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Kate McCann: 'We will never have rest or
peace until we know what happened to
Madeleine' Photo: Andrew Crowley |
Kate McCann did something frighteningly normal the other day.
She stopped at a petrol station, filled up, locked the car and went
in to pay, leaving her eight-year-old twins, Sean and
Amelie, strapped in the back seat. As she stood
anxiously at the till, they pulled faces at her through
the window.
“It was the first time in six years that I have been able to do
that,” she says. “I was very conscious of what I was
doing. I left them behind for a few moments. All the
time they were in view. They used to protest when I took
them inside with me to pay, though they knew it was, as
Sean once said, “because someone might take me”.
It is almost exactly six years since their older sister, Madeleine,
vanished while on a family holiday in Portugal and
became the focus of one of the most intense, prolonged
and high-profile public campaigns ever mounted to find a
missing person. In that time, and despite many
investigations and false accusations – the most hellish
being that the McCanns were themselves implicated in
their daughter’s disappearance – not a single piece of
evidence has emerged to show that she is dead.
Kate and Gerry McCann, balancing realism and optimism, believe it
is possible that their daughter, just a few days from
her fourth birthday when she was abducted, will be
found. How else would they go on?
“As there is nothing to suggest that Madeleine is not alive,” says
Kate, “we have to keep looking for her. We all know
there are cases of missing children, presumed dead, who
have been found alive years, sometimes decades, later.”
Little by little, they have schooled themselves not to dwell on the
lurid possibilities that tormented them in the early
days – that their daughter had been snatched by a
paedophile network or met with a cruel death – but they
are never free of questions, and sometimes they are
ambushed by old fears.
“None of the scenarios is good when your child has been taken,” she
says. “You’re in a dark place some of the time. You get
upset. You get angry. I have spent hours thinking of the
possibilities. Do I want to know what happened? I’ve sat
myself down and asked myself: if you knew and it was
truly awful, would that help?”
Her familiar sharp-boned face looks weary. At 45 she is pretty, but
lines of anxiety show at her mouth and crease her
forehead. She seems poised, not in a studied way but
like a person suspended. Although she says she and Gerry
are “in a better place” than at any time since Madeleine
was taken, her sentences sound as though they are coming
from a long way off.
“Living in limbo with this void and uncertainty is truly dreadful.
It’s hard to rest, to find peace. It’s unsettling and
uncomfortable all the time. Even on a 'good’ day, that
feeling is lurking. And of course you can never stop
until you know; you’re on a treadmill you can’t get off.
It’s draining. Until you know, there is no true peace.
We need to know for us and we need to know for Sean and
Amelie so that, God forbid, in another 10 years or so
they don’t have to cope with this distressing limbo,
too.”
For the moment, Madeleine is as real to them, and to the whole
family, as an absent person could be. They talk about
her all the time, observe her birthdays with a party and
gifts, give her Christmas presents and fill a keepsake
box with things they think she would like – drawings,
school work, sweets, a leaf. Kate fills Christmas
stockings for three. “There is part of me that has to do
it.”
There are photographs of Madeleine everywhere. Her room at the
family home in Rothley, Leicestershire, is as she left
it when they went on holiday, plus the unopened
presents.
Kate opens and closes the curtains twice a day and sometimes stays
to absorb what she can of Madeleine. It is not what
everyone would choose to do, she agrees, but it is her
way. Sean and Amelie still share a bedroom. Soon there
will be the practical issue of what to do with a “spare”
room one of them may need. “But that was the room she
left and it would be familiar to her. It would be hard
to dismantle it.” Gerry, 44, a cardiologist, has a more
practical turn of mind. “So in time we may perhaps look
at it differently.”
The twins’ understanding of what happened in Praia da Luz on the
night of May 3 2007 is matter-of-fact and unafraid. “We
explain it like a burglary,” says Kate. “You must never
take something that doesn’t belong to you. Madeleine
belonged to our family and someone who had no right to
her took her away. We also explain that this is very
rare. It doesn’t happen every day.”
Touchingly, the parents’ protectiveness and resolve is echoed by
their children. When Sean was little more than a
toddler, he reassured them: “Me and Amelie will go on
looking for Madeleine.”
