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Madeleine McCann on the day she
disappeared
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10am: The sixth
day of the McCanns' week-long holiday in the
Algarve. The couple place their daughter,
Madeleine and her twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, in the Ocean Club's Kids
Club while they go for a walk.
12.30pm: After
collecting the children, Kate and Gerry head to their apartment, 5a, on
ground floor of block five of the Waterside Village Gardens,
for lunch before going to the Ocean Club swimming pool.
2.29pm: The last
photograph of Madeleine is taken at the pool. The camera clock reads 1.29pm
but the family says it was out by one hour.
3.30pm: Children
return to Kids Club.
5.30pm: Children
eat dinner at Kids Club.
6pm: Kate takes
children back to apartment while Gerry goes to an hour-long tennis lesson.
6.30pm: Gerry
asks David Payne, one of the so-called "tapas seven", to check on Kate and
the children at the apartment.
7pm: Gerry
returns to the apartment and the children are put to bed in the front
bedroom overlooking the car park and beyond it, the street. Madeleine is
placed in the single bed nearest the door. There is an empty bed against the
opposite wall beneath the window. Between the two beds are two travel cots
containing the twins.
7.30pm: The
McCanns shower and change.
8pm: The couple
share a bottle of wine together.
8.35pm: The
McCanns are the first of the group to arrive at the tapas restaurant, 50
yards away from their apartment.
8.55pm: The group
has ordered starters when the routine of checking on the children begins.
Matt Oldfield goes to check his own apartment. He also tells the Paynes, who
are still in their apartment, that the group is waiting for them at the
restaurant.
9.05pm: Gerry
returns to the apartment through the unlocked patio doors to check on the
children. Earlier that week, the McCanns had used a key to go in through the
front door next to the children's bedroom but, worrying the noise might wake
the children, they began using the patio doors, leaving them unlocked.
He enters the apartment and sees that the children's
bedroom door, which they always left slightly ajar, is now open to 45
degrees. Thinking this is odd, he glances into his own bedroom to see if
Madeleine has gone into her parents' bed. But he sees that all three are
still fast asleep where the McCanns left them. Putting the door back to five
degrees, he went to the toilet and then returned to the restaurant. This is
the last time he would see his daughter.
9.08pm: Gerry
sees Jeremy Wilkins, another holidaymaker at the resort, on the opposite
side of the road as he walks back to the tapas bar and crosses over to talk.
Wilkins and his partner are eating in their apartment since their youngest
child will not settle. The two men spend several minutes talking.
9.10pm: Jane
Tanner walks up the road, unnoticed by Gerry and Wilkins, although she sees
them. She spots a man walking quickly across the top of the road in front of
her, going away from the apartment block and heading to the outer road of
the resort complex. He is carrying a sleeping girl in pink pyjamas who is
hanging limply in his arms. The sighting is odd, but hardly exceptional in a
holiday resort. Her daughter is fine; Tanner returns to the table.
9.30pm: Kate gets
up to make next check on her children but Matthew Oldfield and Russell
O'Brien are checking, too. Oldfield offers to check the McCann's children.
In the McCanns' apartment, Oldfield notices the
children's bedroom door is open again, but this means little to him. He
merely observes all is quiet and makes a cursory glance inside the room
seeing the twins in their cot, but not directly seeing Madeleine's bed from
the angle at which he stood. Afterwards, he could not say for sure if she
had been there or not. Nor could he say if the window and shutter had been
open.
He would later get a hard time from the police because of
this. During his interviews, he was aggressively accused of taking
Madeleine, coming under suspicion because he had offered to take Kate's
turn.
10.00pm: Kate
checks on the children. She becomes alarmed when she reaches out to the
children's bedroom door and it blows shut. Inside the room, the window is
open and the shutter is up. The twins are sleeping but Madeleine's bed is
empty.
Shortly after 10pm:
Rachael Oldfield goes to Tanner's apartment to tell her Madeleine has been
taken. Tanner says: "Oh my God. I saw a man carrying a girl."
10.15pm: Oldfield
goes down to the 24-hour reception at the bottom of the hill to raise the
alarm. Police are called
11.10pm: Police
arrive. They see there is a latch lock on the sliding glass window. The
McCanns thought, but could not be sure they had locked it at the start of
the holiday. Later it was discovered that it was common for cleaners to open
the shutters and windows to give the rooms an airing, so there is no way of
knowing whether the window was locked that night or not. With no forensic
evidence either, it is possible the abductor could have easily used the
front door.
3.30am:
Detectives from the Policia Judiciaria leave. The McCanns claim they noticed
no further police action that night.