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PRAIA DA LUZ - The good news for the reception desk at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz is that they have every prospect of a full house for late April and early May. It is particularly welcome this year, as tourist numbers have been down because of the pound weakening against the euro and Easter falling early.
The downside is that many of their guests are likely to arrive not with bathing costumes, tennis rackets and sun cream, but with laptops, microphones and television cameras. And their focus will be on the one flat in the Mark Warner holiday complex that has lain empty for 11 months: Apartment 5-A, where Madeleine McCann disappeared on the evening of May 3, 2007, a few days before her fourth birthday.
The media's first-anniversary invasion has not yet begun in earnest.
Last week only a trickle of British newspaper reporters, the odd photographer and a team from al-Jazeera television were in evidence. There was no sign of the Policia Judiciaria, Portugal's investigating detectives, nor even an ordinary traffic cop, outside the flat where the little English girl was last seen.
Only a flimsy silver chain barring entry to the back garden entrance recalls the tragedy, the agonising efforts to find Madeleine that became a worldwide campaign and the deepening mystery surrounding the case after her parents, Kate and Gerry, were interrogated and declared arguidos, or formal suspects, by the Portuguese authorities last August.
The posters of Madeleine that filled every shop window in the weeks after her disappearance are gone. Just one faded image of her is still on display - on the bulletin board outside the church, where the local Catholic and Anglican communities hold an ecumenical service every Friday to highlight the case of Madeleine and of other missing children around the world.
Poignantly, a poster recently pinned up at the entrance of the Baptista supermarket, near the flat where Madeleine last hugged her mother goodnight, pleads in Portuguese: "Nao te esquecas de mim." Don't forget about me.
In recent weeks, to the alarm of Madeleine's parents back home in the Leicestershire village of Rothley, that had seemed a real possibility. In Portugal the active search for their missing daughter by the police and hundreds of local residents on the oceanfront, in gardens, olive groves and scrubland has ended.
The police, and the Spanish-based Metodo 3 detective agency hired by the McCanns, are still responding to "sightings" or claims of fresh evidence of what has happened to her, but these have become less and less frequent.
A recent claim by a taxi driver on the eastern end of the Algarve coast, near the Spanish border, that he had driven Madeleine and four adults to a nearby hotel on the night of her disappearance came to nothing. So, too, a freelance search by a Madeira-based lawyer of a lake down a twisting potholed lane outside the Algarve's old Moorish capital, Silves.
The police investigation, and the often lurid local newspaper headlines accompanying it, have gone quiet. Last October a new officer was put in charge. The official spokesman for the investigation has been replaced by two Lisbon-based officials who were politely replying last week to all press inquiries by saying: "Sorry. It is our policy that we cannot comment at all on the case."
In fact, there are now signs of new movement in the investigation - and every prospect that, starting in the next few days and building towards the first anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance, her case will again be front-page news in Portugal, Britain and around the world.
Early this week a team of Portuguese police is due to travel to Britain to re-interview witnesses from the so-called "Tapas Nine" - the seven friends who, with the McCanns, were dining at a poolside tapas restaurant 50 metres from Apartment 5-A on the night Madeleine disappeared.
Particularly in the light of a comment by Portugal's Justice Minister, Alberto Costa, two months ago that the investigation was nearing its conclusion, the mission is likely to prove critical in determining in what direction, and at what pace, the next stage of the largest police probe in Portugal's history is now taken.
The only other person named as a suspect in the case would already seem to be out of the frame, to the cautious relief of his distraught family, veteran pillars of Praia da Luz's expatriate British community. Robert Murat, 33, was on a week's visit from Britain to his mother Jenny's home, metres from Apartment 5-A, when Madeleine disappeared. But he cancelled his return flight, stayed on in Praia da Luz, and was informally helping the investigators as a translator when a British Sunday newspaper journalist told the police she thought he was acting suspiciously.
They brought him in for questioning and - largely, Portuguese police sources have said, on the strength of British crime profilers - formally made him an arguido in mid-May. They secured a routine three-month extension to his suspect status last January, but in recent weeks have returned a computer, his clothing and other property removed from the home that Murat shares with his mother.
The McCanns, too, are drawing some hope from the Portuguese police team's visit to Britain. Their spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said yesterday that while the couple had made clear their readiness to speak to the investigators, or even to return to Portugal if required, "there has been no request to talk to them".
He also revealed that, contrary to media speculation in recent months, the visiting investigators have conveyed no plans to conduct any searches in Britain, to take possession of Kate's personal diary, or of Cuddle Cat - Madeleine's favourite toy, which Kate constantly clasped by her side during the weeks after her disappearance.
