Madeleine (43 page)

Canada was the perfect choice. We all spent five days of our holiday in a cabin on a remote lake in rural British Columbia. It was an idyllic place, surrounded by forest, tranquil and unspoiled, with nobody there but us – and possibly a few bears and moose. Of course, there were tough moments. The solitude emphasized the yawning gap in our family, but that is with us always, wherever we are. Sean and Amelie absolutely loved their adventure and it was wonderful for Gerry and me to be able to spend so much time together with the children.

Perhaps it was too much to expect our trip to remain completely secret. One night, back in Vancouver, Gerry was woken by a phone call from a DC Johnson of the Leicestershire police, wanting to fax us some information. Gerry told him that we didn’t have access to a fax machine and suggested emailing us at our usual address. DC Johnson said it wasn’t that important, he could drop it off when we were back, and asked when we were leaving. Gerry told him and we went back to sleep.

Mysteriously, on our arrival at Vancouver airport on 10 July for our flight home, we found a reporter and photographer waiting for us. There were four more at Heathrow. When Gerry phoned Leicestershire police to speak to DC Johnson, they were puzzled. They said they had no information for us, knew nothing about the phone call and had no DC Johnson working for them. Stitched up again. Still, at least the newspapers got their photographs!

While we were away, there was a hearing in the High Court relating to an application we had made on Madeleine’s behalf for access to all the information held by Leicestershire police relating to her case. As nobody else was now searching for her, we wanted our own investigators to have the chance to check this material for any relevant leads. Naively, I’d thought a court order would be seen by the police, who were always telling us their hands were tied, as a way of helping us without upsetting their Portuguese counterparts. If they were required by law to pass us this information, surely the PJ would need to accept that? I couldn’t have been more wrong. The UK authorities fought our application tooth and nail. I was shocked by the force of their opposition and the lengths to which they seemed prepared to go to deny us this access in these circumstances.

The British police had their reasons, of course, among them the investigative primacy they were obliged to concede to the Portuguese and the concern that being in possession of information otherwise known only to the police and the perpetrator might compromise Gerry and me, since at this point we were still
arguidos
. All of this the assistant chief constable for Leicestershire made clear in a statement written for the court. He had come out to Portugal shortly after Madeleine’s abduction and had seen us at our most grief-stricken, and yet he felt able to comment of Gerry and me in this statement: ‘While one or both of them may be innocent, there is no clear evidence that eliminates them from involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.’ We were completely staggered. No evidence to eliminate us? Whether or not it was his intention, that line stuck in our heads as ‘guilty until proven innocent’.

Given the extreme opposition we faced, we realized this was a battle we weren’t going to win. Reluctantly, we made a tactical decision to accept a smaller amount of information. Having to withdraw was quite galling, especially as the eighty-one items disclosed to us included trivial details that our family had passed on to the police in the first place.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, Gonçalo Amaral, removed as coordinator of the investigation in October 2007, reared his head again. On 30 June he retired from the police force altogether. His reason for doing so was, he said, to regain his ‘freedom of speech’. Nine months after his removal from the investigation, Amaral’s association with it appeared to have increased remarkably. As speculation about the closure of the case mounted, he, along with several of his ex-PJ friends, began to appear in newspapers and on television. His purpose appeared to be to convince the Portuguese nation that Madeleine was dead. He had, he said, written a book about the case that would be published very soon.

On Monday 21 July, the Portuguese attorney general’s office announced that the investigation of Madeleine’s disappearance was to be archived, pending further evidence. The case files were to be released and the
arguido
status of Gerry, myself and Robert Murat was to be lifted. There was no evidence to suggest that Madeleine had come to serious harm and no evidence to implicate Gerry, me or Robert Murat in what had happened to her.

Gerry and I received no official notification of this from the Portuguese authorities. I heard the news at about 4.30pm from a French news agency via Sky News and BBC News 24. It did not come as a great surprise as both the day of the announcement and its content had been pre-empted by the newspapers on Friday and we had been tripping over photographers and news crews at the end of our road all day.

It may sound odd, but in some ways we were glad the investigation had been closed. As I’ve said, we were far from convinced that there was any real investigation taking place anyway, so to have it officially brought to an end didn’t feel like as big a loss as might have been expected. While the PJ had continued to supply the usual response – ‘The official investigation continues. All credible lines of inquiry will be pursued’ – we had been receiving messages from concerned people who had tried to pass on information to the police, only to be told, ‘The child is dead.’ Now that this ‘investigation’ had concluded, reports could be channelled directly to our own team, which would give them, we hoped, more to go on. It was certainly better than nothing.

As for the dropping of our
arguido
status, it was hardly a cause for celebration. All it meant was that, after eleven months of being pilloried, we were back where we started. Madeleine was still missing and we still had to find her. All the same, it was a relief, of course. In spite of my disgust with the whole business, I could appreciate that not being an
arguida
was preferable to being an
arguida
and that Gerry and I were in a better position than we had been the day before. It was also a public acknowledgement that the Portuguese authorities had nothing to implicate us in Madeleine’s disappearance, just as we’d always insisted. And we hoped that some of the doors that had been closed to us since September 2007 would now reopen.

With the inquiry closed, our Portuguese lawyers, Carlos Pinto de Abreu and Rogério Alves, were allowed to consult the case files, and wasted no time in doing so – although the DVD containing the files took ten days to reach them. Given that leaks had become such an epidemic by this time, it will astonish nobody to learn that the prosecutor’s fifty-seven-page summary of the PJ’s final report had been on a Portuguese website since the day after the news broke.

