What I believe really happened that night

DESPITE poisonous rumours and speculation by people who lack real insight into the crime, there is no evidence at all against Madeleine’s parents Gerry and Kate.

They were clearly not involved in any way with her disappearance. But Portuguese police made a grave error by failing to treat them as suspects immediately.

That is simply good practice: they should have systematically eliminated those closest to the child from their inquiries to clear the ground from under their feet.

Instead police started with the assumption that a stranger had abducted her. When that theory faltered, they aggressively turned their focus on the McCanns.

Gerry and Kate were in an impossible situation, at the centre of a worldwide media storm and out of their minds with worry for their daughter. When they were declared formal suspects, or arguidos, whatever they did was bound to be criticised.

So what is the truth of Madeleine’s disappearance? The mistake most investigators have made was to assume she was taken from her bed in the apartment.

In fact, it is far more likely that Maddie left on her own. That morning, she had said that her brother and sister, twins Sean and Amelie, two, had woken up during the previous evening while the adults were out at dinner, and that their crying disturbed her.

What would be more natural than for Madeleine, woken again by her brother or sister, to go looking for her parents? Perhaps she turned the wrong way as she left the flat and wandered into the car park.

Wherever she was, a predatory stranger saw her and acted on impulse.

One of the McCanns’s friends, Jane Tanner, thought she saw a man carrying a small child in pyjamas when she went at 9.15pm to check the children were sleeping. Perhaps that was the abductor – or perhaps no one saw him at all.

This kind of opportunistic crime is very rare but not unknown. My hunch is that more than one person knows what happened to Madeleine. I live in hope that the silence could break, as allegiances shift or attitudes change.