One thing, though, had been very disappointing about Bridget’s article, Gerry thought. He momentarily frowned.

He and Kate and his ‘Tapas 9’ friends had been religiously checking that the children were O.K. every half-an-hour. Why hadn’t she put this in her article? Hadn’t she noticed?

Gerry recalled how, on 2nd May, they’d put the children to bed as usual about 7.00pm to 7.30pm – and then, in accordance with their normal holiday routine, off they had gone to the Tapas bar, as they had done every evening, at around 8.30pm. Once it was clear, of course, that the children were all soundly asleep.

They’d been with the children for two hours in the morning, two hours at lunch-time, and another two hours or so in the evening. It was Kate and Gerry’s holiday too. The evening was when the real holiday fun started.

And what an evening it had been, recalled Gerry. He had been at his riotous best, especially after they’d cracked open an extra 4 bottles of wine they’d ordered just after 11 o’clock. Gerry had had a very good evening indeed.

As usual he was the centre of attention and had made everyone laugh at his string of jokes, some of them on the blue side, as usual. It was just like Bridget O’Donnell had described him in the article in the ‘Guardian’ published just before Christmas: “confident, proud, silly, strong”. That sounded about right. But – ‘silly’?

They’d come back from the Tapas bar at midnight. The children were of course fast asleep – not that they ever bothered to check, it just wasn’t necessary, as they slept so soundly.

It was somewhat of a surprise for Gerry when he had learnt, later, that Kate and he were supposed to have had a disagreement that night. Apparently, Kate had told the Portuguese police that she was upset at being ignored that evening at the Tapas bar. So – apparently after he had fallen asleep – she had climbed into the empty bed in the children’s room, and not slept with him, as some kind of protest.

True, he had had a fair amount to drink that night. He couldn’t actually remember ignoring her. It must have been a storm in a tea-cup. He thought Kate had perhaps been unwise to mention it to the police as they just seized on everything. But then it helped to explain why there had been another made-up bed in the children’s room the night Madeleine disappeared – which looked as though it had been slept in. The police had apparently been asking questions about it.

Well, nothing had been wrong on the morning of May 3rd, he reflected, since, when he woke up, Kate was already getting the children ready for breakfast as usual. He hadn’t even been aware that his wife had slept in a separate bed that night.

It was around 8.30am, as far as he could remember, when he had sat down for his breakfast. Kate had made him a coffee with the jar she’d bought on Monday in the Baptista supermarket, and put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. Just as the two slices of toast jumped up from the toaster, Madeleine suddenly piped up:

“Mummy, Daddy. Why weren’t you there when me and Sean were crying last night?”

You could have knocked the pair of us down with a feather, thought Gerry. Crying? Last night? When? “What do you mean, crying?”, they had both asked Madeleine, almost in unison. But before Madeleine could answer, she had got herself down from the table, and skipped off happily to play with her toys. She didn’t seem at all bothered. She was just as happy as usual. Whatever it was about couldn’t have been that serious.

One other strange thing suddenly struck him. If she had been that upset about her and Sean being on their own and crying the previous night, why on earth had Madeleine waited until breakfast before mentioning it? Why hadn’t she spoken to Kate about it the moment she had woken up, if it was that important? ‘Oh, well,’ Gerry had thought at then time, ‘children are very hard to understand, sometimes’.

Nevertheless, as responsible parents, they discussed the matter together as they were clearing up together after breakfast.

“What does she mean, crying?’, Kate had asked Gerry. “When could that have happened?” “Perhaps it was when she was having a bath or something?”, Gerry had said.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT