The apartment had two doors - a front door on the aspect furthest away from the Tapas restaurant, completely out of sight, and which locked with a key, and a sliding patio door leading to the balcony which overlooked the swimming pool and the tapas restaurant some 70 yards away. The patio door could only be locked from the inside.
The McCanns for reasons best known to themselves left the patio door unlocked every evening, whilst they ate at the restaurant, and the children were asleep inside the apartment.
When Gerry McCann gave his first statement to the police the day after she disappeared he claimed that he had entered the flat through the front door, using the key, and also claimed that his wife had done the same. His wife contradicted him in her statement. One week later Gerry McCann, in a further statement, claimed that contrary to his first statement he had in fact entered the apartment via the unlocked sliding door, which had been, and was habitually, left unlocked. It appears that this was to allow for ease of access to the apartment to check the children. This left the apartment in a very vulnerable situation, with any person from the street able to readily gain access to the apartment by ascending a single flight of steps to the patio. Although this patio was just about visible from the tapas restaurant the view was obscured by vegetation and the McCanns were, by their own admission, facing the opposite direction. On the night Madeleine disappeared Kate McCann had a conversation with her friends in which she discussed the fact that Madeleine had previously woken and become upset, and pondered whether it was better for the door to be unlocked so that she could come and find them in the bar if she became upset again. The practicalities of a three year old negotiating a safe path down the stone steps, via a child safety gate, along a public highway, around a swimming pool and into a licensed premises wearing pyjamas and in the dark does not appear to have been discussed.
At approximately 9.10pm that evening Gerry McCann states he was standing outside the apartment having just checked on his sleeping children. According to his second statement he had entered and left via the stone steps and the unlocked patio door. Jane Tanner has stated that she passed Gerry McCann as he was stood outside the apartment chatting to an acquaintance. She states that she saw a man at the top of the road carrying what could have been a child. In her first statements her descriptions of the 'child' were vague; she claimed she only saw the legs, and was unable to specify the gender of the child. Several weeks later the group provided a printed statement to the Portuguese police in which it was claimed that she saw a man carrying a caucasian girl, aged three to four years old. The reason for her sudden recollection of these details, which she was unable to recall on the night in question, is not recorded.
As Gerry McCann was directly in front of the Patio entrance at the time this sighting is alleged to have occurred, and had only just left the apartment, it follows that for the man Jane Tanner observed carrying a child to be the abductor carrying Madeleine, he must have been inside the apartment when Gerry McCann made his stated 'check' a couple of minutes earlier.
If this man is the same man who was later observed by the Smith family carrying a young girl in a similar fashion, then there is an obvious discrepancy - although the two sightings are only 400 metres apart, the Smith family sighting was at least 45 minutes later. It seems unlikely that someone who had just abducted a child would hang around in the vicinity for a long period of time.
There are a number of aspects to the behaviour of the group which seem rather odd.
Firstly, there is the fact that intelligent professional people were seemingly incapable of appreciating the danger they placed their children in. It has since been admitted that most of the checking of the children amounted to little more than listening outside the window for any crying from within. It is also puzzling that it has been stated that although some of the other couples were in the habit of checking on the McCann children, the McCanns never reciprocated by checking anyone else's. In the case of one friend he ''checked'' on Madeleine and her siblings after the time Jane Tanner claims she saw her being abducted, yet failed to notice that she wasn't in her bed, nor that the window and shutters were supposedly open. Likewise, it is puzzling that between the time Madeleine was supposedly taken and the raising of the alarm, several other members of the group went to check on their own children, during which they all passed by the McCann apartment without noticing that the shutters and window were apparently wide open.
Once the alarm was raised members of the group were quick to contact the media in the UK. There has been much criticism of the Portuguese police for not responding more rapidly and missing the valuable first hour after the abduction, yet if Jane Tanner is correct about what she saw them Madeleine had been gone for close to an hour before either of her parents became aware of her absence. By the time the police were contacted she had been missing for an hour and a half.
By the following morning relatives of the McCann family were giving interviews to news media outlets in the UK in which they were highly critical of the police response in Portugal. Yet contemporaneous reports suggest that the response was immediate with many off-duty officers making their way to the resort to help with the search. The McCanns were told not to contact the media but appear to have disregarded this advice - consequently the Portuguese authorities had to deal with the additional pressure of a media feeding frenzy.
The official police and forensic reports state there were no signs of a break in. A great deal of nonsense has been reported in the press about the crime scene, the failure of the local police to seal off the scene and the evidence or lack of it which was recovered from the scene. It should be remembered that prior to the arrival of the police on the scene approximately 30 people had trudged through the apartment, compromising the integrity of the scene.
There are many more points to note, and questions which are not only unanswered but in many cases unasked. Above all, though, must be why any parent would think that their action in leaving such young children in such a dangerous situation would result in them being anything other than suspects. Had I done that I would expect to have every aspect of my life put under the microscope, and rightly so. It was a time for a little humility and 100% co-operation. It certainly wasn't the time for complaining about the response and demanding helicopters, heat-detection equipment and the closure of all borders.
And they covered it up for fear of going to jail and the consequences that would mean for their other two children.
