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Madeleine: First Extracts Of Kate McCann’s Book

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MADELEINE McCann Book: Day 1 of the Sun’s serialisation of Kate McCann’s book Madeleine.

Front page: “WORLD EXCLUSIVE – KATE MCCANN’S BOOK WILL BREAK YOUR HEART”

You want to feel pain and heartbreak? You want to watch another woman’s suffering and feel it in your own heart? Here goes:

“MADDIE”

It was always Maddie, the media’s pet name for their lightning rod of emotion:

“I SEE HER ALONE…AND SCREAMING”

Where?

“Madeleine McCann’s mother Kate reveals paedophile fears in new book in The Sun”

Pages 2 and 3: “I’m consumed by my worst fear…that a pervert took our daughter.”

The Sun now owns Our Maddie, or at least it is trying to. Now, it gets down to spreading the fear. Rather than beginning the Kate McCann interview with news of the private investigation – the one the book’s revenues will pay for – what we get is:

MADELEINE McCann’s mother has told for the first time of terrible visions that her kidnapped daughter is being abused by a pervert.

This is titillation. How much info do want about these dreams?

In a heart-rending book serialised from today in The Sun, Kate, 43, writes how she is haunted by “flashes” of Madeleine “screaming” for her and husband Gerry.

If you read the book at night, you might be haunted to. But the fact remains: we do not know if a paedophile is involved in the disappearance of the innocent child. This is speculation – a fitting way to begin the story of Our Maddie:

The couple also tell The Sun exclusively about being at the centre of one of the most harrowing stories of modern times.

What more harrowing than 9/11? Less harrowing than the war in Afghanistan or mass murder in Rwanda? More harrowing than the tale of John Sweeney? The news media is full of nightmares.

Says Kate McCann:

“The idea that my Madeleine was taken by a paedophile is my worst fear. I became consumed with it. It was torture for me. It was horrible, so vivid.
It’s worse when I go to bed and think about that first awful night again, when Madeleine went missing. That sense of dark and fear, of being desperate to sleep but not being able to. I just end up plummeting down again.”

Why are we being told this? Is talking about it form of therapy for the distraught mother? Fair enough. But why is it front-page news? Why do we need to see a woman’s pain and look at the images insider her head?

The emotion-charged book by ex-GP Kate is titled simply Madeleine.

You are being told to feel emotion. But you might not. You might just read it and stare. You might not empathise? You might just watch the parents and flick the pages on.

As for the key facts:

She and consultant cardiologist Gerry, 42…

The parents’ jobs were always important to the media narrative. Were they street cleaners, unemployed or – gulp! – black, Our Maddie would have gone the way of other missing children.

…admit they are plagued by guilt over the night Madeleine vanished from their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz while they enjoyed a meal with friends at a tapas bar.

This much we know. We have heard it before:

Kate says: “If your child is killed in a traffic accident, or died of cancer, parents are at peace.”

Are they? Well, you do get closure. This story and the parents could do with that:

“But Madeleine is still missing and she needs us to do something.”

Says Gerry McCann “of his brave wife”:

“There were times when I thought she would never get back to being the woman I love. I could understand why something like this destroys relationships. It’s been so hard to keep your own head above water at times.”

He adds:

“Who’s thinking about child abductions in a little sleepy out-of-season tourist resort? It never entered our minds. We felt very safe – it was a family resort.”

Well, thanks to Our Maddie, pretty much every parent was thinking about abduction and paedos. The story became “every parent’s worst nightmare”. A rare event came an it-could-be-you story.

He “stresses”:

“Blaming us for not being there takes it away from the abductor. Someone went into an apartment and stole a child. Of course we feel guilt. But it doesn’t bring the child back.”

It is not to a delve into a conspiracy theory to ask for proof of an abduction. Questioning any official or quasi-official version of events does not make you a nutter. But the media is accepting. There are no suspects. There is no proof of a crime. For all the heat, there has been no light.

Kate tells of the first night she peeped into her daughter’s pink bedroom after the family got home to Rothley, Leics – breaking down as she recalls imagining Madeleine saying: “Lie with me, Mummy. Lie with me.”

Are you heartbroken yet?

She confesses it shocks her to think her daughter would now be almost eight. The mum says: “How has that time flown by? I see girls of eight and I try to imagine Madeleine like that. And I just can’t.”

And:

Their twins Amelie and Sean, now six, are a source of constant comfort. Sean has promised his mum: “When you’re old, me and Amelie will look for Madeleine.”

Hopefully, the story will have reached a conclusion by then.

Kate says: “They know that Madeleine was stolen. They call the person who took her ‘the naughty man’. They know it happened in Portugal. Amelie said, ‘We went to Portugal and then we woke up and Madeleine was gone’.”

So. They know she was stolen and did not walk off.

Kate says of the abductor: “I think it was someone who knew our movements. I don’t think someone was passing by chance and took a child.”

Again we get speculation where we crave fact. Will the book have any facts or clues?

Kate says her book is “to give an account of the truth” following vile slurs that the couple themselves were involved. She surrounded herself with photos of Madeleine as she wrote it – based on diaries she has kept.

The McCanns were libelled. They fought their accusers and they won. The story that became about them became about court cases. Speculation focused on them as it did on innocent Robert Murat.

Here’s an extract of the book to whet your appetite:

On Madeleine’s bed, the top right-hand corners of the covers were still turned over forming a neat triangle. Cuddle cat and her pink princess blanket were lying where they’d been when we kissed her goodnight I dashed over to the second bed, on the other side of the travel cots, where the twins slept on, oblivious, and looked out through the window. I’ve no idea what I expected to see there. Refusing to acknowledge what I already knew, and perhaps automatically going into a well-practised medical emergency mode, I quickly scoured the apartment to exclude all other possibilities, mentally ticking boxes I knew, deep down, were already ticked.
I checked the wardrobe in the children’s room. I ran into the kitchen, throwing open all the cupboard doors, into our bedroom, searching the wardrobes, in and out of the bathroom, all in about 15 seconds, before hurtling out through the patio doors and down towards Gerry and our friends.
As soon as our table was in sight I started screaming. “Madeleine’s gone! Someone’s taken her!”

And then the single thread of fact was spun out of control.

Pages 6 and 7: “The images I had of our Madeleine no sane person would want in their head”

Page 7: Sketches of the “suspects”

Picture 1 of 14

Picture 1 of 14

The e-fit of a man, as drawn from memory by British born DVD shop owner Simon Russell after being shown it by police last Saturday, in Praia Da Luz, Portugal, following the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

Pages 8 and 9: “”Dear God, no. Please NO!”

“HORROR AND ICY FEAR AS I REALISED SHE WAS GONE”
“I wandered into the children’s bedroom several times to check on Sean and Amelie. They were both lying on their front in a kind of crouch, with their heads turned sideways and their knees tucked under their tummies. In spite of the noise and lights and general pandemonium, they hadn’t stirred. They’d always been sound sleepers, but this seemed unnatural. Scared for them too, I placed the palms of my hands on their backs to check for chest movement, basically, for some sign of life. Had Madeleine been given some kind of sedative to keep her quiet? Had the twins, too?”

You can buy the book here. You can donate to the McCanns here.

The story in photos:

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Picture 1 of 185

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Posted: 7th, May 2011 | In: Key Posts, Madeleine McCann Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink