Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?

I had heard that it was supposed to have been deleted but I didn't think that it was true.

Is the book a non-U K version, 16Miller? Maybe it's on another page.

No Fate Worse Than De'Ath wrote:I had heard that it was supposed to have been deleted but I didn't think that it was true.

Is the book a non-U K version, 16Miller? Maybe it's on another page.

It's a UK version, AFAIK.

I read a paperback version from my library and the p129 bit was later in the book so maybe the page size has changed. I didn't manage to finish the book though. I'm not sure what made me cringe the most  - the purile content or the poor writing. If that's the standard of any defence, then I wouldn't be backing that horse.

In the Irish paperback edition I have the reference to Madeleine's genitals is on page 129.

But this was from a woman quite happy to have details of her sex life published on the front page of the Sun, complete with photo.
[for money, obviously !]
So the fact that she writes kiddy porn should come as no surprise to anyone.

Kate mentions the intruder, well the telegraph in 2011, writes the pj covered up, about the assaults.
http://www.mccannfiles.com/id371.html

If it was written in 2011 that's also when SY opened the case, why only now they're talking about looking for this intruder?
Can't they ask Bill Henderson (the British consul) Kate's says he told her, so who told him?

Here we are 3 years later discussing the guy with the red top.

QUOTE
"Dr Kate spoke to the retired British consul on the Algarve who gave details of a meeting with tour operators in August 2006 when a minor spate of child molestations had occurred.

pp. 296-7

Dr Kate: It was believed that this offender (or offenders) watched for patterns and routines in a family’s behaviour, establishing ‘weaknesses’ in the security of the apartment and determined in advance where parents and children slept. Cold shivers ran down my spine as it hit home that this might have applied to us”.

Dr Kate: “I pressed the former British consul on what happened afterwards. Had there been an investigation? Had anybody been convicted? He wasn’t sure, but thought that an immigrant construction worker had been arrested and released pending trial, which was likely to take place some years down the line. Unbelievable!”


::::


On the telegraph, it says she'd read it in the files, when the pj files came out in the summer.

http://www.mccannfiles.com/id371.html


WHERE IS IT IN THE FILES? I can't find Bill Henderson saying it in the files either?

I haven't read the book although i am hoping a copy will turn up in one of the charity shops i invade in my search for books.
Her book i will do the, what is unthinkable to me, deface it using various colored pens and highlighters as i mark every pronoun and dropped pronouns, every leakage, every, so, because and explanation of why something happened, every temporal lacuna, every contradiction, everything that signals sensitivity.
A veritable Hobs coloring book.
I have advised myself and absolved myself regarding the defacing of a book ( a serious crime in my book, bent over corners, books open face down, writing in books unless an autograph by the author, torn pages etc) as it would be in the course of justice for Maddie.

From what i have read, this book, despite the name Madeleine, is kate's autobiography.
From the dust cover where Maddie's name is all in lower case and kate's is all in upper case showing kate's priority- herself it is all kate, kate, kate with occasional mentions of gerry and the twins and vehement loathing of Dr. Amaral.
This books was written to ease kate's conscience i think.
She could not answer the 48 plus questions (several were compound questions) as she was advised she possibly could/would incriminate herself.
If she was truly innocent of involvement in Maddie's disappearance read death, how could she incriminate herself if she had done nothing wrong?
her TV statements and interviews were all scripted to the nth degree and kate, clutching the almost genitals of gerry and him sat close to her and hand holding in order to signal what to say when to stop and let him talk or shut up before you get us arrested.
We have the various leaked comments about Maddie being dead and possibly where they had dumped her.
We have kate telling us she wanted to commit murder suicide at home because of the stress and pressure, we have her wanting to shout the truth from the roof tops.
We know what she wanted to do and we know she was not allowed to.
We had family coming down to help out, it was almost as if no one wanted to leave her alone with the twins or perhaps deciding to make another call to the PJ or even the UK police.
Kate was and is desperate to confess.
Despite all the lawyers telling her not to write the book as any good lawyer will tell their client to shut up and say nothing knowing anything they say can and will be used in court against them, kate wrote her book which leaked the truth that Maddie died, she had been raped and goodness knows what else, that kate had seen Maddie's body days after she died, describing perfectly what a dead, unembalmed body will look like after several days in a cool or cold environment.
I think if looked at closely enough and also all her statements and interviews, Maddie's final resting place may be revealed, if not an X marks the spot, at least a general area.
Kate was not allowed to confess directly in interviews, the stress was in effect killing her, the book was kate's way of speaking the truth and relieving some of the stress she was and is under.
It may have helped at the time of writing and the early publication, the problem for her is, the investigation is still ongoing.
Perhaps she thought the case would go cold and stay cold and they would be allowed to get on with their now perfect family lives.
Despite the mccanns saying they are delighted the UK investigation is ongoing, they aren't.
They don't really know what the UK police are doing, they know the fund will be/ is being looked at closely given Maddie is dead and they based the fund on the lie that Maddie was alive.
Money was now being moved around various accounts and money is being paid in, a quite substantial amount supposedly from royalties from an 11 year old book.
Other money has been placed in restricted accounts (only to be used for equipment for a business or on property)
It makes me wonder why the money has made an appearance now and not at another time?
Everything they do is for a reason, to misdirect attention, to conceal facts and evidence, to protect funds.
What has happened that they feel the need to move these 'royalties' to the restricted account?
Where was this money before they moved it to the fund?

Kate wants to talk, i want to listen.

Time will tell.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock

Dr Kate: “I pressed the former British consul on what happened afterwards. Had there been an investigation? Had anybody been convicted? He wasn’t sure, but thought that an immigrant construction worker had been arrested and released pending trial, which was likely to take place some years down the line. Unbelievable!”

It is unbelievable.

All of it.

I wonder if that could be verified by police records, court extracts, newspaper reports,  . . . ?
But then the absence of any reports would be used as PROOF of a conspiracy to cover it up !

Hobs wrote:I haven't read the book although i am hoping a copy will turn up in one of the charity shops i invade in my search for books.
Her book i will do the, what is unthinkable to me, deface it using various colored pens and highlighters as i mark every pronoun and dropped pronouns, every leakage, every, so, because and explanation of why something happened, every temporal lacuna, every contradiction, everything that signals sensitivity.
A veritable Hobs coloring book.
I have advised myself and  absolved myself regarding the defacing of a book ( a serious crime in my book, bent over corners, books open face down, writing in books unless an autograph by the author, torn pages etc) as it would be in the course of justice for Maddie.

From what i have read, this book, despite the name Madeleine, is kate's autobiography.
From the dust cover where Maddie's name is all in lower case and kate's is all in upper case showing kate's priority- herself it is all kate, kate, kate with occasional mentions of gerry and the twins and vehement loathing of Dr. Amaral.
This books was written to ease kate's conscience i think.
She could not answer the 48 plus questions (several were compound questions) as she was advised she possibly could/would incriminate herself.
If she was truly innocent of involvement in Maddie's disappearance read death, how could she incriminate herself if she had done nothing wrong?
her TV statements and interviews were all scripted to the nth degree and kate, clutching the almost genitals of gerry and him sat close to her and hand holding in order to signal what to say when to stop and let him talk or shut up before you get us arrested.
We have the various leaked comments about Maddie being dead and possibly where they had dumped her.
We have kate telling us she wanted to commit murder suicide at home because of the stress and pressure, we have her wanting to shout the truth from the roof tops.
We know what she wanted to do and we know she was not allowed to.
We had family coming down to help out, it was almost as if no one wanted to leave her alone with the twins or perhaps deciding to make another call to the PJ or even the UK police.
Kate was and is desperate to confess.
Despite all the lawyers telling her not to write the book as any good lawyer will tell their client to shut up and say nothing knowing anything they say can and will be used in court against them, kate wrote her book which leaked the truth that Maddie died, she had been raped and goodness knows what else, that kate had seen Maddie's body days after she died, describing perfectly what a dead, unembalmed body will look like after several days in a cool or cold environment.
I think if looked at closely enough and also all her statements and interviews, Maddie's final resting place may be revealed, if not an X marks the spot, at least a general area.
Kate was not allowed to confess directly in interviews, the stress was in effect killing her, the book was kate's way of speaking the truth and relieving some of the stress she was and is under.
It may have helped at the time of writing and the early publication, the problem for her is, the investigation is still ongoing.
Perhaps she thought the case would go cold and stay cold and they would be allowed to get on with their now perfect family lives.
Despite the mccanns saying they are delighted the UK investigation is ongoing, they aren't.
They don't really know what the UK police are doing, they know the fund will be/ is being looked at closely given Maddie is dead and they based the fund on the lie that Maddie was alive.
Money was now being moved around various accounts and money is being paid in, a quite substantial amount supposedly from royalties from an 11 year old book.
Other money has been placed in restricted accounts (only to be used for equipment for a business or on property)
It makes me wonder why the money has made an appearance now and not at another time?
Everything they do is for a reason, to misdirect attention, to conceal facts and evidence, to protect funds.
What has happened that they feel the need to move these 'royalties' to the restricted account?
Where was this money before they moved it to the fund?

