Five Feet High and Rising

How high's the water, momma?

Five feet high and rising

How high's the water poppa?

Five feet high and rising

 

Johnny Cash, Sun records

 

It was with deep sorrow that we heard  that the Madeleine Online Shop is no more. It was also a surprise since Kate McCann had written that the store was not despatching goods only because “I am unable at this time to attend to website orders.” Sweet as this vision is of little Kate in her brown overalls licking sticky tape and humping packages into mailbags, it wasn't the whole story, was it?

“She wanted to let people down gently,”  Mr Pal, [you can't say that anymore. Ed.] a friend, [nope.Ed.] a source close to the investigation [no, no, no! Ed.] a spokesman-for-the-McCanns-not-discussing-the-investigation-with-hair-the-colour-of-a-baboon’s-pink-arse [sure.Ed], might have said as he told the Sun of the closure.  “The news was bound to be painful for millions of people so Kate felt that she had no choice but to tell them a bit at a time so they could get used to the idea."

Our sister publication, the Financial & Marketing Bureau, takes up the story:

A Nation Mourns

 

Brand Identity

The news has been met with shock and dismay by thousands up and down Britain - and nowhere more than in Leicestershire.  “That’s it,” said homeless and dripping Tony Parsons 77, throwing open his Morrison’s doorway home and inviting us to share his soiled duvet, “they’ll never be nothing like it again. Never. I'm gutted like a sardine.” His grizzled and somewhat toothless friend Carla Spade,  career chambermaid at Rothley's Premier Inn but now fallen on very hard times, expressed her grief more forthrightly. "If you ask me, it's a f*****g disgrace and they shouldn't of [sic] f******g done it, the f*****g f*****s."

Why exactly do you think so?

"Because we slept in the doorway of that f******g warehouse for years and now we've been moved on to this pi**hole f*****g dump." Clearly there'd been a misunderstanding, so we threw Carla some cider and deodorant money and slipped away.  

Beth – not her real name – a normally chirpy pigskin bleacher  at Rothley’s extensive  "Melton Mowbray-style"  Pork Products  factory, wept quietly as she told us how her childhood, like that of all her friends, was spent swapping images of the latest fashion lines  on the site. “I just can’t  believe it, ” she said, staring at the rain-soaked railings of the nearby village memorial and the squished papier-mache remains of  a once pristine Have You Seen Her poster dribbling towards the gutter. 

Was that hers? we asked. She nodded. “I had eleven, like. There was talk that Maddie had signed some of them but I never saw those."

Inconsolable Loss

Pedro de Silva, who runs a scented candles, fancy lingerie and souvenir stall by the bus station, was covering his stock in black plastic bags as the rain increased to a melancholy, relentless hammering from granite grey skies. He  was distraught, almost beyond expression. “People like me…people like us, I no have the words but we need that little girl, we need those things of her. No, no I cannot speak.”

Later, sheltering under an awning, I encounter Beth again. She is, once more, in tears.  “They’re making me redundant,” she sobs. Who are?  “The Porkies factory,” she cries, “we’re on a one-day week which they said was down to Brexit and now they’ve just told us” – she breaks  off to blow her nose into  a Maddie Loves You handkerchief – “twenty minutes ago they told us that  nobody’s buying their Porkies anymore so we're closing this week.”

There are stories that behind the scenes desperate efforts had been made to keep the Online Store open during its last months. Darcy du Cann, a tall, languid, hipster-bearded marketing expert from Shoreditch Solutions, claims he was considering offering a recovery plan but realised the task was hopeless on his first day.

“I knew at once,” he said over a Fatty Latte in Rothley’s Michelin-starred Exhaust ‘n’ Tyre Pit, the village’s social centre, “I can’t tell you how but I knew. The atmosphere was  like that,” and he motioned  at the memorial,  now gushing rain water from every gargoyle, “hopeless. Once the belief is gone everything else follows.”  The rat-a-tat-tat of a wheel-nut driver announced that the new tyre was now on his Ferrari. He gave me a wink. “One tip,” he added as we left,  “never, ever, invest in failure.”

