyone, to thank them for what they had done for us, and as we approached the few steps leading down into the street, that’s exactly what I did. It’s all a bit hazy now – it was then, for that matter. I know I was crying. The fact that I said anything at all, especially given my antipathy to speaking in public, is a measure of how important it felt to me to do so, and every word came from the heart.

Gerry and I would just like to express our sincere gratitude and thanks to everybody but particularly the local community here who have offered so much support. We couldn’t have asked for more. I just want to say thank you.

Please continue to pray for Madeleine. She’s lovely.

Within a very short space of time, the local people would sweep Gerry and me under their wing and welcome us into their community. We will always be grateful to them for their extraordinary kindness and compassion. They will probably never know just how much they bolstered us during those desperate early days. We continued to attend the Sunday Mass at Nossa Senhora da Luz and the empathy and support we found there never wavered. The words of solace and inspiration, the embraces, prayers, flowers and pictures from the children kept coming, week in, week out. Madeleine was never forgotten and neither were we.

The following Friday, on the eve of Madeleine’s birthday, a youth vigil would be held at the church. Many people wore green, the colour of hope in Portugal, or carried olive branches. There was also plenty of yellow, the colour that has come to symbolize hope for the safe return of a loved one in the US and latterly in Britain, too. It was an amazingly uplifting experience. Towards the end of the service, we all took hold of two lengths of yarn, one yellow, one green, which bound us together as we sang a Taizé chant: ‘
Nada nos separará … do amor de Deus
’ – ‘Nothing will separate us … from God’s love.’ Once again it felt as if the whole congregation was underpinning us, sharing our burden. On that occasion we came out of the church actually smiling. Thankfully, we hadn’t quite forgotten how! We would soon adopt those two colours in our campaign to find our daughter.

That first Sunday saw two further arrivals in Luz: my childhood friends Michelle and Nicky. Both wanted to be with me, and both were naturally very upset, for Madeleine and for me. Michelle, seeing my pain, struggled to contain her own emotions and needed support herself. Nicky’s empathy manifested itself in more practical ways – she was more likely to jump up and ask what she could do. Perhaps that was her way of coping. It was good to have them both there, even if it was just to hold them, or be held by them, when I needed it.

So grateful were we to have our nearest and dearest around us, we failed to notice that our ballooning party of supporters was becoming unwieldy. It took Alan Pike, who was keeping a watchful eye on us and our family and friends, to gently draw our attention to this situation. Alan was great at seeing and anticipating difficulties and at tackling them before they got out of hand. Everyone had felt helpless at home and had rushed out to Portugal to take care of us and to do what they could to find Madeleine. When they arrived, to their dismay they felt just as helpless – perhaps more so, having made the trip in the hope of achieving something only to discover it was not within their power in Luz any more than it had been in the UK. They wanted to be with us, and we wanted them with us, but the presence of so many loved ones, some of them in almost as bad a state as we were, was proving counter-productive.

Alan pointed out that all our family and friends had their own needs but that ours, Gerry’s and mine, had to be paramount. And we scarcely had the emotional resources to prop ourselves up, let alone anyone else. He planted in our minds the idea of reducing the size of our support group. Some people would be better off at home, he said, in their own surroundings and with their own support networks, and would also be better equipped to assist us from there. He felt, too, that we would function better ourselves within a more streamlined, focused team of helpers.

Listening to Alan, it all seemed so obvious. But of course, it left us with the problem of deciding who should go and who should remain, not to mention telling them. It was clear that our parents were struggling to cope and would have more help at home. Johnny, too, seemed like a fish out of water in Praia da Luz. Michelle was very distressed and had two babies in Liverpool who needed her. After giving the matter some thought, we agreed we would ask Trisha, Sandy, Michael and Nicky to stay on. But I was dreading raising the issue for fear of offending anyone.

When it came to talking about it, however, we discovered that Alan, who had spent time with our friends and family as well as with us, had already broached this subject with them, which made it all much easier. Having said that, we ended up getting down to the nitty-gritty rather earlier than anticipated – that Sunday evening, in fact – and not in the way we had planned, either. Gerry had gone round to one of the other apartments our party was occupying, where apparently something was said that annoyed him, precipitating the discussion we’d intended to hold in a rather calmer atmosphere.

We can laugh about it now, but at the time, Gerry and I couldn’t laugh at anything. After the bombshell had been dropped, Gerry’s mum had turned to my mum and said, ‘Well, Sue – it looks as if we’re on the “Granny Express” home!’ We also heard that after Gerry left, there had been a few cracks about ‘Big Brother evictions’. However bleak the situation, whenever a roomful of Glaswegians and Liverpudlians is gathered together, you can guarantee some gallows humour will break through. Still, a decision had to be made and, as it turned out, it was the right one for everybody.

As some of our family and friends prepared to return to the UK in a day or so, we were beginning to become aware of the help being offered locally. We had that Sunday morning experienced the warmth and sympathy of the Portuguese community and soon we would find supporters among the British expatriates living permanently in Praia da Luz, who organized a search of the area around Luz the next morning, Monday 7 May. The volunteers were joined by most of our family and friends, keen to do something practical to help while Gerry and I were tied up with Andy Bowes and Alex Woolfall.

The remainder of our party – namely my mum and dad, Gerry’s mum and Auntie Norah (I’m probably best not describing them as ‘the oldies’) – walked down to a café near the beach. This day provided us with a good example of one of the disadvantages of a large group: unless it is coordinated with military precision, people do not always know who is doing what and tasks can slip through the net. When lunchtime came, Gerry and I were in the middle of another meeting when we discovered there was no one around to collect Sean and Amelie. We had to interrupt proceedings and go to the Toddler Club ourselves, phoning round our friends and family en route to try to get somebody who wasn’t too far away to come back and give them their lunch. A classic case of too many cooks. Or in this instance, not enough!