Kate wants to talk, i want to listen.

Time will tell.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock

I purchased my copy second hand for £0.01 plus delivery from Amazon. It was in excellent condition. There are also text PDF copies around which a member kindly sent to me. So I have both versions which is really helpful.

Hobs wrote:I haven't read the book although i am hoping a copy will turn up in one of the charity shops i invade in my search for books.

If you have the time and motivation to delve into Kate McCann's mental state, you really should read the autobiographical chiclit, 'madeleine' by KATE MCCANN.  No need to buy it, as stated by Rogue-a-Tory, a text copy is widely available at a 'source' close to you.  How else can you get a true idea of where she's coming from?

You can then doodle to your hearts content without fear of shame for defacing a 'good quality' novelette.  You don't think I actually purchased a copy do you?

Personally I think it's a load of old tosh, a penny awful (no offence Rogue-a-Tory:), fit only for recycling.  In my view the McCanns tell what they think you want to hear, what you would expect to hear from grieving parents following the loss of a child. The true feeling is not there to express so they make it up as they go along - aided and abetted by a team of 'advisors' from various walks of life.  Such as talk of suicide, something that could quite easily be the thoughts of a grieving parent.

I take the view that the book IS of some value.  Not as documentary evidence of anything BUT as a hard print testimony which fixes several statements in place.
It is no longer open to the McCanns to suddenly to "remember" that the Pool Photo was taken on Sunday lunchtime, or that the Tennis Balls Photo was taken on Saturday evening.
It fixes in time several details, and allows us to compare those with signed Statements both from the McCanns and others, and to discover that they do not match.
From there we can say, (without fear of contradiction C-R), that one or other, or possibly both and in one case three, versions must be untrue.
For that reason a long time ago I labelled it Prosecution exhibit No 1 

One of the offers of help we’d received came from a paralegal based in Leicester, via a colleague of Gerry’s. He worked for a firm specializing in family law, the International Family Law Group (IFLG). It was difficult to know what this company could do but we decided it would be worth meeting them to discuss the possibilities.

So on the afternoon of Friday 11 May, the paralegal, accompanied by a barrister, flew out to Portugal. We’d warned them to keep their arrival at our apartment low-key, so as not to attract any unwanted attention from the media lying in wait outside.

In they came, dressed in bow ties and braces – the barrister was even wearing a panama hat. I heaved a sigh. They might as well have had great big arrows pointing at their heads reading ‘lawyer’. Not to worry: it was their presence and input that were important.

madeleine by KATE MCCANN

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t13534p400-picture-gallery#395820

https://www.iflg.uk.com/
"The International Family Law Group LLP is a Solicitors' practice . . ."
Solicitors brief Barristers.   
Solicitors do the donkey work and interview clients.
They then present the Brief to a Barrister for an 'opinion'.

The firm was founded in 2007.  
David Hodson
I am joint co-founder (2007) and a partner at iFLG, The International Family Law Group LLP. 

Exhibit 1 has a touch of the burlesque about it - in my enthusiasm I omitted to reference probably the more important aspect of these quasi legal pundits, in particular call me 'Hugh' - hugh shall be otherwise nameless.  For it is he I thought could be the corpulent figure who accompanied both the McCanns on their epic journey to the Policia Judiciaria [viewed from the rear] ..



This a very interesting passage from the autobiographical novelette [for reference ans study purposes only]..

We also discussed the offers of help that were now pouring in, including many financial pledges. Gerry and I were at a loss to know how to handle these. One of Gerry’s colleagues, for example, had called to say that the staff in his department wanted to make a donation to assist with the search for Madeleine but didn’t know how or where to deposit it. IFLG told us that we needed to set up a ‘fighting fund’. They would devise the objectives of the fund and instruct a leading charity law firm, Bates Wells and Braithwaite (BWB), to draw up articles of association.

