Madeleine (29 page)

As soon as we’d finished with
Woman’s Hour
, Gerry and I were approached by Steve Kingstone, a BBC journalist. He appeared genuinely worried. ‘Do you know what they’re saying? They’re saying that you killed Madeleine.’

I’m not sure if there was anything in the world that could have been more offensive to us. We agreed there and then to do an interview with the BBC’s Richard Bilton for pooled broadcast. Gerry, keeping his fury in check, was calm and very firm. ‘If the police have evidence that Madeleine has come to any harm, then we as her parents have a right to be informed,’ he said in that interview. ‘If we have to go back to square one and start again, then let’s do it.’

Wednesday 8 August. We had an early start to see off my mum, dad and Uncle Brian, who were flying home. As our car still hadn’t been returned to us by the police we enlisted the help of a lovely taxi driver we’d got to know in recent weeks. Despite the crowd of photographers, we manoeuvred the children into the Ocean Club without incident before heading for the Tivoli Hotel in Lagos to be interviewed for the BBC’s spiritually based magazine programme
Heaven and Earth
. Talking about our faith at that point, as we teetered on the edge of a new precipice, was a little surreal, but somehow, against the odds, while it was taking a battering we were both managing to cling on to it.

In my wobbly moments, I sometimes wondered whether religion was no more than a crutch to be leaned on when the going gets tough. Maybe it had been invented merely to maintain order in society, promoting compassion and justice and providing solace in the bad times. If so, that didn’t make it a bad thing, just not what I’d been led to believe it was. ‘Maybe religion is just for the weak,’ I remember saying to Trish during one dark spell of doubt. ‘Kate, do you think Auntie Janet is weak?’ she replied. Janet has great faith in God, much deeper than mine. She is also one of the strongest people I know. Trisha didn’t need to say any more.

Back at the villa, Justine phoned to tell us that Alex Woolfall had been in touch on behalf of Mark Warner. He was so sorry, but he had no choice but to ask us to stop using the Toddler Club. Apparently, several Ocean Club guests had complained about the media scrum outside the reception entrance and, of course, we were the reason it was there. I was so upset. The injustice of it all was starting to get to me. Poor Amelie and Sean. They were the ones who would suffer. We’d tried so hard to provide them with stability, to make sure they had other children to play with and lots of activity, and now even this was to be taken away from them.

My immediate reaction was to angrily blame these guests for their selfishness. But eventually I realized they were quite right to complain. Like us, they didn’t want their children subjected to this frankly pretty frightening mob. No, it was the media who were at fault. As it turned out, Sean and Amelie were able to return before too long. We worked out a system whereby one of the nannies would meet us at the twenty-four-hour reception, away from the other parents and children, and take the twins on to the crèche from there.

João Carlos returned our car at lunchtime (albeit with a piece missing from the boot). He said that Neves and Encarnação were ready to see us later that afternoon. Thank goodness! Finally someone was going to explain to us exactly what was happening. João told us he would come and meet us at 3pm near the police station, to avoid the media – we wouldn’t be going to the British Consulate this time. On our way to Portimão we dropped Auntie Janet, Sean and Amelie at the home of Susan and Haynes Hubbard.

If we’d wondered about the change of venue for our regular informal meeting, the reason for it soon became clear: this
wasn’t
our regular informal meeting. We were taken to an upstairs room at the police station where we were greeted by Luís Neves and Guilhermino Encarnação. Our interpreter this time was a police officer, not Proconsul Angela Morado, as was usually the case. The whole demeanour of Neves and Encarnação was different. They looked serious and cold.

There had been a ‘shift’ in the investigation, they said. They had always been optimistic that Madeleine was alive, but now things had changed. Almost instantaneously I could feel my breathing pattern altering and that familiar constriction in my throat. Gerry asked if any evidence had come to light to suggest that Madeleine was dead but they wouldn’t reply. There was a lot of frowning going on which, combined with the language barrier, made it less obvious that they weren’t answering us. Gerry was then asked to leave the room. Now the sirens in my head were deafening. I was on my own and afraid. Please God, let my Madeleine be OK.

