Madeleine (8 page)

In the afternoon the children went back to their clubs and, after a leisurely hour by the pool with Fiona, David and Dianne, Gerry and I took a run along the beach. Being able to play tennis and run together for the first time in ages was a real treat.

Just before 5pm, the arrangement was that the nannies would bring all the children to a raised area next to the Tapas restaurant to meet their parents and have their ‘high tea’, as they called it. Madeleine’s Mini Club arrived walking in single file clutching Sammy Snake, a long rope with coloured rings fastened to it at regular intervals for the children to hold on to. Very cute. The nearby play area had several small slides and a little playhouse, which our team of kids adored, and after tea we all spent half an hour or so there.

We headed back to our apartments, the kids all tired but happy after their busy day. At home, the twins were usually asleep soon after seven, while Madeleine enjoyed the big sister’s privilege of an extra half-hour with Gerry and me. Sean and Amelie had always been perfect sleepers, and Madeleine had outgrown the restlessness of her babyhood, so, barring illness and the odd instance of playing up at bedtime, ours was normally a relatively quiet household by 8pm. If Madeleine ever woke during the night it was always in the small hours, practically never earlier than two or three in the morning.

In Portugal the only difference was that all three children went down around seven, seven-fifteen. None of them had been taking daytime naps for quite a few months before the holiday, and after the activities and excitement of each day, they were all ready for their beds by then. Familiar with their bedtime ritual, they accepted it as a prelude to sleep and, after milk and stories, settled very quickly. It’s a time-honoured routine viewed as the norm by the vast majority of British parents and children, and we were dumbfounded when, in the months to come, it provoked sceptical comments in Portugal.

After putting the children to bed, Gerry and I showered, dressed and sat down with a glass of wine before heading over to the Tapas restaurant, booked for eight-thirty. At that time, most Mark Warner resorts provided a baby-listening service – basically, members of staff listening at regular intervals at the doors of the apartments and villas to check that none of the children inside had woken up. This service was not offered by the Ocean Club, presumably because it was less of a ‘campus’ resort than others, with apartments scattered over a greater area. Instead there was a crèche, where children could be looked after from about 7.30pm to 11pm. Given that our children needed to be in their beds by the time it opened, the crèche wasn’t really workable for us. We both felt it would be too unsettling for them and would disrupt their sleep.

As the restaurant was so near, we collectively decided to do our own child-checking service. This decision, one that we all made, has naturally been questioned time and again, not least by us. It goes without saying that we now bitterly regret it, and will do so until the end of our days. But it is easy to be wise after the event. Speaking for myself, I can say, hand on heart, that it never once crossed my mind that this might not be a safe option. If I’d had any doubts whatsoever, I would simply never have entertained it. I love my three children above everything. They are more precious and special to me than life itself. And I would never knowingly place them at risk, no matter how small a risk it might seem to be.

If we’d had any concerns we could have hired a babysitter. I could argue that leaving my children alone with someone neither we nor they knew would have been unwise, and it’s certainly not something we’d do at home, but in fact we didn’t even consider it. We felt so secure we simply didn’t think it was necessary. Our own apartment was only thirty to forty-five seconds away, and although there were some bushes in between it was largely visible from the Tapas restaurant. We were sitting outside and could just as easily have been eating on a fine spring evening in a friend’s garden, with the kids asleep upstairs in the house.

As it was, we were in an apparently safe, child-friendly holiday complex full of families just like ours. The children were fast asleep and being checked every thirty minutes. Even if there had been a baby-listening service it would not have given our kids as much attention as our own visits did. We were going into the apartments and looking as well as listening. We later heard it was an option that had been chosen by many other parents at similar resorts before us. But I’m willing to bet not many since.

Bringing up children – like all aspects of life – involves making hundreds of tiny and seemingly minor decisions every single day, balancing the temptation to mollycoddle them with the danger of being too laissez-faire. Sometimes, with hindsight, our judgement proves to have been right, sometimes wrong. Mostly when you make the wrong call you can just chalk it up to experience and do it differently next time. It is our family’s tragedy that this particular decision would have such catastrophic consequences.

That Sunday night we headed over to the restaurant. We were all there except Matt, who had a bit of a dodgy stomach, which he attributed to something he’d eaten en route to Portugal. The rest of us enjoyed our meal. The food was good and it was nice to have a little adult time. There weren’t many other diners and, since we were such a large group, we were focused on chatting to and bantering with each other and not taking much notice of anyone else. It was, I remember, very cold and windy and I discovered that five layers of clothing were required to keep me comfortable. We nipped back to our respective apartments every half-hour to check on the children – apart from Rachael, since Matt had stayed behind, and Dave and Fiona, who had a state-of-the-art baby monitor with them. Our visits also gave us a convenient opportunity to pop to the loo or, in my case, to pick up an extra cardigan.

Gerry and I were back in our apartment by 11pm. Mind you, back then we considered ten-thirty a late night. As I’ve said, we didn’t exactly live life on the edge, and David and Fiona in particular seemed to find our early bedtimes highly amusing. Who cared? We were happy – and well rested. From some of the things that would be written about us in the coming months, you’d think we and our friends had been partying wildly every night in Portugal. We may have been noisier than other tables at dinner – there were up to nine of us talking across each other, after all – but we didn’t linger late and our alcohol consumption could hardly be described as excessive. We all had young children (which, as any parent knows, makes it impossible to burn the candle at both ends) and we were all up at seven, seven-thirty every morning.

