Authors: Gordon Burn
Like their friend Esther McVey, it did seem to be the case that Gerry was able to command access to famous and powerful people such as Rowling and Richard Branson and the owner of TopShop, Sir Philip Green, who put his Learjet at the McCanns’ disposal for their tour of European capitals in early June.
The appointment of Michael Caplan, QC, and Angus McBride of the fashionable London firm of Kingsley Napley as their legal advisers set tongues wagging and sparked a whole new chain of real and frenziedly Googled-up connections. The results showed that Tony Blair was reported to have contacted Kingsley Napley at the beginning of the year over the threat of arrest in the cash for honours scandal. Other recent high-profile clients included the England football captain, John Terry, over an
alleged nightclub brawl, and the self-styled ‘rogue trader’, the dodgy banker Nick Leeson.
Michael Caplan (described in Chambers legal directory as ‘the weapon of choice for battleship cases’) was best known for two things: his obsession with secrecy, and for representing the repressive Chilean dictator Pinochet who was arrested just after having tea with his friend Lady Thatcher and faced extradition to Spain. When he was freed on the grounds of his deteriorating health, Caplan personally saw Pinochet onto the plane back to Santiago and made sure the General took with him the inscribed plate that Margaret Thatcher, having made it clear that he was the only person she trusted to carry out her wishes, had placed in Caplan’s safekeeping.
The Blairs spent the summer at their friend Sir Cliff Richard’s villa in Barbados. Around the time Caplan and McBride were photographed stepping through the front door at Orchard House in Rothley for the first time, Cherie was snapped on the Côte d’Azure with her best new friend, Bono. It was the dog days of the summer, and the Blairs were by then staying as the guests of Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior and other luxury brands, on his yacht on the Riviera.
For a long time – for much of the last century, in fact, wrote Richard Schickel – social commentators have been decrying the steady erosion of our old sense of community. In this context, the celebrity community, which has about it aspects of the extended family, offers a kind of compensation. There is a widespread belief that there is a
small and seemingly cohesive group of well-known individuals who share close communal ties with one another at the high centre of our public life – ties that are enhanced by the fact that they share the pleasures and problems inherent in their celebrity status, no matter how disparate their routes to that status have been.
‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition – a hotline to senior members of the government, for example – were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia. ‘We don’t have amazing contacts or anything, we just have strong friends. Everyone brainstormed and became very creative. They did what they could and if that meant asking well-known faces, celebrities, it was done. They are normal people too. They wanted to help.’
*
The house, backing on to fields, surrounded by countryside used by the local hunt, so close to the properties the
Sunday Times
had singled out as the most expensive in the East Midlands, their private pools and tennis courts screened behind dark bosks and bushes at street level but clearly visible from the air, downloadable on Flash Earth, zoom in, zoom out, the burglars’ bible, was a statement of what they had achieved.
Gerry had spent three weeks building a climbing frame in the long back garden, an expanse of lawn laid by the
developers where forested orchard had once stood, all trace of that old part of the village erased, before they left for their holiday in the Algarve. Along with a children’s slide, the coloured Jungle Gym frame was just visible in the aerial shots of the McCann home (a term that always sounded more ominous than ‘house’ when used in captions) that started appearing online and in the papers.
Police began the excavation of bodies from the back garden of a house in the rundown south-coast resort of Margate soon after the McCanns returned from Portugal in early September. And there was a correspondence between the helicopter pictures of the crime scene with its canvas screens and fingertip searches and methodical police activity, and photographs of the McCann house in Rothley, sealed and silent and just as they left it as a family of five in late April.
The house had anyway already become contaminated by then, by association. The interrogation of apartment 5A at the Mark Warner Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine vanished on the night of 3 May, had been exhaustive and unrelenting. The inner life of the architecture had been forensically examined by investigators on the ground and by being made the subject of diagrammatic illustrations, scale models, computer graphics with X-ray perspective and fly-away walls.
