Authors: Kate McCann
Murat, the thirty-three-year-old son of a Portuguese father and British mother, was described in the press as a self-employed property developer. He lived at Casa Liliana with his mother. He had been reported to the police by a
Sunday Mirror
journalist, Lori Campbell, suspicious of what she felt was his odd behaviour – apparently he had been hanging around the media pack, constantly asking questions. Taking what others perceive as an unusual level of interest doesn’t make you a criminal, of course, but it worried several people among the press corps.
We soon found out that Murat had been made an
arguido
. This formal status meant he would be officially treated as a suspect in the crime. It also confers various rights, such as the right to remain silent and entitlement to legal representation. For this reason it is possible and indeed not unheard of for a person being questioned as a witness, with less protection from the law, to declare himself
arguido
, for example if he feels that the line the police are taking suggests they suspect him.
We met up with Alan Pike to talk through how we were feeling. Strange, was the short answer: for a brief period I found myself feeling positive, almost excited, that we might be nearer to finding Madeleine. That evaporated when we went round to see Fiona and David. Fiona told us she’d seen Robert Murat outside apartment 5A on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. Then I began to feel panicky. It had belatedly begun to dawn on me that it probably wouldn’t be good news at all if someone living as close as Robert Murat was involved. As Fiona and David speculated I became more and more anxious. I didn’t want to hear it. Within the space of a couple of hours I went from feeling cautiously optimistic to very, very low. Another long, dark night followed.
It later transpired that on the evening before Murat was taken in for questioning, the police had summoned Jane to a mysterious rendezvous in the car park next to the Millennium area, refusing to say why they wanted to see her and insisting she told no one. Their behaviour seemed so sinister that she was quite scared.
Russell walked her to the car park. On the way they passed Casa Liliana, just as Murat was returning to his villa in his van. He stopped to speak to Russ, whom he must have seen around, eager to tell him what he and his mother were doing to help find Madeleine. Jane, who had never met Murat, was not taking much notice. She was just anxious to get going and for this cloak-and-dagger meeting to be over with. When Russell managed to extricate them, Murat said he needed to be off, too, mentioning that the police wanted to see him.
From the car park Jane was driven round to a nearby street, where a PJ officer asked her to get into the back of a van disguised to resemble a refrigerated delivery vehicle (‘Like Sooty’s van,’ she told us). The police took her straight back to the Ocean Club. They had wanted to park at the point where she’d seen the man and child on 3 May but there was another car there and they had to stop further down the road. She was instructed to look out of the window and tell the police whether she could identify anyone crossing the junction of Rua Dr Gentil Martins and Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva as the person she had seen that night. Three men walked by. Two of them looked nothing like the figure she had described: one was blond and tall and the other too fat. The third could have been him, but at that distance she couldn’t make him out properly and unfortunately, just as he crossed the road, he was obscured by the car in the space the police had wanted, which chose that moment to pull out.
The police moved the van to the car park opposite the Ocean Club entrance to try to give Jane a better look at the third man, but here he was walking along a path and her sightline was blocked by foliage. By now the van windows were steaming up, too. She told the police she could not be sure either way. One of the officers made a phone call to check whether she needed to sign a statement to this effect but then informed her it wouldn’t be necessary.
When Murat appeared on the TV news the next day, Russell pointed him out as the man who had stopped to talk to them outside Casa Liliana the previous evening. Jane was concerned that he might have been picked up purely as a result of the amateurish identity parade in which he had unwittingly participated. Like Fiona, Russell declared he’d seen Murat outside apartment 5A on the evening of 3 May, as, they discovered, had Rachael.
Jane phoned DCS Bob Small. She told him she’d encountered Murat before her rendezvous with the PJ and mentioned that Russell and Rachael had said they’d noticed him outside our flat on the night Madeleine vanished, in case either piece of information was important. Although at that stage it didn’t appear to our friends to be noteworthy for Murat to have been nearby when Madeleine was abducted – he lived just along the road, after all, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t have been there – the police took further statements from Fiona, Russell and Rachael.
