At this point, Gerry brought to mind an article that had appeared in the ‘Daily Mail’, which had over the past two years become one of his favourite newspapers. In that article, he had explained how the door to the children’s room ‘had seemed ‘more open than before’. The relevant part of that article had read as follows:

QUOTE from ‘Daily Mail’: I checked on the children around 9pm. I saw the angle of their door had changed and it was open around 45 degrees. I thought perhaps Madeleine had woken up and left the room. Out of the corner of my eye I looked in our room and couldn’t see her. Then I opened the children’s door 60 degrees and looked to the left and saw Maddie sleeping with her head on the pillow on the right hand side of the bed. She was breathing softly and I thought how beautiful she looked. I thought it was quite hot and I didn’t need to cover her up”. UNQUOTE

This in turn jogged Gerry’s memory as he now recalled the way David Smith of ‘the Times’ had described his last sight of Madeleine. It had run as follows:

QUOTE from ‘The Times’: When he entered the apartment, Gerry immediately saw that the children’s bedroom door, which they always left just ajar, was now open to 45 degrees. He thought that was odd, and glanced in his own bedroom to see if Madeleine had gone into her parents’ bed. But no, she and the twins were all still fast asleep.

Gerry paused over Madeleine, who – a typical doctor’s observation, this – was lying almost in ‘the recovery position’ with Cuddle Cat, the toy her godfather, John Corner, had bought her, and her comfort blanket up near her head, and Gerry thought how gorgeous, how lovely-looking she was and how lucky he was. Putting the door back to five degrees, he went to the loo and left to return to the restaurant. That, of course, was the last time he would see his daughter. UNQUOTE

Yes, that was how it was. And then, of course, he’d bumped into Jeremy Wilkins ‘ ‘Jes’, as he called him – on his way back to the Tapas bar. They’d talked about child care arrangements and tennis for some 10 to 15 minutes. Then he’d rejoined his friends in the Taaps bar.

Well,.he’d thought it was about 10 to 15 minutes he’d been talking to Jes. Yet Jes had told the police that he’d met Gerry McCann by the ‘shutters’ and that they’d only talked for ‘no more than three minues’. What was the matter with people, he mused, irritatedly. Could he not remember them talking for up to 15 minues? Or where they had been talking?

Then Gerry’s mind rapidly went to yet another article that had been written about his visit to check on the children at around 9.00pm. It had been written by Jes’s partner, the lovely Bridget O’Donnell, in ‘The Guardian’. This is how Bridget had put it:

QUOTE from Bridget O’Donnell in ‘The Guardian’: “Our baby would not sleep, and at about 8.30pm, Jes took him out for a walk in the buggy to settle him. Gerry was on his way back from checking on his children and the two men stopped to have a chat. They talked about daughters, fathers, families. Gerry was relaxed and friendly. They discussed the babysitting dilemmas at the resort and Gerry said that he and Kate would have stayed in too, if they had not been on holiday in a group. Jes returned to our apartment just before 9.30pm. We ate, drank wine, watched a DVD and then went to bed. On the ground floor, a completely catastrophic event was taking place. On the fourth floor of the next block, we were completely oblivious”. UNQUOTE

That was better. Bridget confirmed that he was walking back to the Tapas bar, not ‘by the shutters’. And she said thatt hey had a chat avbout ‘daughers, fathers, families’. As if they could have done that within 3 minutes! The idea was ridiculous. He would have to speak to Jes about it next time he saw him.

Looking back, it was so odd that neither Jeremy Wilkins nor he had seen Jane Tanner on her way to check her two children at around 9.15pm. Jane, of course, had been walking up the narrow lane where he and Wilkins had been chatting, when she had seen someone, possibly carrying a child, walking purposefully towards the beach.
Or was it the other way? No matter.

Wilkins had had a baby with him in a pushchair. Jane Tanner said she had seen them both talking. When she had drawn a plan for the Portuguese police, she had drawn herself walking on the same side of the street as he and Wilkins. But when she had appeared on the prestigious Panorama programme, on 19 November last year, she had distinctly said she was on the opposite side of the road from them, and that Gerry McCann had crossed over the road to talk to him. What a mixed-up kid that Jane Tanner could be sometimes. She could be dreadfully vague. It had taken her over 24 hours to talk to him about what she had seen. When she did so, she gave a very generalised description of what she said was a man of normal build and average height who might have been carrying a bundle, and might have been wearing a dark jacket and light trousers. It really wasn’t very helpful.

The clouds in the sky thickened all the time. The breeze grew stronger. The temperature dropped. Still no sign of Kate. What was she doing?

It had of course been vital to get Jane to give a more accurate recollection of what she had seen. Gerry remembered how he and his team of advisers had spared no effort to track down someone who could help Jane’s tentative memory. After weeks and weeks of searching, he’d found someone called a ‘cognitive therapist’, an Amercian lady. She apparently had an awesome reputation for helping people to remember what they had forgotten. It was amazing. For months, Jane had not realised that she had really seen Madeleine, yet after several, expensive, sessions of this cognitive therapy, she had emerged to announce that she definitely remembered seeing a blond-hairde girl with pink pyjamas on, exactly the same as those that Madelenie had been wearing when she was snatched.

But, even better, Jane had now recalled much more clearly what the abductor looked like. Now he was about 5’ 7”, had sleek longish black hair – not ‘short’ any more – a bit shiny or greasy, yes, he’d worn a dark jacket and light trousers, but she’d remembered that he wasn’t white, after all, but had looked a bit eastern Mediterranean, perhaps, Near Eastern or maybe north African. And certainly, definitely ‘swarthy’. You simply couldn’t trust swarthy folk, noted Gerry.

Even more astonihing was that Jane Tanner had remembered all of this despite only seeing the man from the side, only for a maximum of 3-4 seconds, and in the dark. This brilliant lady, Gerry realised, had given him and Kate great hope, at a very difficult time. At last they could confidently give out a description of what the abductor looked like. Admittedy the Portuguese police did not share their view that Jane Tanner’s truly stunning new recollections amounted to good evidnce of what the abductor looked like, nor in fact did that incompetent bunch of malicious fools even entertain the idea that there really was an abductor any more.

Gerry had to concede that, released nearly 6 months after the event, the new sketch that they released of Jane Tanner’s ‘rediscovered’ abductor did not hold out much promise of finding this abductor, in the absence of any other credible sighting of him and without any other ancillary leads. Even if by some miracle they now traced him, the chances of finding Madeleine alive with him must be diminishing rapidly.

Despite the sheer brilliance of the cognitive therapist, Gerry still could never quite understand why Jane Tanner could remember having seen Madeleine in her pyjamas, carried by a sleek black-haired swarthy abductor, after 5 months – but not after 5 minutes, nor after 24 hours. Jane Tanner was sometimes very hard to figure out. So were most women, come to think of it.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT