Last week I failed to publish a column. This was not my intention. I had a subject, the Westgate Mall incident in Kenya, and I had an angle, the presumed involvement of ex-pat Irishwoman Samantha (the Black Widow) Lewthwaite, spouse of the 7/7 bus-bomber Germaine Lyndsay who blew himself, and many others, up that fateful day eight years ago. I chose not to publish as I became less certain by the hour of the accuracy of my research and more certain by the minute that Ms Lewthwaite was in fact hiding in Somalia or South Africa and might well be the object of an imminent American hit. As the author of a public blog, even one with few regular readers, I did not want for a moment to risk compromising the capture or “neutralisation” of such a high-profile target, despite my concerns for the safety of her children.

Now that the Lewthwaite raid has been and gone without success, I no longer feel thus constrained, yet neither do I feel especially compelled to write. That being said, I would not like to leave you hanging with nothing at all on the subject, so here’s a bit of doggerel I wrote while reading up on the case. It should be sung to the tune of “Star of the County Down”.

Near Bambridge town in the County Down
One morning last July
In a Niqq’ab green came a pale colleen
And she scowled as she passed me by
She looked so tough from Kalashnikov
To the screen o’er her nut brown eyes
Such a scary bint, that I took the hint
Running fast as my feet could fly

From Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay
And from Galway to Dublin town
No maid I’ve seen like the jihad’een
That I met in the County Down!

Curiously enough, the original Star of the County Down bore the name of Rose McCann. This segues seamlessly into my subject today: the revival of the Madeleine McCann case in the light of new “evidence”. The evidence in question consists, for the most part, in the recently opened analysis of two “cell-phone dumps” (the archiving of automated retrievals of caller data, call content and location) recorded prior and just subsequent to the disappearance of little Maddy in Portugal in 2007. No, you did not misread that date. These archives were laid down in 2007, and they’re only looking at the cell dumps now! Either this means that there is at last a hot tip, rather than a nudged and fudged memory, or that the McCann grip on the control of all material relating to this case is beginning to weaken.

The McCanns – and though I fully understand their concerns (protection of their other two children), I abhor their methods – have famously used their lawyers to silence critics of the preferred family narrative, that of abduction. Newspapers, TV stations, the former officer in charge and UK sniffer-dog experts have all either issued apologies for their speculations, or had their videos taken down and books removed from sale. Although there is still a lot “out there”, a good deal of it is either psychic rubbish, mawkish tribute videos by singles in need of a child to love, or the endless repetitions of the rather flimsy official line. However, there are some critics who have resisted gagging. These all point out discrepancies in the accepted version, as well as highlighting the odd body language of the McCanns, the sometimes strange use of vocabulary and tenses, as well as the curious blindness of UK police to more conventional solutions.

As a young man, I once directed a group of kids in a performance of Bill Naughton’s “Spring and Port Wine”. Much against the experienced advice of the youth theatre director, I chose to cast young people who physically resembled one another and could thus be reasonably seen as forming a family in this close-up, chamber production in the round of a domestic drama. She, the director, insisted several of these youth could not act beyond walk-on parts carrying a torch or a spear for some Restoration drama. I proved her spectacularly wrong. They were brilliant. Ever since then, I have parsed the TV and video testimony of those seeking to put a spin on their involvement in crimes that capture the media’s attention. How quickly they become too good at it! How easily they seem to convince even themselves!

Occam’s Razor is the name given to a philosophical rule of thumb that prefers a narrative to use the smallest number of assumptions and the largest number of verifiable observations. Of course, verifiable observations are rather lacking when several of the parties in the case have been drinking quite a lot of wine and their statements immediately after the event are only recorded in translation. But it is noteworthy that the area has not been combed for shallow graves, that sniffer dogs (especially trained for cadavers and blood) were very excited by the car the McCann’s hired three weeks after the disappearance of their daughter, as well as by the space behind the sofa in apartment 5A, and that nobody (not even the parents) rushed off to search in the direction indicated by the wobbly and ever-vacillating testimony of the only family acquaintance who claimed to have seen the “abductor” (whose description, given by her, in no wise chimes with the man she later fingered in an identity parade) holding “Maddy” (she most often says “a child”) in “his” (though she most often says “a person”) outstretched arms. Oddly, it is the outstretched nature of the arms, a strange way to carry a sleeping child, unless directly from a couch to a bed, and remarked on by the witness herself, which lends the sole element of verisimilitude to her story.

