Truth may be horrific, but McCanns need closure
IT was the ‘breaking news’ alert that came out of the blue this week. After just over 13 years, countless hours of police work across Europe, millions spent on private investigations, untold red herrings, sightings and dead ends, we may finally have the answer to the riddle of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.
New phone record evidence revealed by German police places a convicted paedophile in the small Portuguese resort just an hour before the little girl vanished from her bed in her family’s holiday apartment.
He speaks at length to an unidentified contact, and next day he re-registers his Jaguar to make it look as if it never left his native Germany. He matches the description of a man seen carrying a toddler through the streets of Praia da Luz on the night the child was taken. He was known to be a drug dealer and a burglar who specialised in targeting holiday lettings.
Police indicated that he was not acting alone, saying there are others who know what happened to Madeleine. So this man wasn’t just an opportunist who stumbled into the McCanns’ empty apartment in search of jewellery and cash, and, finding three small children unattended, decided to take one of them instead.
Rather, as has always seemed more probable, he had a mission, maybe even a lucrative order to fill on some unimaginably dark marketplace.
He rented a ramshackle dwelling close to the beach where Madeleine and her siblings had played each day.
It was a quiet time early in the holiday season, tourists were still scarce and a family like the McCanns, with their gorgeous golden children and their relaxed routines, would have snagged his interest.
So he would have spied on the family, observing the parents’ habit of leaving the tots alone in their beds while dining at a restaurant 80 yards away, returning every half hour to check on them.
He knew exactly how much time he’d have to get into the room, snatch the sleeping child, and make his escape.
He drove a campervan, the perfect mobile crime scene for whatever his vile purpose. The tardy and incompetent response of the Portuguese police gave him and his accomplices ample time to leave the country. It all sounds so depressingly close to the most dreadful, but most likely, scenario. Nobody really believed that the child just wandered off, or that her unfortunate parents had any hand in her disappearance. This, if we’re honest, is how we expected it to end.
So why does it feel less like the solution to one mystery than the start of a fresh one? A convicted paedophile, a neglected property that looks like a movie version of a predator’s lair, and a newly discovered phone call placing him right on the spot at the precise time of the abduction? Is it not all just a bit too pat?
How come, in the course of one of the most extensive criminal investigations in decades, this man never emerged as a suspect before? A local expat, Robert Murat, was wrongly identified as the culprit, just for being a tad eccentric.
GERRY and Kate McCann were named as ‘arguidos’, or suspects, just for looking a bit too composed, a bit too groomed and eloquent, as if there’s a ‘right way’ to behave when your child suddenly disappears.
It seemed as if every tourist and every resident of the western Algarve in 2007 had been investigated. And yet all the time a convicted pervert, known to prey on little girls, had been living just outside the tiny town?
He was peculiar enough to have aroused enmity and attention amongst his neighbours. He was solitary, unfriendly and forbidding, and when he vacated his rented property, the locals who helped clean the filthy house noticed mysterious scratch marks on wooden posts in the sitting room. Yet nobody mentioned him to police?
It’s hard to put yourself in the position of Kate and Gerry McCann, where the best outcome they can hope for is to find their little girl’s body.
They still buy Christmas and birthday presents for Madeleine, who would have just turned 17, every year, but in their hearts they must accept she’ll never open them.
However horrific the truth, at this stage it will hardly be worse than never knowing at all. It is certainly a mystery that this suspect never surfaced until now, but let’s hope it is the last mystery this tragic family have to face.