Madeleine (39 page)

In November 2009 we heard that Halligen had been arrested on suspicion of fraud after a discrepancy in a hotel bill. He is currently on remand in Belmarsh prison, fighting extradition to the USA in connection with money-laundering and wire-fraud charges, all of which he denies.

For the most part, though, our experiences with independent investigators have been good. Our current tried and trusted team has more or less been in place, with a few modifications, since October 2008. It is spearheaded by a former police officer, with input from strategy advisers and specialists in various fields as required. This enables us to recruit the best-qualified people available to handle particular tasks when they arise, and it’s a system with which we have made encouraging progress.

As we got our first investigation team up and running in the autumn of 2007, Gerry returned to work at Glenfield Hospital on a part-time basis from November (full-time from January 2008), while I stayed at home with the children. Apart from the fact that no salaries had been coming in for four months, he had to go back for the sake of his own sanity. His driving role in our campaign was severely restricted by our
arguido
status and the obstacles it placed in our path. Gerry is passionate about his work, he needed to keep busy and focusing on different projects helped him to cope. If it is a generalization that men compartmentalize their lives, it’s certainly true of Gerry. Almost every evening, after the kids are in bed, he is at his computer or on the phone meeting the demands of his other job: continuing the campaign to find Madeleine.

I’m sure Gerry’s approach is healthier, but I reacted differently. With Madeleine constantly in my head, trying to return to my old life would have felt to me as if I were somehow pushing her to one side, and I simply couldn’t do it. It has been essential that Madeleine, and the rest of my family, remain my priority and I wanted to be around more for Sean and Amelie than would have been possible had I returned to general practice. I wonder, too, if I’d actually be able to cope with it now. All GPs have a handful of patients who present with comparatively trivial problems. In view of what I’ve been through, and am going through still, I’d be concerned I wouldn’t have quite the sympathetic ear I once possessed. And I’m sure some of my patients would undoubtedly find it awkward dealing with me, too.

On a practical level, there has been too much to do in any case, especially more recently. Although I have been blessed with plenty of willing helpers, even handling the mail is virtually a full-time job, and some projects, such as analysing the PJ files once they were released to us, have involved months of work.

We were dreading our first Christmas without Madeleine. As winter approached, the prospect of this usually joyous occasion only deepened the ever-present sense of loss. One morning in November, Amelie talked incessantly about her sister on the way to nursery. ‘Madeleine’s getting a big teddy bear for Christmas,’ she was saying as we arrived. By this time, I was quite tearful. It always warms my heart to hear Sean and Amelie chatting about Madeleine but it was the mention of Christmas that tipped me over the edge. I had a few words and a few hugs with a couple of the girls who looked after the twins, then pulled myself together and got on with the rest of the day.

That night I headed to bed relatively early. It had been a tough day emotionally and I was very tired. Stupidly, I switched on the television to catch the news headlines and caught a review of the next morning’s papers. Within seconds I was confronted by Madeleine’s face on the front page of a tabloid beneath a headline screaming, ‘SHE’S DEAD’.

I got little sleep after that. I thought I would never be able to stop crying. The pain was crippling.

Early in December, Amelie said to me, ‘Mummy, Madeleine’s coming.’

‘When?’ I asked.

‘Santa’s going to give her a big cuddle then bring her to Mummy.’ We couldn’t have faced Christmas on our own. We spent it quietly at Anne and Michael’s in Yorkshire with my mum and dad, and then went up to see Gerry’s family in Scotland for a few days. In Glasgow I slept on an airbed with Amelie because Sean wanted a ‘proper bed’ – not the most comfortable of arrangements! ‘Girls together,’ said Amelie. ‘Mummy, Amelie and Madeleine. I’ll save this place here for Madeleine.’

We had hoped that the judicial secrecy restrictions would be lifted early in 2008, giving us access to the police files and with it the freedom to speak. It was not to be. The police asked for a threemonth extension because of the ‘unusual complexity’ of the case. The president of the Portuguese Order of Lawyers, António Marinho Pinto, apparently took another view. He was later to be quoted as saying, ‘There are strong reasons to fear that judicial secrecy is being used to conceal the fact that the police have gone down a blind alley and don’t have a way out.’

On Tuesday 8 January – 250 days since Madeleine’s abduction – there were more appalling headlines. ‘IT WAS HER BLOOD IN PARENTS’ HIRE CAR.’ The emphasis was clearly designed to present this completely false assertion as incontrovertible fact. As we tried desperately to keep the public looking for our child, elements of the press, it seemed, were hell bent on telling the world not to bother, because she was definitely dead. This was our daughter they were writing about. How could these people be so heartless?

Happy New Year.

These terrible headlines never lost their power to cause us profound distress. The worst culprits were the
Daily
Express
and, to a slightly lesser extent, the London
Evening Standard
. The previous year, after one of the outrageous fantasies claiming that we had tranquillized our children, we had got in touch with Adam Tudor at Carter-Ruck, and begun to explore the possibility of taking legal action. As we did not want to make enemies of the major media organizations, we decided to keep this as an absolute last resort. We had relied on them in the past to get our message out to the public and we knew we would need their assistance again in the future, but this was fast becoming the only option left to us.

Now, in the space of a couple of weeks in January, the
Express
published three completely untrue stories, which basically rehashed yet again coverage dating back to September 2007, when we had been made
arguidos
. It was the last straw. We had tried every avenue and felt if we didn’t do something these fabrications, as well as discrediting our efforts to find our daughter, were going to follow us for the rest of our lives. We had a meeting with Adam Tudor, who was extremely helpful and went through the pros and cons of legal action in considerable detail. Adam and his partners agreed to take on the case on a no-win, no-fee basis and that certainly made our decision a lot easier. The thought of having to spend potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds to get justice would have been a major deterrent.