At school, they talk about their missing sister to other people. “I
have to ask: 'Is this all right?’” says Kate. “Because I
know some people like to pretend it didn’t happen and
the world’s a lovely place.”
Throughout that disbelieving summer, the international news was
dominated by a single crime and a single small face.
Madeleine was snatched from her bed between regular
checks made by her parents, who were dining with friends
in a tapas bar 50 metres away from the apartment. They
thought the arrangement was so normal, so ideal, that
they never questioned it, and plenty of sympathetic
parents told them they would have done exactly the same.
There were accusations of neglect, too, but no one was
harder on the couple than they were themselves.
“We thought we had worked out the best plan,” Kate says. “It seems
very different now. I have persecuted myself about that
decision for years, even though deep down I knew I was a
caring parent and how much I loved my children.”
In the early months, even years, she despised her daughter’s
unknown thief. “The thought of her feeling fear and
wanting and needing her mummy and daddy provoked so much
pain. It still does, when I wander down that particular
path.”
Kate is a practising Catholic, and when asked about forgiveness she
used to say she needed to understand the motive. Now,
tentatively, she feels differently.
“I think I could probably forgive Madeleine’s abductor whatever the
circumstances. I don’t know whether it’s simply because
I’m stronger or because there’s no benefit in not
forgiving someone. I can’t change anything and I don’t
want to be eaten up by hatred and bitterness. And maybe
there is an element of pity – what kind of person could
do something like this? Of course, forgiveness will
always be easier if there is remorse.”
The Scotland Yard review of the case, set up two years ago, has
brought the McCanns a degree of equanimity because it
relieves them of the burden of maintaining the search
through private investigators.
“Emotionally, it helps,” Kate says. “We were doing so much
ourselves. Now at least it is not totally down to us. We
have been able to switch off a little bit. If we go
away, we know there is work going on. We are encouraged
by what the Met team has done and found. They have
uncovered so much.”
Thirty officers are working full-time on Operation Grange. “As time
goes on, it is hard to maintain the level of motivation
but, if anything, they are more determined now. But we
still want the Portuguese police to reopen the
investigation [closed in July 2008]. We want to find our
daughter and the person who committed this very serious
crime. This case needs to be solved. Why would anyone
not want to solve it?”
Meantime, there is no let-up in the McCanns’ fundraising and
awareness campaign Find Madeleine (whose 10th birthday
is on May 12). Their all-consuming focus is, and has
been, astonishing. Kate, a former GP, has become an
ambassador for the charity Missing People, which
supports the families of some of the 250,000 who go
missing in Britain each year. A transition, maybe, from
personal grief to a concern for people who lack her own
professional acumen and whose bleak stories do not make
the headlines. “Before Madeleine went missing,” she
admits, “I was horrifyingly ignorant about this issue
myself. It really is much bigger than people realise.”
Despite having had huge problems with her Achilles’ tendons during
training, and spurred on by her children and the
messages of sponsors, Kate aims to raise £20,000 for the
charity by running the London Marathon on Sunday. “I am
a finisher. I’ll get round if I have to crawl.”
Jo Youle, CEO of Missing People, can testify to that. “Kate’s
perseverance is truly inspirational,” she says. “For
families like hers, facing the toughest time of their
lives when a child goes missing, Kate’s marathon gives
hope.”
There are other reasons to be thankful. Once, Kate McCann was
afraid that the intensity of grief would threaten their
marriage, because she could not bear to take pleasure or
comfort in the physical side of their relationship. “I’m
pleased, and relieved, to say our relationship is really
good,” she says. “Given that we’ve made it through so
many awful things over the past six years – and not just
made it through but are united, strong and very happy
together – then we can make it through anything. We’ll
survive.”
Nor are the many reported sightings of Madeleine as upsetting as
they used to be. “I am able to rein in my emotions quite
easily. [The reports] need to have real credibility. It
is encouraging, though, six years on, that people are
still looking and haven’t forgotten about Madeleine –
that in itself gives us hope.
“There are moments when you despair, but they are infrequent now.
As someone said: It’s not that your burden gets any
lighter. It’s just that your legs get stronger. That
really sums it up.”
justgiving.com/KateMcCann-Marathon; missingpeople.org.uk |