Amaral and his chums had evidently been poised to take full advantage of the long-awaited lifting of judicial secrecy. Now they really went to town: we had staged a kidnap, or Madeleine had died in our holiday apartment and we had hidden her body; we had influenced the British police and organized our campaign to mislead investigators into searching for a living child, and so on and so forth. No longer gagged by the law, Amaral was talking more and more openly to journalists and turning up on television chat shows. A friend in the Algarve kept us updated on his activities. It was unpleasant and distressing to hear what he was saying, but we had to know what Madeleine was up against in Portugal. And it was incessant. With the best will in the world, it is hard for anyone to absorb this stuff day in, day out and remain completely objective, especially when it is never challenged or balanced by an alternative viewpoint.

It is impossible to convey, particularly to people outside Portugal who were not aware of Amaral’s behaviour, just how difficult this smear campaign was both to withstand and to counter. And we desperately needed to counter it: we have always believed that the information that can lead us to our daughter is likely to come from Portugal. This is where the crime was committed, after all. Blackening our names was one thing, but if people there were taken in by Amaral’s theories, they were going to think there was no point in looking for Madeleine, or in passing on any information that might be relevant. We are quite sure that Amaral’s posturing has reduced our chances of finding her.

Why on earth would a former police officer want to convince the world that a missing child was dead – with no evidence whatsoever to support his claim? The only conclusion we could draw was that he was attempting to justify his actions while in charge of the investigation and at the same time promoting his forthcoming book to cash in on our misfortune. It just beggars belief.

I spent many days in tears, sobbing at the injustice being done to Madeleine by the very people who should have been helping her. There were times when I felt so incensed by the conduct of Amaral and his friends I thought I simply wouldn’t get through the pain and anger. It was utterly frustrating that there didn’t seem to be anybody in Portugal prepared to stand up against this man. Surely there were intelligent and knowledgeable people in positions of authority who could see through these offensive allegations. Why were they all staying quiet? Was it because it wasn’t their problem? Were they scared to speak out? Perhaps Amaral had tapped into some kind of national subconscious desire for this to all just go away. The country was already reeling from a child-abuse scandal involving Casa Pia, a state-run institution for orphans and other disadvantaged children (when this finally came to court in 2010, six men, including a TV presenter and a former UNESCO ambassador, would be convicted) – the first such case ever to be tried in Portugal. Perhaps it was more convenient and less troubling to lay Madeleine’s disappearance at the door of her foreign parents, put an end to the matter and move on. Who knows?

On 24 July 2008, three days after the inquiry was closed, Gonçalo Amaral launched his book about our daughter’s disappearance. For this to have been possible, confidential information relating to the investigation would have to have been passed to his publishers, and any number of people involved in the production of the book, well in advance of the lifting of judicial secrecy. Needless to say, it repeated his theories, dressed up with fabrication and speculation. What it failed to include was any evidence – something one would expect to be rather important to a police officer – or any detail that didn’t suit his story.

Dear God. I’m finding it really difficult to believe you’re there at the moment. The more our suffering and pain continues and the more we are tested, the more I find myself doubting your presence, which is really scary. Without you, we have nothing; certainly nothing more than a slight chance so it’s almost impossible to give up on you. Please God, if you can’t bring Madeleine back imminently, please give us a sign, something positive.

Gerry and I talked about taking legal action against Gonçalo Amaral but we had concerns about the time and effort this would involve. We did not want to be diverted from our own investigation just as we had put the restrictions of the case behind us and we feared that any resolution through the Portuguese courts would take too long. For the moment we hoped the fuss would die down and Amaral would let up.

While struggling to cope with all this, I had a task of Herculean proportions facing me: combing through the 5,000 or so pages of documentation contained in the case files that had been presented to the prosecutor and received by our lawyers on 31 July.

We were pleasantly surprised by the prosecutor’s conclusions and by how emphatic he was about the lack of any evidence to suggest either that Madeleine was dead or that we were involved in her disappearance. For several months we’d been concerned that if the case was closed, it might be closed in a way that left a dark cloud of suspicion hanging over us, so this came as a big relief. Initially, though, I was a little sceptical as to how much use the PJ’s files were likely to be to us, bearing in mind that latterly, at least, the principal focus of their inquiry seemed to have been Gerry and me.

Four days later, the files were released to the media. DVDs containing our names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, passport details, and those of our friends, relations, Mark Warner staff, witnesses and potential suspects, were being dished out to any journalist who asked for a copy. All those months we’d spent begging for scraps of information about what might have befallen our daughter and now here was the whole lot being distributed to every Tom, Dick and Harry. There is a big difference between what is in the public interest and what is of interest to the public, and surely when it comes to the dissemination of official police records it is the former that should prevail. It meant we had to seek advice on preventing identity theft and other fraud.

Naturally the media were going to be scouring the files for ‘juicy’ stories and angles, without a thought for the consequences for people who had tried to help the investigation. Now potentially valuable witnesses who had spoken to the police in confidence would be losing their anonymity. Gerry and I knew only too well the enormous strain this imposes on such victims and their families. Few people are equipped to deal with it. It had been our intention to go through the files with our investigation team and extract any information relevant to furthering our search. But now, with the media devouring it and rushing out to beard key witnesses, many others would be frightened off. It was crazy, and yet another blow to our chances of finding Madeleine.

We were splashed over the papers once again, of course, the tone swinging from the negative (the dogs, Kate refusing to answer questions) to the more supportive (criticism of the PJ for overplaying the DNA evidence). But exposure of a few of the injustices perpetrated on Gerry and me didn’t outweigh the damage done.