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For most of us' the events in Portugal's Praia da Luz three summers ago
are now a blur ? a distant unhappy memory of lighting candles' prayers
and appeals for a little girl snatched from a holiday apartment.
But then something happens to remind us of Madeleine McCann and once
again we catch our breath and try to imagine the misery her parents'
Gerry and Kate' experience every day as another reminder of their
missing daughter emerges in a child's laughter or a little girl's sudden
captivating smile.
This will be their third Christmas without Madeleine and the maxim "time
heals? could hardly be less fitting. If anything the ordeal of not
knowing worsens with every bogus sighting and false claim. Yet still
brave' strong and united they refuse to give up hope.
"If you know what has happened to Madeleine'? Kate and Gerry said this
week' "its still not too late to do the right thing and come forward.?
There's no blueprint for how couples should manage an ongoing nightmare.
The rule book on dealing with the pain of a missing child has yet to be
written.
But at home' when twins Amelie and Sean are attending lessons at the
school where Madeleine would have been their watchful big sister' Kate
spends hours sifting through paperwork' searching for simple overlooked
clues. When Gerry returns from work he joins her.
At one time I believed this need to scour every last detail might have
been a ritual to assuage the guilt' real or imagined' any parent would
feel over a child's disappearance.
But three years on it doesn't seem futile or pointless.
Children do' against all odds' reappear and might have done so earlier
had every stone been turned or every minute detail properly examined.
A policewoman's hunch led to the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard a few
months ago.
Snatched at the age of 11 from a bus stop in America's South Lake Tahoe
we now know had there been more thorough searches of her captor's
property her 18-year imprisonment in Phillip Garrido's filthy garden
sheds may have ended sooner.
If anything has given succour to the McCanns it's the story of Jaycee
Lee.
But its also helped persuade the cynics' who feel the couple have been
pointlessly banging their heads against a brick wall' that they could be
wrong.
And right now' as they face another difficult Christmas' the family need
all our support.
The chilling reality is that someone knows what happened the night
Madeleine disappeared. They understand the motive and the way her
abduction was orchestrated.
It would be terrifying if' in our lifetime' despite all the advances of
modern technology' high-speed communications and sophisticated policing
skills' a three-year-old girl was able to disappear off the face of the
Earth without a single human being's knowledge.
The McCanns have already backed a Europe-wide alert system for snatched
children. Now the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP)
has gone further with a global campaign targeted at kidnappers and
paedophile rings.
And for those of us who have pushed Madeleine to the furthest recesses
of our memory we're reminded' thanks to age-processed pictures' of how
she might look now.
For years America looked at similar photographs of Jaycee Lee Dugard and
despaired.
She wasn't delivered back to her family by a miracle but by the
sloppiness of an over-confident' arrogant criminal.
Everyone makes mistakes. And one day' the person responsible for
Madeleine's disappearance will too. |