The following days settled into a similar pattern: we’d have breakfast in the apartment, drop Madeleine, Sean and Amelie at their clubs and head to the courts, behind the Tapas bar building, for our hour-long group tennis lessons (mine was at nine-fifteen, Gerry’s at ten-fifteen). We’d collect the children between twelve and twelve-thirty and return to the flat for lunch and tales from the kids’ clubs. Afterwards we would often call in on the others at David and Fiona’s apartment or pop down to the play area for a while. Most afternoons the children went back to their clubs, while we played tennis, went for a run or read and chatted by the pool. We’d usually meet up with the children and nannies for tea, along with the rest of our friends, and then it was off to the play area again for some fun and a good run-around before the kids’ bedtime. Sometimes in the early evening there would be a lighthearted tennis event: Monday was ‘ladies night’, for example, and on Tuesday there was ‘object tennis’, which involved the guests providing the coaches with various objects they had to use instead of a racquet.

Gerry and I have always quite liked having a routine, though I wouldn’t say we were obsessed by it, and our children, like most children, seemed to like it, too. This holiday was no exception. It’s hard to accept that living our lives in such an ordinary way might have been our downfall. Was someone watching us that week? Watching Madeleine? Taking note of the pattern of our days?

In spite of what we’d been told about booking the Tapas restaurant, Rachael managed to get a table for nine at 8.30pm pencilled in for the rest of the week after having a word with the receptionist at the pool and Tapas area.

It wasn’t until a year later, when I was combing through the Portuguese police files, that I discovered that the note requesting our block booking was written in a staff message book, which sat on a desk at the pool reception for most of the day. This book was by definition accessible to all staff and, albeit unintentionally, probably to guests and visitors, too. To my horror, I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and simply to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had added the reason for our request: we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently.

On the evening of Monday 30 April, I made my first foray to Baptista with Jane. We wanted to stock up on a few essentials as the next day was a public holiday. We all managed to make it for dinner at the Tapas restaurant that evening. Again, there was quite a cold wind, but there were plenty of amusing stories and mickey-taking to keep us cheerful.

Our apartment was cleaned on the Monday and Wednesday (another perk) by a middle-aged Portuguese lady. On Tuesday 1 May, after my tennis lesson, two maintenance workers came to have a look at our washing machine, which I couldn’t get to operate. Gerry had also managed to break the window shutter mechanism in our bedroom shortly after we’d arrived, in spite of the sign asking guests to be gentle with it. What can I say? It’s the Gerry touch . . . The two men looked at the washing machine first. Once they’d established that the problem was something simple – not quite as simple as me not having pressed the ‘on’ button, but not much more complicated than that – I went to meet Gerry, whose lesson had started at ten-fifteen, leaving them to fix the shutter.

During Gerry’s tennis lesson, Madeleine and Ella came to the adjoining court with their Mini Club for a mini-tennis session. Jane and I stayed to watch them. It chokes me remembering how my heart soared with pride in Madeleine that morning. She was so happy and obviously enjoying herself. Standing there listening intently to Cat’s instructions, she looked so gorgeous in her little T-shirt and shorts, pink hat, ankle socks and new holiday sandals that I ran back to our apartment for my camera to record the occasion. One of my photographs is known around the world now: a smiling Madeleine clutching armfuls of tennis balls. At the end of their session, the children had been asked to run around the court and pick up as many balls as they could. Madeleine had done really well and was very pleased with herself. Gerry loves that picture.

In the afternoon Gerry and I decided to take the children down to the beach. To be honest, I think they’d have been just as happy to go back to their clubs, but we wanted to do something slightly different with them, just the five of us. We borrowed a double buggy from Mark Warner to make the walk easier for Sean and Amelie. The weather wasn’t great: in fact, on the beach it started to rain. A bit of rain is not something that bothers a Scotsman like Gerry, but Sean and Amelie didn’t like the feel of the wet sand and insisted, in the way two-year-olds do, on being carried.

Our trip to the beach wasn’t exactly a roaring success and the kids certainly weren’t thanking us for it. Still, we made the best of it, and the suggestion of ice-creams soon brought smiles to three little faces. The children and I sat down on a bench and Gerry went off to fetch them. The shop was only about 25 feet away, yet when he called to me asking me to give him a hand with the five ice-creams he was paying for, I was momentarily torn. Would the children be OK on the bench while I nipped over? I hurried across, watching them all the time.

How could I balk at leaving the kids to run a few yards for ice-creams and feel comfortable with the child-checking arrangement we had at dinner? I haven’t ever been able to rationalize this discrepancy in judgement to my own satisfaction. Perhaps in my subconscious the prospect of three active children squabbling, hurting themselves or being hurt by somebody else in a public place in the middle of the afternoon rang more alarm bells than three sleeping children, safely tucked up in bed, being checked on regularly. If the fear of abduction had ever entered my head it would have been in the former situation.

Having polished off her ice-cream, Madeleine asked if she could go back to Mini Club now, please. So much for extra family time! Before heading up the road, we stopped at a shop on the corner of Rua da Praia and Avenida dos Pescadores, one of several open-air, market-style stalls, as Gerry needed a pair of sunglasses. A couple of the women who worked there were sitting by the stall, admiring and making a fuss of the children, who responded quite happily. These ladies were warm and friendly, this is the kind of thing that happens every day, especially in southern European countries, and I only remember it at all because of what subsequently happened.

You may be wondering not only what relevance all these minute details might have to anything, but also how I can recall them so distinctly and how accurate my recollections can possibly be. The answer is that, within a couple of days, every single apparently inconsequential thing that happened on that holiday would become vitally important, and Gerry and I would soon be painstakingly trying to extract from our brains every tiny incident, no matter how small, that might have been significant. Armed with notebook, pen and dated photographs, I would be challenging myself to piece together as comprehensive an outline of the sequence of events as I could. The regular routines of the week helped to make any deviations from them stand out and undoubtedly made this easier.