Ten years on, the smile that says: I’ll NEVER give up hope for Maddie
KATE AND GERRY INTERVIEW
SOMETIME over the next fortnight, Kate McCann will go shopping for a 14th birthday present for her missing daughter Madeleine.
Her unfailing belief that Madeleine might be found alive finds expression in many deeds, but this intensely poignant expedition, endured every year, stands alone.
Kate, 49, says: ‘I obviously have to think about what age she is and [choose] something that, whenever we find her, will still be appropriate. There’s a lot of thought that goes into it. But I couldn’t not… she’s still our daughter, she’ll always be our daughter.’
Whatever Kate chooses will be carefully wrapped and added to the other birthday and Christmas gifts accumulating behind the closed door of her daughter’s bedroom at the family home in Leicestershire, in the East Midlands region of England.
On Wednesday it will be exactly 10 years since Madeleine, then aged three, vanished without trace from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal.
In an interview to mark the anniversary – a ‘horrible marker of time’ – Kate and her husband Gerry spoke of doing ‘whatever it takes for as long as it takes’ to find her, and of how their hope of being reunited with Madeleine burns as strong as it did a decade ago. At times, particularly when recalling poignant moments, pain registers across the faces of the couple – a reminder of their anguished demeanour when they faced TV cameras in the aftermath of Madeleine’s disappearance.
But overall they seem more composed, perhaps more accepting of their situation.
Occasionally, when contemplating a reunion with their daughter, Kate’s face – framed by a new hairstyle – breaks into a smile.
Kate says the decade they have lost, however, ‘feels stolen’. It was, she adds, ‘time we should have had with Madeleine. We should have been a family of five for all that time’.
Noticeably less tense, the couple also discuss how their lives have acquired a ‘new normality’ in which they no longer spend every waking hour engaged in some aspect of the search.
Following Madeleine’s disappearance, Kate, a former GP, didn’t want to let her twins, Sean and Amelie – now aged 12 – ‘out of my sight’. But she reveals that she has finally taken the ‘big step’ to return to work – ‘back in medicine but in a different area to my general practice’.
She says: ‘Ultimately you have to keep going – and especially when you have got other children involved. Some of that is subconscious, I think – your mind and body just take over to a certain extent. But if you can’t change something immediately, you have to go with it and do the best that you can. And I think that’s what we have tried to do… one of our goals, obviously ultimately finding Madeleine, was to ensure that Sean and Amelie have a very normal, happy and fulfilling life, and we’ll do everything that we can to ensure that.’
Gerry, 48, a cardiologist, says: ‘At some point you’ve got to realise that time is not frozen, and I think both of us realise that we owed it to the twins to make sure that their life is as fulfilling as they deserve.’
Now that the twins are beginning to use the internet, the couple have had to warn them about the ‘distressing’ comments about Madeleine posted online.
And occasionally they allow themselves to imagine how they would react to seeing Madeleine again. ‘I try not to go there too often, to be honest – it’s one of those real bittersweet kind of thoughts,’ says Kate.
‘Ten years is a long time, but ultimately we’re mum and dad, she’s our daughter, she’s got a brother and sister, grandparents and lots of family and friends. So it would be absolutely fine, it would be… beyond words, really.’
Her husband talks of how the decision five years ago by the Metropolitan Police to investigate the case took the pressure off them as a family.
‘After the initial Portuguese investigation closed, essentially, no one else was actually doing anything proactively to try to find Madeleine,’ says Gerry.
‘Every parent could understand that what you want, and what we have aspired to, is to have all reasonable lines of inquiry followed to a logical conclusion.’
The couple have been buoyed by the advances made by Met detectives, though they decline to share details of the investigation. Kate says: ‘My hope for Madeleine being out there is no less than it was almost ten years ago. I mean, apart from those first 48 hours, nothing has actually changed since then. I think the difficult thing has always been how will we find her, because you’re relying on the police doing everything they can, and you’re relying on somebody with information coming forward.’
Echoing her sentiments, Gerry says it was ‘devastating’ not to have found Madeleine but adds: ‘We are still looking forward, I think that’s the most important thing – we still hope.’ He says he clings to the view of experts that ‘the younger a child is when they’re taken, the more likely they’ve been taken to be kept’.
There have been many ‘unbelievable’ cases, he says, in which victims have been held for years.
‘You think, “How could that have
Our time has been stolen– we should be a family of five
Ten years is a long time, but she’s still our daughter, and she will always be our daughter We’re still looking forward – it’s important that we have hope
happened?” and that is probably what is going to happen with Madeleine’s case as well, that people will go, “That’s incredible, how did that happen?”’ Every possible theory has been investigated: that Madeleine was abducted by a paedophile or child traffickers, that she was killed during a bungled burglary or that she simply wandered out of the apartment and died in an accident. But despite being the subject of one of the biggest missing person investigations of all time, no trace of the little girl, who was about to turn four, has ever been found. There have been innumerable leads and countless false sightings, and the McCanns’ press spokesman Clarence Mitchell revealed yesterday there were times when the couple genuinely believed they were close to finding Madeleine.
On one occasion, in 2007, after reports that a blonde-haired, English-speaking girl was living in a village in Morocco, he said an ‘aircraft was put on stand-by, waiting to pick her up’.
During their interview the couple also speak of life before Madeleine disappeared, when they felt they had ‘managed to achieve our little perfect nuclear family of five’.
Gerry says: ‘We had that for a short period… then your vision is altered and you have to adapt. And unfortunately for us, a new normality is a family of four.’
The couple dismiss criticism of the £11m cost of the Met’s inquiry as ‘unfair’. Gerry says: ‘I know it’s a single missing child, but there are millions of British tourists that go to the Algarve, year-on-year, and essentially you’ve got a British subject who was the subject of a crime.
‘There were other crimes that came to light following Madeleine’s abduction that involved British tourists, so I think prosecuting it [the investigation] to a reasonable end is what you would expect.’
And his wife adds: ‘I used to feel really embarrassed when people used to say about the amount of money, but then you realise that other big cases, like Stephen Lawrence, cost a huge amount of money. I guess the one thing, because you always do feel guilty as the parent of a missing child, is that other families haven’t had the publicity and the money.
‘The positive is that it has brought the whole issue of missing children to the forefront and I think people have benefited in different ways.’
The McCanns also vowed to continue a legal battle against former detective Goncalo Amaral, who wrote a widely discredited book alleging Madeleine died as a result of an accident and her death had been covered up by her parents.
Asked how they will mark the anniversary itself, Kate says: ‘I think it’s just that number, that tenyear mark, which makes it more significant – that is a reminder of how much time has gone by and obviously ten’s a big number.
‘We’ll get by as we have any other year, really– we’ll be surrounded by family and friends. Obviously we’ll be there remembering Madeleine, as we always have.’