The camera, on the other hand, very seldom does so; lie that is.

So it is with more of a purpose than merely 'raking over old ground' that one might focus afresh on the only reconstruction the McCanns have ever been interested in furthering, i.e. the one portrayed by their own 2009 documentary production, Madeleine Was Here. And not just the reconstruction either. The documentary as a whole is somewhat more revealing than one suspects the McCanns either realised or intended. Quite early on the viewer is treated to this exchange:

"What name do you think that is, Sean?"
"Amelie"
"Who's your other sister?"
"Maddie"

At a stroke we have confirmation that both of Madeleine’s siblings were accustomed to calling their sister 'Maddie' (Amelie was reported much earlier to have referred to 'Maddie's jammies'); this is the very term of endearment the parents claim never to have used. So where on earth did the twins get their cue from, if not the parents?

Somewhat later the interviewer/narrator asks Gerry McCann, 'Who is looking for Madeleine at the moment?' Following a response which includes a curious juxtaposition ("...it's a very serious crime and, erm, we've got to do it.") she concludes that "there are two men still looking for Madeleine." Now that might seem like a very noble gesture on the part of the two men in question, but the observation assumes particular significance in a later context.

The duo are, of course, the then recently appointed team of Edgar and Cowley, whose remit was to act upon information gleaned by the McCanns, principally Kate, from the 30,000(!) case files released into the public domain by the Portuguese authorities. (Thank goodness they were archived on DVD. No small task for the Portuguese that). Quite understandably the 'vast bulk' of the information was in Portuguese, so the McCanns, in order to profit from it, had the files translated, at a cost, so Kate announces to camera, of some £100,000. Now a sum that substantial ought to feature fairly visibly in the accounts of Fund expenditure, supposing this to be considered a legitimate outlay (furthering the search for Madeleine, and all that). Yet it appears not to have been itemised for the year ending 2009. Or 2010. Perhaps it was an instance of beneficence 'off the books' by some third party or other.

Developing the topic, we next see Kate at her computer doing her 'incredibly valuable work' going through every document. Looking into the screen she is, it would appear, in the process of scrutinising the following:

POLICIA JUDICIARIA

VOLUME VI
(translation)

(Pages 1592 - 1629)

And that would entail going on to read, albeit in translation:

1592 to 1596 - PJ informational documents
1597 to 1602 - Information from Portugal Telecom regarding phone number
1603 - External Diligence 20067/05/25
1604 to 1605 - Letter regarding IMEI information and interception
1606 to 1610 - Witness testimony of Martin Smith taken 2007/05/26 with map of sighting
1611 to 1614 - Witness testimony of Aoife Smith taken 2007/05/26
1615 to 1624 - Witness Testimony of Peter Daniel Smith taken 2007/05/26 with map of sighting
1625 to 1626 - PJ/Vodafone correspondence
1627 to 1628 - PJ/PT Telecom correspondence
1629 to 1630 - PJ mobile phone analysis relation document

Given the ostensibly reworked nature of the information in question, it is difficult to determine just what Kate is looking at beyond verbage segregated by explicit pagination. But what she then turns to on her desk is something altogether different. Volume VI it is not.

SUMMARY OF POTENTIALLY RELEVANT INFORMATION AND POSSIBLE ACTION POINTS FROM VOLUME 1 (main volume)/
'APPENDICES VI' Volumes 1 - 5

In a mixture of black and red ink (red being reserved for the 'actions') we may read, among other details

PRIORITY 2

Ref: Vol.2 apx 6 pg 530
(blanked)
Re: suspicious male near OC apartments
Nb: main statement on pg 800-806 (presumably main volume) ...
532

GM to find statement and look at E-Fit. Take statement also

PRIORITY 1

Re- 2 men, 'orphanage collectors' knocked at her door in PdL ...
evening of 03/05/07. She is a frequent visitor to PdL (4x/yr) and ...
many years - she has never experienced this before.

To contact Ashton and take a statement - Kate to introduce ...
been taken, take statement over the phone.

Whilst making the point that the culprit they seek has possibly been identified within the files already, but that 'the name' is not necessarily highlighted, nor marked with an 'asterix' (how galling), Kate circles with her hand between PRIORITY 1 (above) and PRIORITY 2 (below)

PRIORITY 2

Ref: Vol. 1 Main Vol. Pg 154
(Blanked)
(Blanked)
attempting, he believes, to abduct his 4 y.o. daughter. Describes a silver grey
Renault Clio being involved.
(Blanked)
(Blanked)
Who flew from Berlin to Faro rtn on 28/04 - 05/05. Interpol were involved and the
couple were spoken to by Polish police on their rtn and appt searched ...
See photos from CCTV on pg 194 in main volume
? Fully followed up
Obtain the CCTV footage - send all photo's and E-Fits to Mr Jesus ...
and get all E-Fits to Mr Jesus ...

These commentaries are clearly not translations of 'the files' per se. Each is a precis of a certain investigative aspect. On the one hand we have the experience of Beryl Ashton, who wished to draw the attention of the police to two men who, in the late afternoon/early evening of May 3, 2007, had knocked on her PdL door, canvassing, or so it seemed, for donations to an orphanage in Espiche. Except there is no orphanage in Espiche, which makes their activity rather suspicious.

The other incident, on 29 April, involved odd behaviour by a Polish gentleman in Sagres, who was later identified as one W. K. and who, apart from appearing to take clandestine photographs of children in the vicinity of the beach, demonstrated certain antagonistic behaviour toward witness Nuno Lourenco de Jesus, the suspicious father of two such children, one of whom actually bore a striking resemblance to Madeleine McCann.

A likely pair (threesome?). And names are to hand.

But seriously folks, did the McCanns, Kate in particular, expect their audience to subscribe to the notion that the 'two men still looking for Madeleine' had the 'clout,' the time, or the intellectual finesse, to discover and to fill meaningful gaps in a professionally run investigation that had been documented to the very last detail (30,000 + pages worth, don't forget). Of course these avenues had been explored. That's how come accounts of the relevant police activity could be summarised in the first instance, names and all.

Lead investigator Dave Edgar announces: "I don't know what the Portuguese authorities have done actually to eliminate these people from the inquiry, so we've got to presume that they haven't done it and go with that... it's got to be the facts that we know and not try to fill in the gaps..."

Why not simply contact the Portuguese and ask them? Or, if they decline to comment, take a more careful look at the 'diligences' described in the files your employers have just had translated at enormous expense. Why had you to presume that the Portuguese did not complete their inquiries in any given direction?

Forgive me if I anticipate an interjection here - 'The Portuguese investigation was seriously flawed.'

Au contraire. It is the McCann fantasy of a private investigation that is seriously floored. And the pun is intentional, as will later become apparent.

Winding forward just a little from Kate's whimsical reference to 'the name,' we arrive at:

Narrator: "In the files, Kate believes another statement from an Irish family describes a very similar sighting to Jane's..."

KM: "The reason why this is significant is both sightings are given independently, so when this family gave their statement they weren't aware of Jane's description and there's actually quite a lot of similarities."

Let's look quickly at some of the similarities:

The Tanner sighting was of a swarthy long-haired male carrying a prostrate child, assumed to have been a girl because of pyjamas, assumed to have been pink and which, if they were Madeleine's, would have had short sleeves.

The Smith sighting was of a short-haired man carrying a little girl, approximately 4 yrs of age, her torso upright, who was wearing lightweight pale clothing, possibly pyjamas, with long sleeves.

These discrepancies disappear before our very eyes once the incidents are reconstructed for the benefit of the documentary camera. All of a sudden the same child is both dressed and carried in the same way by the same individual, on both occasions. JK Rowling, whose fastidious concern for the accuracy of the Harry Potter film scripts is well known, was clearly not involved in this production.

