Quant à l'auteur, Antony Sharples aka John Blacksmith
L'auteur a écrit un jour ceci, auquel je souscris pleinement
Could
I ask a favour of readers? I'm grateful to all who read here but
unfortunately some post entire sections onto forums rather than just
a link. Copyright law regarding quoting in entirety applies here and
it is surely good manners, if nothing else, to observe it. I am
rather uncomfortable, also, with having blogs posted up on those
sites about which I have expressed disgust and contempt in the past
(and my opinion of them remains the same.). Putting whole sections up
in those horrible places is simply a provocation to the more
inadequate of their members. Nor do I wish to address them. This only
applies, of course, to the "anti" sites I have castigated:
the others are beyond reach of good manners or anything else.
Puis-je demander une faveur aux lecteurs? Je suis reconnaissant à tous ceux qui lisent (mon blog), mais malheureusement certains en postent des sections entières sur des forums plutôt qu'un simple lien. La loi sur le droit d'auteur concernant la citation dans son intégralité s'applique ici et les bonnes manières, au moins, exigent de la respecter. Je suis également assez mal à l'aise de voir des chroniques postées sur les sites pour lesquels j'ai exprimé du dégoût et du mépris dans le passé (et mon opinion à leur sujet reste la même). Mettre des paragraphes entiers dans ces endroits horribles est simplement une provocation pour les plus inadéquats de leurs membres. Je ne souhaite pas non plus les aborder. Cela ne s'applique bien sûr qu'aux sites "anti" que j'ai fustigés : les autres sont hors de portée des bonnes manières ou de tout autre chose.
Puis-je demander une faveur aux lecteurs? Je suis reconnaissant à tous ceux qui lisent (mon blog), mais malheureusement certains en postent des sections entières sur des forums plutôt qu'un simple lien. La loi sur le droit d'auteur concernant la citation dans son intégralité s'applique ici et les bonnes manières, au moins, exigent de la respecter. Je suis également assez mal à l'aise de voir des chroniques postées sur les sites pour lesquels j'ai exprimé du dégoût et du mépris dans le passé (et mon opinion à leur sujet reste la même). Mettre des paragraphes entiers dans ces endroits horribles est simplement une provocation pour les plus inadéquats de leurs membres. Je ne souhaite pas non plus les aborder. Cela ne s'applique bien sûr qu'aux sites "anti" que j'ai fustigés : les autres sont hors de portée des bonnes manières ou de tout autre chose.
Malheureusement les liens disparaissent ou se transforment. D'où la présence des chroniques ici. Mais si l'auteur en juge autrement, ses observations souvent pertinentes sur l'affaire MC seront effacées.
- Introduction
- Back to Basics
- Beginnings
- Why Us ?
- Why, Welcome !
- Never in a Million Years
- Noble English Tradition
- Noble English Tradition
- Absent Friends
Introduction - Réflexions sur l'affaire MC
The
bulk of the material is, of course, in Portuguese. Volunteers from
that country have, over the years, translated and made available to
the public via the internet most of the key documents.
Controversialists have pointed to gaps and ambiguities in the
translated material as evidence of bad faith by the translators. In
fact the gaps mostly arise from the variable formatting of the DVD:
some material could easily be copied and pasted for machine
translation which, used as a basis for a final version, could greatly
speed up the task. Much could not, hence the late appearance of
some sections. Portuguese
is not a difficult language and literate readers who wish to assess
the reliability of the translations can use Net translator sites and
common sense to evaluate any particular passages quite easily. Cela dépend des passages. Les phrases complexes se prêtent mal à la traduction par des robots. The
translations remain a remarkable tribute to unpaid volunteer effort.
Back to Basics
It is a notable summary and while the strangulated prose of the original testifies to the bitter experience of confessing failure its conclusions are significant. Reading from the final sentence back:
In these unpromising conditions the 9 spent their time schlepping the juniors to and from creche, kids' club, play area, eateries and (occasionally) the sea-side in between lengthy - when their bowels permitted - jogging runs, windswept watersports and tennis - before another whirl of bed, biscuit and bath time followed by execrable English food at the "tapas" bar gobbled down in the intervals between the famous checking. And early to bed on most nights. Surprisingly, perhaps, not one of the 7 appears to have had anything except a wonderful time, with none of the bitching or depression that such circumstances can often unleash. Or so they say. To the questions of the investigating officers, some of them with rueful memories of the stress of small children - with one of them, a woman, the eyebrows can almost be seen rising at these sunny responses - the answers were always the same: everyone got along just fine, everybody was really happy. Everything was lovely.
Were they fibbing? In the strict sense I think not, with some important exceptions. The explanation for much of their behaviour is surely in the personalities and experience of this naive and thoroughly unsophisticated crowd, meritocrats all, "outer-directed" people to whom careers have been everything and whose children have all been placed in the optimum planned birth slot after the completed first lap on the way to success and the "civilised" life - mid to late thirties. Reflective about their emotions, their present circumstances or anything else? Hardly at all. Capable of real insight into themselves? Not on the evidence so far. If you want a Hamlet meditation on the tragedy that has enveloped them you'd better go elsewhere for these are, in the most literal sense, deprived people. Everything is not false but pasteboard, as in those appalling, self-delusory, round-robin Christmas letters that we sometimes receive: holidays are "wonderful", friendships terrific, parenthood an unalloyed pleasure, while the possible abductor is, of course, a monster, never seen in human terms but through filters, as the drawings of Jane Tanner illustrate.
But perhaps not that strange. Many of us have known one of these tight-knit provincial university groups who somehow manage to keep in touch with each other - sometimes with the dreaded round-robins or their Facebook equivalents - for decades after graduating, and whose aims and interests, such as they are, are deeply entwined. This one seems to have shared, in career terms, the long view, a determination to make the most of their middling talents and a willingness to forgo youthful diversions on the steady upward march to “success”, that beguiling phantom of the future, with children scheduled for the appropriate time, accommodation increasing steadily in size – the McCanns’ Rothley house providing a stunning example of their domestic tastes – and, eventually, no doubt, a Mediterranean villa to linger in or retire to, probably the first in their respective families.Les TP semblent avoir partagé, en termes de carrière, la vision à long terme, la volonté de tirer le meilleur parti de leurs talents médiocres et la volonté de renoncer aux déviations juvéniles au profit de la marche ascendante vers le «succès», ce fantasme de l'avenir.
The National Health Service, that vast, over-inflated monopoly bureaucracy, so often more welcoming to its employees than to its patients, was the comforting arena for their dreams and struggles, the latter rarely involving any risk to pocket or possessions. So, single minded déterminés, decent, in many ways admirable people these, sharing the slightly mindless interests of medical students, growing apart, in the modern way, from their family origins, sharing also, due to their institutionalization in the NHS and despite their exposure to the sufferings of patients, a certain blinkered innocence about the teeth and claws of real life waiting in the shadows for all of us. And, indeed, with these interests, their very young children and their collective boyishness, which embraces the ladies as well, with the exception of the aging in-law Diane Webster, it is easy to forget just how old they are. The running joke which caused so much mirth at the chilly dinner table on May 3 - that Jane Tanner was going to “relieve”, snigger (ricaner), giggle, her partner back at the apartment – seems more suited to a university bar or rugby changing room than to the evening meal of a hospital consultant with receding hair, his colleagues and their partners. Perhaps this collective naivety, now coming under pressure from the realities of approaching middle age, is the key to the first of a series of failures of judgement that they made: their absolute unwillingness to accept that having infants in the family changes everything for ever, including such trivia as the planning of holidays.
Dr David Payne, our consultant on the left of the picture, and his wife - the stance and expression of the latter reflecting a certain admirable je ne regrette rien - were the initiators of the holiday. Clearly comfortable in the role of organiser, if a slightly bumbling one, and accepted as the “leader” of the group, whether through his talent or through a certain lofty (dédaigneux), if amiable, presence, Doctor Payne described its origins (the italics are all mine) thus
The good, perhaps...
...the bad...
Jane Tanner, brought by fate into the bleak surroundings of the Leicester Police interview room, watched by both a video camera and, behind a two way mirror, the Portuguese police, had had her fill of “theories.”“There’s a lot been said but, you know, we’re not a bunch of swingers that went out there for a swinging holiday,” she protested, adding the fascinating aside that, “I can’t think of anything worse, to be honest.” Her questioner, possibly intrigued by this insight into her personal tastes, let her proceed. “We didn’t go out there on a swingers’ holiday to dump our kids in the kids club while we got pissed and shagged each other, you know. That’s not what we did. One week a year,” she added bitterly, “there’s, there’s one week a year, the other fifty one weeks of the year with the kids all the time! In terms of our family, you know every spare moment’s with the kids: Russell doesn’t go off playing golf or go to the football ...it’s spent with the kids. I just think the Portuguese police have obviously got this idea of us and it’s completely, completely wrong in terms of the way we are and what, you know, our motives for being on holiday there were.” She added, as Jane Tanner often did, “I’m telling the truth.”
Neither then nor later did Jane Tanner enlarge on this alternative explanation of peer pressure and it remains another of those little gems that she drops now and then without quite realising the impact of what she has said, especially since it implies that she might, under some circumstances, be just be a tiny bit, well, suggestible. We can recall also the “well organized” Russell O’ Brien’s flat, “It [the decision to leave the children] was a group decision, collectively taken.” So nobody’s going to hear anymore about that, then. In any case, by the time Jane addressed the question in Enderby a year after her uncomfortable Portimao experience, both of her earlier “explanations” had vanished without trace. "Of course, you look back now and think, yes, probably we were stupid but I think we were lulled into a false sense of security because this baby listening service is offered in other places and yeah you look at it now knowing what happened and... you’d think we were probably reckless...”
So that’s clear then.
This surprising distance between the couple and others and the fuzziness in recollections of their activities - in very sharp contrast to the seven’s solid certainties about the McCann’s characters and what they were and were not capable of - runs like a leitmotif through what little can be discerned of their lives. Both born in 1968, both the children of artisan families with no particular advantages, Kate an only child, Gerry the youngest of five. The Healy’s from Liverpool, that tough, bitter, city of sentiment and decline, the McCanns Irish immigrants to the equally tough city of Glasgow. Both families Catholics and both attending Catholic schools, something of more importance to Gerry than Kate: Glasgow is still a city where your religion can matter when you're growing up. Intelligence and determination, and no doubt firm parental encouragement, were the means that took them away from these thoroughly deprived surroundings, using the upward path of the professions and the comforting career structure of the NHS. Kate McCann, a high flier at school apparently, studied at the University of Dundee, her husband closer to home, at Glasgow. Gerry clearly the more ambitious, specialising, after a stint in sports medicine, in cardiology, not as a surgeon but as a diagnostician. Kate qualified as an anaesthetist, eventually going into general practice. They met in 1995 at the Western Royal Infirmary before both taking posts in New Zealand for a year. Married in 1998. Their first child Madeleine was born in 2003.