There had been re-enactments using actors, grainy montages on YouTube, dimly filmed guided tours of other apartments in the block with a shifty pornographic ambience (‘And this
here
is the bathroom!’), the distance
between apartment and tapas bar paced out by video sleuths and posted on the internet as a prompt for more superheated speculation and outlandish gossip.
The body dogs Keela and Eddie had sniffed out every inch of the interior; individual fibres had been identified and removed for investigation.
So there was that contamination of the McCanns’ otherwise blameless house in the Midlands caused by the generic scene-of-crime-style overhead pictures that had been put into circulation; caused too by the transference of the atmosphere of uncanniness from the holiday flat in Praia da Luz to the house in Rothley – from one place connected with Madeleine to the other; the spectre of demonistic or magic forces.
The connection, more a mood or a suspicion up to that point, was given concrete form when, on their return to Britain, the McCanns appointed a man whose face had once been familiar to millions of viewers from the
Six
O’Clock
and the
Ten O’Clock News
as their press spokesman.
Clarence Mitchell’s was one of those television faces which had never registered as missing until it suddenly reappeared. For many years a thread in the broad tapestry of the national pageant, reporting mostly on the misfortunes of strangers but also the deaths of notable figures such as Jill Dando and the Queen Mother, he had eventually been reassigned to the BBC’s round-the-clock, rolling news operation,
News 24
. Put on the graveyard shift newscasting through the night, one night he did the
1 a.m. and the 2 a.m. but then closed his eyes and slept through the three o’clock bulletin, after which, having served the Corporation man and boy, he had severed his ties.
Clarence – the slightly antique name was matched by a personal manner of impeccable restraint and an old-fashioned, maître-d’-like sense of deference – had first turned up in the context of the McCann story shortly before they travelled to Rome at the end of May for their St Peter’s Square audience with the new Pope, Benedict XVI. He shepherded the McCanns into their place in the receiving line and in front of the cameras and fielded questions at the press conference which followed courtesy of the British Ambassador to the Holy See. For viewers, it was disconcerting to have him back on their screens as a participant in a story rather than in his accustomed role of non-aligned reporter. (This was mixed with the sense of guilt they felt at not having noticed he had gone missing in the first place.) After leaving the BBC he had taken the job of director of the Media Monitoring Unit at Number 10.
To many people Clarence Mitchell was the reporter most closely associated with the television coverage of the West murders in Gloucester in 1991. It was Mitchell who reported the developing story of the apparently respectable married couple who had been charged with murdering their daughter and burying her body under the patio in the back garden. And, after Rose West had been found guilty of murdering Heather and twelve other girls
and young women (Fred West had hanged himself in prison before he could be tried), it was Clarence Mitchell who stood outside the house in Cromwell Street in Gloucester where bodies had been discovered buried in pits in the garden and under the cellar and described how the Wests had tortured and sexually abused their children over a period of many years.
So, for those with memories of this earlier Clarence Mitchell, it was strange to see him cast in the role of spokesman and media representative (‘spin doctor’ was a phrase that was soon used) for a couple who a few days earlier had been declared
arguidos
or official suspects by the Portuguese police investigating the disappearance of their daughter.
In his new incarnation – and Mitchell chose to demonstrate his belief in the McCanns’ total innocence in a persuasive way: he resigned his government post to become their official mouthpiece soon after they returned from Portugal, his salary taken care of by a Cheshire businessman, Brian Kennedy (no relation to Kate McCann’s uncle of the same name), who had made his money in double-glazing and was now also the owner of Sale Sharks rugby club – facing the cameras with the McCanns usually now standing mutely alongside him, Clarence assumed the air of a man holding his funeral director’s black silk hat considerately behind his back, a little scuffed and showing signs of wear (dandruff dusting the brim, perspiration stains dunning the pleated, satinised lining), mourning a professional future that was now well behind him, as well
as the child who vanished into folklore and common fame in the family-friendly foreign resort.
