'I looked in bin and thought: Please God, don't let Madeleine be in here'

Published on Monday 9 May 2011 15:09

THE mother of Madeleine McCann has relived the frantic search that followed her daughter's disappearance on holiday in Portugal's Algarve.

Kate McCann has written a book about the agony she and husband Gerry faced, their frustration with police and their fears for their young child.

Madeleine was almost four when she went missing from the couple's holiday apartment while they were eating at a nearby tapas restaurant with friends.

The following day, as soon as it was light, they began their long and desperate search of the surrounding area.

Mrs McCann wrote: "We jumped over walls and raked through undergrowth. We looked in ditches and holes.

"I remember opening up a big dumpster and saying to myself 'Please God, don't let her be in here'. The most striking and horrible thing was that we were completely alone. Nobody else, it seemed, was out looking for Madeleine."

She said that when she and her husband returned to the apartment the previous evening a window had been opened from the outside and blinds were fluttering in the wind.

The couple fear Madeleine was abducted and have admitted that "when she was first stolen, paedophiles were all we could think about and it ate away at us".

Mrs McCann, 43, still believes a man seen by one of their friends earlier that evening, who was holding a child, is the person who snatched Madeleine.

"That morning I learned of the man our friend Jane had seen in the street," she wrote. "Although Gerry and our friends had been trying to protect me from further distress by not telling me about this sooner, when they did I was strangely relieved.

"He was carrying a sleeping child horizontally across his arms, the child's legs dangling. Although Jane had never seen or known about Madeleine's Eeyore pyjamas, her description of this child's night clothes matched Madeleine's almost exactly.

"There was little doubt in my mind then, nor is there now, that what Jane saw was Madeleine's abductor taking her away."

When she was first interviewed by police she was hopeful that detectives would find Madeleine, but that belief soon turned to despair at how the investigation progressed.

She wrote: "As Joo Carlos, a Portuguese detective, led me up the stairs, I inquired whether he had any children. He told me he hadn't. 'But don't worry. We will find your daughter'. It was exactly what I was yearning to hear."

Just five hours later, when their police driver received a message on his radio and suddenly performed a U-turn before heading back to Portimo at 120mph, she thought the police had found Madeleine.

"I cannot overstate how terrifying this was," Mrs McCann wrote.

"Had Madeleine been found? Was she alive? Was she dead? I was crying hysterically and praying for all I was worth.

"Back in the police station someone showed us a photograph of a blonde child with a woman in a petrol station shop. We were asked whether the little girl was Madeleine. She wasn't. We were sent on our way, devastated."

As the search went on she tired of "hollow" police assurances that "everything that can be done is being done" and grew increasingly angry.

"The frustration and anger were reaching boiling point," she wrote.

"I felt like a caged, demented animal. This was torture of the cruellest kind. Finally, I erupted. I began to scream, swear and lash out. I kicked an extra bed that had been brought into the apartment and smashed the end right off it.

"Then came the inevitable tears. Prostrate on the floor, sobbing like a baby, I felt utterly defeated and broken. I had not slept in 42 hours. I was exhausted and my whole body was racked with pain."