I think it is in one of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown tales that the jewel thief turns out to have been a magpie. This perfectly plausible solution to a missing ring mystery pokes fun at the then contemporary idea of blaming a vagrant, a gypsy or one of the servants for anything that went missing in English country houses of the period. It pillories the primitive form of profiling that was the routine stuff of police work at the time. Profiling (making use of existent perpetrator statistics) has come a long way since then, and even if police are discouraged from over-reliance on it for preventative purposes, it is a common technique for the solution of particular types of crime and a vital tool in criminology. The reasons are obvious. We begin to profile on the basis of conjecture and supposition the moment a crime has been committed. Leaving aside Chesterton’s magpie for the present; when confronted with a burglary we will usually assume a young, fit, male homo-sapiens as perpetrator rather than an old, female dachshund (legs too short, for one thing). Sexual predators are most often, though far from always, lone males. Abductors are opportunistic loners or meticulous planners. They will generally be male and single, though they may (the Dutroux case and many others) have “submissive” female accomplices whose role is more or less active.

Whether the “submissive” adjective has something to do with our innate desire to see women as caregivers or genuinely reflects a reality is an under-investigated issue. We do seem to resist the idea of women as predatory perpetrators, regardless of the evidence (I’ve dealt with this in a previous post; see The quality of mercy?, Edwin Drood's Column, 26 June 2012). In particular, there is a public blind spot on the subject of female paedophilia. This may be due, and quite understandably, to the socio-biological specificity of women, who are universally expected to feel attraction to children, and thus naturally presumed to asexualise that feeling. Yet it also reflects a certain prudery with regard to female sexuality in general. But another potential woman perpetrator model is common in a specific type of abduction case. The typical “baby-snatcher” is filling an emotional and affective void in her life that is mocked by the very clear lack of empathy she shows towards the baby’s real parents. The late toddler age and cuteness of Madeleine McCann does not rule out this kind of perpetrator. However, the observable facts lead to a harsher conclusion.

It is not easy to mask a murder as an accident. It is even less easy to make accidental death look like murder, in order to implicate someone particular or draw an enquiry away from an uncomfortable truth. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to make accidental death look like abduction, particularly of a child. All you have to do is hide and/or dispose of the body. The public mind gets wonderfully exercised by a kidnapping and has a deep-rooted need to believe that the greatest threats to children come from outside the family, despite all evidence to the contrary. We will universally rally round the story of a tiny victim in the clutches of a perverse maniac or unscrupulous villains who smell gold. We will hold vigils, we will hang posters in our windows, we will post endlessly on Facebook and, above all, we will buy, buy, buy the tabloids.

The McCann case is archetypal food for blood-sport journalists: cute little blond tyke, pure English Rose, abducted by dagos, foreign policemen who don’t “get” the Brits, photogenic mother, bluff and hardy father, both doctors, both highly responsible citizens … Soon this tormented couple will be treated as heroic and selfless, soon we will conveniently forget that they regularly went out drinking and dining with friends while their four-year old girl and twin babies were left alone in a locked apartment. We all want the big story, not the sordid little one. We need our innocent angels, our Maddie McCanns and Princess Dianas. There will be much baying and braying and theorizing about white slave traffickers and paedophile rings. There will be little real examination of the evidence on the ground: the un-tampered window, the un-tampered door, the daily ritual of sedation, the curious behaviour of the trained tracker dogs, the testimony of the English family who also claimed they’d seen Madeleine being carried somewhere that same night … by her Dad.

Above all, because this is a case with over a million pounds of private funding as well as the vested interests of media organs at stake, it resists even the possibility of closure. Thus there will be silence on the subject of the statistical elephant in the room: that in over 95% of cases, abducted children, whether for ransom or sex, very rarely live more than half a day from the time they are taken, and the norm is three hours. The McCanns want us all to think that there is still hope for Maddy and I’d love to go along with them (if that is truly what they believe). That’s why they have released two hypothetical updates to her picture: images of a virtual Maddy at seven and eleven. But Madeleine McCann was, in all probability, either dead within hours of being “taken”, if taken she was, or else she never left apartment 5A alive. Why do I think this now?

