Those kids were in danger, because of their parents. And as a mum I can’t look at Gerry McCann — a man his wife says can ‘switch off’ from grief — without the hairs on my arms standing on end. Kate was no better. There were 48 police questions Kate McCann refused to answer after Maddie was gone. Surely if you wanted to find your child you would give anything, tell police everything you knew, offer anything you had? We are not the police. We cannot pretend to know what really went on.
What happened that night will remain a mystery and someone will take the truth to their grave, but we can understand as parents how we would feel if it happened to us. Any mother who has lost her child even for a heartbeat understands how horrifying it is. The prickle under the armpit, the sudden silence in a noisy shopping centre, the blind panic. Running through treacle while time stands still. Waiting for a little face to show itself, telling her off when she reappears because you love her so much you can’t bear for her to be lost even for a second. And in that second you imagined the very worst.
When your first baby is born you join a special group of people – a group whose lives have been transformed.
That first morning in hospital you understand the enormity of your new responsibility to keep another little part of you alive. You have accepted The Fear. Suddenly the life you knew before is transformed, filled with all the bad things that could happen to your baby. Jabs which go wrong. Death in a cot for no reason. Spots on the chest which don’t go away under glass. You live every second with The Fear that your baby will be taken from you, or die before you and upset the natural order of life turning everything you trusted into a lie.
I still live in dread of my children’s lives being shortened, that someone might take them from me, strip away the thing I would happily hand over my own life to sustain. I tell them to shout fire if someone grabs them. And I will never need them to get in a strangers car, no matter what they say. Others give their children phones, hoping these will keep them safe, imagining them to be protection from predators roaming our streets looking for baby prey.
Mine sleep with the soft toy bunnies they have had since the day they were born.
Not so cuddly now, mostly rags at best, but rags which I will keep if I live to watch my children grow old. They are keepsakes of another time, when my kids were chubby and twitchy in their cots, when they needed me more fundamentally. For warmth and food, cuddles for tears and encouragement to be brave. And when they leave me for families of their own, for every day I wished I didn’t have to do the school run, there will be a thousand more when I am grateful that I did, knowing I kept them safe, but now the faces I associate with neglect are being used to promote the Child Rescue Alert campaign. And I am sorry, but I am not buying it!
Because nothing in this story reads well to the mum in me. Or the dad if that's you. Leaving your babies alone, too far away to see. Knowing your daughter is gone and still able to play tennis. Taking her little bed-time toy, Cuddle Cat, with the last smell of their daughter, and putting it in the wash just five days after she vanished into the night. I speak to people who have lost parents and cannot bear to wipe messages from their answer machine because it’s something to hold on to. They keep them just to feel close. Some even call their mothers’ phone, just to hear it ring and imagine she might there to say ‘sleep tight’ one last time. I would put Cuddle Cat under my pillow every night to be close to the baby I lost. Not wash its memories away.
The night before she became a memory, Maddie asked her mother, ‘Why did you not come when Sean and I cried last night? I’d ask her the same question now. How did you leave the daughter you longed to have?
Maddie wasn’t lost because someone took her. She was lost because she was left to be found.