Of course, they might have been crying for a few minutes in between their half-hourly-or-so checks. Either Gerry or Kate had said: ‘We perhaps ought to check on them a bit more often tonight’. The other had agreed. Gerry struggled to recall which of them had made that suggestion, and whether they had actually agreed any specific plan to check more often than they had done before. It had been half-hourly checking. He couldn’t actually remember whether they had decided to increase that to every 20 minutes or not.

By about ten past nine, the children were ready for the crèche. As usual, they went happily into the ‘Kid’s Club’, as it was called. First Gerry had taken Madeleine down to the club; then, 20 minutes later, Kate had gone down with the twins, who took longer to get ready.

‘See you later’, Kate and Gerry had said cheerily to the twins as they had sauntered off down to spend an hour or two on the beach. It was absolutely clear by now that Madeleine and Sean couldn’t have been upset by their spot of crying last night – if indeed they really had been crying. Perhaps they had even made it up, pondered Gerry. They had obviously forgotten all about it, anyway.

Gerry couldn’t recall what they’d done next. It had been quite a sunny day, though not that warm, so probably they had sat around in the sun, perhaps wandered into town to do some shopping and have a mid-morning coffee by the harbour somewhere. Or perhaps they’d played tennis? No, that was the afternoon.

Then he suddenly remembered. Of course! That nice Bridget O’Donnell had written it up in her fine article for ‘The Guardian’, just before Christmas. Now, what was it she’d said? Ah yes! He remembered. This was what she’d written:

“Earlier that day there had been tennis lessons for the children, with some of the parents watching proudly as their girls ran across the court chasing tennis balls. They took photos. Madeleine must have been there, but I couldn’t distinguish her from the others. They all looked the same – all blonde, all pink and pretty.

“Jes and Gerry were playing on the next court. Afterwards, we sat by the pool and Gerry and Kate talked enthusiastically to the tennis coach about the following day’s tournament. We watched them idly – they had a lot of time for people, they listened.

“Then Gerry stood up and began showing Kate his new tennis stroke. She looked at him and smiled. “You wouldn’t be interested if I talked about my tennis like that,” Jes said to me. We watched them some more. Kate was calm, still, quietly beautiful; Gerry was confident, proud, silly, strong. She watched his boyish demonstration with great seriousness and patience. That was the last time I saw them that day. Jes saw Gerry that night”.

Gerry mused. Yes, all those young girls playing tennis, they had indeed all been ‘blonde, pink and pretty’. And, yes, O’Donnell, bless her, was right! She’d said: ‘They all looked the same”. How true that was. Yes, how very true that was. Perhaps, he reasoned, that was why, to date, a total of 5,783 people had reported seeing Madeleine in countries as far away as Spain, Belgium, Germany, Morocco, Malta and even Venezuela. Oh, and now he came to think of it, wasn’t there a ‘sighting’ in Brazil? And another in the U.S.A.? And Croatia, yes, and Bosnia. Or was it called Bosnia-Herzegovina? The cost had been phenomenal – millions of pounds of police time and efforts had been spent across the globe investigating these sightings of small, blonde girls. It was not something Gerry and Kate ever stopped to think about, however. There were, after all, much more important considerations, like which company would do the next TV interview or documentary and what their fee – which would of course be donated in full to the Helping to Find Madeleine Trust Fund – would be.

Dear old Bridget had really done them proud. His mind dwelt on and relished the compliments. “They had a lot of time for people, they listened”. It was almost like music in Gerry’s ears. ‘The listening couple’, he thought. ‘The couple who care enough to listen’. ‘The couple who always had time’. ‘The caring, listening couple’. He even softly whispered the words to himself: “They had a lot of time for people, they listened”. The sound comforted him, and obliterated any reminder of the fact that he hadn’t been there to hear Madeleine screaming and sobbing: ‘Daddy, Daddy’ for 75 minutes on the Tuesday evening. If, that is, that old bat Pamela Fenn really did hear what she claimed to have heard.

And Bridget had described Kate as “Calm, still, quietly beautiful”. He paused. ‘Calm’. ‘Still’. Yes, that was his Kate all right. The Portuguese police were obviously lying through their sardine-munching teeth when they had claimed that Kate had twice gone berserk, once when the police came to search their rented house in Praia da Luz and again when she was interviewed under caution in September. Lies, lies, lies. She was ‘calm, still’. And what about all those newspaper headlines: ‘Kate fury at this’, ‘Kate fury at that’? Just more lies.

