Madeleine (45 page)

Naturally, I was interested to see what ‘evidence’ the PJ files contained against the first
arguido
, Robert Murat. I was aware of our friends’ accounts of having seen him near our apartment on 3 May and Luís Neves and Guilhermino Encarnação had, of course, fed us negative ‘information’ about him for almost two months. But our own bitter experience of the PJ’s way of working had taught me that I needed to take that with a pinch of salt. I tried to clear my mind of all these possible influences and remain as objective as possible as I explored the files in more depth.

I read Murat’s statements and the statements of others concerning him. I read the transcripts of his phone calls, intercepted by the police. I recognized details we had been told (I even found the Casanova newspaper clipping the police had described to us), but I could see now that the PJ had put their own spin on these to present them as suspicious – in much the same way as they had cited Bridget’s Bible as an indication that I had something to hide. I came across nothing that could be classified as hard evidence against Murat.

As was to be expected, for the most part, the later volumes of the files were devoted to Gerry and me. I still despair at the lengths to which certain elements of the PJ were prepared to go to try to unearth some sort of evidence to use against us. On the night Madeleine went missing, Russell, anxious to get posters produced and out there quickly, asked me for my camera, so that he could use the photographs of Madeleine stored on it. The PJ appear to have been determined to prove we’d brought these posters on holiday with us from Britain. They sent them to a forensics lab for analysis, asking for information on how old they were and how they had been printed and cut. Having established that Kodak paper had been used, they contacted a Kodak representative to find out where this paper could have been bought. I was so exasperated to read all this. There was a much easier, more obvious way of confirming how and where these posters were produced. They could have just asked. As it was, it took them until April 2008 to verify that the posters had been run off, on the night of the abduction, by Amy Tierney, the Mark Warner duty manager, using her own Kodak paper and her own Kodak printer.

We knew the police didn’t have any evidence against us, of course – if they had, we’d have been in jail. We certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the country. This was confirmed by the reports in the police files from Mark Harrison, the British NPIA search expert, Martin Grime, the blood and cadaver dog handler, and John Lowe from the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham.

Mark Harrison, on the results produced by the sniffer dogs, concluded: ‘It must be stated, any such indications without physical evidence to support them cannot have any evidential value, being unconfirmed indications. Additionally, I consider no inference can be drawn as to whether a human cadaver has previously been in any location without other supporting physical evidence.’

Martin Grime: ‘No evidential or intelligence reliability can be made from these alerts unless it can be confirmed with corroborating evidence. The dog alert indications
must
be corroborated to establish their findings as evidence.’

John Lowe: ‘Low copy number (LCN) DNA profiling is highly sensitive; it is not possible to attribute a DNA profile to a particular body fluid.’ In other words, it is not possible to determine whether DNA has originated from sputum or blood.

On the matter of the DNA sample retrieved from our hire car, Mr Lowe continued:

A complex LCN DNA result which appeared to have originated from at least three people was obtained (but there could be up to five contributors). There are 37 components in total [Madeleine’s DNA profile is made up of 19 different components]. The individual components in Madeleine’s profile are not unique to her; it is the specific combination of 19 components that make her profile unique above all others. Elements of Madeleine’s profile are also present within the profiles of many of the scientists here in Birmingham, myself included. It’s important to stress that 50 per cent of Madeleine’s profile will be shared with each parent. It is not possible in a mixture of more than two people [as was this specimen from the car] to determine or evaluate which specific DNA components pair with each other. Namely we cannot separate the components out into 3 individual DNA profiles. In my opinion therefore this result is too complex for meaningful interpretation/inclusion.

As I stated earlier, even if Madeleine’s DNA had been identified in any of the samples from the apartment or the car, there were perfectly legitimate reasons for it to have been there. As it was, her DNA was
not
identified in any of these samples. The test results were all described by the scientists as ‘incomplete’ or ‘too complex for meaningful interpretation’. And still all those stories about Madeleine’s blood and 100 per cent DNA matches were deliberately fed to the media and thence to the whole world.

All of this information had been given to the PJ before they interrogated us in September 2007. Yet they chose to ignore it and declared us
arguidos
regardless.

22

STANDING UP FOR THE TRUTH

The weekend of 13 and 14 September 2008 was not one of our best. On the Saturday I was bothered by a persistent caller (dubbed by Sean and Amelie ‘the man with the poorly head’), whose initially erratic behaviour ultimately became terrifying when he jumped over the fence into our back garden and tried to get into the house through the patio doors. His last act before being carted off by the local constabulary was to throw one of my large ceramic plant pots through the windscreen of my cousin Anne-Marie’s car, parked in our drive.

As if that wasn’t enough for one weekend, on my way back from church the next day I received a text from one of the staff at the children’s nursery, sympathizing with me about the appearance of entries from my diary in the paper and hoping I was OK.

My diary?
What?

Welcome to our world.

She was right. Transcripts of my diary for May to July 2007 had been splashed across five pages of the
News
of the World
and I’d known nothing whatsoever about it. The familiar heavy sensation in my chest returned and I started to cry. Surely they couldn’t do this?

The coverage was presented in a sympathetic way – in fact, some friends and family assumed the diary had been published with my blessing – but that was hardly the point. Anyone with any decency understands that a diary is private and very personal to whoever wrote it. And as everyone knew, May to July 2007 had been an extremely traumatic period for me.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. After taking away my journals in August 2007, the PJ had had them translated into Portuguese. To my horror, back in July excerpts had already been published in a pro-Amaral newspaper in Portugal – just three days after the launch of the former officer’s offensive book. Now that version had been sold or given to the
News
of the
World
and translated back into English. I knew only too well from my interviews with the PJ how words and meanings could get lost in translation, and it was obvious this was what had occurred here.