Such are the bare facts of an unusually bare joint biography. Their known responses to their experiences, or any projections of themselves as individuals are vanishingly rare. There is a short Facebook entry by Gerry written – in contrast to the oppressive, strangled banality of his later, thousands of words long, “blogs” – in the usual bouncy, brainless Facebook style with limited details of what appears to be, as we have seen before, a rather limited life. There seem to be no records of how they see themselves and who they are. There are no recollections by anyone of why they wanted to go into a healing profession, or whether they had a sense of vocation, or even any interest in healing. Neither of their medical specializations involve the conscious patient very much – an output map from an MRI scanner and associated aids in one case, an unconscious and masked figure in the other. Kate’s later, and brief, experience in personal healing as a GP seems to have left hardly a trace. “Interests,” in the conventional sense, are conspicuously missing, except for sport. On the matter that separates them from the rest of the nine – the desire to have children early rather than late, the failure to do so and the IVF treatment that followed, some of it, apparently, in Amsterdam – almost nothing has been said, by them or others.
Impressions, on the other hand, rather than description, as in Praia de Luz, were in plentiful supply once the child had disappeared, although, oddly, few of them seem to derive from their ex-patients. Everybody quoted in the media described them as popular or very popular, though few were actually able to say why. Coming to more recent times the universal opinion was that they were devoted to their children and were “brilliant” parents; these opinions, expressed after May 3, are of dubious value since the media will only say saccharine things about victims, but there is plenty of consistency in the accounts and no reason to disbelieve them.
Introduction - Réflexions sur l'affaire MC
The Cracked Mirror was
written in 2009. It is not a blog but a study and perhaps deserved a
different website – but Blogger was free and available so here it
appeared. It has never been amended since publication and since the
Blogger format is unfriendly to narrative structure – the beginning
being found at the end and vice versa – readers may have had
difficulty in finding their bearings. There appears to be a
continuing demand for the work so the running order has now been been
corrected and the narrative can be read as the author intended. It is
based on two primary sources which became available at that time. The
first was the DVD released in summer 2008 containing virtually all
the case evidence: many thousands of pages of documentation in
facsimile, interim assessments, correspondence with other forces and
a final report on the case by the PJ (the Portuguese criminal
investigation force) submitted to the Attorney-General's department,
summarising and cross-referencing this mass of material. This summary,
in turn, formed the skeleton of the prosecutors' own final report and
recommendations, which led to the release of the three arguidos and
the archiving, or shelving, of the investigation. To avoid confusion
readers should note that in writings on the case the DVD material is
normally referred to as the case files, or simply the files. The AG
department's summary is known, naturally enough, as the archiving
summary or final report – but researchers should note the
distinction between this document and the PJ report of similar length
and content.
The
second primary source used in The
Cracked Mirror
is the collection of transcripts of interviews of the McCanns'
holiday friends (the "Tapas 7") by Leicester police in
spring 2008. Unlike the DVD the transcripts were
never officially released to the public but emerged anonymously from
Portugal and were circulated to interested parties via email and the
Net. With such a dubious provenance students of the case might
feel cautious about trusting the texts but they have been evaluated
at length, by the author among others, and there is no possible doubt
as to their authenticity. They are normally referred to as the
"rogatory interviews", after the international treaty
protocol for interviewing foreign witnesses known as the Letters
Rogatory process. The transcripts can be found on a number of
websites.
These
two sources finally provided proper research material rather than the
exceptionally unreliable media stories and leaks which had been the
sole source of information until then. They work well together, since
the thousands of pages of exhaustingly dry evidence in
the DVD are complemented and brought to life by the words of the
seven holidaymakers. While
the other material in The
Cracked Mirror
has not been source-noted the sources will be found without
difficulty via the Net and, in particular, that Aladdin's Cave, the
McCann Files. Media reports are only used here as verbatim
records of what people said at a given time, not as evidence of what
they were actually up to – and then only when they are quoted
directly and with their names given. Full verifiability, in
other words.
After
some consideration no alterations have been made to the text. The
only significant primary material to emerge since 2009 is Kate
McCann's Madeleine,
an extraordinary document but not one which throws any further light
on the subject matter here. Since the Tapas 7 have declined to add to
their Leicester depositions and since the Portuguese have refused to
re-open the case, the material on which the Cracked
Mirror is
based remains both the last official word on the investigation and
the last (and only) description of events by the McCanns' fellow
holidaymakers. So the original material, any errors included,
remains: readers already familiar with the case can assess for
themselves how well it has stood the test of time.
Where
is the
Cracked Mirror
coming from? The answer is the PJ investigation itself, which
ended with a series of questions in its final report that remain
unresolved to this day. The text here adds to and enlarges upon those
questions, particularly in the light of the rogatory interviews and
the comparison they offer with the police statements by the group to
be found in the case files. It should be noted that the Portuguese
police, having been informed that the seven were not willing to
return to their country to clarify their previous evidence and
activities, decided not to analyse the Leicester interviews in
detail. So the
Cracked
Mirror, like
the original investigation,
like the PJ report, is filled with questions, not answers. Much has
been written about the 2007 investigation, most of it, unfortunately,
worthless. To understand it properly the reader should forget media
comment and concentrate on the two issues that lay at its core.
The
investigating officers and analysts found the evidence of the nine
unconvincing virtually from the start, though the McCanns took great
care to prevent this being known in the UK, publicly maintaining that
they were not under suspicion before mid-August. In fact by May 10,
when the first round of statements had been checked, the
investigators were accusing a number of the group of outright lying.
One of them, Mathew Oldfield, was heard crying hysterically in
the interview room that day when aggressively questioned
about his extraordinary "hear no evil, see no evil" "ne pas entendre le mal, ne pas voir le mal" Il était à avoir pu voir et à n'avoir pas regardé. Il
visit to apartment 5A on the evening of May3, although he made no
mention of this in his Leicester interview . In court and under oath
in the matter of McCanns v. Amaral in 2009 officers described the
group's version of events as a childish "fairy story" which
nobody with an ounce of critical judgement could take seriously.
But
this in turn meant that the theory of abduction itself was in
trouble: the group lacked veracity, according to the police,
yet it was the group who provided the evidence of abduction, notably
in the statements of Kate McCann and Jane Tanner. The task of the
investigators, therefore, lay in establishing the reliability of
these witnesses and simultaneously searching for positive evidence of
the abduction beyond the nine's claims. The
subsequent story of the investigation is, despite all the glare and
uproar, essentially simple: it was impossible to establish the
veracity (by supporting evidence, reconstruction, CCTV, statement
analysis and telecommunication links) of the group; and it was
impossible to find independent (CCTV, forensic science material,
eye-witnesses) evidence to confirm the abduction theory.
There
have been claims that the focus on the parents and their friends led
to the neglect of other lines of inquiry and the PJ itself has been
willing to accept such a possibility. Is there any evidence
demonstrating the reality of such a supposition? In other words has
evidence emerged to show that the group were the victims of
misunderstanding and that their veracity has now been demonstrated?
OG n'a pas cru devoir le faire. And has the passage of years turned up evidence showing that an
abduction probably occurred? The
answer to both questions is an objective and categorical no. At no
time have the seven friends co-operated in exercises to confirm the
truth of their accounts, despite the specific warnings of the
Attorney-General's department that failure to do so would mean that
the innocence of the parents would never be demonstrated. Le procureur l'a dit après, mais il avait mis en garde quant à l'enquête qui s'arrêterait si la reconstitution n'avait pas lieu. For the
parents themselves the picture is even bleaker. The record since the
investigation was shelved shows conclusive evidence of deception and
untruth. In Madeleine,
for example, Kate McCann described deceiving journalists – and
hence the British public – about the true level of police activity
against them and it is now clear that her husband did the same in his
so-called "blogs".
Unimpeachable
documentary evidence also demonstrates that the parents claimed to be
observing the legal ban on discussion of case evidence in
Portugal while breaching it on a regular and widespread basis in
their own interests. Nor were such deceptions confined to the crisis
of 2007: Gerry McCann gave numerous press conferences
explaining in detail why he had returned to Portugal in 2009
but Madeleine
reveals that these were all fictitious, a measure of the care
the couple can take to disguise their motivation when they feel it is
necessary. Finally, in an official statement from a source
independent of the investigation team, José de Magalhaes e Menezes,
co-author of the archiving summary said under oath in McCanns v.
Amaral that the group "had not told the truth" in
their accounts of the evening of May 3. The police, therefore, were
correct in their doubts about the group's veracity. MeM a parlé de "non-vérités".
It is
reasonable to suppose that if the PJ had failed to pursue other
leads or lines of inquiry through their supposed "obsession"
with the holiday group, rather than the absence of any such evidence,
then subsequent inquiries without that narrow focus should turn up
some sign at least of what these missed leads might be. The
various private investigations paid for by the McCanns using the case
files as a starting point have produced many headlines and zero
results; two years and £4.5 million of the Scotland Yard review have
produced a number of encouraging statements and zero results. So the
2007/8 police position that there was no evidence of abduction beyond
the claims of the group remains valid.
To look
at the case through the eyes of the investigators is not to impute
guilt. The archiving summary ends, after all, with the unassailable
statement that there is no evidence of the commission of any crime by
the McCanns and, as we know, abductions do happen: when something
with a very low probability does
occur then
suspicion can easily attach itself to innocent people. Unfortunately,
innocence rarely means "free of character flaws" in the way
beloved of film and drama; all human beings are flawed and few of us
can be certain that, when our lives are put under a harsh spotlight
by the police, our history and personalities will immediately
demonstrate how innocent we are. False accusations in themselves can
have a devastating effect, leaving us distressed, confused and unsure
whether sticking to the truth will actually help – after all it
failed to protect us from the false accusation in the first place –
or whether we should avail ourselves of tactical silence, or even
flight. Accusations under a foreign and unfamiliar jurisdiction, of
course, make everything much more terrifying.
The
Portuguese have made it clear that they will only re-open the case if
important new evidence is uncovered. Their refusal to do so at
present indicates that Scotland Yard has not provided any.
Robert Murat, the third of the arguidos, has now called for others to
return to Portugal for a re-enactment which, he says, might provide
it. The parents have not backed his call and the other seven,
as usual, have said nothing. All nine remain trapped in
the limbo of uncertainty – undemonstrated innocence – which the
archiving summary, the last act of the investigation, both warned
them of and condemned them to. For them, as for the child,
there is no escape.
Pas de salut pour eux, comme pour l'enfant.Back to Basics
The
summary of the case by the Portuguese police for the prosecutors
runs to just over 56 pages. It is the last official word on the
affair and the summation of their findings and, as such, an
extremely important document. The English translation available is a
poor one and its windiness and lack of clarity have done its
conclusions no favours. In the extract below I have re-translated
the document with minor alterations to the grammar and sense. For
those who wish to compare my version with the indigestible existing
translation the latter can be consulted on numerous sites, the
McCann Files being one of them.The concluding pages
(54-57) run thus:
"We turn now to the question of the "reconstruction" (Article 150º of the Penal Process Code),which was not performed due to the refusal of some of the members of the holiday group to return to our country, as documented in the Inquiry. The reconstruction, at the actual location where the events took place, would have provided due clarification of the following extremely important details, amongst others:
- The relative distances between JANE TANNER, GERALD McCANN and JEREMY WILKINS at the moment when the former passed them which coincided with the sighting of the supposed suspect carrying a child. We find it unusual that neither GERALD McCANN nor JEREMY WILKINS saw her nor the alleged abductor, despite the restricted area.
- Matters concerning the window of the bedroom where MADELEINE slept with the twins, which was open according to KATE. Clarification as to whether there could have been a draught causing movement of the curtains and pressure under the bedroom door, as described by the witness.
- Establishing a timeline which includes the checking of the children left inside the apartments, given that if the checking was as tight as the witnesses and the arguidos describe, it would be to say the least, very difficult under such conditions for an abductor to enter the residence and leave with the child through a window of limited dimensions. We would add that the supposed abductor could only pass that window holding the child in a different position (vertical) from the one that was described by witness JANE TANNER (horizontal).
- What happened during the interval between 5.30 p.m. (the time at which MADELEINE was seen for the last time by anyone other than her family and the time at which the disappearance was reported by KATE HEALY (at around 10 p.m.)
Les points mentionnés dans l'ordonnance ne sont pas tous les mêmes.
The requested assistance and investigation from the British authorities mentioned above, despite the fact that it was almost completely carried out, added nothing new to the investigation. The questioning of the holiday group merely corroborated what had already been established during the investigation, without providing any additional significant detail. In conclusion, despite the efforts that were made and the exploration of all lines of investigation, it is not possible to obtain a solid and objective conclusion about what really happened that night, nor about the present location of the missing child. It should be remembered, however, that this investigation took place under conditions of exceptional media exposure, with the publication of much “news” of imprecise, inexact or even false content. This did not help in the discovery of the truth and frequently created a climate of unusual commotion and lack of calm. Therefore, as we do not currently envision the pursuit of any other line of enquiry within the process that might produce any useful result I submit our findings for your consideration, for you to determine and decide accordingly.
Portimão, 20th of June 2008"
It is a notable summary and while the strangulated prose of the original testifies to the bitter experience of confessing failure its conclusions are significant. Reading from the final sentence back:
- They state that they are pursuing no new lines of enquiry and nor do they envision any.
- That their investigation was hampered by unprecedented media exposure and "commotion".
- That the UK "rogatory letter" interviewees, principally the "Tapas 7" , provided no additional information.
- That they are still lacking information about what happened within the holiday group between 5.30 & 10PM on May 3.
- That the "timeline" provided by the holiday group makes it "at the least very difficult" for an abductor to have entered and left.
- That the information (provided by Kate McCann) that a draught had alerted her to a previously unopened window needed clarification or replication.
- That the circumstances of the Jane Tanner sighting were hard to reconcile with the geography of the location and the close proximity of others.
- And that clarification of these and other matters could not be obtained due to the "refusal" of members of the holiday group to return to Portugal for the necessary reconstruction of events.
Readers
will note that these are the only constraints on the investigation
described in these final pages: no reference is made to any burdens
or problems involved in getting at the truth of events outside the
holiday group itself, save for a reference to media coverage. There
is no mention of any other witness inadequacies outside the holiday
circle affecting the outcome of the investigation. Leaving
aside the extreme reserve with which the parents are treated in this
document, when an investigating team states that it has no plans to
pursue new lines of enquiry,adds that there are "very
important" aspects of the investigation still unresolved, names
the witnesses who could help resolve them and states that a number
of them - walking around freely in the UK - have "refused"
to come back to do so, then it is hardly surprising that many people
agree with the Portuguese police that there are urgent questions
surrounding the holiday group still requiring an answer. And that is
whether one believes in the possibility of an abduction - as I do -
or not.
To
the outsider there is something forlorn about the Tapas 7 and the
McCann's Portuguese holiday and reading the former's accounts of it
is a numbing experience. Quite how the group could have believed
that a holiday abroad in dispersed accomodation with nine children
at their most demanding ages, and with the assistance of only one
in-law and no nannies, would be "relaxing" is a mystery.
And the experience itself was reminiscent of out-takes from Carry
On Camping:
the resort was semi-deserted, there were disputes about the
facilities, the weather was miserable until May 3, the pool was
freezing and unusable, the sea required a wet suit, the beach was
like a grey morass, and a stomach bug, complete with vomiting such
as one of them "had never experienced before", ran through
almost all of them for the whole week.
In these unpromising conditions the 9 spent their time schlepping the juniors to and from creche, kids' club, play area, eateries and (occasionally) the sea-side in between lengthy - when their bowels permitted - jogging runs, windswept watersports and tennis - before another whirl of bed, biscuit and bath time followed by execrable English food at the "tapas" bar gobbled down in the intervals between the famous checking. And early to bed on most nights. Surprisingly, perhaps, not one of the 7 appears to have had anything except a wonderful time, with none of the bitching or depression that such circumstances can often unleash. Or so they say. To the questions of the investigating officers, some of them with rueful memories of the stress of small children - with one of them, a woman, the eyebrows can almost be seen rising at these sunny responses - the answers were always the same: everyone got along just fine, everybody was really happy. Everything was lovely.
Were they fibbing? In the strict sense I think not, with some important exceptions. The explanation for much of their behaviour is surely in the personalities and experience of this naive and thoroughly unsophisticated crowd, meritocrats all, "outer-directed" people to whom careers have been everything and whose children have all been placed in the optimum planned birth slot after the completed first lap on the way to success and the "civilised" life - mid to late thirties. Reflective about their emotions, their present circumstances or anything else? Hardly at all. Capable of real insight into themselves? Not on the evidence so far. If you want a Hamlet meditation on the tragedy that has enveloped them you'd better go elsewhere for these are, in the most literal sense, deprived people. Everything is not false but pasteboard, as in those appalling, self-delusory, round-robin Christmas letters that we sometimes receive: holidays are "wonderful", friendships terrific, parenthood an unalloyed pleasure, while the possible abductor is, of course, a monster, never seen in human terms but through filters, as the drawings of Jane Tanner illustrate.
Did
something...
Even
the weird and disturbing premonition of disaster that Kate McCann
had about the holiday fails to raise much reflection. Fiona Payne:
"Kate...what she said, when I was sort of twisting her arm
really, she was unsure, I think Gerry was immediately quite
keen...to come and Kate had said, when I rang up, she said ‘I
don’t know why I’ve just got an uneasy feeling about it’. And
I don’t know why she said that, I don’t think she even knows, I
never mentioned it to her since."
These people are not practised liars on the model beloved of some
amateur detectives, very unlikely "swingers" indeed, and
the unsatisfactory nature of their descriptions of what happened
does not look like group conspiracy. The weaknesses in their story,
again with important exceptions, are connected with their inability
to tell, or grasp unaided, the truth about what is happening to
them.
...happen
to us?
The
inability to make sense of what has happened, and the resentment at
the fate that has befallen them for simply being in the wrong place
at the wrong time, runs like a thread through the UK police
interviews.
On comprend ce grand ressentiment. Pendant onze mois les TP9 ont été accusés de négligence parentale, d'échangisme, de complicité, de simulation, etc. Quel qu'ait été le type de drame, aucun des TP9 n'a songé à se demander en quoi il aurait pu y contribuer. À les entendre ils seraient tombés dans un piège.
And understandably so: they had by then been run through the rumour mill in a particularly crushing way, accused of almost everything, from gross child neglect, through sexual perversion to premeditated murder. Jane Tanner, for example, the most emotional and expressive of this emotionally rather buttoned-up crowd, breaks down as she describes her shock at being called a liar and fantasist. Her partner Russell O’Brien is bitter and talks of getting revenge on the media one day. Mathew Oldfield, on the right of the High Court photo, is clearly still so cross that he might just burst out of his shockingly ill-fitting jacket. Their feelings are reflected to a greater or lesser extent by the entire group: how, they ask, could “anyone in a million years” – a frequent phrase - have predicted what would happen on May 3? Any sense of having helped shape events by their decisions, however well-meaning, or that their own personalities might have played a role in what happened, is absent: instead there is a slightly strange, teenager-like, attitude that the world has let them down. They are, genuinely, innocents abroad.
On comprend ce grand ressentiment. Pendant onze mois les TP9 ont été accusés de négligence parentale, d'échangisme, de complicité, de simulation, etc. Quel qu'ait été le type de drame, aucun des TP9 n'a songé à se demander en quoi il aurait pu y contribuer. À les entendre ils seraient tombés dans un piège.
And understandably so: they had by then been run through the rumour mill in a particularly crushing way, accused of almost everything, from gross child neglect, through sexual perversion to premeditated murder. Jane Tanner, for example, the most emotional and expressive of this emotionally rather buttoned-up crowd, breaks down as she describes her shock at being called a liar and fantasist. Her partner Russell O’Brien is bitter and talks of getting revenge on the media one day. Mathew Oldfield, on the right of the High Court photo, is clearly still so cross that he might just burst out of his shockingly ill-fitting jacket. Their feelings are reflected to a greater or lesser extent by the entire group: how, they ask, could “anyone in a million years” – a frequent phrase - have predicted what would happen on May 3? Any sense of having helped shape events by their decisions, however well-meaning, or that their own personalities might have played a role in what happened, is absent: instead there is a slightly strange, teenager-like, attitude that the world has let them down. They are, genuinely, innocents abroad.
But perhaps not that strange. Many of us have known one of these tight-knit provincial university groups who somehow manage to keep in touch with each other - sometimes with the dreaded round-robins or their Facebook equivalents - for decades after graduating, and whose aims and interests, such as they are, are deeply entwined. This one seems to have shared, in career terms, the long view, a determination to make the most of their middling talents and a willingness to forgo youthful diversions on the steady upward march to “success”, that beguiling phantom of the future, with children scheduled for the appropriate time, accommodation increasing steadily in size – the McCanns’ Rothley house providing a stunning example of their domestic tastes – and, eventually, no doubt, a Mediterranean villa to linger in or retire to, probably the first in their respective families.Les TP semblent avoir partagé, en termes de carrière, la vision à long terme, la volonté de tirer le meilleur parti de leurs talents médiocres et la volonté de renoncer aux déviations juvéniles au profit de la marche ascendante vers le «succès», ce fantasme de l'avenir.