At the last two meetings the barrister and legal assistant were joined by a consultant called Hugh, whose profession was not at first explained (‘Just call me Hugh,’ he said enigmatically). It transpired that he was a former intelligence officer, now a kidnap negotiator and counsellor. We were told that an anonymous (but evidently very generous) donor had set aside a considerable sum of money for us to put towards the cost of hiring a private-investigation company if we wished. Hugh had been brought in by a firm called Control Risks, which was primed to help. This company is an independent specialist risk consultancy with offices and investigators on five continents and their main line of work is corporate security. It was a big gesture, we were immensely grateful and it was good to know this option was available to us.

The first session Hugh attended, which took place at night, had something of a James Bond atmosphere to it, and not in a good way. I felt as if I’d entered a whole new world, and it was an extremely mysterious and frightening one. Perhaps the worst bit was a remark Hugh made about the reward that was on offer. He told us dispassionately that such an inducement would have ‘put a price on Madeleine’s head’. I was very upset. The thought of anything we had done jeopardizing Madeleine’s life was too much to bear.

By the Sunday evening, we found ourselves giving our statements again, this time to a couple of detectives from Control Risks.

We were concerned that parts of the statements we had made to the Portuguese police, especially on that first day, might have been lost in translation. We also felt that these accounts were not sufficiently thorough and wanted to have every detail we could remember registered properly. Unfortunately, in our haste to pass the new statements on to the PJ, we made the mistake of assuming that the transcripts would be correct and discovered only many months later that these, too, contained inaccuracies. And they had been given and recorded in English! A word of advice, in case you are ever unlucky enough to find yourself involved in a criminal investigation in any country: always make sure that you read your statement, in your own language, after you’ve provided it.

It was after one of the IFLG meetings that Hugh asked me whether I was keeping a diary. Quite apart from the fact that I was an emotional wreck and hadn’t had time to blink for the past week, the idea had never crossed my mind. I hadn’t kept a diary since my early teens, and the accounts of my life then were mind-numbingly boring: what time I got up, what I ate for each meal and which lesson I’d enjoyed most that day.

‘You should,’ he said. He didn’t elaborate on why. The barrister handed me a spare A4 notebook he happened to have with him.
....................

Extraordinary procedure for two innocent people caught up in the trauma of their own 'abducted' child.  A fight fund - ooops!  I wonder if these legal representatives were clocking every minute of their time in preparation of the next invoice.

It certainly has a ring of the Bondesque.

And going back to a thread from 2011. 
The Group was only 6 weeks old, and already sending Barristers on field trips and site visits ? ?
Yeah.  Right !

"The IFLG is even younger - it launched 31 March 2007... so 6 weeks or so old by the time of the events... and by 22 August Richard Jones is no longer with them... didn't stay very long... 


The International Family Law Group launches at its premises in Covent Garden, London

The International Family Law Group (iFLG) launches at its premises in Covent Garden, London. We are a new specialist law firm providing services to the international community as well as for purely national clients. We have a special contract with the Legal Services Commission for child abduction work and are regularly instructed by the UK Government. We act for international families, ex pats and others in respect of financial implications of relationship breakdown including forum shopping and international enforcement of orders. We receive instructions from foreign lawyers and, as accredited specialists, act for clients of other law firms seeking their specialist experience.

See our attached media release and contact us for more details

Posted on 31 March, 2007 by David Hodson


Absolutely NOTHING About Abduction by stranger, by criminal gangs, or anything else remotely pertinent to what the MCcanns were insisting

It should be noted that this influx of legal representation commenced on or around 10th May 2007, just seven days after Madeleine's alleged disappearance - according to the autobiography.

Question remains unanswered - why the need for legal representation when you are only the innocent victims?

Answers on the back of a plain brown envelope - it'll get there!

Saturday 5th May 2007

Having been so late back from the police station the previous evening, we’d decided to wait until morning to meet the trauma psychologist, Alan Pike [former social worker] But by this point we realized that we needed help urgently. Just before 5am Gerry rang Craig Mayhew, the Mark Warner overseas manager, and asked if Alan would be able to come and see us. He was at the door of our apartment by 6am.

Alan is a clinical partner at the Centre for Crisis Psychology, pioneers in psychological trauma aftercare following disasters at home and abroad ....

Thursday 10th May 2007

I sat in the waiting area for eight hours before I was told that it was now too late for me to be interviewed and I should go home and come back the next day. Gerry was there for thirteen hours. When he finally returned to the apartment he related how Matt had been almost hysterical during his interview. Gerry had heard him shouting and crying. Apparently, it had been put to Matt that he’d handed Madeleine out through the window to a third party. It was like something out of Life on Mars.

Alan Pike was concerned about my wellbeing and asked for my rescheduled interview to be postponed for a few days. The PJ couldn’t have considered it all that important: it was 6 September before I was interviewed again.

Verdi : Question remains unanswered - why the need for legal representation when you are only the innocent victims?

Much the same question occurs to Police Officers when they ask a witness to come to the police station to make a statement, and they ask for a solicitor.
It happens.

Ce qui s'excuse, s'accuse
Wer sich entschuldigt, sich beschuldigt
El que se disculpa, se culpa
Qui excusat, se accusat.


Strange how it works in all languages !

There's a big difference between asking for the presence of a solicitor when routinely giving a witness statement and surrounding yourself with a bastion of legal representatives covering an assortment of dimensions. 

Surely?

The words of a devout catholic, a believer in the mystic and yet a medic with scientific knowledge that, by rights, debunks the mystic..

At our next meeting with Neves and Encarnação, on 28 June, we tentatively raised the possibility of bringing in Danie Krugel, a South African ex-police officer who claimed to have combined DNA and satellite tracking technology to develop a device that could be used to locate missing persons.

I know this sounds mad, so let me rewind a little to explain. Danie’s name, and his offer of help, had reached us via a variety of sources within the first few weeks of Madeleine’s disappearance. At the time we were in too much turmoil to pay much attention to anything so esoteric, and in any case we had all our hopes pinned on the police investigation. Towards the end of May, a friend of Danie’s arrived in Praia da Luz and virtually pleaded with me to take up his offer. She spoke of references from the South African police, for whom his machine had brought results, of its 80 per cent success rate and of the support of the South African minister for justice. Whether we were influenced by the distance this young mother had travelled just to talk to us, or whether we were simply plain desperate, I can’t be sure – putting it in perspective today, I’d say it was the latter – but by now we were more receptive.

We were told all we needed to do was to provide samples of Madeleine’s DNA. Desperation does strange things to people. We’re scientists and we don’t believe in hocus pocus or crackpot inventions. How on earth can a machine use a single hair to locate somebody anywhere in the world? It’s impossible, surely. It makes no sense to us now and it didn’t then. But we wanted so badly to find Madeleine that we didn’t need to know how it worked. We even managed to turn a blind eye to the fact that Danie’s ‘matter orientation system’ hadn’t been formally tested by any independent and trustworthy authority. Danie sounded like a nice person (family man, ‘fellow Christian’), and indeed he was. As the director of protection services and occupational health and safety at the Central University of Technology in Bloemfontein, he was professionally credible, and he was prepared to bring his machine over from South Africa to find Madeleine for us. I feel a heavy sadness now, though, at the memory of how close to the edge we were, and how vulnerable that made us.

I remember talking to Gerry and Sandy, trying to decide what to do. Even Sandy, who dismisses anything lacking logic or transparency as mumbo-jumbo, felt, as we did, that since the investigation appeared to have ground to a halt, it was worth trying anything. What else did we have? What harm could it do?

So, in the second week of June, we had confided in Auntie Janet and our friend Amanda back in Leicestershire and got them to go round to our house looking for hairs that could only be Madeleine’s. They came up with five head hairs from the inside of a coat hood and a couple of eyelashes from her pillow and couriered the lot off to Danie in South Africa. They didn’t question what we were doing: they, too, were just desperate for Madeleine to be home.

A week or so afterwards, Danie informed us that he had obtained ‘signals’ relating to Praia da Luz, but that he would need to come over in July and operate the machine in the Algarve to produce more accurate results and pinpoint Madeleine’s location. This all seemed to make sense – or at least, more sense than trying to find her from Bloemfontein.

So here we were now, discussing all this with Luís Neves and Guilhermino Encarnação. Somewhat to our surprise, they seemed quite amenable to giving it a go and agreed to smooth Danie’s transfer through the airport (he had certain requirements to ensure the safety of his MOS machine) in a couple of weeks’ time.

madeleine by KATE MCCANN

[Excerpt for study and research only]

So what is it to be - Science v. The Mystic?

Can one realistically hold both values close to the chest or is one or the other a means to an end? Does Ms Healy and him indoors believe science, their respective calling, or do they believe the mystic, their religion, their other calling?

