Authors: Kate McCann
I was still in control and I felt strong.
Justine was going to drive me to Portimão. Gerry would be following us there that afternoon for his own interrogation. I told Justine we needed to stop at the Ocean Club on the way. Amid the chaos of that morning, I’d discovered, too late, that Trisha had decided to take the twins to Toddler Club to save us an extra job. It was, of course, the right thing to do from a practical point of view, but I’d missed their departure and I needed to see them and hold them before I left Praia da Luz. After all, I had no idea whether I’d be coming back. I knew this would make us late, but given the hours and hours I’d spent to date waiting in that bloody police station, I didn’t really care. The children were in the play area next to the Tapas restaurant. I went over and hugged and kissed them. Embracing them tightly, I told them, ‘I love you.’ Please God I’d be back doing the same thing that evening.
Justine and I made our way over to Portimão in her little car. In spite of the gravity of what lay ahead I had to stifle a smile as we pootled along, alternating between second and third gear with the occasional kangaroo jump thrown in for good measure. The journey seemed to take for ever. Just when it seemed the whole situation couldn’t get any more surreal, before turning the corner to the police station, Justine stopped the car, took her lipstick out of her bag and, looking into the rear-view mirror, began to reapply it.
The street leading to the police station was once again lined by huge crowds of press and onlookers. I was suddenly boosted by a surge of adrenaline (must’ve been my Scouse fighting genes kicking in). I got out of the car and walked calmly towards the entrance, my head held high. I felt strangely invincible. There was some jeering from the locals as I passed by, apparently, but I didn’t hear it. The police were not looking for Madeleine, I reminded myself. They hadn’t been looking for my baby for weeks. The mere thought of that incensed me. There was no way I was going to let her down, too.
Justine remained outside to give a statement to the media. By this stage, they knew as well as I did that I was about to be declared an
arguida
. Carlos, Sofia, my interpreter and Cecilia Edwards, the British consul, were waiting for me inside. Carlos appeared ever so slightly more positive this morning. My interpreter, too, seemed warmer today.
I wasn’t taken to the interrogation room until 11.50am, so my late arrival made no difference, as I’d been pretty sure it wouldn’t: I was getting used to the PJ’s concept of time. The same people were present as the day before. Today Carlos had advised me not to answer any of the questions put to me. He explained that this was my right as an
arguida
and it was the safest option: any responses I gave might unintentionally implicate me in some way. He knew the system better than I ever would, so it struck me as prudent to accept his guidance. Since I was unable to comprehend how anything I’d said already could have led me to this point, I wasn’t about to try to get through to the police again now.
As anticipated, my interrogation began with João Carlos explaining that my status from this moment on had been changed from witness to
arguida
. He ran through the rights and obligations this conferred on me. I sat there quietly, trying to compose myself despite the anger bubbling below the surface.
They
haven’t
been
looking for Madeleine
. . . Then they started. What had I seen and heard after entering apartment 5A at 10pm on 3 May 2007? Who called the police? At what time? Who contacted the media? It’s actually quite difficult not to answer when someone asks you a question. The natural reaction is to reply, out of politeness if nothing else. And of course the urge to say what I thought about some of their vile and ridiculous insinuations was hard to suppress. On the other hand, I was very weary and at least repeating ‘No comment’ didn’t involve engaging my brain. It certainly speeded up the translation process. With luck it would mean these proceedings wouldn’t drag on any longer than they had to.
Ricardo Paiva played a more prominent role in the interrogation this time, which did nothing to maintain my equilibrium. This was the man who had invited us to his home for dinner. Our children had played with his son. ‘The twins were restless in the UK so you sedated them?’ he was saying. ‘In the UK you were trying to give Madeleine to a family member? You get stressed and frustrated with the kids?’ I knew exactly where this line of questioning was going and, as much as it riled me, I refused to rise to it.
If I’m honest, I’d been quite nervous about seeing the videos of the dogs. I had no idea what to expect, although I was quite sure something couldn’t be quite right about the results they had apparently produced. We knew from Bob Small that the responses of specialist dogs were, or ought to be, classed as intelligence, not evidence, but in my head I’d built up these film clips into the most damning ‘evidence’ imaginable; the ‘I rest my case, Your Honour’ finale. Now Ricardo was giving me his spiel about the dogs. ‘These dogs have a 100 per cent success rate,’ he said, waving an A4 document in front of me. ‘Two hundred cases and they’ve never failed. We have gone to the best laboratory in the world using
low-copy
DNA techniques.’ His emphasis suggested this was the gold standard. I just stared at him, unable to hide my contempt. What did
he
know about low-copy DNA? I was so tempted to ask him to elaborate. These dogs had never been used in Portugal before, and he knew little more about them, either, than I did.
Ricardo started the video player. I saw the dogs going into apartment 5A, one at a time, with the handler, PC Martin Grime (then of the South Yorkshire police, later self-employed). Each dog ran around the apartment, jumping over beds, into the wardrobe and generally having a good sniff. At one point, the handler directed the dogs to a spot behind the couch in the sitting room, close to the curtains. He called the dogs over to him to investigate this particular site. The dogs ultimately ‘alerted’. I felt myself starting to relax a little. This was not what I would call an exact science.
In footage of the apartment next door to ours, one of the dogs began to root in the corner of a room near a piece of furniture. PC Grime summoned the dog and they left the flat.
The film show continued. Now we were in an underground garage where eight or so cars were parked, including our rented Renault Scenic. It was hard to miss: the windows were plastered with pictures of Madeleine. In medicine we would call this an ‘unblinded’ study, one that is susceptible to bias. One of the dogs ran straight past our car, nose in the air, heading towards the next vehicle. The handler stopped next to the Renault and called the dog. It obeyed, returning to him, but then ran off again. Staying by the car, PC Grime instructed the dog to come back several times and directed it to certain parts of the vehicle before it eventually supplied an alert by barking.
Each time a dog gave a signal, Ricardo would pause the video and inform me that blood had been found in this site and that the DNA from the sample matched Madeleine’s. He would stare at me intently and ask me to explain this. These were the only times I didn’t respond with a ‘No comment.’ Instead I said I couldn’t explain it, but neither could he. I remember feeling such disdain for Ricardo at this point. What was he
doing
? I thought. Just following orders? Under my breath, I found myself whispering, ‘Fucking tosser, fucking tosser.’ This quiet chant somehow kept me strong, kept me in control. This man did not deserve my respect. ‘Fucking tosser . . .’
When researching the validity of sniffer-dog evidence later that month, Gerry would discover that false alerts can be attributable to the conscious or unconscious signals of the handler. From what I saw of the dogs’ responses, this certainly seemed to me to be what was happening here. We would later learn that in his written report, PC Grime had emphasized that such alerts cannot be relied upon without corroborating evidence.
Towards the end of my interrogation, I walked over to Ricardo and asked why he’d asked us over to dinner that night. Had it been a strategic invitation? He looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Like everyone else, we trusted you,’ he said. Good God in heaven. I think if anyone was justified in having problems trusting others, it was Gerry and me, not the PJ.
As I walked out of the interview room at 3.15pm, Gerry was on his way to Portimão for his interrogation. I wasn’t allowed to see him but I had been able to speak to him on the phone. Carlos told me it looked as if we could be up in court on Monday. For the moment I would not be permitted to leave the country. This news didn’t affect me as badly as might have been expected. Nothing that happened surprised me any more. Every new twist was as bizarre as the last and I just couldn’t believe in any of it. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I’d even get out of the police station, let alone home. In the end that dispensation, at least, was granted, and I was allowed to leave. As I walked out of the door there was the inevitable noise and shouting and a fresh plethora of photographs, this time of ‘Kate the
arguida
’. I was very tired and desperate to see my children, who had been taken by Trisha to Susan Hubbard’s house. Justine drove me there, tailed all the way by the Portuguese press.