Prospects

What does the future now hold? The McCanns’ celebrated financial nous and a particularly smart way with copyright means that any independent attempt to fill the gap in the highly valuable souvenir market is likely to fail, despite Mr de Silva’s hopes of stocking Sweet Tot brand snow-globes and  Maddie Sticker Books (with ready to  tear pages) from Vietnam. Besides, as Darcy pointed out before roaring off into  the distance, “…look, these things have a finite marketing life and now it’s gone. Selling a cute blonde kid’s dead easy but how’s anyone going to sell a Maddie Tee-shirt when nobody knows what she looks like? She might be six feet tall and fat already. To be honest, nobody wants to invest in the McCann brand anymore. Ask around:  once it was nectar, now it’s poison."

Later, as your correspondent headed safely southwards, wipers thudding, twenty miles back  the local radio station was headlining its latest weather report, No way out from Rothley, folks. Somehow I found myself thinking again of those last few words from Darcy du Cann. 

Well it's five feet high and ri - sing. Rothley brook overflows. 

Shambles Time

 

 

Hm. Is This an Audition?

Shambles Time

The disarray as every seam of the McCann’s oh-so-clever strategy starts to unravel at once is something wondrous to behold. Yet the more it unravels the more puzzled many people are. It just doesn’t seem to fit in with the supposed invulnerability of the couple, courtesy of Unknown Forces and Hidden Hands. And, to be fair, there's a secret, much more forgivable,  can this really be happening? feeling abroad, a pretty reasonable response to eleven years of well-rewarded deceit.

Yes, it can and is. And no, we haven't said that before. The McCann strategy that has been clear since 2007 and has never changed is starting to collapse under pressure. And that strategy is? No extradition.

As we know, the head of the McCann legal team, Smethurst, gave the  game away in 2007. After stating that the couple had been subject to “trial by media” since their return to the UK he told BBC Panorama “… there were two strands to this case, part of it is the criminal case, but part of it is the media speculation and the media perception, and we see it as incumbent upon us to portray the truth to the media and in particular to try and expunge any ill-founded theories about Gerry and Kate's involvement…”

More Than Meets the Eye

Now that famous statement posed a couple of serious questions. Why should adverse media comment in the UK affect a Portuguese prosecution? How could changing opinion in Britain help the couple if they stood in a Portuguese dock? And secondly, it suggested a certain lack of confidence that the facts alone would ensure they walked free out of a Portuguese court.

The answer to both questions is the same. The defence aim was to ensure that they never came within a hundred miles of a Portuguese courtroom, let alone allow the facts to “demonstrate their innocence” in one. Smethurst and his team were many things but they weren’t stupid, which is why one of the two senior members of the team was Britain’s foremost extradition lawyer.

In extradition cases law meets politics – and politics usually wins  since countries generally don’t extradite people their “public” feel sorry for. So, in a case where innocence is hardly self-evident, you get stuck in and work on manipulating people's emotions in the suspect's favour by inventing simplified, show business  models of them to replace the rough stuff you're actually defending.

The public, in general, can't handle real human beings but crude, highly coloured, celebrity  cartoons of them, victims or villains, always go down a treat and the McCanns loved being soap opera characters and played them beautifully except in their unguarded moments, apparently untroubled that it might end up making them lose their minds.   Again Smethurst’s team wasn’t stupid: the other of the two senior lawyers was a media celebrity expert, with the usual skills and contacts.

The details and methods can be found in the most open of these cases, that of Gary McKinnon the “superhacker,” to which the reader is referred. It’s all there: a budget provided largely by sympathetic well-wishers, a huge PR campaign to create the “victim” role (and mental health issues), to whip up xenophobia,  (“wicked American dungeons” “against “wicked corrupt cops”) to trivialise the charges (“just a bedroom hacker” against “we’ve all done it”) and so on. The similarity isn’t surprising – the McKinnon people were following the same template. It’s dirty but it works. No extradition!

 

Smethurst didn’t decide this strategy, any more than the other “experts” who grew fat on the fruits of the Madeleine case. By some instinctive brilliance, or exceptionally unusual cunning, the parents found their own way to the “twin strands” within days of the disappearance, stumblingly at first and then gaining pace and conviction as time went on, with the  assistance, no doubt, of Gerry's bedside reading, Lance Armstrong's memoirs. Thus, as we know from reading Nigel Moore’s McCann Files, the “second strand”, the endless, glutinous media sentimentalising about the poor parents’ suffering, building on natural public sympathy, was accompanied by a quite different, much more brutal  first strand –  secretly working behind the scenes, through proxies and anonymously, to muffle  the facts and divert attention.

 

That's The Way to Do It

Strand Two,  Suffering Victims

 

And...

