We have had some odd days covering the Madeleine McCann disappearance here in Portugal and this was about to be another one. We started off enjoying a normal morning outside the court in Portimao where a dossier of evidence against Kate and Gerry McCann was being considered by Judge Pedro Frias.I was about to leave when a transit van came up the one-way street the wrong way, horn blaring. The van stopped near the media huddled in the shade of the midday sun and the driver said, in broken English, that the police looking for Madeleine were about to search his house.
The van driver introduced himself as Eef Hoos, the owner of Creon Starlight, a pet crematorium an hours drive from Praia da Luz where Madeleine was last seen.
The previous week his business had been mentioned in a Portuguese tabloid as the site of a possible search and I had visited the house. Eef, real name Evert Hendrik Hoos, was not there when I arrived and I am not ashamed to admit that I was rather glad. His home was high in the beautiful Monchique mountains but it was around two kilometres off a minor road, on a rough dirt track. Remote and rambling, it was guarded by angry dogs. We knew little of its owner other than he had been jailed in Holland for a bombing campaign in the 1980’s and had been free since 1995.
Now, in the relative safety of a large town, I begin interviewing him. He tells me the incinerators of his pet crematorium were sealed by police earlier in the year while they investigated the legitimacy of his business and they had now told him they were coming back to check the seals. We set off for his house, diverting our satellite truck and another crew to meet us there.
Eff expects the police later in the afternoon and while we wait he talks. The police are incompetent fools he says. They sealed up his incinerators and now they are asking him if they are sealed or not.
“….and these are the people who expect to find Madeleine McCann,” he says, adding “they are like children themselves.”
The crematorium is a part-time labour of love, he says, which costs more to operate than it makes. Built in a narrow valley below the villa are two incinerators, one for domestic pets and one large enough for a horse.
The rumour amongst the media pack is that police think Madeleine’s body could have been destroyed here, perhaps disguised as a pet – a silly nonsense according to our host, who adds that he himself used to run a private detective agency in Holland.
“Give me a team of four, who speak Portuguese, English and Dutch and I could solve this case in three months,” he says.
Asked what he now does for a living, Eef smiles and says he is an international debt collector. A few more questions reveal his business model.
“I don’t tell them whose debt I am collecting. They have money and they must give it to me.”
His methods make me think of my unannounced visit to his house the previous week when I found myself rooting around the garden.
“If you wake up in the middle of the night with me sitting on your head and my friend sitting on your wife, you would pay me I think. No?”
What would he have done had he found me in his undergrowth, I wonder.
It’s now nearly four o’clock and Eef’s mobile phone rings. He says it is the police and he answers in English. We hear him giving directions to the house. A few minutes later the phone rings again and it is put on speaker phone so we call all hear.
“We are coming to see your house,” a voice says, again in English, “where is it?” Another attempt to explain the remote setting fails and Eef offers to drive to the main road to guide them to their target. He sets off leaving around three dozen members of the media in his garden, open-mouthed.
The police arrive and remind the journalists of Portugal’s secrecy of law and say they cannot reveal what they are doing. They also say we are not allowed to film them. Their every move, however, is being tracked by at least 15 television video cameras while more than a dozen stills photographers take their pictures. Wherever you look, on either side of the valley, is a camera. Five hundred metres up the valley we see one of AP’s cameramen from Madrid being chased by what appears to be a Chihuahua.
“They search a crematorium for Madeleine and tell us we can’t use the pictures. This just goes to show how naive they are,” says one UK tabloid snapper.
When the police leave Eef is surrounded again and tells us they asked him three times if he had spoken to Madeleine’s parents. He also says the officers took away the paperwork and permissions he needs to operate his incinerators as a pet crematorium. So, we are now at a loss to know for sure if this is part of the inquiry into Madeleine’s disappearance or a local dispute between a maverick Dutch businessman and his neighbours in the mountains above the Algarve.
Eef knows what he thinks, but the police will not confirm or deny anything. We file a story based on what Eef has told us about the officers’ line of questioning but with little else of what he has told us. It’s too odd. That said, very little that has ever been printed about the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has ever been confirmed, but still it is broadcast and published. Today would be no different, except video of the police officers faces is blurred before we give it to clients. A simple enough act of compliance.
Coverage of the Madeleine investigation in general and today in particular may spark debate over the strength of sources for some time to come. It also leaves me with an uneasy vision – that of a large, heavy Dutchman, sitting on his unfortunate customers. It’s a thought I hope to banish before bedtime.
