PeterMac's FREE e-book: Chapter 49 My Search for the Madeleine Call: One Researcher’s 14-year Hunt to Solve Europe’s most Elusive Phone Call.

Could he have been monitoring Portuguese or Spanish Police radio communications ?

I think the first announcement was on GMTV.

How GMTV got its hands on it, I don't know.

What is the time of the first call, his departure and his arrival, in his novel?

For research purposes.
"Just Another Early Morning Job Chapter 2 It was an extraordinarily early start. Up and out of the house before 7am was rare for my new life in Spain. It was May 2007 and I was living in the stunning Serrania de Ronda mountains, near Malaga, having relocated from London, and Fleet Street, to set up as a stringer in southern Spain. As I had just set up a regional newspaper, The Olive Press, I was used to taking trips around the country and its islands – usually involving celebrities on holiday, tourists falling out of windows or something connected to the costa del crime ... so to be sent off by the Daily Mail on a missing child story in Portugal wasn’t too out of the ordinary. What was different though, was the family involved. The professional, middle-class doctor couple Kate and Gerry McCann were not your typical Brits abroad-type victims – the least likely of British tourists to want to get involved with the press, particularly on holiday. But they were clearly in desperate need for help. Conjuring up a legion of journalists to help in their hunt for their missing daughter (the prettiest, most striking of little girls) seemed to be the best way forward. I didn’t know the poor minion who had called me from the Daily Mail’s London HQ half an hour earlier. I think he was new to the job, and, as is the way with the Mail, there were few pleasantries (when I worked there in the 1990s, its computer password for casual staff was ‘Yes Sir’). ‘Can you get to the Algarve ASAP?’ he said (for it was more an order than a request). ‘Some girl’s gone missing. A doctor’s kid. The Foreign Office is already on it. Place called Ocean Club in Praia da Luz. Just get going, we’ll call you with more en route.’ It was fairly standard stuff for a stringer abroad and I was on the road within about 15 minutes, with just enough time to grab a cup of tea, my always-packed overnight bag and give a quick kiss to my wife Francesca and soon to be 2-year-old daughter Maria. It was a beautiful May morning and my British-registered Subaru Impreza loved the empty roads through the stunning Serrania de Ronda, where many a car advert had been filmed. We’d been living there for a couple of years and were about to finish renovating an eighteenth-century farmhouse. One of Spain’s most scenic drives, the winding A-374 skirts the rugged Grazalema Natural Park, past the emblematic white villages of Zahara de la Sierra and Algodonales before striking north towards Sevilla and the dry, flat Guadalquivir plane. It was a journey I knew well, so I was on auto-pilot, losing myself in the excellent early morning show on Spain’s Radio 3. It wasn’t until I got to my usual roadside venta for a coffee and a tostada near Utrera, about an hour into the journey, that I began to dwell on the job at hand. By then my mobile had rung twice more, once from The Sun and once from the Daily Mirror, asking me to cover it for them as well. Putting me ‘on an order’ as it is called in Fleet Street, I knew it was going to be a fairly lucrative day by the time I’d added in expenses. I didn’t have any more clues to the media storm that was beginning to blow in from a tiny, little-known seaside resort at the other end of the Iberian Peninsula’s long southern coastline.  The story had first appeared as a news flash on Sky News at around 7.45am in the UK, but I figured it would be over by the time I got there: she would be found, like the vast majority of other kids that wander off during their holidays, either dead or alive, in a swimming pool or a ditch somewhere. As a father to a toddler, I understood how the parents must be feeling. Some years later, our own son, Albert, who would be born in 2008, wandered off during a holiday in Portugal deciding, at two years old, that he fancied picking plums in the grounds of the rental home. We lost him for a terrifying ten minutes. As I drove, my mind turned to my daughter’s second birthday that coming Sunday and my wife’s that we had celebrate a few days before at a new restaurant that had recently opened in Ronda. I was excited about our pending move into the main part of the ancient farmhouse that we had nearly finished renovating after a year of builders and dust … and thankful, I guess, to have some decent work to pay for it all – in pounds from the UK. So I was loaded up with positive thoughts of my future as I finally sped into the sleepy resort of Praia da Luz, some three-and-a-half hours later. ◆◆◆ It wasn’t hard to locate the Ocean Club, which sits in the heart of ‘Luz’, as it is known locally. Almost dead centre in the seaside village, just up from its main supermarket, Baptista, and about 300m from its stunning beach, it’s the sort of unremarkable, low-rise block of flats that typifies most southern European resorts. I soon found out it was a Mark Warner resort, which made it all the more surprising, as for some reason I imagined it running far more modern, slicker and certainly more security-conscious centres. It was immediately apparent that security was not one of its strengths. It was now between 9.45am and 10.15am local time (an hour earlier than Spain and sensibly in the same time zone as the UK) and I was the first British journalist on the scene. A small group of expats and tourists were already getting mobilised after a night of drama and anxiety. The McCanns’ apartment was on the corner of the block at the junction of Rua da Escola Primaria and Dr Agostinho da Silva. Easily spotted, it had a flimsy bit of police tape run up the side of it by a rickety gate, and another bit of tape around the front where the car park was. After establishing the name of the missing toddler as Maddie or ‘Maddy’ from one of the expats hovering outside, I walked up the short flight of stairs to the apartment, number 5A, – completely unimpeded by police – to speak to the parents, as any decent journalist is programmed to do on arrival at a job like this. I walked inside the open front door and bumped straight into the McCanns, who were heading off to the police station in nearby Lagos to make an official missing persons statement. They looked fraught and stressed, but were somehow still functioning, despite presumably not sleeping a wink. I smiled and said ‘hello’, introducing myself as a local hack, working for the Mail, just arrived from Malaga. I promised I’d help as best I could to find their daughter. They seemed grateful and smiled ... well grimaced to be fair – saying ‘thank you’ and mumbling a few other pleasantries, before telling me their daughter’s name and the rough time she had disappeared, which was between 9pm and 9.45pm. I don’t remember much but I do remember them describing it as ‘a nightmare’ and saying they were ‘sure’ she had been snatched. I scribbled it down in my notepad. It was clear they couldn’t hang around and needed to go and get the local police force to actually give a damn, for it was apparent right from the start that they really didn’t care very much. This was obvious from the shortage of officers on hand. There were two local bobbies on duty, but the side of the house was unguarded and life in the resort was going on as normal. The police, meanwhile, refused to give me any help. Not a thing. No comments, no clues, nothing. I was shocked to see some sniffer dogs making an appearance later on that afternoon, some 18 hours after the child had gone missing. … From the very first moment I arrived in Praia da Luz that May morning in 2007, my overbearing drive was to solve the mystery and find young Maddie. The rules of journalism revolve around the five ws: When, Where, Why, Who and hoW. Stick to these and you can’t go wrong. I now knew when she had gone missing, more or less, so now I needed to try and work out where she had gone and why. I knew that the parents, friends and half the neighbourhood had been up all night searching the resort, but it didn’t stop my inbuilt sense of optimism from thinking I could somehow make a difference.

Clarke, Jon. MY SEARCH FOR MADELEINE: One Reporter’s 14-Year Hunt To Solve Europe’s Most Harrowing Crime (pp. 20-24). OP Books. Kindle Edition.

OR, if you prefer another "Version of the truth" . . .
In the ABC blurb about his book, which He himself advertises and wished people to read, he tells of receiving the call on Thursday 3/5/7, and of arriving at 0130 4/5/7, or "in the early hours of the morning.

Take your pick.
It may be one or the other, or of course Neither.

And at the last count Clarke has given the world these times for his arrival in PdL
0130
Early hours of the morning
0900
0930
0945-1015
1145
noon
later that day
2150.  = "shortly before the press conference"

As Tanner once said "I'm not making this up" !

Has anyone asked him which one is correct?

Many of us. Many times.
Anyone who does is labelled a "Troll" and told to get on with something else.
It is one of the issues about which he is most sensitive.

from Ch 42. 
"It is marred at times, as is so much of Clarke’s work, by viciousness and vituperation, and his pathological venom-spitting hatred of anyone who seeks to question either him or the “official narrative”, using all the well worn clichés, “evil, vitriolic minds behind this filth”, “his gang of trolls”, “and all the usual restricted vocabulary employed by those who will not, or cannot argue the case in a civilised manner. He adds the obligatory ad hominen attacks and repeats one or two well rehearsed lies, several of which have been discussed in other Chapters about Clarke and his progressive distancing of himself from the normal rules of veracity."