The National Health Service, that vast, over-inflated monopoly bureaucracy, so often more welcoming to its employees than to its patients, was the comforting arena for their dreams and struggles, the latter rarely involving any risk to pocket or possessions. So, single minded déterminés, decent, in many ways admirable people these, sharing the slightly mindless interests of medical students, growing apart, in the modern way, from their family origins, sharing also, due to their institutionalization in the NHS and despite their exposure to the sufferings of patients, a certain blinkered innocence about the teeth and claws of real life waiting in the shadows for all of us. And, indeed, with these interests, their very young children and their collective boyishness, which embraces the ladies as well, with the exception of the aging in-law Diane Webster, it is easy to forget just how old they are. The running joke which caused so much mirth at the chilly dinner table on May 3 - that Jane Tanner was going to “relieve”, snigger (ricaner), giggle, her partner back at the apartment – seems more suited to a university bar or rugby changing room than to the evening meal of a hospital consultant with receding hair, his colleagues and their partners. Perhaps this collective naivety, now coming under pressure from the realities of approaching middle age, is the key to the first of a series of failures of judgement that they made: their absolute unwillingness to accept that having infants in the family changes everything for ever, including such trivia as the planning of holidays.
Dr David Payne, our consultant on the left of the picture, and his wife - the stance and expression of the latter reflecting a certain admirable je ne regrette rien - were the initiators of the holiday. Clearly comfortable in the role of organiser, if a slightly bumbling one, and accepted as the “leader” of the group, whether through his talent or through a certain lofty (dédaigneux), if amiable, presence, Doctor Payne described its origins (the italics are all mine) thus
"The first ... concept of a group holiday was when we went to Italy for our wedding... we had all of the guests staying there for that weekend, and it was fantastic. We had children staying there and everyone came and said what a fantastic time they’d had so that was the beginning.”
He
added
“Subsequently…we had holidays with other people, we went away with Kate and Gerry and other friends to Majorca and …although it was very hard, difficulties with our child sleeping wise and it’s hard work, still you appreciated the fact that there’s a group of you there and we subsequently had been away with Russell, Jane, and Matt and Rachael on another group holiday the year after that, and …it is much easier when you have a group of children, it’s great for the parents and you’re all at a similar stage in life with the way that they’re growing up. We were always looking to continue that yearly holiday.”
To
each his own. It is surprising that Payne talked about the work
involved and yet still felt that a group of children was “easier”
and it is also questionable if the successful Italian weekend in
2003, when only the McCanns had a child, had any relevance to later
times, particularly 2007 when five of the children were under three
and three of them were only one.
“We were looking to go on that type of holiday where we had all the amenities that Mark Warner offer so they’ve got the sporting facilities, they’ve got the crèche facilities for the children... so that, that kind of holiday was what we were looking for.”
Fiona
Payne
“all those Mark Warner holidays were very much the same, different resorts but the same sort of layout, the same hypothesis of having kid time and adult time”. She also said, “They all offered a babysitting service. When Dave and I went we didn’t have children, but we were very aware, we met lots of couples that were using the baby listening service.”
And
Mathew Oldfield, roped in by the Paynes said,
"... some of us had been to various Mark Warner resorts before, the Greek one in Lemnos, originally before Grace was born, a last minute deal and it was great, it was all inclusive, we all like sport and sunshine it was...just a very relaxing place to go, and we were quite keen to do that again because everybody in the group is pretty sporty, if you have a lot of people together you can share sort of the child care arrangements and it’s also very relaxing for everybody.”
“...when we went to Greece it was like the fastest holiday I’d ever been on because there was only about an hour when they [the children] were asleep at lunch each day and a couple of hours in the evening where you were actually sort of off child care duties, so the week went by in about sort of six hours, it was all sort of, it was very quick.”
Jane
Tanner was asked the obvious question at her interview – what
plans had she made for what she would be doing and what the children
would be doing on the forthcoming Praia de Luz trip?
"Er,” she replied, “we didn’t really think. I think we thought Ella would definitely be going to the kids club because I almost felt bad that she wasn’t getting that much kid attention in Exeter. And Evie probably to the kids club in the morning but then stay with us in the afternoon and that morning would give, well me a break you know to do, to do something else but at that point I hadn’t really, I hadn’t really thought about what that would be or, you know, whatever.”
It
should be clear by now that none of the group, save possibly Kate
McCann with her premonitory worries, were thinking clearly about the
holiday, for reasons outlined above and, no doubt, because young
children can make you loopy. At no time were they able to answer the
question of whether it was a group of families or a group holiday
with children attached. There was nothing reprehensible or
neglectful about this and clearly there is no evidence of any hidden
motives: it was just a lousy, lousy, decision, of the sort that we
can all make at different times but worsened, in this case, by the
tight psychological similarities of a group that still, deep-down,
saw themselves as couples.
It has
to be said, however, that the Paynes, having roped everyone into a
venture that started with their own inner needs - “we
were always looking to continue that yearly
[group] holiday”
- and having unintentionally chosen a resort which made a bad
decision worse, made some pretty appropriate follow-up choices: they
took Fiona’s mother with them, they made sure they got a large
apartment and they took a highly effective baby-monitor along,
neglecting, perhaps, to suggest that the others do the same. The
result was that for them the holiday was indeed reasonably relaxing,
more or less what they wanted, and they were able to sit at the
supper table floating free of the time consuming and frantic
silent-movie “checking” routine apparently taking place on all
sides. Looking
again at the photo on the court steps it is very easy to picture the
chronically unpunctual but otherwise unruffled Dr Payne, sitting,
slightly smugly, with his wine glass close to hand,at the
misleadingly named “tapas” bar table. One rather gets the
feeling that that’s how things have often turned out for David and
Fiona Payne, but not necessarily for others around them.
In
late 2008 the author Paul Richardson read extracts from his book A
Late Dinner,
on BBC UK radio. Richardson lives in Spain and in his book, which
was described as exploring the Iberian culture and way of life
through its food, he lovingly described the sense of revelation he
felt when, as a young man in Santander, he was invited for the first
time to join one of those long, tumbling, family meals in a seaside
restaurant where time seemed to stand still and which, for him,
conjured up a feeling for life and its joys which he had somehow
never experienced in Britain. Richardson
was writing primarily about Spain but such ritualised gatherings are
a regular feature throughout the southern European littoral,
stretching in a huge arc from the Bay of Biscay to Naples and
Calabria. As well as being the source of sheer enjoyment they affirm
the centrality of a certain vision of family life to Latin Catholic
culture, buffeted as it is by so-called globalization and the
atomizing tendencies of modern life. What strikes interested
northerners at once is the way all generations are accommodated into
these unhurried three hour feasts, whatever time of day or night,
and the way the prolonged consumption of wine almost never explodes
into argumentative drunkenness on the British model. It is an event
which, like the seafood itself, is strongly bound to its locality:
to have the children present in numbers without wrecking things –
to have them greatly adding, in fact, to the pleasure of the
occasion – means having grandparents,
the avos, nonnas and abuellas,
at the table to control and indulge them while others talk. The
acute fragmentation of family life in post-modern Britain, where the
grandparents end up living in their own reservations hundreds of
miles from their children, has not – yet — destroyed the
traditions of the Catholic south. C'est le cas des MC, en tout cas, leurs parents respectifs vivent loin de chez eux. La mère de KMC (et KMC est l'unique enfant) était embarrassée le jour où dans un programme de la TV espagnole on lui a demandé quand elle avait vu sa petite fille pour la dernière fois... Elle n'a évoqué qu'un coup de téléphone...
The good, perhaps...
An
interest in local culture, including its cuisine, is not exactly a
Unique Selling Point in the Mark Warner experience. Its gated
compounds, in fact, announce the reality – that an MW holiday
should have nothing to do with its host location but be nicely and
predictably the same whether it takes place in Lemnos or Ulan Bator:
the same sports and sportiness, as many English staff as possible,
the same execrable food and – a reflection of the fragmented
society from which it originates - the same generational apartheid.
“Suitable
for”,
conclude typical holiday puffs - or “reviews” as they are known
- “suitable
for: couples, young families with children etc. Unsuitable for:
families with teenagers, the elderly, the disabled.”
...the bad...
The
firewall against the local community which protected those who
signed up for the Mark Warner Experience, however, was breached
radically in the charmless Ocean Club development in Praia de Luz, a
once remote fishing village, initially by the nature of the MW
facility itself and, ultimately, by the disappearance of Madeleine
McCann. In their UK police interviews the seven talked repeatedly of
“knowing what Mark Warner offered” and signing up for PDL on the
basis of successful past trips, but when the cumbersome, seventeen
strong party and its paraphernalia was eventually discharged from
the people movers and mini-buses, they might have wondered if they
were the victims of a practical joke.
Instead
of the welcoming – if grotesque - embrace of an MW hotel building,
some examples of which can be seen here, they found themselves
staring at a chilly and semi-deserted mish-mash of facilities rented
from the Ocean Club and dispersed over a hillside area about as big,
and nearly as cold, as a Premier League football field, an area so
large, indeed, that the group had been unable to find each other on
arrival Où ? and had resorted to making contact via text messages. True
there were the famous cordon
sanitaire
MW gates but their accommodation, and thus their supervision and
security, was beyond the walls, in apartment blocks further up the
hill. This was not exactly the realization of past dreams – the
early morning gleeful dash in the sunlight from the door of your
thatched chalet, past the palms and into the communal pool: on the
contrary the doors of the ground floor apartments faced onto nothing
more romantic than an excessively gloomy five-foot concrete wall
and, while the rear balcony doors did indeed overlook a pool, they
were separated from it by a wall, an embankment and, well below
them, an alley.
...and
a postcard from heaven...
David
Payne, ever willing to put a favourable gloss on the consequences of
his own decisions, claimed, rather optimistically, that it was
possible to have a conversation with people in the pool while
enjoying a drink on the balcony. Où ? Leaving aside the fact that it
would probably have required a megaphone, or perhaps a baby monitor,
to do so, the rest of the party might have been forgiven for not
having this vision in mind as they waited for buses to take them
from reception to their apartments. In any case on April 28th the
pool itself was about as warm and welcoming as an Arctic seal hole. “Basically,”
said Rachael Oldfield, “Dave had chosen the resort and hadn’t
really read the small print.” A remarkably generous assessment,
but by the time she told the UK police this they had all been
through experiences that put such relatively minor annoyances in the
shade. This, and perhaps an awareness that they need their
friendships intact, mean that their states of mind regarding those
and other irritations are hard to gauge from their statements.
Still, there is no escape from it: Dr Payne had comprehensively
dropped them all in the shit.