...Strand One, Operating from the Shadows

 

And all this is what the Bureau and others have been addressing over recent weeks. The fraught interviews, the “blogs”, the desperate attempts to conceal the search of their home and the seizure of their property, the fantastic lying at the Edinburgh festival, the claims that they were being forced into confessions – those aren’t random reactions but have had  a single aim: don’t let the UK public think badly of you. Countries don’t extradite people the public feel sorry for.  And within days of arguido time they legged it to the safety of the UK and never came back until the case had been shelved.  

No extradition. The attempt to stop Amaral from bringing his theories to the British public; the innocent-schoolgirl fiction of Madeleine; the toe-curling anniversary celebrations and the regular reminders of the empty bedroom shrine; the performance at Leveson, with its repetition of the Edinburgh lies. Whatever happens keep the dimmo public believing in the cartoon goodies.

And then look at the other strand. The passage of time has not produced anything to counter or dismiss the official reservations about their innocence. The Attorney-General’s specific claims about their failure to assist the investigation and the lack of explanation for it, the Leicester police statement, still not withdrawn, that there is no evidence to exclude them from involvement in the disappearance, the Portuguese Supreme Court’s 2017 detailed refutation of their “cleared” claims.  Nothing there to make them look forward to demonstrating their innocence in a Portuguese court. No extradition is still the only game in town.

So the  distortions of relations between Scotland Yard and the Portuguese police over the last five years can hardly be unwelcome, can they?  Nor can the threats to Grange funding. Nor can the repeated, and invented, attacks on the professionalism of both forces and the supposed list of “last suspects” garbage.

Shambles

But now they’ve nearly all run out. Since Grange tightened the screw on the couple in April all that stuff has suddenly stopped. The mysterious  Mr Pal, so voluble and useful in those fictions  has disappeared with them. Instead of the confident assertions about the course of Grange that Heriberto Janosch had been providing to the UK media, courtesy of a mystery English PR man’s media contacts book, for the last three years we have the extraordinary collapse of the entire Team McCann media machine.

Just look at that “machine” - the professional feeds featuring Mr Pal, a spokesman for the couple and  a “source” have disappeared since April in favour of a disorganised and leaderless ragtag collection of junk – first of all the amateurish Totman lead balloon and now GM’s depression, poetry (poetry and the McCanns?!) and a bizarre set of stories on the “fund” that twitter readers, understandably, suspect are elaborate practical jokes, so gross are they in their untruths and so opaque in their aims.

But why? If the McCanns are certain of  their undemonstrated innocence then why on earth should they be so unsettled by Grange's instruction to stop discussing the progress of the investigation? Why, indeed should they have stopped discussing it - for none of the recent examples are about the investigation itself.  

As we said, it would all be happening in 2018. Perhaps it’s time to call up Mr Smethurst. Oh, and a family member to remind us of what she said repeatedly in 2007/8 -  that poor Kate McCann might be "too mentally fragile" to travel to Portugal. Just like Gary McKinnon. Or even a crazed-looking Gerry McCann.

 

 

Culture Corner

The Bureau has been very fortunate to be sent part of the transcript for a new BBC radio programme. Enjoy!

Presenter Amanda Bruce-Fanner: We read that lovely poem by Simon Armitage recently, all about bacon. Does that  help you when you're perhaps feeling the sort of mental  pressures you've described so meaningfully?

Guest: The bacon? 

ABF: No, no, the poetry.

Guest: I think it does, you know. I mean we've been so busy for so long that you never get much of a chance to do all the things you'd like to. As I get older I'm beginning to see the importance of human feeling -

ABF: How old are you?

Guest: Fifty, Amanda.

ABF: I believe that William McGonnagle, author of the "Tay Bridge Disaster"  is something of a favourite of yours.

Guest: Yes. I've never met him but I believe that he organized some readings a while ago for us. Great  fellow and a tremendous fisherman! Not that we get the time to fish and it's a very expensive hobby which we can't indulge in too often.

ABF: Here's  Gerry's desert island poem.

It's a Disaster William Mcgonagle*

 

Oh, twas terrible, terrible  on that windy starless night,

Where the sardines are fished  and the seagulls take flight,

Aye, and a monster stalked that stony shore, up to no good as he shuffled apace

To the nearby toun, with six-foot arms and black spots on his face

His long shaggy hair and a skin so swarthy as never was seen in guid old Dunday

In the market square where it rains every Monday!

 

'twas later that night in the twilight gloaming that people they roared

Call out the watch! There’s a monster abroad! And the people cried and the tears they oozed

For they all decided this was very bad news

And they looked for him hither and they searched for him thither

But nothing was seen in that cold May night weather

Nor since has he showed, at least on this earth, not even in Glasgae

For what that is worth

And to end this tragedy that we’ve all been lamenting

'twas all in the bounds of respons’ble parenting.

[Silence]

Guest: It's a bit different to what I remember.

ABF: But very moving. And I think very appropriate. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Guest: Ah'm, Ah'm not actually sure that's the one I meant.

********

ABF: This one, I believe, is a joint choice by you and your wife. Is that right?

Guest: Yes. It's by a man called TS Eliot who, I believe, has had mental health issues of his own, or was that Billy Connolly?  He's very famous in America and I think was a guest at the White House when I stayed there.

ABF: What does it mean to you both?

Guest: You know it talks about the future and ageing, things like that.

ABF: Does that mean a lot to you?

Guest: Sometimes, after all we've gone through, we both like to think of… rest, I suppose, peace. Acceptance. 

You'll Be Lucky! TS Eliot

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled,

Then to the church on a sunny Sunday morning shall I stride or saunter, thinking manfully of vexed issues,

Such as the opaque debates of  Tertullian and the winged lines of John  Donne, or perhaps the pattern of my beloved’s heartbeats on a flickering screen

While puffing at my pipe.

You and I will stand rock-like, all struggles done. In peace.   

 

ABF: Beautiful. Out of suffering can come wisdom.

Guest. Gets you right there.

ABF: And your last choice?

Guest: Well this one was sent to me yesterday by a well wisher - at least I hope he was! - and I was very struck by it. Ah don't fully understand it yet - but I'm getting there! It's by Shakespeare, who's always been one of my favourites.

 

To His Onlie Soulmate  William Shakespeare*

What be this doom that surroundeth me,

 Like as to cold fingers stretchd out from the grave?

 No rest, no peace in the darkness I see. 

Warmth and comfort alike canst thou crave 

Alongside me in our cursed, tumbled bed

But nay, none will come; not now, nor at dawn

For us, say I, there will be naught but dread

Eternal, timeless, ne'er again the glad morn 

No chattering chorus by blackbird sung 

Our secret safe but our souls racked and drawn

 Oh cover her face; she died young.

______________________________

Our thanks to our culture correspondent M/S Carlotta di Spade for her research notes:

William McGonagle 1825-1902. An unusually bad poet. The guest's doubts about whether this was
the poem he intended suggest that he may have been the victim of a hoax, possibly by a member of the BBC staff. No record of this poem exists.

TS Eliot. 1888-1965.  While the style might be consistent with that of Eliot - just - the extremely un-Eliot title suggests that it might be by a follower, perhaps one who wrote a similar work called "Lobster on Cape Cod".  There is no record of Mr Eliot staying at the White House while our guest was there.

William Shakespeare . This complex but moving poem only surfaced very recently - on the 18 September 2018.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Shock Corridor

 

From the Bureau, April 2018.

“They are not suspects or persons of interest and have not a tea-stain on their characters. Still, their informal spokespeople, the famous Mr Friend and his chum Mr Pal, all otherwise known as Clarence Mitchell, tell us that  the parents have been banned by the Yard from publicly discussing the case, or “specifically advised not to” as Mr Pal describes it. 

 

So, as Grange enters its final stages, every one of the Tapas Nine has at last been silenced and  the horrific farce of the media being used to bypass or influence the normal legal route  – Expunge it! being the words of the then head of the McCanns’ criminal defence team for the policy –  has, it seems,  come to an end after ten years.

We shall see whether Mitchell thinks he can get round it. It will be tough because anything he says from now on about the case will mean either a) he is inventing things without authority from the parents or b) the parents are knowingly breaching the new requirements of the Yard. Since Mitchell is a mentally exhausted shell who has contributed nothing but his contact list to the team for at least three years he is unlikely to be up for the challenge.”

The “mentally exhausted shell” has indeed been unable to meet the challenge. Readers who have missed his recent efforts on behalf of his only known “clients” can feast on this devastating PR initiative from a few days ago:

“A source close to the couple from Rothley, Leicestershire, said today: 'They have been here before. They simply have no idea if the search will abruptly come to an end or will carry on. It is a daunting prospect they face once more.’”