Tell us about that night, they said. Tell us everything that happened after the children went to bed. I gave them every detail I could remember, as I had before, but this time they responded by just staring at me and shaking their heads. I was reeling with confusion, disbelief and panic. What the hell was going on? Evidently not satisfied with my account, they pressed me. Was there anything else I wanted to add? Anything else unusual that had occurred that night?

Of course there wasn’t. If there had been I would have told them on 3 May. I’d recounted absolutely everything and anything – more than they wanted or needed to know, probably, just in case some triviality I recalled might be significant. How could they think I would hold something back that might help my daughter? Why were they asking me this?
Why?

Neves stated bluntly that they didn’t believe my version of events. It ‘didn’t fit’ with what they knew. Didn’t fit?
What did
they
know?
I was sobbing now, well past the stage of silent tears and stifled sniffs. I began to wail hysterically, drawing breath in desperate gasps.

Why did I think Madeleine had been alive when she was taken from the apartment? they persisted. I explained between sobs that there had been nothing to suggest otherwise; no indication that she might have come to harm. Had I ever considered that she may be dead? Yes, of course. Early on that was all I thought, all the time: that some paedophile had grabbed her, abused her and later killed her. Then I’d begun to wonder if she was being held by pornographers, I told them, or had been taken for someone who wanted a child.

I was becoming more and more distressed and more and more scared. I wanted Gerry. Still they pushed me. They proposed that when I’d put Madeleine to bed that night, it wasn’t actually the last time I’d seen her. But it was.
It
was!
I felt I was being bullied, and I suppose I was. I assume these tactics were deliberate: knock her off balance by telling her that her daughter is dead and get her to confess. Because I was in no doubt now that they were trying to make me say I’d killed Madeleine or knew what had happened to her. I might be naive but I’m not stupid.

On and on it went. They tried to convince me I’d had a blackout – a ‘loss of memory episode’, I think they called it. My denials, answers and pleas fell on deaf ears. This was their theory and they wanted to shoehorn me into it, end of story. At last they seemed to decide that the interview was over. They told me I could ring them any time, day or night, to give them the information they were waiting for.

I was allowed to spend a couple of minutes with Gerry, but I don’t think he was able to get much sense out of me. Then it was his turn to be interrogated. He managed to remain a little calmer than I had but he was still visibly upset and shaken afterwards. He gave the police his account of the events of 3 May and the reasons why he didn’t believe Madeleine had been killed in the apartment. Through his tears he pleaded with the two men: ‘Do you have evidence that Madeleine is dead? We’re her parents. You have to tell us.’

‘It’s coming,’ Neves told him. ‘It’s coming!’

Outside the room, I was praying – begging prayers. I was beginning to come unstuck. But if I thought the police had finished with me, I was mistaken. Before long I was ordered back into the room to join Gerry for round three.

Once again Gerry wanted to know if the case had now become a murder inquiry. The answer was indirect: ‘You can probably guess that from our lack of response.’ In a slightly threatening manner, Luís asked why I wasn’t looking him straight in the eye. There was no reason, other than that I was incapable of looking at anyone properly: my own eyes were so swollen and sore that I was struggling to keep them from closing completely. Finally, Gerry tried to establish when – and if – we would be having another meeting with them. ‘The next time we meet it will be across the table.’ The message behind this rather Delphic statement was clear: there would be no more informal meetings.

Outside the police station we were surrounded by the press. There was no need to ask how they knew we were there. On our way back to Luz we had a call from Angela Morado, who had been informed by the police that her services would not be required at our meeting that afternoon. She’d naturally been concerned by this departure from the norm. Gerry spoke to her. I was too upset to talk to anybody.

