Madeleine (11 page)

I was just so overwhelmed by fear, helplessness and frustration, I was hitting out at things, banging my fists on the metal railing of the veranda, trying to expel the intolerable pain inside me. Gerry had been over to the Mini Club above the twenty-four-hour reception, thinking that if Madeleine had been left somewhere, she might possibly make her way back to any place that was familiar to her. Our friends were running to and from the Tapas area, pleading with people to ring the police again from there.

Despite the horror of the situation, some sense of the necessity to approach the crisis calmly and methodically appeared to kick in among our friends as they tried to exert a modicum of control over the chaos. What could be done? What should be done? Aware that we were only an hour and a quarter’s drive from southern Spain, and beyond that lay the borderless continent of Europe – not to mention the short hop across the Strait of Gibraltar to north Africa – David was saying, ‘We need roadblocks set up. The borders to Spain, Morocco and Algiers need to be alerted.’ Russell later asked us for our digital photos of Madeleine and went off somewhere with our camera.

Gerry, meanwhile, was running from pillar to post, urging me to remain in the apartment with the twins so that I’d be on hand if Madeleine was found and brought back there. He’d asked Fiona to stay with me. I was in our bedroom, on my knees beside the bed, just praying and praying and praying, begging God and Our Lady to protect Madeleine and help us find her. They had heard many a supplication from me in the past but none so intense, nor so important, as these.

At some point, Emma Knights, the Mark Warner customer-care manager, came in and sat on the bed near me. She was very nice and tried her best to comfort me, but my grief was so agonizing and so personal that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted her there or not. I didn’t really want anyone around me but people I knew well. Another British woman, in her late forties or early fifties, turned up on our veranda at one point and kept trying to put her arm round me. She was quite drunk and smelled of cigarettes and I remember willing her to go away.

Then a lady appeared on a balcony – I’m fairly certain this was about 11pm, before the police arrived – and, in a plummy voice, inquired, ‘Can someone tell me what all the noise is about?’ I explained as clearly as I was able, given the state I was in, that my little girl had been stolen from her bed, to which she casually responded, ‘Oh, I see,’ almost as if she’d just been told that a can of beans had fallen off a kitchen shelf. I remember feeling both shocked and angry at this woefully inadequate and apparently unconcerned reaction. I recollect that in our outrage, Fiona and I shouted back something rather short and to the point.

I wandered into the children’s bedroom several times to check on Sean and Amelie. They were both lying on their fronts in a kind of crouch, with their heads turned sideways and their knees tucked under their tummies. In spite of the noise and lights and general pandemonium, they hadn’t stirred. They’d always been sound sleepers, but this seemed unnatural. Scared for them, too, I placed the palms of my hands on their backs to check for chest movement, basically, for some sign of life. Had Madeleine been given some kind of sedative to keep her quiet? Had the twins, too? It was not until about 11.10pm that two policemen arrived from the nearest town, Lagos, about five miles away. To me they seemed bewildered and out of their depth, and I couldn’t shake the images of Tweedledum and Tweedledee out of my head. I realize how unfair this might sound, but with communication hampered by the language barrier and precious time passing, their presence did not fill me with confidence at all.

We did not appreciate until later that these two officers were from the Guarda Nacional Republicana, or GNR, who are essentially military police, like the Gendarmes in France or Guardia Civil in Spain, run by the Interior Ministry. They deal with matters like highway patrol and crowd control, and are also responsible for law enforcement in more rural areas like the Algarve, but they do not handle criminal investigations. At that stage, of course, we weren’t familiar with the various tiers of the Portuguese police system. As far as we were concerned, they were simply ‘the police’.

We tried to explain what had happened. David reiterated his concerns about roadblocks and border notification and I reported my fears that all three children could have been sedated. A lady called Sílvia, who worked at the Ocean Club, had arrived to help out with translation. We learned later that she was the maintenance and services manager. I remember her telling me that she had two grown-up daughters herself. She was very kind and I was glad of her help and support.