Punchy, isn’t it? You couldn’t get a more inert  and submissive message of defeat by Grange unless you watched a pink-haired baboon bending over and baring its arse to fate  in London Zoo. Still, it confirms what we’ve all suspected – that the stuff Mitchell's churned out for years about “Kate and Gerry are kept fully up to date with the progress of the investigation” is and was a load of tosh.  They've been told nothing.

Anyway, depressed Mitchell,   (google “new job for Clarence Mitchell 2018”), who has found it hard to get up in the mornings since 2014, can now stand alongside Mrs Kate McCann who, as everyone will remember,  told the world in the libel writ against Goncalo Amaral about the horrific depression, insomnia  and suffering that had struck her after being made arguida after that wicked book had been published.

And today, shuffling  forward to join them, comes Gerry "I will never be silenced"  McCann, 50, who has granted an interview in a token effort to show defiance to Grange to discuss “his own agony in honest, personal and sometimes painful terms” to  raise awareness about mental health, saying he hoped it might lessen the taboo of males talking frankly about their emotions.” He’s all heart, isn’t he?

Our Mental Health Correspondent Olivia de Manning writes:  

In fact Professor McCann has impressive qualifications for such a role. He is no stranger to mental difficulties, as his wife once told us when she described the terrible episode that struck him down over a decade ago. Like most others, they were caught completely unprepared: having been running a successful international campaign, welcome at the Vatican and  the White House, safe in the knowledge that “nothing had been happening” in Portugal, they were preparing a leisurely farewell  when nightmare suddenly struck. Soon Kate witnessed the early signs:  “I could see by this time that Gerry was starting to crack.”

Nor is he afraid to admit shedding tears – his wife remembers with touching concern that, “Gerry was distraught now. He was on his knees, sobbing, his head hung low. ‘We’re finished. Our life is over,’ he kept saying over and over again.” That was when he was faced with the terrible dilemma that so many ordinary people suffer in their lives, or as Kate McCann put it  – “Was this what it came down to? Confess to this lesser charge or risk something much worse?”

But Gerry came through it, dried his eyes and shouted that immortal message to all fellow sufferers, words of comfort that echo across the years  - “They’ve got nothing!”.   

Three people, three decent, caring people. And all suffering, or having suffered from, the agony of mental distress. Is there a common factor, a pre-condition, something  that somehow unites them? The doctors, as yet, have no answer. Life can be so terribly unfair.

 

JB adds: Yep, and it's getting worse.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Inwards or Outwards?

A Doddle to Find

 

Which way? The question – to concentrate resources inwards onto the disappearance itself or outwards in pursuit of suspect and victim – features in all suspected kidnappings and looms large in the Madeleine McCann Case.

In the immediate aftermath of such crimes, when those involved are still within range  and rapid apprehension  may save the victim’s life, search and pursuit is the priority, the crime scene being seen primarily as the source of a trail to pursue. The balance changes if the searches are fruitless: then resources are targeted back on the scene, both to investigate the circumstances surrounding the crime and uncover new leads to chase.

The nature of the resources will also differ. At the beginning search and pursuit is a brute- force operation requiring merely supervised volunteers with probing canes; later, as the initial trail goes cold, the balance shifts again and the crime scene starts to gobble up all available skilled staff.

An associated problem in such cases is dealing with those close to the victim. How to reassure and calm their state of shock sufficiently to gain rational descriptions of events and tease out significant details is a skill all of its own; listening officers, though  – they normally do this work in pairs  – must also keep a cold eye out for untold stories or tensions just beneath the shock and hysteria. The statistics, unfortunately, dictate that course.

Turning to the McCann case, we can try and ignore here such well-worn features of the affair as the role of the media, political complications etc., and confine ourselves to this  “which way” question - with one exception: always remember that, because of the wild UK media presence, the profile, and thus the ability to influence events, of the family was immeasurably greater than usual in these cases.

So it's well known that the McCanns and the Portuguese police had diametrically opposed views on the which-way question. Unusually, though, the PJ, whose view was orthodox and logical, found it much harder to explain and justify it against the media fairground noise than the parents did, having  brought the fairground in.

Why was it “orthodox”? The entire investigation produced a grand total of three possible trails – the Tanner sighting, the sniffer-dogs track and the Smith claim – all of them within Praia da Luz only and all of them ending in a matter of metres.

Why was it “logical”? Because without a start, a direction to follow, the search task becomes, immediately, infinite, in other words impossible to carry out. The search area is simply the whole world. And since there is no consistent and reliable description of any suspect, except the one naming Gerry McCann, the list of potential “suspects” is incalculably large.

Closer to Home

Alipio Ribeiro, then PJ boss and the true head of the investigation, a refined and honourable man and much quicker at dodging a bullet than Goncalo Amaral, explained his force’s thinking in his summer 2007 interview. He stressed that he needed no more “resources”, that is brute-force searchers: there was nowhere for them to be used.

Instead he compared the current stage of the case to a crime novel, an object in which most of the facts except a very few key ones, are clear to the reader. It was successful analysis of what he possessed that was necessary, he suggested, not the garnering of yet more "information" – information in the form of “sightings” had nearly drowned them – from the wider world.

His force wasn’t successful, however, and he carried the can and - no can would ever be carried without  the McCanns and their spokesman smearing shit all over the carrier - probably read Team McCann's gloating media lies on arguido release day that the Ministry of Justice had "mocked him" for his interview. 

Alipio Ribeiro - took one for the team

 

The PJ orthodox? Yes, completely. Logical? Indisputably.  And they were right, as eleven years of the comic opera “Search” have proved. The latter has produced much needed buffoonery in the shape of the Edgars and Suttons but results? Zero.

So much for the PJ view. What about that of the child’s next of kin and their friends? Well, we know, don’t we? For a start that well-known and truthful account Madeleine tells us that before the police had arrived and almost certainly before they’d even been called at 10.40 PM:

“Aware that we were only an hour and a quarter’s drive from southern Spain, and beyond that lay the borderless continent of Europe – not to mention the short hop across the Strait of Gibraltar to north Africa – David was saying, ‘We need roadblocks set up. The borders to Spain, Morocco and Algiers need to be alerted.’ Russell later asked us for our digital photos of Madeleine and went off somewhere with our camera.”

So, it’s outwards folks.

And, some hours later:

“Dave, seeing Gerry’s anguish and frustration at how little was being done, knew Madeleine needed more help than she was getting. At some point before the PJ left, a retired British couple in a nearby apartment lent him their computer and he sent an email to Sky News alerting them to the abduction of our daughter, using an address listed on their website.”

That’s the media being readied to help take it further out. Useful, eh?

And, in the morning, the final piece of the jigsaw:

“That morning I learned of the man Jane had seen in the street. Although Gerry and our friends had been trying to protect me from further distress by not telling me about this sooner, when they did I was strangely relieved. Madeleine hadn’t just disappeared off the face of the earth. There was something to work on.”

Something to work on? Something for who to work on?

She is completely uninterested  in what the police will have to offer. She hasn't managed to disguise that. At any moment a police officer or rescue worker could appear at her door and announce that the child has been found, bewildered and frightened, sheltering in a culvert. But no, there was something to work on. Kate McCann, you are not telling the truth. How could you be so certain that the police hadn't already located the child - or her corpse?

That “something to work on” led directly away from the Ocean Club and into the outside world – and ultimately, as we now know for certain, to a blank, a total void.

Kate McCann figuratively  stood there at 8.30AM  on May 4 shouting and pointing her finger at a person who never existed and in a direction that led nowhere; first she shouted at the police,  and then called out to the world’s media. And she never stopped. Hasn’t stopped pointing to this day.

The rest of the story, including her repeated demands that the PJ attach more significance and resources to the non-existent Tanner abductor - voids 'r' us - is too well known to repeat. But why? Why was she at once so certain that expanding the investigation outwards by any means was the answer? Note that she quotes the owl-like David Payne, a man not famous for his knowledge of the world, or for getting to places on time, or  for making a Mark Warner booking that didn't end in a child vanishing,  as twittering about “alerting the borders”. Did it really never occur to her that her fellow holiday makers might have been misdirecting?

Lying failure, invented image, hapless buffoon, show business

Yep, your child's fate in those hands

Oldfield was the last one to look in the child’s bedroom, she says. How could she possibly not have wondered what exactly he did there? Mothers in our experience will turn like snarling tigresses on anyone who might have had contact with an abused, harmed  or missing child, even their own relatives. And some of the “seven friends”, indeed,  were hardly known to KM. Yet, not a breath of  from her about investigating or probing any of them has come to light.

And when the time came for clarity about the doubts, the final act of the “turn within”, the police-requested reconstruction*- far from leaping at the opportunity, any opportunity, to find out more about her daughter's fate, she was utterly uninterested.

Why? Why?

 

_________________________________________________