In the interest of clarity, let's now replay Jane Tanner's personal contribution, in the form of the infamous 'I remember it differently' episode.

Voice over: "The McCanns were on holiday with a group of friends. In the evenings, they all ate together and took it in turns to make half-hourly checks on each other's children."

(This statement is completely untrue. They did not take it in turns to make half-hourly checks on each other's children - only their own, if at all, as confirmed by the various Rogatory Interviews).

JT: "So, I think you were about here. Cos, I think that you were standing like that and, Jes (Wilkins) was there, with his pram, pointing down that way. Cos, I think if you'd been looking at me, I would've said something, cos I would've said about, cos Kate had been moaning that you'd been gone a long time watching the football."

GM: "I'm almost certain that when I came out, I came over and he was here and I was like that. That’s my memory of it, it's like Jes is 6'3" or something and looking up and then turning in, when I finished. That's my memory of it."

JT: "Yeah. I mean, well we just..."

DE: "It's like I said, there are, you know, inconsistencies, you know, in every major investigation."

JT: "Ok, that's fine."

DE: "Obviously, the most important thing is what you saw, Jane. It's not where Gerry and Jes were actually stood. Because they didn't obstruct your view of the man. So..."

A pause for thought. 'The most important thing is what you saw, Jane.' Jane is not a bat. She doesn't do echo-location. How then did she know that Gerry McCann and Jes Wilkins were in the street together, talking? She saw them. But where the two men were standing was not as important as what Jane saw, was it.

JT: "I was walking up here to do the check and probably, as I got to, it's hard to know exactly where, but probably, about here, I saw the man walk across the road there, carrying the child. I just got up and walked out the Tapas bar, past Gerry talking to Jes. That's when I saw somebody walk across the top of the road, carrying a child and I think, I did think, oh, there's somebody taking their child home to bed. But, they didn't look like a standard tourist. This is ridiculous isn't it? It just looks so much like somebody abducting a little girl, when you look at it. It just looks so obvious when you know, you know. Just look at it and you think, why the hell didn't you think there is somebody abducting a child. That was not even a thought, that somebody's gonna go into an apartment and take a child out. You know, you're probably the one person that could've actually stopped it and you think, oh, what if? It's that what if? what if?, what if and you can take those what ifs to ad infinitum really."

Another pause for thought. Accepting that this reconstruction was recorded two years after the event, did no one think to remind Jane that she was in a 'family friendly' resort, where parents quite often carried their children, even into and out of apartments? Jane Tanner cannot imagine this. She seems able only to imagine an abduction taking place. 'Just look at it and you think, why the hell didn't you think there is somebody abducting a child.' Perhaps because somebody carrying a child in a 'family friendly' holiday zone does not necessarily equate to somebody abducting one?

Fast forward now to the no less important interior scene.

GM: "So, I actually came in and Madeleine was just at the top of the bed here, where I'd left her lying and the covers were folded down and she had her cuddle cat and blanket, were just by her head It’s terrible because, I , erm, had one of those really proud father moments, where I just thought, you know. I just thought, your absolutely beautiful and I love you and I just paused for a minute and then, I just pulled the door closed again and just to about there and, er, I felt incredibly proud standing there and having, you know, 3 beautiful children."

MO: "Pretty much from the approach down here, you can see straight into the room. (Not with the door closed you can't) So you can see the cots as you are walking in. So it never really felt like there was any real need to, sort of, go all the way into the room. Erm, you could see both cots and see into them from there (i.e. several steps further back into the main room). I, sort of, ummed and ahed about the angle and things. All I just know is that I had an unimpeded view (of the bedroom door?) and it was just dead quiet, and just... why I didn't take those extra couple of steps in..."

This testimony is unconvincing. We see GM monitoring it at the 35.00 minute mark.

GM: "Yeah, I mean, I was saying this earlier, that at no point, other than that night, did I go stick my head in. That was the only time, because the door was like that. I mean, I knew how I’d left it."

So Gerry visually 'checked' his children once only during the entire holiday. And the door was like what when he did so? (at 35.36, once Oldfield has finished explaining himself, we finally glimpse the bedroom door, which is wide open). In his statement above, Gerry makes no reference whatsoever to entering the bedroom because the door was any different to the way he'd left it. Madeleine wasn't, so why should the door have been? Silly me. Of course. The abductor had left it open.

The abductor, having entered via the patio (just ahead of GM) and hidden, goodness knows where, in Madeleine's bedroom, forgot to pull the door to behind him/her, leaving it wide open for a puzzled Gerry to close, just prior to leaving the apartment. And close it he did, to the degree shown at 29.42 of the documentary, leaving a gap of no more than about 3 inches! Notice too that, in his statement, Gerry makes no mention of surprise at encountering an open door himself. He just 'comes in.' But on leaving the room he 'closes the door again,' confirming that the door was closed in the first place. As for the abductor, he now escapes through the window, without having to touch the door, and leaving Matthew Oldfield with the task of exercising his X-ray vision.

In the course of giving his verbal 'seal of approval' to Oldfield's faltering explanation of events, Gerry forgets that, according to the consensus timeline, it was his actions that preceded Oldfield's, not vice versa. Hence Oldfield must have encountered the apartment as Gerry had left it. And if Gerry said he closed the door then he closed the door (the abductor left through the window, not the patio, don't forget).

Someone is lying. And it's all on camera; that agent of truth.

Such are the perils of committing oneself to celluloid, or indeed to print. Seemingly averse to reconstructions of any complexion, Kate McCann, like a lioness protecting her cubs, smelt the danger a long way off:

KM: "I mean, I'd like to go back, but not for this to be honest."

And yet she still falls into a trap of her own devising.

"I think it's actually going through the scenario of that night as well, you know, errm... I mean, you know, even what I can remember of the night, you know, seeing Gerry, that distraught really, sobbing, on the floor."

To draw attention to Gerry's behaviour in this way suggests that it was highly unusual and perhaps even 'conduct unbecoming' on his part. It was certainly unusual enough for her to comment upon it, from an observer's perspective. So where was Gerry (and where was Kate) when she saw him 'on the floor?'

There are only two recorded instances of Gerry behaving in any way in the manner Kate describes. The first was upon the arrival on the scene of two GNR officers. A statement from one of the officers in question provides the relevant details:

José María Batista Roque: 'When they arrived, they saw the girl's father, a friend whom he cannot describe, an OC employee and a translator who was also an OC employee, named Silvia Batista.

He then went to the apartment, accompanied by his colleague, the father and friend as well as the translator. When he arrived at the apartment he saw the mother there.'

Events at 11.00/11.05 p.m. have been generally described by both participants and the media thus: A GNR patrol arrives at Ocean Club (two men); ca. 11.05 When GNR arrived, Gerry McCann walked to them, kneeled down and put both his hands on the ground and shouted twice, with rage in his voice, saying something that the witnesses close to them could not understand.

Not crying exactly, but Kate could not have seen him in any case. She was inside the apartment with the twins.

José María Batista Roque: 'After the search, he noticed a situation that seemed unusual to him, when at a determined moment, the girl's parents kneeled down on the floor of their bedroom and placed their heads on the bed, crying. He did not notice any comments or expression from them, just crying.'

So when exactly on the night did Kate see Gerry, on the floor, distraught and sobbing? It wasn't when he greeted the arrival of the GNR with his bizarre display. Nor does she say, of their subsequent 'heads on bed' incantation, 'seeing Gerry on the floor beside me, sobbing, like myself.' The impression is given that Kate witnesses Gerry doing something which, at that precise moment, she herself is not doing.

So which night are we really talking about? And which floor? Whichever one it was, Madeleine was indeed there.