While Miranda and I were burbling gently around the Auvergne this past summer, our idyllic tour was disturbed by the appearance of a disappearance. I should explain. I was filling Miranda’s capacious tank at a small petrol station near Saint Nectaire, when I saw the poster of little Fiona Bourgeon, who had gone missing in a public park just 24 hours earlier. At that moment it was just a photocopy, part of a local campaign to alert everyone for miles around to watch out for Fiona. Suddenly I felt the hair rise on my neck as I realised I fell precisely into the “ideal” target group of lone, male, foreign tourists of a certain age who were actually in the area at the time. Of course I believed the story. It seemed somehow poetic that such a tragic thing would happen in such an idyllic place at the start of the holiday season. There was a reason why I was so easily convinced.

I was standing on the edge of a beautiful lake in northern Italy some years previously, delighting in the gradually changing light of evening, when I chanced to overhear a woman remark to her friend that it was sad such a fabulous view would now forever be associated in her mind with last week’s tragedy. It transpired that I was the only person at my hotel still unaware of the young Dutch couple on their honeymoon, fooling around in a skiff, who had managed to capsize it and become entangled in the rigging. She drowned and he was resuscitated after suffering hypothermic exhaustion and damage to the lungs while trying to save her. It was early in the season, few people about and no one had noticed until it was too late. Et in Arcadia ego. I now realized that these sleepy country towns in the Auvergne were similarly touched by tragedy, and would forever be accompanied in my mind by the image of that little pixie face with the sticky out ears.

It is part of police profiling routine to analyse the visuals and vocabulary of all public statements made by the parents of “abducted” children because, statistically, they are, if not the preferred, then surely the most likely suspects. Thus the officers stood calmly by with understanding and sombre looks on their faces as Fiona’s mother wove a web of fantasy that involved her “falling asleep” in the park and waking up to find Fiona gone. They nodded sadly to one side of the frame as the distraught mother, heavily pregnant with her third child, appealed to the public to keep a lookout for any sign of her darling daughter. They watched her eye movements and body language as she begged live on camera for her daughter’s ravisher to bring Fiona back. It took four months before she exhausted herself and admitted that she and her boyfriend had dug a shallow grave to hide the child’s naked body in a forest near the Puy de Dome. The truth, as always, was sordid and commonplace: Fiona had probably choked on her own vomit in the night due to trauma suffered from injuries inflicted by Berkane Maklouf, the aforementioned boyfriend. Now she lay in the cold earth near one of France’s most spectacular natural sites. I had walked extensively through those forests during my stay. I shuddered at the thought that I had passed, once again, so close to death and known nothing.

Fiona’s body has still not been found. Her “parents”, who so spectacularly failed her, even failed to note where they had hidden her corpse. Fiona’s little sister was crying in the car while they dug, which distracted them from taking any precise bearings. Why did they strip the child before burying her? Was it to slow an eventual enquiry by removing evidence, or was it to reinforce the sexual abduction narrative they have since so convincingly promoted? Hard to say, but probably both aspects played their part. Either way, it is a particularly gruesome and heartless detail that will doubtless be harshly exploited by the prosecution, if and when the body is found.

Is there an upside to all of this? Maybe there is … for the film industry! Because not only would either one of these stories, Maddy’s or Fiona’s, make a compelling screenplay, but it also seems that, contrary to the received wisdom, just about anyone can act if enough pressure is applied. But as regards body language, the missing body can be even more eloquent and misleading than those who know things they are not telling or who tell things they do not really know.


© Edwin Drood, October 2013



Illustration:

"Desaparecido"

One of the posters appealing for information about seven-year-old Yeremi Vargas who disappeared from outside his home in Gran Canaria, Spain on 10th March 2007, eight weeks before the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal.

10,000 such posters were distributed around the Canary Islands shortly after Yeremi vanished. Spanish police later attempted to link the cases of the two missing children and their photos appeared together in subsequent publicity campaigns.

Photo by David John, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, June 2007.