The Issue
The twin problem at the heart of the Madeleine McCann affair remains: almost everyone who investigates or studies the case in detail is troubled by the parents’ attitude to the truth. Yet, given their innocence of involvement in the disappearance of the child, what possible motive could they have for lying?
The parents are the only two people who saw, and bore witness to, the unmistakable evidence of intrusion into their apartment— the disturbed shutters which no three year old would have been capable of lifting from inside. Accept their word and abduction must have occurred.
Why don’t they believe us?
But from the beginning of the investigation the parents’ words failed to convince. The first officers on the scene, while not suspicious of the pair, were unable to share the self-evident certainty of an abduction that the parents, sometimes impatiently, sometimes hysterically, pressed on them. Both the written statements of the parents and their friends and the printed timeline which they offered to the police, a document in which weird and disturbing exactitude about the nine adults’ own movements was combined with a void about the child herself, created a sense of unease amongst the investigators. While the parents, as befitted their special role, were not immediately challenged, we now know that as early as May 10 the police had switched from suspicion to active disbelief of the group version of events, for Gerry McCann overheard Oldfield’s sobs in the face of shouted claims that he was lying.
From then until September the parents were somehow incapable of convincing the police that they were truthful and reliable witnesses. That may be because Portuguese policemen are unintelligent monsters who only believe a story when it is beaten out of the unfortunate victim with clubs. But the evidence suggests otherwise, for their increasingly frequent, and heavily structured, broadcast interviews seemed to provoke the same scepticism in some of the public as it had in the original investigators; even some of their supporters noticed the strangled caution with which they expressed themselves and a certain tension that was hard to put down purely to grief at the loss of their daughter.
Just what is it about them?
Critics were troubled, and with good reason. Even when they were safely back in England, even after the investigation was shelved, their interviews continued to give the impression of wriggling away from anything resembling free discussion, much more like modern politicians caught up in some queasy scandal, trying to fend off questions rather than answer them while simultaneously searching for answers that wouldn’t be used against them in the future.
Always there was a sense of an agenda, sometimes obvious, sometimes, it seems, known to them alone. Invariably they seemed incapable of narrating a simple rounded version of events rather than a partial, and self-serving one. Whatever the subject, whether they were describing the “checking”, the fund, the Portuguese authorities, the future, not only did their answers need retrieving from beneath a dense and deadening blanket of sentimentality, apparently capable of being called up or discarded at will, but once found they were almost always strangely devoid of that human necessity, a sense of proportion.
So we grew used to the awful predictability of their appearances and the evolution of those familiar, dispiriting voices. There was Kate McCann’s practised and exaggerated Scouser drone, impenetrable guardian of her real feelings and reactions, capable of provoking instant fury at her evasions before gradually numbing us into submission, like smoke puffed onto angry bees. And Gerry McCann’s all-purpose Glasgow street chippiness—picture that chin and nose thrust upwards, the neck stretched, the eyes narrowing—a studio version of, “do ye no fockin’ believe me, eh?” always ready to burst free, like a special-effects Hollywood alien elbowing its way out of its Respectable Doctor container. Whew!
Naturally while we sat helpless at our screens shouting just answer the question there were voices explaining to us the reasons for their weird performances. Of course they weren’t at ease, they’d lost a child! Of course they couldn’t speak freely, there were the secrecy rules, or the mysterious and sepulchral “operational reasons” quoted so self-importantly by Clarence Mitchell. And of course Mitchell wasn’t a repulsive Uriah Heap helping them evade the truth, why he protected them from countless demands on their time. If your daughter had been taken then you’d be different too!
If we knew we wouldn’t tell you
And then, in May 2011, Madeleine was published and, astonishingly, blew the gaff and turned our suspicions into facts. Kate McCann showed clearly that in Portugal they really had been lying to us, and the evidence remains in print and on the Net. Their claims to the public, as expressed in their interviews and in Gerry McCann’s so-called blogs were an outright exercise in deception: the blogs, which, remember, nobody forced them to write and which addressed people directly without the contaminating influence of the professional media, show how Gerry kept up the deadpan pretence that they were not “subjects of interest” to the investigation for months. Even when they were left with only the clothes on their backs, the rest having been seized for forensic examination, and even as his wife was hysterically denying to her police accusers—just like Oldfield, way back on May 10—that she was lying about the disappearance, Gerry was reassuring the world that there was no reason whatever to believe that the police suspected them.
Worse, and one cannot over-emphasize the significance of this admission, the book showed (on pages 205/6) that they are willing to tell calculated lies—Kate’s word—to prevent the public from knowing anything about police investigations into their own role in the disappearance, and she gave a flagrant example of them doing so.
She appears to have no understanding of the implications of what she has written—that she and her husband will be the judges of when to tell the truth about police inquiries into themselves and when they will choose to lie and deceive. From the book the motive is clear: denying the existence of any facts that might sully their consciously created image of wounded innocence and weaken public support, their most valuable defensive asset. How often have they acted on these calculations and lied to us about police inquiries since that occasion on August 2 2007? We cannot know, except that she does not claim that it was the only time. Have they lied about, say, similar inquiries or forensic investigations by Leicester police? Again we don’t know: we only know, since Kate McCann, told us, that that is the way they operate. As Gerry McCann once sniggered to an interviewer in a different context, “if we knew we wouldn’t tell you,” and now we know that, for once, he was telling us the truth.
Given what Kate McCann has revealed about their modus operandi in Madeleine, one theory, always unlikely but a sort of refuge for Bureau people anxious to avoid drawing the grim but obvious inference of their untruthfulness, now seems untenable: the remote possibility that a joint psychological weakness in communication, some congenital incapacity for handling the truth, lies at the root of all their troubles, making them look guiltier than they are and arousing a false certainty in everyone from Amaral onwards that the innocents are deliberately lying. Pages 205/6 knock that theory on the head.
Accordingly it would have been pretty unrealistic to expect a sudden conversion to vivid frankness in their latest public outing: much more likely was a repeat of Gerry McCann’s performance in front of the Media, Culture and Sport Committee, with the street-fighter firmly packed away back into Special Effects while its owner, Dr McCann, gave us the benefit of his weighty views. Still, it would be worth a look, if only to see if anything had changed.
Part Two follows later today.