It took a couple of months of legal to-ing and fro-ing, but the Express Group finally conceded that their stories were untrue. They agreed to acknowledge this in the High Court, and on the front pages of both the
Express
and the
Daily
Star
, stating that they had agreed to pay £550,000 into Madeleine’s Fund to aid the continuing search.

Although this sum was much higher than we had anticipated and would have been ready to accept, we had been told that if the case went to court we could expect substantially more and, potentially, ‘exemplary’ damages – a departure from the principle that the purpose of awarding damages is to compensate the plaintiff rather than punish the defendant. In other words, the Express Group could have been additionally penalized not only for causing us harm, but for doing so for purely commercial motives.

But for Gerry and me, the money was very much a secondary matter (though, of course, hitting the Express Group in the pocket would underline the seriousness of the offence and serve as a warning to others to think twice before running similar material). All we really wanted was for these articles to stop, and for the Express Group to admit they were not true. The corrosive effects of their stream of lies (over a hundred articles were cited in our action) about both the search for Madeleine and us were immeasurable, and we would much rather none of it had ever been printed in the first place.

With freedom of the press comes a moral responsibility to behave with integrity. Publishing untruthful allegations harms lives. Sometimes the harm is irreversible, regardless of apologies and financial compensation. As a family, we only barely managed to survive and I am sure that, without the support of the general public, friends, family and those who came directly to our aid, like Brian Kennedy, Edward Smethurst, Richard Branson and Stephen Winyard, who were prepared to stand up for us in our darkest hour, we probably wouldn’t have done.

When our action against the Express Group was concluded, we also issued a formal complaint against Associated Newspapers, and particularly the London
Evening Standard
, which at that stage they owned. After a rather protracted series of negotiations we came to an agreement involving financial compensation and a front-page apology in the
Standard
. We could probably have successfully sued all the national newspapers in the UK but we didn’t want to spend time and energy on long wars of attrition like these. Besides, we had achieved our aim. The press were now well aware that we would take action if they continued to print these fictions about us and Madeleine, and as a result coverage in the UK did improve at last. With hindsight, we probably should have done this earlier, but by the time we finally did so, we were prepared to go the distance. It’s just a shame we had to do it at all, and if the media had listened to us, to Angus, Justine, Clarence and to the chief constable of Leicestershire police, it could have been avoided.

In the wake of our libel action against the Express Group, the seven friends who were on holiday with us in Portugal also filed formal complaints against the company. They settled out of court, for a total of £375,000, which was also paid directly into Madeleine’s Fund.

Robert Murat, too, had his problems with the media. He received £600,000 in damages and apologies from four newspaper groups, and, later, further substantial damages and another apology from Sky Television, for numerous false claims published about him.

Adam Tudor and his colleague Isabel Hudson continue to do a vast amount of work for us, without payment, most of it quietly, behind the scenes. They have given us invaluable advice, for example, in our attempts to deal with the widespread defamatory material circulating on the internet. We have taken action against one or two websites, but it has proved almost impossible to get this stuff removed from some of them, particularly those hosted in the USA. Friends flag up some of the worst offenders for us, but in the end it comes down to picking your battles. You could spend your whole life doing nothing but trying to shut down crank websites with little prospect of success.

That January, we also began our campaign for the introduction of coordinated child rescue alert systems (CRAs) within Europe. We knew to our cost that the response to child abductions can often be haphazard and disorganized and we’d seen on our European visits how widely procedures varied. Given the ease with which anyone – including abductors and child traffickers – could now move from country to country, there was an urgent need not only for properly functioning national systems, but for a cooperative policy that allowed for the launch of cross-border alerts when appropriate. A lot of groundwork had already been done to develop, improve and unify CRAs by the European Commission, with the help of Missing Children Europe and individual NGOs, but we hoped that our involvement, and the publicity it would bring, might help speed up the process.

It had always been part of our plan for the future of the Find Madeleine campaign to use our resources, and the attention focused on us, to try to save other children and their families from the same nightmare. As a result of the unprecedented publicity surrounding our case, Madeleine’s image had become almost iconic, the face that represented all missing children. Her plight had brought the whole issue into the spotlight, greatly increasing public awareness. That was something positive in itself. We realized that while the appetite for news of her remained high, we should capitalize on the platform it gave us to help other missing and exploited children.

Until Madeleine was taken, I’d been aware of only a few child abduction and murder cases. Horrific though they were, they seemed such a rare occurrence, and of course, you never dream anything like this will happen to your family. As we learned more, and discovered the massive scale of the problem, we were appalled. Sickened and perplexed at first by how little I had known, I was only now beginning to realize that such ignorance was widespread. In general these crimes are so poorly publicized, probably because they are so low on the political agendas of too many countries, that public awareness, too, is low.

It is difficult to be precise about the number of children who go missing each year, primarily because there is no standardized method for collecting, recording and categorizing data within Europe, or even nationally. Some countries have no recording system at all. For every high-profile case like ours, there are many others that go unreported by the media.

In the UK alone, in 2009–10, more than 200,000 reports of missing children and teenagers were received by the police. This figure encompasses a wide range of cases, of course, including runaways and juveniles absconding from care homes (who make up the great majority of this number), as well as parental and family abductions, and the most serious but thankfully by far the smallest group: stranger abductions (or ‘stereotypical kidnappings’, as they are known in the US).