I didn’t yet know that at around 9.15pm Jane had seen a man on Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva carrying a child who appeared to be asleep. When I’d discovered that Madeleine was missing she had been in her apartment three doors along. Hearing the commotion, she had come out and discovered what was going on. Taking Fiona to one side, she told her how, after leaving the restaurant to make her first check on her children, and having passed Gerry and Jes talking on Rua Dr Gentil Martins, she had seen this man crossing the junction with Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva, ten or fifteen feet in front of her, walking from left to right. Obviously, at the time she had thought little of it: as far as any of us knew, Madeleine was asleep in her bed, and, having just seen Gerry, Jane was well aware that he had been in our apartment only a few minutes before. Quite naturally, she’d assumed the man was a father with his child, perhaps on their way home from a crèche. As soon as she heard about Madeleine’s disappearance, everything fell into place and she felt sick. She immediately reported this sighting to the police. Gerry was informed but, given the condition I was in, he did not share this development with me until the morning.

While the officers looked around, Gerry called his sister, Trisha. As difficult as it was to tell our family, we knew we needed help from home, and quickly. Trisha, who is a nurse, and her husband, Sandy, are Madeleine’s godparents and two of life’s copers. Gerry was a mess – ‘roaring like a bull’, as Trish put it – and sobbing down the phone. She could barely make out what he was saying. It was painful for me to see my strong, assertive husband unravelling, and frightening for her to hear her ‘wee bro’ in this state. I could hear him crying over and over again, ‘She’s gone, Trisha. She’s gone.’

After Gerry rang off, Trisha and Sandy called the Foreign Office in London, the British Consulate in the Algarve and the British Embassy in Lisbon, requesting assistance. It was also left to them to tell the rest of Gerry’s family. Trish drove over to their mum’s. This was not news that could be broken to her over the phone.

At 11.52pm, Gerry spoke to my Uncle Brian and Auntie Janet in Rothley, at my request. Janet is a woman of strong faith and I wanted her to start praying for Madeleine as soon as possible. Brian then got in touch with the duty officer at the Foreign Office in London.

The call I’d been putting off now had to be made. My mum and dad completely adore Madeleine and I just couldn’t bring myself to shatter their world. I dreaded to think what this would do to them. So, just after midnight, it was Gerry who had to tell them. Distraught, they rang friends and family who immediately rallied to their support.

I’m pretty sure that initially the GNR officers assumed Madeleine had simply wandered off by herself. By midnight, however, evidently they were concerned enough to inform the Polícia Judiciária (PJ), the main force that actually investigates crimes, under the aegis of the Ministry of Justice. The PJ were based in the larger town of Portimão, twenty miles or so from Praia da Luz, and took over an hour to arrive. It felt more like a day to Gerry and me. Eventually, shortly after 1am, two officers walked in. Once again, the events of the evening were relayed to them and brief statements taken from us. Dave asked whether we should get the media involved to increase awareness and recruit more help. The reply was swift and unambiguous. ‘No media!
No media!
’

People had been in and out of the apartment for the last three hours, and until one of the PJ officers stuck a piece of police tape across the doorway of the children’s room, it was Gerry who tried to make sure everyone kept clear of it. Now one of the PJ men (I remember him very distinctly: he was quite young and, I assumed, probably quite junior) entered the room, where the twins were still asleep, with a brush and a pair of latex gloves. He also tried to take fingerprints from Gerry and me. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out: we had to provide them again the next day at the police station. Then they asked for our passports, including Madeleine’s.

Meanwhile, desperate for God’s intervention, for ourselves and for Madeleine, I asked the resort staff if they might be able to find a priest to come and pray with us and support us. I think they tried, but either they couldn’t contact anyone or there was no priest available, so I carried on praying on my own. The pain, terror and the suffocating helplessness I felt are indescribable. There just aren’t the words to adequately convey such torment. Just after 2am, I spoke to my friend Father Paul Seddon, the priest who had married Gerry and me and baptized Madeleine. He offered me words of comfort and then prayed for our little girl.