And he visibly beamed as he recalled how Kate had practically drooled over his brilliant new tennis stroke. It had been the so-called ‘drop shot’. The technique of the drop shot, which had been perfected by the Spanish tennis ace Manuel Santana – or ‘Manolo’ as he was better known – in the 1960s, was to make your stroke look like a powerful backhand drive, but at the last minute you dropped the racquet slightly to produce heavy backspin on the ball. The result was that your opponent would anticipate a drive coming right down to the baseline, but instead, the heavy backspin would cause the ball to lob gently over the net and drop a few feet the other side of the net. The hapless opponent would be stranded the other side of the baseline, and would only be aware that it was a drop shot at the very last minute. The opponent would then make a mad dash to the net, hoping to reach the bal before it bounced twice. But it would be futile. The opponent had been deceived by the back spin.

Yes, drooled Gerry. Heavy back spin to deceive your opponent and make him look a fool, and win a valuable point. He loved it!

In fact, he thought, the principle of heavy back spin to deceive opponents could have quite a wide application.

And, quite rightly, Kate had smiled and admired, admired and smiled. Bridget had written that Jes had said to her: “You wouldn’t be interested if I talked about my tennis like that”. A shame, thought Gerry, that Jes wasn’t as brilliant as him and therefore Bridget was less admiring of her partner than Kate was of him. No wonder so many of their relatives and friends had described him and Kate s ‘the perfect couple’.

Back he went in his mind to collecting the children from the crèche, at about 12.30pm, as usual. They had taken them back to the apartment for a spot of lunch, and afterwards gone to the poolside to relax.

There was, of course, proof of their being by the poolside that lunch-time, namely the famous ‘last photo’ of Gerry with Amelie and Sean, taken at precisely 2.29pm. Well, the time on the photo actually showed 1.29pm, but allowing for summer time it was really taken at 2.29pm, European summer time.

Gerry brought that photograph clearly into focus in his mind. He had seen it ten thousand times, and knew every detail about it.

He was wearing sunglasses, looking at the camera, and appearing preoccupied and glum. Just as he had done on that ’bus trip to the plane, where his moodiness had been noted by one of his cheerful holiday friends. ‘Cheer up Gerry, we’re on ’oliday’, one of his Doctor friends had said, trying to liven him up.

The video of this ’bus trip had been posted on YouTube. The video camera, he recalled, had been held by Fiona Payne. But what had possessed her to put it up on YouTube? On the video, Gerry had been heard to reply to his Doctor friend: ‘F___ off’, or that’s certainly what it sounded like. It had miffed him greatly that one of his party had posted that clip up on to the Internet. It didn’t portray him in a very good light – moodily swearing in front of the ladies of the party and all the children.

Gerry couldn’t bring to mind why he’d been in such a bad mood at the airport, though he’d also been heard to say: “We’re not here to enjoy ourselves’. Nor could he remember why, at 2.29pm on Thursday 3rd May, he had also been staring glumly into the camera. Sean was sat beside him, looking ahead. Kate had taken the photograph, with Amelie beside her. And then there was Madeleine. How thoroughly happy and contented she looked on that last photo. She was clearly tickled pink by something amusing happening somewhere to her left. Her tongue was slightly sticking out, in that involuntary facial gesture which speaks of a child whose pleasure in something is so great that they cannot fully contain themselves. Her feet were dangling into the pool. Her hair had a bead in it, though some had mistakenly thought it was a large elastic band.

It was scandalous that people thought he had photoshopped Madeleine into that photograph. Disgusting in fact. Yet, though he scratched his head and thought about it, he still could not account for why it had taken him three whole weeks to produce that photo to the Portuguese police – and only upon his return from a two-day trip to England. People had accused him of taking Kate’s digital camera, on which that last ’photo had been taken, back to England. Well, so he had. But not for the purpose of falsifying a photograph. Maybe he had just been too busy campaigning, arranging to visit the White House and the Pope, etc. to bother about the tiny detail of getting out a photo of Madeleine on the day she had been abducted.

He sighed as that last photographic image of Madeleine remained fixed in his mind. He reached over for his glass and hurriedly took another gulp before emptying some more win into it. As he did so, he noticed a bit of a change in the weather. The wispy cirrus clouds he had gazed at earlier were being replaced at quite a pace by a layer of much lower, strato-cumulus clouds, which made an attractive pattern against the western portion of sky. In the distance, he noted a grey-white lenticular-shaped cloud. He thought nothing of it; the sun was still shining brightly, and it was hot. There was still no sign of Kate.

They’d taken the children back to the crèche immediately after that last photo was taken, unusually arriving about 10 minutes late. They’d then gone back to the pool for a while, where they absorbed the heat of the day, before he and Kate had drifted across to the tennis court, where he was due to play tennis with Julian. He and Kate had arrived at the tennis court around half past three, and Julian had arrived shortly afterwards. Kate, as usual, had been happy to just sit and watch and simply admire his increasing prowess at tennis.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT