He sipped another mouthful of wine, and continued with his reverie.

Clarence Mitchell had been brilliant. It was he, using his strong connections with the Roman Catholic Church, who had persuaded the Papal Archbishop of Britain to hastily arrange Pope Benedict XVI’s Papal blessing on their search of Madeleine. Clarence had bragged about it in one of his many TV interviews. But then, like himself, he didn’t ‘do humble’. True, Gerry had felt more than a little uncomfortable when he met the Pope. But it was probably just ‘stage nerves’. And he’d got over that a long time ago.

The thought of his being portrayed as a ‘devout Catholic’ caused the corners of Gerry’s mouth to lift slightly, just for a moment – with an involuntary smirk. Just like, in fact, the involuntary smirk caught on camera in the early days after Madeleine had ‘disappeared’. A journalist had asked him whether he thought Madeleine was still alive. He hadn’t been aware of the smirk at the time. Honestly, thought Gerry, people will pick holes in anything.

As Gerry’s train of thought brought him back to his time in Praia da Luz, he remembered fondly his claim of having received a ‘vision’ in the Catholic church, the Sunday after Madeleine had gone missing. He spoke of having had a vision of ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. It had been a inspired PR move. The way he had written it up in his blog almost made it seem like he’d received this vision from God himself. And by now he had perfected the art of looking solemn and holy, especially when the cameras were on him in a church service.

His mind wandered away from the Pope, the Catholic church and his holiness to the United States of America. There had been his visit to the White House. Within the space of just a fortnight, Gerry had been present in two of the main power centres in the world – the Vatican and the White House.

After he had visited both the Pope and the White House, the demands for interviews had flowed in. He’d set up a special panel to negotiate terms for those interviews. Of course, no really sensitive questions would be allowed, because the investigations into Madeleine’s ‘disappearance’ were secret, and they risked prosecution. It wasn’t that they felt uneasy in being asking difficult questions. Far from it, they eagerly wanted to answer every honest question, but were tied hands and feet by dire warnings from the Portuguese police if they revealed any scrap of information about the investigation.

Naturally, they could not receive payment for the interviews directly. That wouldn’t look good at all. But his team of PR experts and legal advisers had been able to extract generous payment by the media into the Helping to Find Madeleine Trust Fund.

One attractive by-product of all the intereviews, apart from all the money, was that it effectively bound those media fast into maintaining the belief that Madeleine was alive. They could hardly make payments into The Helping to Find Madeleine Fund one week – and then a week later turn round and challenge the abduction claim.

There had been a rocky period between August and October when the media were full of stories about their ‘arguido’ status and lurid stories about Madeleine’s blood and the ‘smell of death’ being found in their apartment. It was ludicrous, of course, to suggest that, even if cadaverine had been detected, it meant that Madeleine had been killed. There could have been all sorts of reasons for the smell of death and Madeleine’s DNA being found in the apartment and the hired car. Madeleine had grazed her knee on climbing up the steps to the plane. Gerry had carried rotting meat to the dump and they’d carried around dirty nappies in the car boot as well.

They’d dealt with the cadaver dogs’ evidence brilliantly, effectively and swiftly, though Gerry. There had been an Irish case, and another one in the United States, in which the evidence of cadaver dogs had been thoroughly discounted. They’d trumpeted the unreliability of cadaver dogs’ evidence loud and clear, and the media had gratefully picked it up and poured scorn on the lurid stories of the scent of cadaverine in their apartment and in the hired car. That had been quite an achievement, Gerry reflected, given that the dogs Eddie and Keela had had a 100% record in detecting the smell of death in over 200 instances.

As he thought about his upcoming interviews in the autumn, Gerry remembered how well their interviews on British TV, with CNN, and with Spanish and Portuguese media had been received. However, it had been a bit of a disappointment when, immediately after the Spanish TV programme was transmitted, 70% of those viewers responding to a telepoll immediately afterwards voted to say that they thought the McCanns were lying about what really happened to Madeleine. That had been very hurtful at the time, though he now realised that the Spaniards simply didn’t have the same powers of discernment as the Brits.

As he took another sip of his Nuit St. Georges 1990, Gerry recalled that marvellous moment in July 2007 when he had been loudly applauded, as he received a bravery award at a Police Awards ceremony. The citation was for his ‘courage’ in the face of adversity.

Then there had been the public acclaim over Kate’s and his support for the Amber Alert scheme.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT