Madeleine (44 page)

In the meantime, I set to work on the files. Scrutinizing them would in the end take up six months of my life, and it would be a painful as well as time-consuming labour.

The 5,000-odd pages were divided into volumes and annexes, which seemed very disjointed. Usually the information was presented chronologically rather than separated according to subject matter. As a result, pieces of data relating to a certain line of inquiry or suspect were scattered throughout the files in different sections. The majority of the material was in Portuguese, so one of our first jobs was to find a company to translate it into English. Ultimately, the entire file would be translated, at a cost to Madeleine’s Fund of almost £100,000, but initially Gerry and I spent hours scanning through it to prioritize the sections we wanted most urgently. Then I began on the few sections that were in English, primarily statements from British witnesses or information forwarded to the PJ by the Leicestershire police.

9 August

Feeling a bit unsettled and agitated this evening. Going through the files brings back the emotion, desperation and uncertainty. At the same time, I have a slight flicker of hope that maybe something will emerge soon – but I’m just too scared to go there.

Inevitably, I spent a great deal of time bringing together bits of related data in order to get a clearer picture of what they actually represented. But I waded through the documents doggedly. It was essential that I did. I don’t believe anybody else would have examined them in such microscopic detail, or with the same determination or motivation, as Gerry and I. How could they? They were not Madeleine’s parents.

One of the most concerning and upsetting pieces of information to emerge quite early was the record of sexual crimes against children in the Algarve. This discovery made me feel physically sick. I read of five cases of British children on holiday being sexually abused in their beds while their parents slept in another room. In three further incidents, children encountered an intruder in their bedrooms, who was presumably disturbed before he had the chance to carry out an assault. I guessed these were the reports that Bill Henderson, the British consul at the time of Madeleine’s abduction, had told me about.

These incidents had occurred within an hour’s drive of Praia da Luz over the three years prior to Madeleine’s disappearance. The PJ had never mentioned any of them to us. In fact, I gathered from the files, some of them hadn’t even been recorded by the authorities at the time they were reported (evidently, they were not considered to be actual
crimes
). So they might never have come to light if the parents of these children hadn’t been brave enough to come forward to the British police after Madeleine was taken and relive their nightmares. They did so in the belief that there could be a link between what had happened to their children and what had happened to her.

It broke my heart to read the terrible accounts of these devastated parents and the experiences of their poor children. Unbelievably (or maybe not, by this time), there was a familiar thread running through them all. The parents had called the police; they hadn’t felt that the crime was taken seriously, by the police or by their tour operators; statements were often not taken; DNA and fingerprint evidence was frequently not sought. In most instances there was no sign of a break-in. I cried for hours after reading a letter of complaint from one mother to the GNR regarding the sexual abuse of her daughter and the lack of proper attention paid to it by the authorities. The final line in particular has haunted me ever since:

It is difficult to see with this lack of investigation or interest how a profile of this man can be built up. It did not appear to us that there was any great incentive or determination to find the offender and bring him to justice . . . Furthermore, it could all have been so much worse . . . indeed this man could go on to do much worse to another child if he’s not stopped now.

Six months later, our beloved Madeleine was grabbed from her bed.

Of course, none of these children was abducted and these crimes may be completely unrelated to what happened to Madeleine. We do not know who has taken our daughter and for what purpose. What these cases do demonstrate, however, is that British tourists in holiday accommodation were being targeted. At the very least, the possibility of a link between these incidents and Madeleine’s disappearance should have been investigated.

It is so hard not to scream from the rooftops about how these crimes appear to have been brushed under the carpet. The authorities have known of them for a long time and yet the perpetrators, as far as the families are aware, remain free. But we can’t shout about them. Children are involved and they need to be protected. We are extremely grateful, however, to their parents for having the courage and compassion to share their experiences with us to try to help us find our daughter.

These atrocious offences occur all around the world, of course, not just in Portugal. But if individual countries do not acknowledge and deal with them thoroughly, they will multiply. Unless these criminals are tracked down and punished, and measures are put in place to stop them, not only will they continue to offend but others will flock to what they see as an easier milieu for their activities, eager to take advantage of weaker laws and laxer attitudes.

Combing through the files, I despaired. It was only now that I became aware of just how cursory some of the police work had been. Vital questions had not been asked, alibis not verified, lines of inquiry left dangling or, at best, not adequately documented. There is no doubt that the police were overwhelmed, both by having to deal with a crime of this nature under such scrutiny and by the sheer volume of information pouring in. The systems and resources they needed simply weren’t there. I felt some sympathy with them over the challenges they faced, and it was clear that Paulo Rebelo, who replaced Gonçalo Amaral as coordinator of the investigation, had tried to make up for some of the initial inadequacies by checking back for anything that had been overlooked. But the discovery of each missed opportunity was another twist of the knife in my chest.

It was here I found the receptionist’s note in the Ocean Club staff message book explaining that we wanted to book the Tapas restaurant for the rest of the week because we were leaving our children alone in our apartments. I was dismayed. This was a glaring green light to a child-taker – and yet no mention is made of it in the files until December 2007.
December
2007!
Seven months after Madeleine’s abduction! I could only conclude that its relevance had not been appreciated by the police.

Door-to-door inquiries appeared to have been delayed and haphazard. If nobody was at home, too bad: as far as I could tell they didn’t get a second visit. Many of the witness statements looked extremely vague and brief, crying out for what seemed blindingly obvious and essential questions to be asked and answered. Those made by the Ocean Club staff in particular were very sketchy, even allowing for the fact that almost 130 employees were interviewed in the space of just a few days. We have discovered since that there were staff who were not interviewed at all.

Night after night, I read of depraved individuals, British paedophiles, Portuguese paedophiles, Spanish, Dutch and German paedophiles, and of the horrific crimes they’d committed. The police went to visit some of them, looked around their apartments and recorded merely, ‘No sign of the minor.’ Was that enough to eliminate these vile characters from the inquiry? If more had been done, there was certainly nothing in the files about it. No description, no photograph, no alibi, no DNA. Just ‘No sign of the minor.’

27 August

A late night. Depressing reading.
So
many child molesters! Dear God, please don’t let this have been what’s happened to Madeleine. Please, God.

It’s difficult not to criticize, and I know I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but honest to God, when your child has been stolen, surely you are entitled to expect more than this. Much more.

It was unsettling to realize, from some of the statements in the files, how people can be completely wrong in their recall, opinions and feelings, and yet so utterly convinced they are right that what they tell themselves becomes hardened in their minds as fact. A member of staff based at the Millennium restaurant, for example, stated how she saw us there every morning having breakfast with the children. She described in detail what a nice family we were and what a lovely relationship we had with Madeleine. Very kind of her to say so – but we weren’t there. We had breakfast in the Millennium restaurant only once, on our first morning in Praia da Luz, along with all of our friends. As I read these statements, it became slightly less baffling to me that Robert Murat and the witnesses who said they saw him on the night Madeleine was taken could all be so certain of their conflicting recollections.

One of the reasons I was so staggered when we were made
arguidos
was that I knew there was nothing to implicate us. And yet now I was finding testimony from witnesses claiming they had seen us in places where we hadn’t been or doing things we’d never done. Some of these inaccurate reports weren’t particularly harmful but others could have been. On top of these ‘facts’, notes had been taken of various suspicions. Not surprisingly, all of these accounts seem to have been given
after
we were declared
arguidos
. Once we were presumed to be complicit in Madeleine’s fate, people apparently began to ‘remember’ actions or events that might support that theory. One witness reported having seen Gerry in Lagos on 7 May, on his mobile phone, saying to somebody, ‘Don’t hurt Madeleine.’ At the time we were both in Praia da Luz surrounded by media, police and embassy officials – as, of course, Gerry’s phone records showed.

Working through each volume and appendix, I made notes and produced a summary of each section, outlining areas where I felt further digging was needed and commenting on whether or not I felt this was achievable, given the limitations imposed on our independent investigators. At regular intervals Gerry and I met up with Brian Kennedy to discuss progress and set ourselves action points. Despite my initial scepticism of the likely usefulness of the files, and my frustration and despair at what I was finding there, having access to all this information
did
help us with our own search. For a start, it provided us with the names and contact details of potential witnesses we would otherwise have known nothing about. It gave us something to work with to move our investigation forward.

It was good to have confirmation that none of the local searches, and particularly the properly planned and executed search finally carried out in August 2007, had turned up any evidence to support the theory that Madeleine had been killed and her body dumped nearby. We’d been told very early on that the majority of child sex offenders who kill their victims dispose of the body within a few kilometres of the abduction site. This fact, together with the absence of any sign of Madeleine in the vicinity of Praia da Luz, increased the chances that she had been removed from the area and in many ways gave us more hope that she was alive.

It was only through having the police files that we learned of several key sightings of a suspicious individual or individuals near our apartment in the days and hours around Madeleine’s abduction. As chilling as some of the accounts were to read, I appreciated that knowing about them gave us the opportunity, at last, to develop these leads.

In addition to the man and child seen by Jane Tanner at about 9.15pm on the evening Madeleine was taken, and the similar sighting forty-five minutes later by the family from Ireland, there were six reports from four independent witnesses of a ‘suspicious’ male noticed around the Ocean Club. He was described either as watching our apartment or generally acting oddly, or both. Details of all eight sightings are given at the end of this book (corresponding artists’ sketches can be found in the illustrations).

The police did not appear to feel that Jane’s sighting in Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva and the man and child reported by the Irish holidaymakers in Rua da Escola Primária were related. They seem to have concluded that these were in all likelihood two different men carrying two different children (if, they implied, these two men actually existed at all). The only reason for their scepticism appeared to be an unexplained time lapse between the two sightings. They didn’t dovetail perfectly. To me the similarities seem far more significant than any discrepancy in timing.

Every time I read these independent statements in the files (and neither could have been influenced by the other, remember – Jane’s description had not been released to the public before the Irish witnesses made their statements), I am staggered by how alike they are, almost identical in parts. As a lawyer once said to me, apropos another matter, ‘One coincidence, two coincidences – maybe they’re still coincidences. Any more than that and it stops being coincidence.’

Who knows why there was a forty-five-minute gap between the two sightings, or where this man might have been in between? I long ago stopped trying to come up with answers because I don’t think I need to. If the child was Madeleine – and in four years, no father has ever come forward to say it was him and his daughter – why would we assume he would be behaving normally or logically? There is nothing normal about stealing a little girl from her bed, so why should his subsequent actions be predictable? The abductor would hardly have been expecting to see Jane walking towards him as he escaped, let alone have anticipated that Gerry would be standing talking round the corner. Whatever plan was in his mind, he might well have been forced by these near misses to change it pretty quickly.