He
had, it is true, made them to a certain extent aware of some of his
increasingly complex hassles with Mark Warner before they left,
leading at one point to a farcical and embarrassing mix-up in which
a copy of his insulting statements about MW, together with added
comments of a “Get
‘em, Dave”
nature by the recipient, was emailed by one of the seven to Mark
Warner themselves. Où ? Payne suspected afterwards that Mark Warner had,
in revenge, deliberately put the Payne entourage on a different
floor from the others. He had also made the group aware, sotto
voce, that
there might be “some differences” (!) from other MW resorts that
his friends were familiar with, but it was clearly not until their
arrival that it sunk in just how great their difficulties were, and
that it was now too late – because of Payne’s prior formal
acceptance of the facilities, including the non-existence of baby
listening and the lack of MW security overview of the apartments –
to claim that they had been misled. David leur a fait obtenir une ristourne.
Still,
any thoughts of lynching their Leader must have been dismissed by
this extremely tolerant group and, after some hours of settling in,
welcome meetings and activity choices, the group assembled to perk
themselves up with the first collective meal of their holiday. Due
to yet another of the “some differences” described by Doctor
Payne, this was not to be in a hotel dining room, since there wasn’t
one, so the group, who must by now have been half-dead from
tiredness and hunger, found themselves in unknown territory,
stepping out for the first time for a Portuguese, multi-generation,
friends and family meal at the “Millennium” restaurant.
It
was, of course, yet another disaster. Fiona Payne said
“I think we all went to the Millennium Restaurant, which had a sort of kids supper and that was certainly sort of, sort of early evening, I can’t remember whether it was six or seven, that sort of time, I remember the kids being very tired but we all trooped across and had a massive table, you know, overtook the restaurant, it was a bit of a walk and certainly with the younger kids it, you know, imagine we’re having to pick them up and put them down and they’re wanting to walk, it just took ages and it was quite sort of late for the children, they were sort of not behaving particularly well and just very tired and wanted to go to bed...”
Mathew
Oldfield confirmed the details of this trek and added some of his
own
“The Millennium was a good ten minute walk along roads with sort of, where you had to actually cross into the road to get round ...obstructions on the pavement and there was quite a lot of traffic that did come occasionally through quite fast, so it was quite a long walk to get there.”
And
Rachael said that the “dinner at the Millennium, was all,you know,
was quite chaotic because there were eight, you know, eight kids and
nine adults.” She then added the final detail to this latest scene
from Carry
On Doctors,
“it was like... well Matt, Matt wasn’t well that night, he threw
up a few times.” Fiona Payne’s understated verdict on this first
encounter with the Algarve? “It was not,” she said, “a
success.” Such
were the realities of their long-planned trip, their first battle
with real Portuguese streets [“all
cobbled!”
runs another internet review of Praia de Luz, “disastrous
for pushchairs and young families]
and the nearest they came to an encounter with the culture of the
Algarve before meeting its police officers on May 3. It was, of
course, not just a graphic reminder that the holiday they had
vaguely envisaged was simply impracticable and not just a collision
between two different ways of life - but a harbinger signe avant-coureur of things to
come.
The British had been bringing their beefy physiques, their
weird emphasis on sports and games - suggestive to southerners of
sexual frustration - their curiously unsubtle ways of thinking,
their politely hidden but deep-seated feelings of the superiority of
their own culture, their virtual, colonially-minded, indifference to
that of others and, most of all, their irritating wealth and
potential power, to Portugal since the sixteenth century and,
despite the old alliance, it could easily trigger some very complex
emotions: soon the gap that opened up between Portugal and the UK
over the McCann affair was as great as it had been in centuries. Food
as a reflection of culture? Well, perhaps only in England could a
senior police officer, Doctor Gonçalo Amaral, within a couple of
months be mocked and vilified as a "disgrace" for the
crime of taking “two hour lunches,” rather than, presumably,
snatching the tea and dogmeat burgers that their English equivalents
are apparently happy to manage with.
“It’s just we are sort of fairly similar...we’re sort of from the same background, we have similar issues about child rearing, which is why we sort of get on.”
Matthew
Oldfield, despite the anger that could overtake him at their
collective fate, was one of the more laid-back members of the group.
Not querulous, like Russell O’Brien, who typically spent some
hours of his UK police interview making nit-picking and sometimes
self-serving corrections to his statement, Oldfield described
himself as “somewhere between” the fumbling (maladroit) David Payne and the
thoroughly driven motormouth Glaswegian Gerry McCann. Tall and fit,
greying, conventionally good looking, the granite face, without a
sensual feature to it, speaks of a certain decency, strength and
determination in the eyes and mouth as well as a sense of modesty.
The latter might well have contributed to the swelling discomfort
manifest on the High Court steps: Matthew Oldfield, in contrast to
his wife, doesn’t like being the centre of attention.
Not
only does Rachael Oldfield look a great deal more comfortable in the
limelight than her partner but all the women in the group, with the
exception of the virtually invisible Dianne Webster, overshadow
their men in one way or another. Fiona Payne’s mother may have
been a mindless nonentity but the glamorous Fiona, whose outfits
look like they may have eaten up a fair chunk of the family budget,
is clearly one of those ladies who straightens her husband’s tie
before they step out of doors. Kate McCann’s blonde, ambiguous,
looks constantly and notoriously stole the public attention from her
husband, whose greyish, pin-eyed and argumentative face is,
admittedly, about as photogenic as the River Clyde on a November
day. Rachael, the self-possessed networker, an amusing, amused but
coldly ambitious lady who looks very happy indeed to be Rachael
Oldfield, clearly has enough oomph
for both she and partner Matthew, with possibly some left over. As
does the dark haired, slightly Celtic looking, Jane Tanner, the
least conventionally pretty but in many ways the most
interesting-looking, as well as the most thoughtful, of the ladies:
pictured in her company the weak and rather unconvincing features of
her partner Russell O Brien look as though they’ve had an airbrush
run over them. Of none of the ladies, despite their ages, does the
word maternal spring to mind.
That
this combination of talent, flair and ambition could make such an
utter hash of their childcare arrangements once the Millennium
restaurant (of which, Dianne Webster said, getting her priorities
right as usual, that “the food wasn’t very good either”) had
proved its unsuitability, has been a source of perplexity and
suspicion for investigators and many of the public alike,
particularly among the Latin Catholic Portuguese of the Algarve,
where the idea of excluding the children from meal times, let alone
leaving them on their own, is, as we have seen, simply
incomprehensible.
The
choices, after all, were simple enough: with the daytime activities
sorted out on the Sunday the sole question was what to do about the
evening meals. Given that none of them, understandably, fancied the
idea of carting the children to an evening crèche some distance
away, the obvious solution was to find someone, either a local
person, or one of the off-duty English staff, to act as a patrolling
baby sitter with access to their apartments. Cette nanny aurait pu faire le baby listening service en restant dans le corridor d'où aucuns pleurs ne lui auraient échappé. At between ten and
fifteen euros an hour, say, three hours a night would cost the three
couples – one does not get the impression that the Paynes were
going to hurl money into the kitty – around eighty euros each to
cover the remainder of the holiday.
Dr Gerald McCann has made a great many comments about his ill-fated trip and, indeed, about a vast number of other things but explaining just why such an obvious step wasn’t taken doesn’t appear among them. Nor have the 7 felt able to enlighten us. Perhaps it was, indeed, money: they are a notably careful lot and at this stage of their lives may have felt there wasn’t much to spare on top of the holiday costs. It can’t have been intellectual stupidity. And – here come the sleuths! - the idea that it was a deliberate act to avoid outside scrutiny of their activities accords neither with what we know of their personalities, nor with any supporting evidence. Certainly finding and organizing such assistance would have bitten into another day or so of their holiday, just as the inferior alternative of buying more baby monitors would have done, assuming that these were even available in Lagos. Even so the decision to do the evening supervision themselves is hard to explain, contradicting as it does their expressed desire for some – by no means undeserved - “social time on our own”.
Dr Gerald McCann has made a great many comments about his ill-fated trip and, indeed, about a vast number of other things but explaining just why such an obvious step wasn’t taken doesn’t appear among them. Nor have the 7 felt able to enlighten us. Perhaps it was, indeed, money: they are a notably careful lot and at this stage of their lives may have felt there wasn’t much to spare on top of the holiday costs. It can’t have been intellectual stupidity. And – here come the sleuths! - the idea that it was a deliberate act to avoid outside scrutiny of their activities accords neither with what we know of their personalities, nor with any supporting evidence. Certainly finding and organizing such assistance would have bitten into another day or so of their holiday, just as the inferior alternative of buying more baby monitors would have done, assuming that these were even available in Lagos. Even so the decision to do the evening supervision themselves is hard to explain, contradicting as it does their expressed desire for some – by no means undeserved - “social time on our own”.
The
tendency to inadequate judgement outside their own narrow vocational
fields which I have described and characterised earlier seems to
have been, once again, the cause, coupled, perhaps, with holiday
inertia. The way in which they implemented the decision, as we shall
see though, involved something more, something relatively unusual in
a group of nine adults - the absence, temporary or otherwise, of
anyone with
adult common sense and concentration. This apparently average
“middle-class” group – as our class obsessed UK media love to
describe them – was as I wrote before, seriously deprived in
imagination and experience and, underneath the apparently
conventional surface, rather weird.
Fiona's
somewhat blurred mother - Quite where the hazy and
indistinct figure of Dianne Webster fits into this pattern is
another matter. Subject to none of the constraints of the rest of
the group in upbringing and occupation, she should, surely, have
provided perspective and perhaps even wisdom for her daughter and
her younger companions in their approach to family life. Some hope.
At an age when many people are at the peak of their careers with all
their marbles intact she gives the impression of a badly worn
ninety-four-year old clutching a glass of port, with neither advice,
impressions, observations, judgement, a hint of wisdom or even
memory, to contribute to anybody or anything. By
the time of the UK interviews this lady may well have been in
neurotic fear that something, somewhere, had gone very wrong and
that her obvious ability to put her foot in her mouth unless closely
watched – one can almost see her husband’s glare - might
unintentionally make her daughter and the others look neglectful of
their children. Under such circumstances an apparently poor memory
is by no means a crippling burden. In any event her recollection of
events is comprehensively worthless, typified by the contrast
between her May 4 2007 interview and her UK deposition. Had she
noticed anything unusual on the holiday, she was asked in May,
anything which could be linked to the investigation? Nothing
at all. A
year later she remarked, with a sort of dull, sit-com, certainty,
that oh,
yes, they’d clearly been under observation by a potential abductor
at all times. He’d chloroformed the McCann children too.
The kindest things one can say about her are that she does not seem
a liar and that she may well have aged prematurely, and leave it at
that.
But
the whole question of supervision and “checking” has become so
loaded since May 3 that most of the statements made about it by all
those involved, not just Dianne Webster, are of debatable value, not
because the 7 (I exclude the McCanns) were liars but because the
issue was tied up, in both their statements and their own minds,
with problems of guilt, shame, self-preservation, loyalty to the
unfortunate McCanns and bewilderment. They spoke, for example, about
the decision to eat at the tapas bar and look after the children
themselves as if it had somehow “emerged” without much
discussion.