‘I was really upset’ had become ‘I was fed up’, ‘I never felt that relaxed’ became ‘I’d never felt so relaxed’, and so on. Most of it, though, consisted of my thoughts and messages from the heart to Madeleine. I felt as though I’d been mentally raped.

Two days later, I discovered from the PJ files that on 27 June 2008 an investigating judge, Pedro Frias, had ordered the destruction of all copies of my diary, on the basis that it was not of interest to the investigation, it was a personal document and its use would be a violation of the person to whom it belonged. Why, then, had this order not been complied with? And who had given this material to the media? We had a pretty good idea.

17 September 2008

I feel like climbing into a hole and staying there. Sometimes it just feels like we are getting tested beyond all limits . . . Yet again I’ve been feeling today that the only way this can stop, justice prevail and all be well again, is if Madeleine is returned to us. I am clinging to my hope that the good God I have always believed in exists and that somehow and at some point, He will bring Madeleine back to us.

After several unpleasant days of phone calls between lawyers, the
News of the World
agreed to make financial restitution. Sadly, there was no other way I could be compensated – the damage had been done. It was especially disappointing given that this was the paper that had put together and promoted the reward package back in May 2007, but we had to seek redress as a deterrent. Unfortunately, though, it seems too many newspaper editors view this as an occupational hazard.

Towards the end of October I contacted Ernie Allen in the US to ask if the NCMEC team there would be willing to produce an age-progressed image of Madeleine. It was clear that a lot of people were still picturing her as a child of not quite four. It was hardly surprising, considering Gerry and I found it difficult ourselves not to cling to the Madeleine we knew. Despite the fact that almost a year and a half had gone by we were still receiving photographs of blonde toddlers from concerned members of the public asking, ‘Could this be Madeleine?’ We needed to remind everyone that the little girl we were looking for had grown.

A forensic artist named Glenn, who was very patient and understanding, took on the task of producing an image of Madeleine as she might look at six, which was the age she would be by the time his portrait had been finalized and released. He worked with photographs and sophisticated computer software, even seeking advice from a forensic anthropologist to achieve as close a likeness as possible.

The first picture of ‘Madeleine, aged six’ arrived without warning via email in mid-December. I was devastated. Caught unawares, I could not stop crying. It just wasn’t how I’d imagined my daughter would look. It brought home to me how much time had passed and smacked me in the face with the cruel realization that I didn’t actually know what my little girl was like any more.

As it turned out, this wasn’t the finished article, just a rough draft. I dried my eyes and, over the coming weeks, with the help of many more photographs of Madeleine, pictures of Gerry and myself at the same age and a lot of feedback and suggested amendments from me, we arrived at an acceptable or ‘close enough’ resemblance. I was anxious about appearing to be too critical but Glenn was at pains to reassure me that my comments were vital to him. I was the expert, he told me. The viewing public was very forgiving and the human brain had an amazing ability to ‘fill in the blanks’. ‘As artists, we can feel quite disappointed when a recovered child doesn’t quite resemble our age-progressed image,’ he said. ‘But what we think matters little. It’s what the witness thinks that matters most.’ The image is an investigative tool, not a true likeness, and in the end, it isn’t important how faithful it is to the real child as long as it achieves its aim.

When I look at the final picture of ‘Madeleine, aged six’, I still can’t really see her as our Madeleine. This little girl looks a bit too American and, though she is pretty, if I’m really honest, I think Madeleine is prettier. Maternal bias again.

As 2008 drew to a close, Gonçalo Amaral was still parading his unsavoury theories around Portugal and beyond. By the autumn it had become clear that he was not going to go away. We were beginning to realize that the harm being done to our search for Madeleine, especially in Portugal, was outweighing our reluctance to be distracted from it. We needed to put a stop to this serious damage. We had already spoken to our legal team on several occasions about taking action and knew that the only way of assessing our chances of success would be to seek advice from a Portuguese libel lawyer.

We had first talked on the phone to Isabel Duarte on 28 November. She was very understanding and sounded nice. By this point we felt as though we had been condemned by an entire country, so to receive sympathy from someone in Portugal was like stepping into a welcoming warm bath. Six weeks later, Gerry went to Lisbon to meet her. Although we were still resisting the temptation to sue, her parting shot left a lasting impression on him. ‘Don’t forget!
That
man
said you buried your daughter on the beach!’

On Monday, 7 April 2009, we discovered that a pro-Amaral article had appeared in
Público
, one of the most respectable newspapers in Portugal. Since it had, in the main, steered clear of the Madeleine ‘story’ and was well regarded by the country’s opinion-formers, this was a worrying development.

By coincidence, that weekend Gerry and a couple of our holiday friends had been in Praia da Luz, where significant events and sightings potentially related to Madeleine’s disappearance were being reconstructed, using actors, and filmed for a Channel 4 documentary we were working on (at last – a re-enactment people would see). I had stayed at home with Sean and Amelie – there was no need for me to put myself through this. I desperately wanted to return to the village when the time was right, but we did not feel we could go there as a couple until we could do so safely and quietly, without our visit turning into a media-fest and causing yet more disruption. As it was, the press, suddenly forgetting that the world was in economic crisis, were claiming that disgruntled workers blamed us for redundancies at the Ocean Club and the downturn in the local economy in general, and made much of Gerry being ‘heckled’ in Praia da Luz. In fact, maybe two people in a good-sized crowd shouted something at him. Those holding pictures of Madeleine, which they pressed to their hearts to show their support, didn’t warrant a mention.