Next I called my best mate, Michelle. I needed her to get her large Catholic family praying, too. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the hour, nobody answered the home phone. Eventually, at about 3am, I managed to get hold of Michelle’s partner, Jon Corner, on his mobile. When I told him what had happened, I don’t think he believed me at first. He even said, ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ He’d undoubtedly been asleep, I wasn’t at my most coherent and what I was trying to tell him was just so far off most people’s radar it was hard to grasp. Poor Jon – I don’t think he could quite get his brain in gear for a moment or two. He said that Michelle was asleep, implying that it wasn’t a good moment, as if I’d phoned for a desultory chat at an inconvenient time. I urged him to wake her up. ‘No one’s listening!’ I wept. ‘Nothing’s
happening
!’

The next thing I knew, the PJ officers were heading for the front door. I felt another surge of panic. When I asked them anxiously where they were going, they said they had finished for tonight. They told us we could take whatever we needed for the twins from the children’s room. Rather more frantically, I tried to establish what would be happening next and for the remainder of the hours of darkness. The only answer the officers gave us was that they would come back in the morning. Pressed as to when, they said it would be after nine. And with that they were gone, leaving us to our own devices. It was incomprehensible. Surely that couldn’t be it for the night? The sense of helplessness and agitation just kept intensifying.

Dave, seeing Gerry’s anguish and frustration at how little was being done, knew Madeleine needed more help than she was getting. At some point before the PJ left, a retired British couple in a nearby apartment lent him their computer and he sent an email to Sky News alerting them to the abduction of our daughter, using an address listed on their website.

Evidently this wasn’t the best way of contacting Sky, because, as it turned out, Dave’s email remained buried in some inbox. Despite the fabricated tales that later emerged in certain quarters, suggesting that we had contacted the media before we’d even called the police, apparently the first Sky heard of Madeleine’s disappearance was from the Press Association, and from seeing one of our friends on GMTV, later that morning. Though we knew little of what was going on at the time, it is true that the news filtered through overnight. Rachael had contacted a friend of hers at the BBC seeking help and advice and several friends in the UK informed the press some time after 7am.

We probably could have stayed in our apartment, but who would have wanted to? Looking back, it’s inexplicable, of course, that we should ever have been left in what was now a crime scene. We shouldn’t even have been allowed to take things out of the children’s bedroom. Mark Warner had prepared another flat for us on the first floor of an adjacent block, but Gerry and I were in no condition to be on our own. We couldn’t look after ourselves, let alone the twins. So the staff put up two extra cots in Fiona and David’s apartment and we carried a sleepy Sean and Amelie into their sitting room. But I needed to keep them close to me. I lowered myself down on to the couch with Fiona. She took a twin from me and we both sat there hugging my children. Holding one of my babies provided me with some much-needed comfort, albeit fleetingly.

On my insistence, Gerry and Dave went out again to look for some sign of Madeleine. They went up and down the beach in the dark, running, shouting, desperate to find something; please God, to find Madeleine herself. It was only much later that Gerry told me he’d already started remembering cases of other missing children and acknowledging the horrific possibility that Madeleine might not be found. It was a possibility I could not have begun to contemplate.

I don’t know whether the Mark Warner staff were still searching.

I couldn’t see anyone about by this time, except for a couple of GNR police cars in the road outside and a handful of officers hanging around. None of them appeared to be doing very much. I couldn’t stand the thought of nothing happening while time marched inexorably onward. Madeleine could be miles away by now. At one point I went out to speak to the police, needing some reassurance. It was difficult and exasperating as communication was so limited, and there was no reassurance to be had. I walked briskly up and down Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva, sometimes breaking into a jog, clinging to the hope that I’d spot something in the dark. The fear of Madeleine being dumped somewhere and dying of hypothermia started to hijack my thoughts.