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We're
divided and now confused by the McCann investigation - and in real danger of
losing our common decency
Visit the Sky News website and you'll see in the menu of topics the single word
Madeleine, sandwiched between UK News and World News. The story is now so big
that it commands its own category, on a par with Politics or Business. There
is, of course, no need to supply a last name or any other details: Madeleine
refers to what is surely becoming the biggest human interest story of the
decade. It's not just the hour-by-hour updates on television news or the
you-the-jury phone-ins on the radio. A more reliable indicator is the chatter
heard in offices, at bus stops or in queues at the shops. Thanks to the
astonishing twist of recent days, the British collective conversation is not
focused on the war in Iraq
or the efficiency of the NHS, even if it should be. Instead, its great
preoccupation is the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a story that gets ever
more strange.
Even before last week, the case had gripped. The apparently random abduction
and murder of children always does, whether it's Holly Wells and Jessica
Chapman, Sarah Payne or the victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. We fear
these crimes like no other; they touch fears with deep roots in the cultural
soil. The child snatcher is a creature from myth, whether the oldest Gaelic
folktales or Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. Modern storytelling
is hardly immune: my own generation once cowered in terror from Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang's Child Catcher. So when the news first broke in May that a sleeping
child had vanished from her bed in a Portuguese holiday resort, all the
familiar fears were stirred.
But last week brought a dizzying twist, one that has left the watching public
badly confused. The notion of a predatory stranger seizing Madeleine McCann was
terrifying but uncomplicated: we knew how we were supposed to feel. The naming
by Portuguese police of the little girl's parents as formal suspects has
obliged us to contemplate not an ancient fear but a grave taboo: infanticide.
Of course, the grim reality is that cases of parents slaying their young are
all too common. The boyfriend battering his lover's child to death has become a
grisly staple of the news bulletin, usually consigned to halfway down the
running order. The middle-class temptation in such cases is to comfort
themselves with the thought that these families are dysfunctional, that they
are nothing like them. The branding of the McCanns as suspects allows for no
such lazy response. Their campaign enjoyed such widespread press backing in
part because they are the very model of a middle-class, professional couple:
both are doctors, still society's most trusted group. Indeed, since May, the
sight of a distraught Kate McCann clutching Madeleine's toy Cuddle Cat had
become the very image of parental love. Even to conceive of them as the
suspected killers of the daughter whose loss they have been grieving is to experience
cognitive dissonance.
Which is why people don't know how to react. Suddenly we have to hold two
entirely contradictory thoughts in our head at the same time. For the McCanns
have now either suffered the cruellest fate imaginable - not only to have
innocently lost their beloved daughter but also to have been publicly accused
of a wicked crime - or they are guilty of the most elaborate and heinous
confidence trick in history, deceitfully winning the trust and sympathy of the
world's media, a British prime minister, the wife of the American president and
even the Pope, to say nothing of international public opinion. One of those
statements, both of them extraordinary, describes the truth. As a senior
tabloid journalist put it to me yesterday: "They're either the victims of
a horrible smear which they will never fully escape or they are cold, psychotic
killers" responsible for the death of their own child.
His own newspaper now covers this story with both possibilities in mind. Note
the headlines in the Sun and the Mirror, carefully surrounded by caveats and
qualifiers, just in case the other scenario proves to be true.
This is not how stories like this usually play out. Ordinarily, the popular
papers, in particular, have a hunch about the culprit (and very often their
hunches are right). Not this time, however. The press pack following the McCann
case is apparently split into two camps, for and against the couple, with some
reporters refusing to speak to those on the other side. One tabloid editor is changing
his mind on where guilt lies "on an hourly basis".
It's easy to see why. Yesterday it was reported that the Portuguese police had
found not just the odd DNA trace in the boot of the McCanns' hire car - rented
weeks after Madeleine's disappearance - but substantial amounts of the child's
hair and even bodily fluids. Suddenly, an entire narrative assembles itself,
built from leaked nuggets and speculative fragments, which runs as follows. The
McCanns had sedated their children so that they could have an undisturbed
dinner with friends (hence the failure of the two younger McCann children to
awake even during the loud chaos of the night of May 3). They returned to find
Madeleine dead. Fearing their twins would be taken from them if they confessed
the truth, they hid Madeleine's body, then hid it again in the spare wheel
compartment of their rented car until finally burying it somewhere else.
(Where? The anti-McCann view even has an answer to this question. Portuguese
police are reported to be planning to search the Our Lady of the Light church
in Praia da Luz, where the McCanns prayed regularly and to which they were
given the keys, so they might visit day or night. Detectives are said to be set
on digging up an area around the church - including one cobbled street where
roadworks were under way when Madeleine disappeared.)
It hangs together well enough until you start asking questions. How could
two people under constant media scrutiny possibly have carried out and hidden
their daughter's body without being seen? If they really had concealed a corpse
in their car, wouldn't the smell have been obvious?
How could two people
unfamiliar with the local landscape have found an eventual hiding place that
would still, months later, remain undiscovered? Is it plausible to imagine
that, in the moments after suffering the trauma of a dead child, two people
could have constructed such an elaborate cover-up plan, executed it coolly and
remained steady ever since? Could anybody maintain this front, a global lie,
for so long without cracking?
Arguments like that are going on everywhere, in pubs or the train to work, as
well as in newsrooms around the world. The McCanns must hate it but they cannot
be surprised by it. For wholly understandable reasons, they chose to make the
loss of their daughter public property, to recruit the media to their cause. So
now we are like folk gathered in the village square, offering our
two-pennyworth on the mysterious events that have befallen one benighted
family.
How will this story end? That's what makes it so grimly compelling: none of us
knows. Until we do, basic justice demands that we presume the McCanns are
wholly innocent. Common decency demands the same. For if they are eventually
found guilty, there will be plenty of time for condemnation. But if they are
innocent, to presume otherwise is to commit a second crime against people who
have already suffered enough. |
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