Are we trying to kill the McCanns? Well, that's what it feels like as, day after day, the barrage of critical stories keeps coming.

Kate McCann finally broke down on Spanish TV and showed all the emotion she has been accused of lacking.

The doctor whose professional manner and pretty face have attracted so many bitchy comments was barely able to control herself.

Practically howling like a wounded animal, she said that, as Madeleine's Mummy, she believed her little girl was still alive.

Were her critics satisfied? No, poor Kate had apparently cried the wrong kind of tears. Tears of guilt, not sorrow.

Now that she was showing her true feelings, all those armchair detectives concluded that Maddie's mum must be faking it.

Under attack again: The McCanns should be left in peace

Seventy per cent of viewers said that they did not believe the McCanns.

They were bothered by Gerry and Kate's body language - the couple appeared unable to comfort each other.

Suspicious, eh?

Furthermore, Gerry was overheard coldly telling his wife to make sure her microphone was turned off before she spoke to him.

My, how a million amateur Sherlock Holmeses loved that clue!

Please note that Gerry is always described as doing things coldly.

Not numbly.

Not in the shell-shocked manner of a man who has failed in his most sacred duty as a father, which was to protect his first-born daughter from harm.

A proud man who has pulled himself up into a good profession from a poor Glasgow background and who must be humbled daily by the knowledge that all his achievements are as dust weighed against this one monumental, agonising failure.

And now the McCanns are under attack again, this time for making two mortgage payments out of the Madeleine Fund.

Yet when Gerry says that he is going back to work this week as a heart specialist, he is accused of being too distraught and potentially putting his patients at risk.

So what are the family supposed to do for money? Or must they sell the house and live rough with the twins on the street to appease the snarling gods of public opinion?

Why can't we just accept that shock does strange, deforming things to people? Unexploded grief can blow entire families apart when they appear to be in the same room.

In his new autobiography, former England rugby captain Lawrence Dallaglio movingly recalls the devastating effect on his own family when his 19-year-old sister, Francesca, perished in the Marchioness riverboat disaster in 1989.

"Dad was in one place, trying to be very stoic and behaving as he thought the head of the family should behave. Mum was overcome with grief and clearly traumatised," writes Lawrence.

Eileen Dallaglio later admitted she had gone into a type of shock from which she did not recover for 15 years.

Like Kate McCann, she threw herself into campaigning to make things safer for other people's children.

Lawrence's dad eventually had a heart attack, believed to have been triggered by all the suppressed emotion.

Is that the ending we foresee for Gerry McCann?

The cardiac specialist who dies of a broken heart? Or would the couple's tormentors settle for mental breakdown and divorce as the latest twist in the nation's favourite soap opera?

Or here's a thought: how about leaving the McCanns in peace to salvage what remains of their lives, and to begin the slow and painful process of grieving properly for the daughter they have lost?

It may not make for front-page drama, but it's the development they surely deserve.

Meanwhile, six months on, Portuguese detectives have made a stunning breakthrough in the case.

They think it's possible that Madeleine was abducted.

Well, it's a start.