To be or not to be - that is the question.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The decision to publish this book has been very difficult, and taken with heavy hearts … My reason for writing it is simple: to give an account of the truth … Writing this memoir has entailed recording some very personal, intimate and emotional aspects of our lives. Sharing these with strangers does not come easily to me, but if I hadn’t done so I would not have felt the book gave as full a picture as it is possible for me to give. As with every action we have taken over the last four years, it ultimately boils down to whether what we are doing could help us to find Madeleine. When the answer to that question is yes, or even possibly, our family can cope with anything …

What follows is an intensely personal account, and I make no apology for that …

Nothing is more important to us than finding our little girl.’

Kate McCann, May 2011

madeleine by KATE MCCANN
...................

ac·count

/əˈkount/
noun

1.  a report or description of an event or experience.

Synonyms: description, report, version, story, narration, narrative, statement, news, explanation, exposition, interpretation, communiqué, recital, rendition, sketch, delineation, portrayal, tale
..................

But Kate McCann doesn't know the 'truth'.  Her daughter disappeared from her bed sometime between a notional 9:15pm and 10:00pm on the night of Thursday 3rd May 2007 - how then can she possibly know the truth let alone give an account of it.

Whoever wrote this book should have concentrated on distinguishing between fact and fiction. As it is, it's nothing but a micro-autobiographical recount of past life, a work written in the true spirit of the romantic novel - or is the version of the holiday intended to portray the something referred to as 'the truth'?

So what truth is it that Ms Healy wishes to convey - the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or her account of the truth?  Surely the truth is the truth is the truth, a definitive word with no room for manoeuvre or worse still, misinterpretation?  Anything but the true truth can only be speculation, supposition, theorizing, presumption  or perhaps .... fabrication?

Which is it to be Ms Healy?  What would you have us believe - the truth or your account of the truth.

Night of 3rd/4th May 2007

Gerry was a mess – ‘roaring like a bull’, as Trish put it – and sobbing down the phone. She could barely make out what he was saying. It was painful for me to see my strong, assertive husband unravelling, and frightening for her to hear her ‘wee bro’ in this state. I could hear him crying over and over again, ‘She’s gone, Trisha. She’s gone.’

madeleine by KATE MCCANN
...................

Saturday, 12 May 2007. Madeleine’s fourth birthday. Until it was upon us, we hadn’t been able to think about it: we simply couldn’t countenance the idea that by the time it arrived she wouldn’t be back with us to mark it. Not being with her today, loving her, pleasing her, enjoying her delight, was unbearable.

madeleine by KATE MCCANN

Friday 4th May 2007

It was about 10am by the time a couple of PJ officers turned up. (One of them, in his thirties, tall and well built, I thought of for ages simply as John. I’m not sure he ever gave us his name, but later – much later – we found out that it was João Carlos.)

They told us they had to take us and our friends to the police station in Portimão. We couldn’t all go at once as somebody needed to look after the children. After some discussion, it was agreed that Gerry and I, Jane, David and Matt would be interviewed first and the PJ would come back for the others later in the day.

Fiona and Dianne took Sean and Amelie to their club along with the other children. While our world was falling apart, the best way of trying to keep theirs together seemed to be to stick with what they were used to.

madeleine by KATE MCCANN

It is a while since I read the Kate Mc book but one of the things I still find odd is her reference to her daughters perfect genitals or something similar. What parent woukd say that? Or have I got mixed up somewhere over the years?

Brookers wrote:It is a while since I read the Kate Mc book but one of the things I still find odd is her reference to her daughters perfect genitals or something similar. What parent woukd say that? Or have I got mixed up somewhere over the years?

No, you haven't.

Apropos of the PJ reconstruction

British consul Bill Henderson and Ambassador John Buck were visiting us on a fairly regular basis and we were seeing the Leicestershire FLOs every day. The flow of information, however, was slow and limited.

The Portuguese police were divulging very little to the British police and vetoing many of their suggestions – bringing out specialist dogs, for example, or staging a reconstruction.

What was forthcoming, particularly in terms of the quality and depth of the investigation, would become increasingly concerning to us. Grounds for elimination, for instance, often seemed very flimsy. I remember Gerry and me exchanging quizzical looks after the FLOs tried to explain how one couple had been ruled out of the inquiry. When we asked them if they were comfortable with this decision, there was an awkward pause before they replied, ‘No, not really.’

madeleine by KATE MCCANN

[Excerpt for research and study purposes only]