*
The law as it stands puts no obligation on vendors to disclose a property’s history. A Yorkshire couple discovered this when they attempted to sue the people who had sold them a house that had been the scene of a particularly horrific murder. Alan and Susan Sykes found out about the history of the house in Stillwell Drive, in Sandal, a suburb of Wakefield, while watching a documentary about a man who killed his adopted daughter. The programme was about Dr Samson Perera, a dental biologist at Leeds University, who murdered the little girl, Nilanthie, in 1985. The couple the Sykes had bought the house from in 2000 had decided to move two years after buying it after being filled in on its grisly past by a helpful neighbour.
Apartment 5
A
at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz. The McCanns’ family home at Orchard House in Rothley. Casa Liliana, the house belonging to the mother of Robert Murat, the first official suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Praia, a hundred metres from the Ocean Club apartment: a dark house in a landscape of sun-soaked brilliant white render, cocooned within dense hedges and tall wire-mesh fences, bits of the hedge starting to die where people had inserted themselves into it for a better view. Myrobella, the Blairs’ base for twenty-three years in the north of England, with its strategic screening and hot-wired security annexe, its air of concealment,
inviting speculation. The West house in Gloucester before the council pounded it to dust, the pedestrian form of its dark shape.
Is there any way of sensing from outside, with whichever organ it might be, in which of two identical properties an atrocity has been committed? A way of telling the ‘house of horror’ from the ‘dream home’, the soap star’s bolt-hole, the prime minister’s residence? Does something of past events linger in the rooms, the places where they happened? Something sensed, felt, remembered, suspected, imagined, no means of perception excluded? In a room, by a wall. The uncanniness of something excluded, closed off.
After very many months, a picture of the room in the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz from which Madeleine had been subtracted – she had been sleeping in the bed with the twins, Sean and Amelie, sleeping either side of her in their cots at the time – was finally released. The white walls, the wall-length wardrobe, the bare floor, the wooden chair, the narrow bed, the mattress stripped, the sheets bunched, a baby-blue blanket thrown over a pregnant pillow, the little chest of drawers. What was locked and what was open? Was there an abductor? A gauze-like green curtain was it, between bed and chair, lifted on the wind, billowing in? The world’s largest-ever manhunt. The town awash with rumour. The clairvoyants and the diviners. The astral seers. The texters and bloggers and the spitters of abuse.
Tony Blair announced his intention of standing down
as prime minister on 10 May, a week to the day after Madeleine’s disappearance. The 3 May, the day she disappeared, was the tenth anniversary of Blair’s first full day as prime minister. Overnight on 2 May 1997, he flew from his Sedgefield constituency to London; later in the day, he drove past cheering crowds to the Palace to receive the official invitation to form a government. He spent the following day, a Saturday, finalising Cabinet appointments and completing the fine-tuning of the new government.
Two big publishing events took place in the early summer of 2007. The first was the final instalment of the Harry Potter saga,
The Deathly Hallows
. (Jo Rowling’s plan to have a bookmark with Madeleine’s picture on it inside every copy was abandoned when it was decided that young readers would find this too distressing.) The other big bookworld push was for Alastair Campbell’s ‘Diaries’ of his years spent spinning for Tony Blair and New Labour.
Campbell’s diary entries for the summer and autumn of 1999 turned out to be dominated by the event of Cherie Blair’s pregnancy and the birth the following May of Leo, the first baby born to a serving prime minister for more than a century. It becomes clear that the new baby brought Blair great solace through difficult times. But returning to Number 10 at the end of a gruelling foreign trip or a long day dealing with the foot-and-mouth crisis or strategy meetings for beginning the second Gulf War, he would sometimes return to Downing Street to find that the baby had climbed in with Cherie and he would end up
picking his way through the trains and Thomas the Tank Engine toys scattered across the carpet in Leo’s room and collapse exhausted into Leo’s bed.