It was perhaps telling that Jane had not been required to sign anything, since the absence of documentary evidence to the contrary allowed claims to be made later that she had identified Murat as the man she’d seen on 3 May. This was completely untrue. Jane would’ve loved to have been able to make a definite identification, because it might have helped the investigation, but the fact is she couldn’t. The set-up was so inadequate that she was unable even to recognize Murat as the man she had met half an hour earlier, let alone say with any certainty that he was the one she had seen ten days before.
We had pleaded for an informal meeting with the PJ to keep us abreast of what was happening. We took it as read that those in charge of the investigation would have a duty to tell us, as the parents of an abducted child, whether they were any closer to finding her. It would be standard practice, surely. No, not in Portugal. The judicial secrecy law ruled this out, we were told. An information blackout in such a painful situation is nothing short of inhumane. Not knowing where your child is, how your child is, who she’s with or indeed whether you will ever see her again is a glimpse of hell. Not knowing, either, about anything that is (or worse, isn’t) being done to find her, or whether those looking for her are privy to more information about her circumstances than you are, only piles on the agony.
With little chance of learning a great deal from the PJ, we tried to focus on the imminent launch of Madeleine’s fund and on coming up with ways to put the accumulating donations to the most effective use. The response of prominent philanthropists and the general public alike to our daughter’s plight and Gerry’s call to arms had already been fantastic. That weekend, well-wishers had queued at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Glasgow to join a vigil for Madeleine. Football star David Beckham had appealed for information and there had been words of support, too, from prime-minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown. In Portugal, hundreds of bikers set off to ride the length of the country with leaflets and posters.
It was an ex-colleague of Gerry’s in Glasgow who had suggested the Beckham appeal. Gerry’s ex-boss, who was the Scotland football team doctor, spoke to Sir Alex Ferguson on our behalf, Sir Alex got in touch with David Beckham, and he instantly agreed to do it. We are so grateful to him: he said his piece with such feeling that it couldn’t fail to touch people. Sir Alex Ferguson was also behind the appeal made by Cristiano Ronaldo, the world-famous Portuguese footballer who played for him at Manchester United. There followed more spontaneous messages from other players, including Chelsea’s John Terry, Ricardo Carvalho and the Ukrainian Andriy Shevchenko, who made his appeal in several languages.
BWB, the law firm drawing up the articles of association for the fighting fund, had talked to the Charity Commission about whether it would be eligible for charitable status. As its objectives were limited to the search for a single child and the beneficiaries were essentially one family, it was deemed that the ‘public benefit’ test would not be met. So the fund took the form of a not-for-profit, private limited company. It was set up with great care and due diligence by experts in the field. From the outset everyone agreed that, despite the costs involved, it must be run to the highest standards of transparency. There needed to be independent directors as well as family representatives, and people from a variety of professions joined my uncle Brian Kennedy and Gerry’s brother Johnny on the board. At the time, though, we had little idea how important these measures would prove to be in enabling us to withstand the massive scrutiny to which the fund would be subjected, especially when the tide turned against us.
Meanwhile, Alex Woolfall had recommended that, given the high profile of our situation and the fact that he was there principally to represent Mark Warner, we really ought to engage our own family spokesperson. Gerry had contacted the Foreign Office to ask if they could help and they kindly arranged for Sheree Dodd, an independent consultant, to come to Praia da Luz for a week or so to act as our family spokesperson and assist us with our burgeoning campaign. Sheree joined us on 15 May and got down to work straight away.
By this time we were using one of the apartments loaned to us by Mark Warner as an office (immediately nicknamed ‘Mission Control’ by the family) and it was fast becoming a hive of activity. Also helping out at that time were my good friend Lynda, who used to keep a sisterly eye on me playing in our road in Huyton when I was four and she was ten, and Father Paul, aka Seddo, an important figure in our family life. It meant a lot to me to have him there, providing spiritual support as well as an extra pair of hands.
