For five years their lives have been a sleepless hell, haunted by nightmares of what might have happened to her that night and ever since 

Tomorrow evening Kate and Gerry McCann will go to bed knowing it is exactly five years since they lay down for a peaceful sleep.

For the following evening, May 3, 2007, their four-year-old daughter Madeleine was abducted.

Since then their lives have been a sleepless hell, haunted by nightmares of what might have happened to her that night and ever since.

That’s five years when the rest of us have cracked on with our lives; working, holidaying, laughing, pottering about.

But for the McCanns life has stood still, stuck somewhere on that Algarve coast where everything changed for ever.

I don’t believe we are any closer to knowing who took Madeleine or why than in the first hours after her disappearance, whatever the Met Police reinvestigating old leads might say.

They might have got the files in better order but it seems unlikely the lines of enquiry can lead anywhere, particularly as the Portuguese have no interest in reopening the painful sore of their inept investigation.

“Are they still looking for that girl?” my seven-year-old son asked when he saw the picture of Madeleine in the papers this week.

He was only three when she disappeared but the blanket coverage of her photograph remains firmly imprinted on his mind.

“Yes,” I replied. “Because if you get lost Mummy and Daddy will never, ever stop looking for you.”

I didn’t tell him the other reason; that the night Madeleine disappeared, at the moment she needed them most, her parents weren’t there.

And because of that they are compelled to spend every fibre of their beings trying to make amends.

Five years on some people still find it hard to sympathise with the McCanns because of that one terrible mistake.

But it must be a cold heart that shows no pity for their unending agony even now.

Their fight for their daughter since her disappearance is utterly admirable.