“We
just saw the tapas bar,” said Fiona, “and thought, oh that’s
great, we’ve got somewhere to eat, it’s easy, we could keep an
eye on the kids, get them to bed when they’re tired and, erm, you
know everyone’s a winner really.” And at another point she said,
“I think, you know, once we, the following day we got more to
grips with the layout of the place ... we sort of saw the Tapas Bar
and that well that looks ideal, you know, to eat.” And Jane
Tanner added, "...we sort of thought, at that point we thought
we can either do it between ourselves and one night one couple you
know stay back and then do the baby listening when we found where we
were and the proximity to the restaurant we just thought if we are
checking and doing the baby listening as is done in other Mark
Warner resorts we should be okay, which it obviously wasn’t, but
that was, that was the thought process behind it.”
Just
how much the subject, and its implications, were actually discussed
is smothered under a certain amount of flannel. It is quite clear
that none of the 7 were willing to admit that any one person
suggested the idea, or that is was a consciously agreed decision in
the knowledge that there were risks. “In relation to the child
care issues it was a collective decision made as a group,” said
Russell O’Brien to the UK police, in one of his characteristically
pompous comments, suggestive of a certain, shall we say,
defensiveness. As often in his interviews, Dr O’Brien sounded more
like a tight-lipped social worker defending his performance to a
tribunal rather than a witness trying to help reconstruct the truth
of events. And the line that, far from worrying about potential risk
– which implies ultimate legal responsibility - they were simply
duplicating exactly what Health & Safety compliant Mark Warner
would have done, speaks more about the advice of expensive lawyers
than the reality.
“So
what sort of arrangements did you come to as a group in respect of
checking on the children?” Rachael Oldfield was asked by her
police questioner. “That we would just check our own children,”
she replied briskly, ( Rachael does a lot of brisk) “we’d go and
have dinner [at the tapas bar] and then we’d sort of run back you
know every fifteen twenty minutes and have a listen at the door and
make sure nobody’s screaming their head off.” And she
added, “Because The
Millennium
had been a bit of trek and a bit too stressful with all the kids and
it was thought it would be quite nice to have dinner by ourselves,
so I booked a table for eight thirty in the Tapas...we thought we’d
do our own baby listening as if we’d been in another Mark Warner
resort where that would have happened.”
All very simple. Like having the kids in the bedroom of your own home while you sit in the garden fifty - or is it twenty? - metres away. Jane Tanner, slightly contradicting her comments above, made it clear that it wasn’t like supper in your own garden at all – after all such homely events are not normally preceded by a Risk Assessment. She admitted, “...we were just weighing it up and it seemed a reasonable risk, well I did think of it as a reasonable risk then it just, we thought it would be fine.” At this point alert readers may have noted that the McCanns make no appearance at all at this crucial time, which seems, to put it mildly, odd, considering Dr McCann’s firm views on just about everything and considering also that it was he and Kate McCann, as parents of three young children, who were by far the most affected by this “collective decision”. It seems rather unlikely that he was uninvolved, doesn’t it? It is much more probable that, in the absence of Leader Payne - who, with his supportive mum-in-law and baby monitor, was out of this particular loop - Gerry McCann would have been closely, and characteristically loudly, involved in the final decision. No doubt the group subsequently felt that it would be wrong and unfair to say so, hence the other reason for O’ Brien’s disingenuous comments about group decisions.
All very simple. Like having the kids in the bedroom of your own home while you sit in the garden fifty - or is it twenty? - metres away. Jane Tanner, slightly contradicting her comments above, made it clear that it wasn’t like supper in your own garden at all – after all such homely events are not normally preceded by a Risk Assessment. She admitted, “...we were just weighing it up and it seemed a reasonable risk, well I did think of it as a reasonable risk then it just, we thought it would be fine.” At this point alert readers may have noted that the McCanns make no appearance at all at this crucial time, which seems, to put it mildly, odd, considering Dr McCann’s firm views on just about everything and considering also that it was he and Kate McCann, as parents of three young children, who were by far the most affected by this “collective decision”. It seems rather unlikely that he was uninvolved, doesn’t it? It is much more probable that, in the absence of Leader Payne - who, with his supportive mum-in-law and baby monitor, was out of this particular loop - Gerry McCann would have been closely, and characteristically loudly, involved in the final decision. No doubt the group subsequently felt that it would be wrong and unfair to say so, hence the other reason for O’ Brien’s disingenuous comments about group decisions.
But
the various strangled circumlocutions of the 7, all those “ it
was thoughts,” “collective decisions”, “ we sort of
thoughts”
, disguising the individual responsibility and implying the
“emergence” of a decision, as in the election of a pope, cannot
disguise the fact that debate did take place. Not only had Jane
Tanner assessed the risks but as Matthew Oldfield confirmed
“...we’d thought about it [leaving the children alone in their rooms] and talked about [it] in between couples and between Rachael and I was, I mean, the worst thing you go well, you know, why are you worrying so much? They’re locked in, they’re safe, the worst thing that can happen is they wake up and not really know where you are for five, ten minutes, and first that’s pretty unlikely, Grace sleeps all the way through nearly, you know, nine times out of a hundred, and at worst she’s gonna be upset for ten minutes and then you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be there err just the thought of something like this is just completely just out of our experience.”
So
Rachael Oldfield, for example, did
have doubts, and was reassured, or persuaded by Matthew; Jane Tanner
was aware
that it was risky. Kate McCann had had her premonitions about the
holiday; the safety issue was
explored between the couples. No, not at all like your average
garden supper. And yet they went ahead with the men and with the
wrong decision - and then they all worsened it immeasurably with
their grotesque failure to secure the apartments, which we shall
come to in detail below. Seulement les MC et probablement seulement le 3 mai. It really does seem that all of them
- save Dianne Webster who was not consulted and was probably making
sandwiches or staring into space - were imaginatively incapable of
putting themselves in the position of a terrified child at risk, the
limitations of their personalities coming once more to the fore.
“There’s obviously this image,” concluded Jane Tanner, “that
we were like ah, fuck the kids, we’ll go off to the Tapas bar
they’ll be fine, and it wasn’t like that at all.” And she was
telling the truth: it wasn’t. But using, significantly, a Kate
McCann phrase, she added, “We just thought...you don’t imagine
in a million years.”
Imagine what? Fire? Bizarre and unlikely accident? An intruder? Pas nécessairement un ravisseur, plus probablement un cambrioleur, surtout si la porte est ouverte. Is it really that inconceivable? People a little less sheltered than these narrowly dedicated - or should it be, especially in the case of Gerry McCann - focused professionals, rich or poor, might find such things all too easy to imagine. For every aspiring Tapasite in the embrace of a safe provincial university and the National Health Service or convention circuit, there were plenty of others who'd strayed beyond Mark Warner and had their pockets picked in Madrid or Athens, or who’d come home in their youth to Moss Side or London, to find a dealer or a hooker in their doorway, vomit in the hallway, or their rented rooms smashed, burgled and ransacked.
Imagine what? Fire? Bizarre and unlikely accident? An intruder? Pas nécessairement un ravisseur, plus probablement un cambrioleur, surtout si la porte est ouverte. Is it really that inconceivable? People a little less sheltered than these narrowly dedicated - or should it be, especially in the case of Gerry McCann - focused professionals, rich or poor, might find such things all too easy to imagine. For every aspiring Tapasite in the embrace of a safe provincial university and the National Health Service or convention circuit, there were plenty of others who'd strayed beyond Mark Warner and had their pockets picked in Madrid or Athens, or who’d come home in their youth to Moss Side or London, to find a dealer or a hooker in their doorway, vomit in the hallway, or their rented rooms smashed, burgled and ransacked.
“It’s
just we are sort of fairly similar,” said Matthew Oldfield, “
...we’re sort of from the same background.”
It was
Jane Tanner who, towards the end of her UK police interview, best
expressed the group's view about the way they’d behaved during
their holiday and the utterly unfair criticism that they’d
subsequently faced. All of the seven gave the police the same basic
picture of their time in Praia de Luz: taking the children to the
Mark Warner crèche in the mornings, going to tennis, sailing or
windsurfing lessons, meeting up, usually, for sandwich lunches at the
Paynes’ apartment, dropping the children back at the crèche –
which most of the kids seemed to love – and exhausting themselves
with more sport for the rest of the afternoon, before the usual
routine of tea with the children, bath and bedtime story. Once the
children were finally asleep they all met for their evening meal at
the so-called tapas bar, sitting at a sheltered outside table which
looked across the pool to their apartments beyond the Ocean Club
perimeter.
Documentary
evidence, the crèche records and restaurant reservation sheets, for
example, generally backed up the group's version of events, as did
the police statements of independent witnesses such as the Mark
Warner and restaurant staff, confirming, in particular, that they had
indeed left the dinner table at intervals, apparently to check on
their children. Pas vraiment. There were no major discrepancies in the versions of
events which the seven provided to the UK police; Discrépances horaires quand même. evidence of
conspiracy, either to disguise the true nature of their stay in Praia
de Luz, or to assist the McCanns in a cover-up of some kind was
conspicuously absent; and not one of them, despite the Damocletian
possibility that they might be compelled to return to Portugal, ever
took refuge in a “no comment” answer.
These interviews, coming as they did after almost a year's silence, tended in many cases to strengthen the seven's credibility, which had been under attack in the media of both countries: Russell O’ Brien’s claim, for instance, that he had been dealing with his sick child’s bed sheets on the night of May 3 had been mocked as a lie for months, for Mark Warner employees had told the Portuguese press that he had never requested clean sheets. Quite right, said O’ Brien dismissively, he hadn’t – because the apartment had a washing machine, which he’d used that night. Of course, he added with his characteristic resentment, the Portuguese press hadn’t reported that, had they?Nor, it transpired, had the group spent forty suspicious minutes
after the child's disappearance, possibly preparing their story,
before eventually calling the police: the first call, as confirmed by
Mark Warner staff, had been made by 10.15. Faux. Le premier appel, sur l'ordre du gérant de l'OC, a été fait à 22h43. And, as we have seen,
Praia de Luz was not a carefully selected venue for suspect private
pleasures – it was a David Payne small-print botch-up, with
facilities that satisfied nobody.
These interviews, coming as they did after almost a year's silence, tended in many cases to strengthen the seven's credibility, which had been under attack in the media of both countries: Russell O’ Brien’s claim, for instance, that he had been dealing with his sick child’s bed sheets on the night of May 3 had been mocked as a lie for months, for Mark Warner employees had told the Portuguese press that he had never requested clean sheets. Quite right, said O’ Brien dismissively, he hadn’t – because the apartment had a washing machine, which he’d used that night. Of course, he added with his characteristic resentment, the Portuguese press hadn’t reported that, had they?