We realized that the extraordinary media coverage given to Madeleine’s case was probably reaching saturation point in the UK and Portugal. As it was just as likely that she could have been taken out of the country, we were now thinking about ways of extending the scope of our campaign abroad.
Sheree was experienced at running campaigns – she had previously handled one for the Department of Trade and Industry – and, equally importantly, she was warm, considerate and easy to get on with. Soon she was almost one of the family, joining us for meals and always happy to muck in. She even ironed a shirt for Gerry once, which was definitely above and beyond the call of duty.
On the day after Sheree’s arrival, Wednesday 16 May, Madeleine’s Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned was launched in Leicester. Rugby player Martin Johnson, the former Leicester Tigers skipper and World Cup-winning England captain, generously agreed to front the launch. We were represented there by a large contingent of family and friends and saw it ourselves live on TV in Praia da Luz. Jon Corner had produced a DVD of photographs and video images of Madeleine to the soundtrack of the Simple Minds song ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. It was a wonderful film but very difficult for Gerry and me to watch. That evening it was shown at the UEFA Cup final at Hampden Park in Glasgow, which happened to involve two Spanish teams, Sevilla and RCD Espanyol. With Spain so close and accessible from Luz, we were heartened that it would help to increase awareness there. The more people who knew Madeleine, the more eyes there would be out there looking for her and the greater our chances of finding her would be.
That day, Gerry played tennis with Seddo, David and the Mark Warner tennis coach. There was no way I could have done this. As well as being acutely aware that the last time I’d played tennis was the last day I’d seen Madeleine, I was far from ready to take part in anything that could be classified as pleasurable. Although I’d been for a run two days before, to me, as I’ve said, this seemed a necessity rather than a pleasure, and there is no doubt there was an element of self-punishment to it. All recreational activities seemed inappropriate, verging on disrespectful, and because they weren’t yet right for me, I found it hard to understand how Gerry could enjoy them, either.
In spite of what I felt, I knew that, whatever our different ways of coping and adjusting, our common and indeed only goal was to find our daughter, and everything else was unimportant. So my oversensitivity never caused any real problems between us. The last few years have been a crash course in the complete spectrum of human nature and one lesson I have learned from it is never, ever to judge. There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ responses in any case. To judge in ignorance is conceited, inconsiderate at best. Gerry needed to keep active. Perhaps he needed, and was able, to briefly switch off. I know how much he loves Madeleine and I can feel how painful it is for him not to have her in his life. He is a good, strong, incredibly focused and loyal man, and to this day I feel guilty that I questioned his actions, albeit silently in my head.
As Gerry, Lynda, Paul and I headed down to the church early that evening we noticed satellite trucks pulling up and journalists gathering in Rua 25 de Abril. One or two cameramen spotted us and began to run over but we managed to get into the church before they caught up with us. Thank heaven for small mercies. Very small. We didn’t find out until later the reason for all the activity, and when we did, once again it was from the television and not from the police. This street was home to Sergey Malinka, a young Russian IT expert and business associate of Robert Murat, for whom he had set up a property website. After police found a logged call to his phone from Murat’s shortly before midnight on 3 May, Malinka was taken to the police station to be questioned as a witness and his flat was searched. Ultimately, the PJ were satisfied that he was not implicated in any wrongdoing.
Gerry and I spent the rest of the evening with our holiday group in Jane and Russell’s apartment. It was the first time everyone had been able to get together in the past thirteen days and it would be the last: the next morning, Jane, Russell, Matt, Rachael and Dianne would be flying home. Fiona and David had decided to stay on until the following Tuesday. I’m sure this was a very difficult step for them all to take and they probably felt quite guilty about leaving us behind in Praia da Luz with Madeleine still missing, but obviously they had to return at some point. Their lives had to go on. But the terrible experience we shared would stay with us all, on one level or another, and bind us together for ever. It was, understandably, a very emotional farewell.