We drove first to the Hubbards’ to collect Sean, Amelie and my aunt. When we calmed down a little and told them what had happened, we were presented with several shocked faces. Susan suggested I went and had a bath as I was still pretty shaky. In her bathroom I leaned over the washbasin and peered into the mirror. My eyes were narrow slits in fat, purple lids. My blotchy face seemed to be ageing by the day. Where are you, Madeleine? What is happening? What’s going to become of us all?

Gerry’s brother and his family arrived from the UK a short while later. We had to ask them to get a taxi from the airport and then smuggle them through the side entrance of the villa in order to shield our young niece and nephew from the media. Not quite the welcome they’d been expecting. It was, inevitably, a difficult evening. Gerry made several phone calls in search of help and advice, and we spoke to Alan Pike, who was sympathetic, understanding and rational, as always.

We awoke the next morning feeling deprived of sleep and generally quite awful, but Gerry, at least, managed to kick into gear and get on the phone again. Once he’d talked to Angela Morado and the British Embassy in Lisbon, we took refuge in Nossa Senhora da Luz for fifteen minutes. That day and the next we had a host of interviews scheduled to mark the hundredth day since Madeleine was taken from us. My immediate instinct was to cancel them all. I was tired out and there were more pressing issues to be dealt with. But that would have broken one of our rules: keep your focus and don’t let others push you off track.

We were doing these interviews for Madeleine. If ever there was an extra incentive to mobilize every remaining shred of strength, this was it. Gerry had not initially liked our search being described as a ‘campaign’. Not only did it suggest a long-term quest but the military imagery grated. Yet here we were, one hundred days later, involved in skirmishes on several fronts. The term was beginning to seem more appropriate by the day.

The interviews were all taking place in a villa on the Meia Praia in Lagos. It was a terrible day: both the atmosphere and the line of questioning followed by the press were intensely antagonistic. Their focus, dictated by the behaviour of both the police and some sections of the media over the past few days, was very different from ours. We wanted to talk about one hundred days without Madeleine, the search, and the launch of ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ on YouTube; they wanted to talk about blood and dogs.

It’s all a bit of a blur now, but I do remember one journalist persisting sceptically with a familiar thread: ‘Why has Madeleine got all this attention? How have you managed to run this campaign when you have lost your daughter?’ Gerry and I both replied, ‘Well, what would you do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, what would you do if this was your child? Would you do nothing?’

He didn’t reply. We felt like two lone figures with catapults fighting an army.

What made it worse was our distress that all the time and effort we’d put into publicizing the hundred-day landmark and the plight of other missing children was being trampled underfoot. It was exasperating and the disrespect and injustice we felt on Madeleine’s behalf were very hard to stomach.

Later, Angela and Cecilia Edwards, who was taking over from Bill Henderson as British consul, came over to the villa to discuss the recent problems with the media and the way we had been treated by the police. Alan Pike also flew out from the UK on a mercy mission. We were very grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with him face to face for a dose of his calm, considered advice. It all helped to strengthen our armour.

15

ONE HUNDRED DAYS

Saturday, 11 August 2007. Here we were. Day One Hundred: a day we’d hoped we’d never reach. There was a horrible, sad inevitability about it. It was a day when we would be buoyed up by loving kindness one minute and brought crashing down the next.

At 11am, Gerry and I walked down to the little church we loved so much, where Susan and Haynes Hubbard and Auntie Janet, with the help of many others, had organized a One Hundred Days of Hope service for Madeleine and missing children everywhere.

On this occasion we saw the massive media presence outside as a positive sign. They were not here today about blood and dogs, and it was important to us to show the world that we weren’t giving up or giving in. The service was beautiful and uplifting. The church was full, with many Portuguese people among the congregation, which mattered very much to us. Haynes led the service. He is such a strong man, his trust in God unwavering, especially when the going gets tough. At one point during his sermon he made the point that it would be the easy option for everyone to turn away from Gerry and me right now. What we badly needed at this time, he declared, was their support.