Byline: Brenda Power
THE walk from the tapas bar to the apartment took less than a minute. It was dark, just after 10pm, when Kate Mc-Cann went to check on her sleeping children.
There was silence, a good sign as far as a mother of toddlers was concerned, but the children's bedroom door was wide open. She reached to close it and glanced in. All appeared normal in the dim glow from street lamps - she didn't want to switch on the lights for fear of waking the children - and she hesitated for a few seconds trying to make out Madeleine's sleeping outline in her bed.
I've heard these details so many times that I almost know them by heart and yet there's something in Kate McCann's retelling of this life-altering moment, in her new book on her daughter's disappearance, that makes it suddenly chillingly vivid. Somehow, I'd always pictured her looking into a softly-lit room, instantly realising that the child was gone, and racing out in a screaming panic.
Instead, that pause in the darkness, as her brain rebels against processing the information that her eyes are relaying, rings painfully true.
Her head would have been full of the happy chatter at the table she'd just left a minute earlier, a funny comment or a good anecdote being polished in her mind for the minute or so in the future when she would rejoin her friends, report that the children were all sleeping soundly, and get on with enjoying the last night of her holiday.
CONTRARY to the way I had imagined, it would have taken several moments for her to realise that there was something monumentally wrong with the scene before her.
And those were probably the last few untroubled moments that the poor woman's mind will ever know. Reading her minutely detailed account of that night, the perfectly happy and carefree days that preceded it and the stomach-churning hours that followed, it is almost impossible to believe that anyone suggested the McCanns could have harmed their daughter.
While it may have suited the bungling Portuguese police to point the finger at the parents to deflect from their own ineptitude, it's even more amazing that the story grew legs among a wider public and is still a hot theory in web discussions on the most baffling case in decades.
It is an absolute nonsense to cling to a suspicion that the Mc-Canns killed and dumped their little girl. If she'd died in an accident or even, as one of the more persistent theories suggests, was unwittingly overdosed with a sedative administered so her parents could party with friends, their biological instincts would have overridden fears for their own skins.
They'd have sought help, regardless of the consequences, and anyone who says otherwise hasn't a clue of the bond that parenthood forges.
And if it wasn't an accident, then the only other theory is that these people coldly planned the murder and disposal of their three-year-old child under cover of a carefree family holiday.
By contrast, the possibility that aliens landed a massive space ship in the centre of a small Portuguese fishing village and stole the sleeping child from her bed is far more credible.
The suspicions that linger, though, serve to articulate a more legitimate unease about the McCanns' culpability for Madeleine's disappearance. Just because they didn't harm her deliberately doesn't mean they are free of all blame for what happened. In her book, Kate McCann says that leaving her children asleep in an unlocked apartment bedroom, while they ate in a restaurant at the complex, was no different to putting them to bed in a home and having a summer drink in the garden. With hindsight, she says, it was a catastrophic mistake but 'it's easy to be wise after the event'.
I know this couple have to find a way to live with their actions, but that's the sort of glib comment that inflames detractors. Because they weren't in the familiarity of their family home, and even if the only danger was that the children would wake and wander in strange surroundings, the risk was still too big to take. But nobody, not even the most vicious internet gossips, will be as hard on the McCanns as they'll be on themselves.
So maybe it's time, as they mark the fourth anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance, for a little more understanding about the context of their dreadful mistake. Every parent knows that it can take years to grasp how a child's arrival has changed your life. You quickly realise that a full night's sleep, spare cash and a tidy kitchen are things of the past. But, somehow, you cling to the illusion that holidays can still be relaxing and adult-centred.
YOU pack the books you'll read, the evening clothes you've been saving for a cocktail by the pool, the music you'll enjoy while snoozing on the beach. And after years of unpacking the unread books and the unworn clothes back home, the truth dawns: There's no such thing as a 'family holiday' - there are children's holidays, in which the adults participate as playmates, sand-castle builders, ice-lolly buyers, story-readers, theme park-chaperones and endless sources of hard currency.
The poor McCanns were still novices at the parenting game - Madeleine was only three, after all - and they just hadn't learned that a holiday with children is all about children, not about late-night drinks in nice places with grown-up company, and that it is foolish to resist.
In time, they'd have learned to develop a taste for fish fingers, water slides and early nights. But they thought they could enjoy themselves too, and that was the first mistake they made on the trip. It's one we all make in the early days, and, in time, we learn the rules. They didn't have time, though and, unlike most of us, they learned the hardest way of all.
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