A few
days after the interviews had finished and the Portuguese police
observers had flown home, Rachael Oldfield was willing to comment on
them for a BBC documentary on the disappearance. Had
any of them changed their story?
No, replied Rachael coolly, they certainly hadn’t – there’d
never been a group “story” in the first place.To
many, of course, such self-confidence was a sure sign that they were
all under protection of some kind, perhaps because this little group
of provincial nonentities had powerful connections, or maybe because
they were uncomfortably close to organised VIP paedophile rings whose
exposure would bring the government, or the monarchy, crashing down.
After all, hadn’t the "UK Secret Services," whoever they
might be, arrived within forty-eight hours of Madeleine McCann
vanishing from her bed? However possible or impossible such theories
may be, one can only say that they are not obviously derived from the
available evidence, although that evidence can, naturally, be used to
support them.
Jane Tanner, brought by fate into the bleak surroundings of the Leicester Police interview room, watched by both a video camera and, behind a two way mirror, the Portuguese police, had had her fill of “theories.”“There’s a lot been said but, you know, we’re not a bunch of swingers that went out there for a swinging holiday,” she protested, adding the fascinating aside that, “I can’t think of anything worse, to be honest.” Her questioner, possibly intrigued by this insight into her personal tastes, let her proceed. “We didn’t go out there on a swingers’ holiday to dump our kids in the kids club while we got pissed and shagged each other, you know. That’s not what we did. One week a year,” she added bitterly, “there’s, there’s one week a year, the other fifty one weeks of the year with the kids all the time! In terms of our family, you know every spare moment’s with the kids: Russell doesn’t go off playing golf or go to the football ...it’s spent with the kids. I just think the Portuguese police have obviously got this idea of us and it’s completely, completely wrong in terms of the way we are and what, you know, our motives for being on holiday there were.” She added, as Jane Tanner often did, “I’m telling the truth.”
Given
their manic frénétique sporting activity – just reading about those fearsome
sweat-drenched afternoon jogs above Praia de Luz makes the spirits
drop – and the tedious and exhausting nature of the
teatime-bath-and-bed children’s routine, let alone the disabling
stomach infection which laid most of them out at one time or another,
one is inclined to accept her protestations. No handcuffs or copies
of A Hundred
and Twenty Days of Sodom
spilled out of their luggage onto the airport carousel; fifteen
minutes at a time away from the supper table was hardly sufficient
for refined and inventive sexual variations; the crack of whips was
not to be heard through the cheap, badly insulated, apartment walls.
I can’t
think of anything worse
to be
honest - cue
Gerry McCann in that fleece of his: let’s face it, as hedonists the
tapas nine are nowhere.
But
let’s be clear here – we are talking primarily about the seven
who were questioned in the UK, not the nine. Gerry and Kate, whom the
Portuguese authorities saw fit to make arguidos,
or suspects, in the disappearance of their own child, an action for
which they have expressed no regrets and few reservations, have their
own story to tell, as we shall see. The behaviour of the seven needs
to be considered quite separately from that of their two
friends. Jane Tanner’s outburst sounds sincere and conforms
to the author’s personal view that the group's manifest belief in
its own innocence is justified as far as the actual disappearance is
concerned. But once again we see the weird tunnel vision of this
tightly connected and slightly odd clique: just how
had the Portuguese police come to believe that they might have been
there to “dump the kids in the kids club, get pissed and shag each
other?” Didn’t Jane Tanner ever ask herself this question? Had it
never occurred to her that the seven’s own actions might have
contributed to the way they were seen? The problem here, the one that
lies right at the heart of the police enquiry, was that while the
seven had an unshakable conviction of both their own and the McCanns’
innocence regarding the actual disappearance, perfectly justifiable,
it seems, in the former case, rather less so perhaps in the latter,
their attitude and behaviour as far as the rest of their holiday is
concerned is a quite different matter. Yes, they described the broad
picture but when it came to the details of the children’s care,
well, as Fiona Payne might say, Phew!
A witches brew of guilt, shame, inability to confront their own
actions and - with the growing realization of how their behaviour was
being seen by outsiders - barely controlled fear of legal action,
made their responses to the Portuguese police very far from frank and
open.
The
crime of child neglect, in the English sense of failing in a duty of
care, does not exist in Portugal. Its nearest equivalent, sometimes
translated as “neglect”, is a much more serious matter –
effectively abandoning a child to its fate with the intention that it
should come to harm. Exposiçao (au danger). There was no reason for the seven to be aware of
these fine details, at least until these innocent “witnesses of
interest” started, no doubt for very good reasons, to consult
lawyers, and not just libel lawyers at that. All of them, however,
must have had a pretty good sense of potential risk, perhaps in
Portugal, very possibly from the UK’s increasingly draconian, if
often ineffective, child protection laws.
In
their first, hurried, statements, on May 4, the group made almost no
comments about the child care arrangements, except to confirm the
obvious fact that Madeleine McCann had been left alone, for short
periods, while they all ate. In the second set of interviews at
police headquarters in the charmless town of Portimao almost a week
later, however, a more detailed picture was emerging of their
activities, including, as we have seen, the uncomfortable fact that
far from being a one-off, “all
right we made a mistake,”
aberration, the decision to leave the children alone every night was
consciously taken near the beginning of the holiday in the knowledge,
as Jane Tanner has confirmed, that there were risks involved.
It
was rapidly becoming clear that they had certainly not taken action
to obviate those risks. Leaving the “checks” aside only Tanner
and O’ Brien had been able to maintain that they had secured the
critical children’s bedroom windows; it was certain that none of
the others, despite David Payne’s and Matthew Oldfield’s bullish
assertions to the contrary, had done so. Comment ? Worse, it was now evident
that the McCanns themselves, who in their statements on May 4 had
been ambiguous about just how they had entered their apartment, had
in fact been leaving their rear patio doors unlocked, for no better
reason, apparently, than because it made for a quicker and easier
walk between there and the tapas bar. Une des raisons.. Leurs déclarations sur la manière d'entrer n'étaient pas ambigues, elles étaient contradictoires.
Conscious
awareness of risk to others, combined with repeated failure to take
all reasonable precautions to counter it, means the possibility of
criminal charges in almost any Western society and in almost any
field, whether it’s a matter of child care, public safety or, as
the group must have known, medical practice. Unsurprisingly, perhaps,
the seven were not particularly forthcoming communicatif to the Leicester police
about the effect this awareness might have had on their responses to
the Portuguese criminal police, or PJ, as we shall now refer to them.
The
same Jane Tanner who made those passionate assertions that the PJ had
a totally false picture of her and her companions began her Portimao
interview on the evening of May 10 with some interesting social
insights. Asked about the decision to leave the children unattended,
the gist of her reply, according to the PJ records, was that:
“It was quite normal, culturally and traditionally, for English tourists to leave their small children alone in the bedroom or apartment to sleep while the parents are absent.”
Well
now! Hotel
bedrooms, with fire doors, smoke alarms and a certain amount of
security and porterage do, no doubt, lull some people into leaving
their children unattended at times, but to describe it as “normal”
and extend it to apartments
was a bit of
a stretch wasn't it? Jane TB était très manipulable (voir GMC). Culturally and traditionally? Whose culture and
what tradition? Jane seemed to be hoping to fall back on the
traditions of that venerable British institution Mark Warner, a
cultural beacon to us all no doubt, but she wouldn’t have been able
to find an example of MW encouraging such a practice in external
apartments whose security they didn’t control. It didn’t happen
because it was far too dangerous for MW, or any other holiday
company, to contemplate. The
reaction of her interrogators to these insights is not recorded but
one can venture that it wasn’t a vote of thanks, especially as the
interviewers were already lining up some tough questions about her
reliability as a witness. Perhaps their failure to welcome her brief
lecture unnerved her somewhat because pretty soon she grew altogether
less certain about the strength and dignity of British tradition,
turning, in fact, about one hundred and eighty degrees:
“...personally,” the record continued, “personally she didn’t
make a habit of leaving her daughters alone this way but only did so
because all
the couples of the group did it.” CQFD à propos de la manipulabilité.
Neither then nor later did Jane Tanner enlarge on this alternative explanation of peer pressure and it remains another of those little gems that she drops now and then without quite realising the impact of what she has said, especially since it implies that she might, under some circumstances, be just be a tiny bit, well, suggestible. We can recall also the “well organized” Russell O’ Brien’s flat, “It [the decision to leave the children] was a group decision, collectively taken.” So nobody’s going to hear anymore about that, then. In any case, by the time Jane addressed the question in Enderby a year after her uncomfortable Portimao experience, both of her earlier “explanations” had vanished without trace. "Of course, you look back now and think, yes, probably we were stupid but I think we were lulled into a false sense of security because this baby listening service is offered in other places and yeah you look at it now knowing what happened and... you’d think we were probably reckless...”
Reckless?
Oops.
But then she added, “...this [baby-listening] is a service that is
offered, you know, marketed as a service in other resorts and we felt
we were doing more
than is maybe offered there.” In
this, another of her helpful and highly incautious comments, Jane had
summed up the “line” that they were all to take regarding the
child care, or rather the slightly disgusting shortage of it, that
ultimate, "collectively expressed," view of the seven as a
whole. It was a neat and highly difficult to refute position, covered
in lawyer’s fingerprints and with conclusions that followed as
smoothly as a well oiled exercise bike - these sports freaks can get
to one's brain - or perhaps a defence counsel’s final address: it
was their understanding [members of the jury?] that a famous and
reputable holiday group, Mark Warner, regularly uses a baby listening
service by which employees listen from outside for sounds of
disturbance or distress every half an hour or so. By doing it
themselves they were not merely following good and accepted practice,
members of the jury, but
were actually improving on this highly respected holiday company’s
child care - by listening at the same or more frequent intervals than
MW. Cute,
eh? The reason for the unanimity regarding the magic “every half
hour” should now be clear, despite the irrefutable evidence that on
at least one night the interval was considerably longer and featured
an uncontrollably sobbing child in the McCanns' darkened apartment.
Still, knowing, as all professional English people do, the nightmare possibilities associated with child neglect accusations, such as their removal by the mad, incompetent, commissars of the social services without the irritating formality of a trial, who can blame the seven for tacitly adopting a line and sticking to it? Wouldn’t you? The trouble was that the fumbling and ashamed stonewalling of the seven which preceded the “emergence” of a defensible line on the neglect issue was perfectly obvious to the trained officers of the PJ, making it dreadfully difficult, if not impossible, for them to decide whether they were truthful witnesses or not in the separate and altogether more serious matter of the disappearance issue. It was a situation that was never resolved and its ultimate consequences for the investigation were, as we shall see, profound.
