Over to you, Edgar- The Blacksmith Bureau

So, no more libel diaries until the re-scheduled trial.

As far as the first batch is concerned the response has been plenty of hot air and abuse but, as always with the Bureau claims, no refutation of the facts: the parents never contacted the emergency services, nor were they contacted on the parents’ behalf; the police were finally contacted – not by the parents – using the non-emergency local police route, some seventy five minutes after the claimed abductor would have driven off. Kate McCann, in Madeleine, page 74, by the way, helpfully points out that it takes seventy five minutes to drive to the Spanish border from Praia da Luz.

Let's mug the old lady

To which, as a footnote, we can add the little matter of Kate McCann’s encounter with Mrs Fenn. In her artfully scrambled description in Madeleine of the hour following her discovery of the empty bed (artfully scrambled in exactly the same way as her description of events on September 6 )* devout catholic Kate McCann devoted a lengthy paragraph to this brief episode, most of it consisting of bewildering abuse of the old lady.

Nigel Moore has pointed out to us that Kate McCann somehow managed to place this meeting at “about 11PM” and made no mention of Gerry McCann being present, only Fiona Payne.

“Upon leaning over the terrace," runs Mrs Fenn's police statement, "after having seen the mother, Mrs Fenn asked the father, Gerry, what was happening to which he replied that a small girl had been abducted. When asked, she replied that she did not leave her apartment, just spoke to Gerry from her balcony, which had a view over the terrace of the floor below. She found it strange that Gerry when said that a girl had been abducted, he did not mention that it was his daughter and that he did not mention any other scenarios. At that moment she offered Gerry help, saying that he could use her phone to contact the authorities, to which he replied that this had already been done. It was just after 22.30.”

So, according to this independent witness, Gerry McCann told her that the police had already been calledten minutes before any call had been made. Kate McCann's version differs by half an hour and implicitly exonerates Gerry McCann from having made such an untruthful and inexplicable statement. Quelle surprise!

No, no, black remains white


Regarding this example the defenders of the parents will always seize on the possible unreliability of Mrs Fenn’s version of events, even though her statement is precisely sequential in its description of that evening while Kate McCann’s is, shall we say, an impressionist one, i.e. a deliberate non-sequential jumble. Whatever happens, in this case as in all others, they won’t treat the evidence to a fair evaluation but will always find reasons why the McCann evidence is truthful and that of anyone with a different account is likely to be wrong.

The various wrigglings of the defenders when confronted with evidence, always resolving conflicts of evidence in the parents' favour, are of no significance except in one regard. When the Scotland Yard review officers argue out the case among themselves in brainstorming sessions –as police do – the group asked to argue for the innocence of the pair will find themselves having to do exactly the same thing. And doing it too often to fit the probability calculus.From which certain inferences follow, even to the most blinkered of policemen…

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Dave "Goatherd" Edgar being consistent

Talking of which, one last point. We hear much from the defence side about witness conflicts and how normal it is [yawn] that different people should give different versions of events, blah, blah, as though Detective Goatherd Edgar and his cohorts are telling us anything new. But get this: they never seem to apply to the McCanns themselves. Now why should that be? Why, for example, are the myriad “usual inconsistencies”, starting with those of the Tapas 7 and Jeremy Wilkins, missing when the parents give their individual versions of events to the police? There are none of the usual conflicts between them. Why?

This is not a question that the Goatherd has ever allowed himself to chew on, in public at least. Perhaps the Bureau can help, even though we lack Edgar's brains and, thank God, those hands. The only time that the parents have ever given the police descriptions of events that could be compared is on May 4 2007. On the next round of statement-taking, the first in which the PJ were actually looking for inconsistencies, there couldn’t be any conflicts between their accounts because Kate McCann was unavailable for questioning, so only Gerry was heard. And on the next round, on September 6, only Kate McCann was questioned, not Gerry, so there couldn’t be any conflicts there either. And then on the next day, as we all know, only Gerry McCann answered the questions so there couldn’t be any conflict then either! Nor does it end there. Gerry wrote a blog and Kate McCann didn't. Kate McCann wrote a book about the events while Gerry McCann didn't. Finally, even in that most supportive forum, the Leveson inquiry, they both turned up together, like they did for Kate McCann's May 4 statement-taking.

Those May 4 interviews were preliminary and skeletal and thus, unlike subsequent interviews, it was easy for the pair to synchronise their versions, which is what they undeniably did. Not only were there no conflicts between the pair's statements but they were almost word for word identical, including the passages when one describes what the other was doing – clear proof that the statements were not independent. Over to you, Edgar.

*Those people who have the time and interest can try this little project. Take both episodes, that is pages 71-75 of Madeleine and pages 239-245 and try and write an accurate timeline of the events from her description without large gaps – what is happening at, say, ten minute intervals in the first case and one hour intervals in the second. You will find it impossible. That is no accident.

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