As I squeezed my beautiful babies tightly, pressing my nose against them to inhale their sweet scent, not wanting to let them go, a sense of wellbeing and warmth swept over me. This was what was important. This was why we needed to keep battling: our family; our children. I sat down, cup of tea in hand, in the bosom of my family and friends and listened to the tales of the day from Amelie and Sean. It was as though I had momentarily been transported in a Tardis to another much nicer world where everything was happy and innocent. It was lovely while it lasted.
I took the twins back to our besieged villa at 6.30pm and rang Alan Pike to talk through the day’s events and let him know that I was OK. Reinforcements arrived in the shape of Sandy and Michael. It was reassuring to have another couple of men around. The phones were red hot again. Many relatives and friends had expressed through the media at home their concern and disgust at the way Gerry and I were being treated. Phil had gone as far as mentioning the ‘deal’ put to us indirectly by the PJ. Gerry was uneasy about that being made public (though this might have been because he was inside the police station at the time). I had no qualms. It had happened, it was the truth and it was outrageous. The PJ responded by saying, ‘We don’t do deals.’ Not officially, maybe, but from where we were standing it was certainly a deal, and a thoroughly reprehensible one at that.
After dinner, a lot of chat and some much-needed down time, I went to bed. Kate McCann, the
arguida
; Madeleine’s mum, the
arguida
. Publicly suspected of killing my precious daughter or at least of disposing of her body. The mere idea made me want to vomit. The world was not only cruel, it was mad. This scenario would be considered too far-fetched even as a plot for a movie, surely. I was burning with the injustice of it all and my heart broke that bit more for my little girl.
Gerry wasn’t back from his interrogation until 1.30am. Like me, he was officially declared an
arguido
at the start of the proceedings. His intention had been to take Carlos’s advice, as I had done, and refuse to answer any questions. But when the first question – along the lines of ‘Did you dispose of your daughter’s body?’ – was put to him for the third time, incensed by its sheer absurdity and offensiveness and by the way the interviewing officer was goading him, he simply couldn’t stop himself. In these conditions, his reaction was perfectly understandable, but unfortunately our inconsistent responses to interrogation led to me being portrayed as ‘difficult’ or even ‘guilty’ in certain sections of the media and, of course, by the nutters who pour forth bile on the internet. However, I suppose this was a minor problem in the grand scheme of things.
Like me, Gerry had been relieved by the inadequacies revealed by the sniffer-dog video, dismissing it as ‘the most subjective piece of intelligence-gathering imaginable’. Ricardo had told him, too, that they had recovered Madeleine’s DNA from inside the hire car, using the ‘best forensic scientists in the world’. When Gerry asked to see the DNA report, Ricardo became quite flustered, waving PC Grime’s document in the air and saying, ‘It is the dogs that are important!’
At that point Gerry began to feel a lot better. He realized that no one could have planted forensic evidence to implicate us because – despite what we had been led to believe by the PJ and the newspaper headlines – there
wasn’t
any such evidence. They had no proof that Madeleine was dead. All they actually had was the signal of a dog trying to please its instructor in an apartment from which Madeleine had been taken three months earlier. As we now know, the chemicals believed to create the ‘odour of death’, putrescence and cadaverine, last no longer than thirty days. There were no decaying body parts for the dog to find. It was simply wrong.
It would be eleven months before we learned the truth from the released PJ files: the full report from the UK Forensic Science Service, sent to them
before
they interrogated us, had concluded that the DNA results were ‘too complex for meaningful interpretation’.
There was no evidence whatsoever that Madeleine was dead. The search had to go on.
On the drive home from the police station it had become clear to Gerry that Carlos believed charges were likely and that we might have to stay in Portugal. The preparation of a case like this could take years. If the charge was murder, rather than the lesser crime of hiding a body, we might even be remanded in custody for all that time. Given the lack of evidence, it was impossible to understand how such charges could be brought, but if you’d told us a few weeks earlier that we were going to be declared
arguidos
we wouldn’t have believed that, either. The prospect of being separated from Sean and Amelie, holed up in jail unable to prepare our defence properly, was terrifying. Gerry was seriously considering sneaking us into a car and driving us all across the border to Spain. It would have been crazy. The whole world would have thought we were guilty, and maybe that was what the police were hoping we’d do.