Still, knowing, as all professional English people do, the nightmare possibilities associated with child neglect accusations, such as their removal by the mad, incompetent, commissars of the social services without the irritating formality of a trial, who can blame the seven for tacitly adopting a line and sticking to it? Wouldn’t you? The trouble was that the fumbling and ashamed stonewalling of the seven which preceded the “emergence” of a defensible line on the neglect issue was perfectly obvious to the trained officers of the PJ, making it dreadfully difficult, if not impossible, for them to decide whether they were truthful witnesses or not in the separate and altogether more serious matter of the disappearance issue. It was a situation that was never resolved and its ultimate consequences for the investigation were, as we shall see, profound.
Kate
and Gerry McCann are about to step forward into the lights.
There
has been something blurred and fleeting in their appearances up to
now. Yes, they were part of the group, but their days were spent away
from it most of the time and they are usually described by the others
from a distance: a green and white snapshot on the tennis courts, a
glimpse of Kate on a punishing jog on her own above Praia de Luz,
finally the cheerful chaos as the children are picked up from the
crèche. As a couple they appear private and enclosed, with more than
one of the seven saying that they’d never been to the McCann’s
apartment before the night of May 3. Seul David y était allé. Later, pressed by the police to
say when they’d last seen Madeleine, their friends found it
extremely hard to do so, hardly able, indeed, to place the movements
of the family. They'd been around, certainly, hadn't been out of
sight for long, but it was so hard to recall details exactly...
Few
of the group, it turned out, could even claim to know them as
friends. One of the men, when asked a question about relations
between the McCanns, told the police that their friendships “weren’t
like that,” that is, they didn’t stray into areas of emotional
significance, once again suggesting, like the "Russell's getting
relieved" jokiness at the tapas bar table , that their
companionship was more that of a club football dressing room, or a
golfing foursome, than of friends bound by deeply felt links. Even
allowing for all that it is surprising just how far the McCanns were
outside the rest of the circle and how recent or unformed the
“friendship” was. The only true friendship appears to have been
between the pair and the Paynes, with Fiona Payne clearly close to
Kate and David Payne companionably at ease with Gerry. But even the
Paynes told the UK police that, in Praia de Luz, “a lot of the time
we didn’t tend to see Kate and Gerry - it was Russell and Jane
primarily[we mixed with], I remember, and sometimes Matt and Rachael
and Grace but generally Kate and Gerry would do their own thing
during the day.”
And
Fiona Payne, when asked if the only time she really saw Kate and
Gerry was at the tapas bar, replied, “We saw them round and about
during the day... I remember one afternoon I wandered down to the
pool...and had a diet Coke by the pool with them, they’d just
finished a tennis lesson...but we didn’t really do any activities
altogether”.
Rachael
Oldfield said that although they had known the pair for some years
before the holiday they only ever met them at the Paynes, not
independently. Matthew Oldfield, for his part, said he “didn’t
know Gerry and Kate and their children so well,” and, as far as
Praia de Luz was concerned, they saw less of them because, “Russell
and probably Dave...we knew them better. Gerry and Kate were much
more organised about their day and what they did and they had signed
up for tennis lessons.”
Jane
Tanner said she
didn’t
know the McCanns well either. Before they went on the trip, she told
the police, “they were the two people in the group that - I knew
we’d get on with Dave and Fiona, I knew we’d get on well with
Matt and Rachael just because they’re our best friends but it was
nice to be able to get to know Kate and Gerry better.”“Your
contact with Kate was limited to your tennis lessons and then to sort
of just sitting socially?”"Yeah.”
"And
with Gerry it was just limited to the social side?”
"It
was mainly in the evening that we saw, well, after the high tea for
the kids and afterwards in the play area with the kids and then, and
then in the restaurant in the evening.”
Russell O’ Brien was supposed to be the friendliest, after the Paynes, but then it turned out that he didn’t know them that well either, although you have to work to discover it. Dr O’Brien, readers may have observed by now, could be very crisp when addressing subjects that animated him, like his treatment by the press, and very clear in his recollections when they concerned such things as the behaviour of the Portuguese police. On other matters he was considerably more vague and a great deal more prolix. He was asked the straight question, put in at the request of those same Portuguese police, “what kind of relationship is there between you and the McCann couple”?
Russell O’ Brien was supposed to be the friendliest, after the Paynes, but then it turned out that he didn’t know them that well either, although you have to work to discover it. Dr O’Brien, readers may have observed by now, could be very crisp when addressing subjects that animated him, like his treatment by the press, and very clear in his recollections when they concerned such things as the behaviour of the Portuguese police. On other matters he was considerably more vague and a great deal more prolix. He was asked the straight question, put in at the request of those same Portuguese police, “what kind of relationship is there between you and the McCann couple”?
“Yeah,
sort of partially explained that there, erm so initially it was a
working relationship with Gerry at work, then there was a series of
err things, largely meetings at Dave and Fi’s house with the kids,
yeah well and the fact that we had the kids the same age, err and
it’s become erm you know, a friend, a friendship, although we, we
wouldn’t sort of see them or necessarily contact them you know
regularly, it was more you know that during, you know during err
meetings with, with Dave and Fi at their house”.
So that’s clear then.
And
about how often they met during the holiday, he replied:
“Erm
it varied day to day, we’d certainly see them erm a number of times
each day, err generally, we probably didn’t see them at breakfast
time, they were, I say they, they played more tennis than sort of
down at the water front I don’t think they did an awful lot down on
the water front at all, so erm Jane probably saw slightly more of,
of, of, of Kate and Gerry because she did a bit more tennis than me.
We, we’d see the children and them often at lunch time on a number
of days, we had joint lunches in one or other of the, of the rooms,
erm that didn’t necessarily happen every day, high tea we would
always see all the children and all the adults together when they
were served, they were served their dinner, erm think it was about
five or about quarter past five, something like that, err so at least
three or four times a day, I mean we, people did do their own thing
you know during the week as well and then obviously every, every
evening, err we were, you know we, we all kind of congregated
together”.
Taking
a hosepipe and broom to that answer we can see that his reply was
much the same as the others: regularly in the evenings, not very
often during the day.
This surprising distance between the couple and others and the fuzziness in recollections of their activities - in very sharp contrast to the seven’s solid certainties about the McCann’s characters and what they were and were not capable of - runs like a leitmotif through what little can be discerned of their lives. Both born in 1968, both the children of artisan families with no particular advantages, Kate an only child, Gerry the youngest of five. The Healy’s from Liverpool, that tough, bitter, city of sentiment and decline, the McCanns Irish immigrants to the equally tough city of Glasgow. Both families Catholics and both attending Catholic schools, something of more importance to Gerry than Kate: Glasgow is still a city where your religion can matter when you're growing up. Intelligence and determination, and no doubt firm parental encouragement, were the means that took them away from these thoroughly deprived surroundings, using the upward path of the professions and the comforting career structure of the NHS. Kate McCann, a high flier at school apparently, studied at the University of Dundee, her husband closer to home, at Glasgow. Gerry clearly the more ambitious, specialising, after a stint in sports medicine, in cardiology, not as a surgeon but as a diagnostician. Kate qualified as an anaesthetist, eventually going into general practice. They met in 1995 at the Western Royal Infirmary before both taking posts in New Zealand for a year. Married in 1998. Their first child Madeleine was born in 2003.
Such are the bare facts of an unusually bare joint biography. Their known responses to their experiences, or any projections of themselves as individuals are vanishingly rare. There is a short Facebook entry by Gerry written – in contrast to the oppressive, strangled banality of his later, thousands of words long, “blogs” – in the usual bouncy, brainless Facebook style with limited details of what appears to be, as we have seen before, a rather limited life. There seem to be no records of how they see themselves and who they are. There are no recollections by anyone of why they wanted to go into a healing profession, or whether they had a sense of vocation, or even any interest in healing. Neither of their medical specializations involve the conscious patient very much – an output map from an MRI scanner and associated aids in one case, an unconscious and masked figure in the other. Kate’s later, and brief, experience in personal healing as a GP seems to have left hardly a trace. “Interests,” in the conventional sense, are conspicuously missing, except for sport. On the matter that separates them from the rest of the nine – the desire to have children early rather than late, the failure to do so and the IVF treatment that followed, some of it, apparently, in Amsterdam – almost nothing has been said, by them or others.
As
in Praia de Luz, the people around them hardly seem to remember
details at all. The newspapers’ routine trawl through their
backgrounds revealed a tiny number of individual recollections but
almost nothing of what they had ever actually done to strike people,
apart from Gerry’s success in the under nineteen’s 1500 metre
title championship and Kate’s apparent liking for a drink and a
good time as a student. So faint was the trail they left behind that
conspiratorially minded sleuths afterwards suggested that the usual
suspects – the intelligence services and others – had suppressed
their history.
Impressions, on the other hand, rather than description, as in Praia de Luz, were in plentiful supply once the child had disappeared, although, oddly, few of them seem to derive from their ex-patients. Everybody quoted in the media described them as popular or very popular, though few were actually able to say why. Coming to more recent times the universal opinion was that they were devoted to their children and were “brilliant” parents; these opinions, expressed after May 3, are of dubious value since the media will only say saccharine things about victims, but there is plenty of consistency in the accounts and no reason to disbelieve them.
There
is also some consistency among the friends in Praia de Luz. Kate is
described, with genuine warmth, as laid-back and “lovely,” a
“perfect foil” to her more driven husband - the latter opinion
receiving some independent confirmation later on, when, after Gerry
had erupted at an interviewer’s unsuitable question and stormed out
like an angry bull, leaving an empty chair and a manifest sense of
unease behind him, Kate McCann remained where she was and murmured
placidly to the media crew, “it’s all right, it’s just his
way.” Comments by the seven about Gerry are, understandably,
slightly different: his habit of talking at you as though you are a
public meeting is alluded to a number of times, though there is no
malice in the memory and clearly the relationship, except between him
and David Payne, is one of respect rather than affection. But even
that should be balanced by the seven’s – and others’ –
memories of this taut individual, whose voice and manner recall the
harsh ugliness of a Northern Ireland town, romping indulgently with
his young children, a boyish smile on his face.
So
they hover at the side of the stage, dim outlines – hard in Gerry’s
case, attractively soft in Kate’s – rather than crisp visions,
having left hardly a footprint behind them anywhere in almost forty
years, only those impressions. If one of them had ever gained fifteen
minute fame or notoriety, for medical triumph or medical misconduct,
or anything at all, then their appearance on the stage might have had
less dramatic consequences. As it was this strange absence, or
ambiguity, of content meant that people, by the million, by the tens
of millions, were able to fill in the shapes for themselves as they
watched them step forward to confront the lights, Gerry’s shaking
hand clutching his first speech, Kate’s holding the child’s soft
toy like a dead rabbit: through the deforming power of the media’s
cameras everyone was now free to create their own imaginary version
of the pair, like a reflection in a cracked mirror.