But an unprecedentedly detailed account of the days and weeks after Madeleine's disappearance from a well-placed Portuguese police source suggests that - after numerous fruitless twists and turns in the investigation, and in the absence of either a "body or a confession" - the police focus is on the accounts of the McCanns and their friends of precisely what happened to Madeleine on the night she vanished.
The source has not suggested there is evidence that Madeleine's parents were involved in the disappearance, or the possible death, of their child. But the source has said that, almost from the outset, the "key" to the investigation had been in unravelling what the Policia Judiciaria felt were "difficulties and contradictions" in the accounts given by the McCanns and their friends in the aftermath of the tragedy.
Part of the police concern, he said, involved details of Kate and Gerry's initial statements - whether the back window and shutters in the flat had been open or closed, for instance, and whether Gerry had entered from the front door or the back and exactly when the parents or their friends had checked to make sure Madeleine and her then 2-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, were safe and well.
Equally crucial to somehow resolving the case, he said, were the accounts of the 'Tapas Nine' - and particularly Jane Tanner, who earlier this year went public in a BBC television documentary with her account of having seen a man carrying a child in pink pyjamas like Madeleine's outside the McCanns' flat at 9.15pm.
"Jane at first made no mention of the pyjamas," the source insisted.
He said that this detail and a number of others about the man apparently carrying a child emerged only later in her statements to the police.
He said the initial statements by the McCanns and each of their friends had "never fit together" and that the police were particularly sceptical when, after the group had had time to talk a few days later, an "agreed time-line" seemed to emerge.
Mitchell said yesterday that, far from opposing the latest move by the Portuguese police to press their concerns over the "Tapas Nine" testimony, the McCanns, Tanner and their other friends eagerly welcomed the opportunity, in the hope of finally bringing the legal process to an end and focusing "on what really matters - Madeleine". Some of the friends, he said, had even considered going back to Portugal to try to speed an end to the investigation.
Mitchell said he was not surprised by the inconsistencies.
"You had nine people in a bar without watches on, without mobile phones, and absolute panic set in when they realised what had happened.
"They were running around and then several hours later they were forced to sit down and recount their movements in exact detail and they were at sixes and sevens ... We would say that, if the police had a perfect time line across nine people, that would be a damn sight more suspicious than the fractured, illogical composite statements they might have got."
And although Mitchell was not in Praia da Luz in the days after Madeleine disappeared, he said his personal contacts since then with Tanner and the other friends had convinced him there was "nothing furtive or suspicious" about the time-line provided to the police. "Everything I've seen and heard on a private, human level tells me that this is an innocent group of people who have got caught up in this awful situation and they're doing their best to try and help their friends on a decency level."
Luis Maia, a leading Portuguese journalist who co-authored the first of what are now five books on Madeleine in Portugal, said his gut feeling was that - barring an unexpected breakthrough, or a formal police request to re-interview Kate or Gerry - the investigation was finally nearing an inevitable end, with the mystery of the missing girl no closer to resolution.
For the parents, the next few days and weeks are likely to be difficult, with the approach of the anniversary of the disappearance of a daughter nearing her fifth birthday - especially in Rothley, in the home Kate had said she could not bear to live in again without having Madeleine back.
"Some days, for both Kate and Gerry, are better than others," Mitchell said. "But they still believe she is quite possibly alive. There has been no evidence to the contrary.
"And every day that goes by without her being found makes them think that she must be somewhere, very well hidden, and that someone must have her."
KEY PLAYERS PIECING LIVES TOGETHER
THE PARENTS
As the first anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance draws closer, her parents are back home in the English village of Rothley in Leicestershire. Gerry has returned to full-time work as a cardiologist, on call, with regular hours. Kate, a general practitioner, has decided not to go back to work at a local surgery until the fate of her daughter is resolved. She takes Sean and Amelie to nursery school every day and is in frequent phone or email contact with "Find Madeleine" campaign organisers, charities, the family's lawyers and police. "There are good days and bad days," says the McCanns' spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, but they take hope from the belief that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, their daughter is still alive. They have thrown themselves into urging Britain and the rest of Europe to improve co-ordination in dealing with missing children and to adopt an American-style "amber light" alert system to speed up attempts to find them.
THE McCANN'S FIRST SPOKESMAN
Within hours of the news of Madeleine's disappearance, Alex Woolfall of the London-based PR agency Bell Pottinger was asked by Mark Warner to fly to Praia da Luz as part of a "crisis" team to help her traumatised parents deal with the media. "People forget there was quite a lot of hope at the time and we figured that if we got photos out someone would call up and say: 'Yes, I've just spotted her'." Woolfall says he feels the way the media behaved was "unique and extraordinary - and I put that down to the fact that so many of the journalists out there were doing the story as parents first, and journalists second. It was: 'There, but for the grace of God, go we'." He has inevitably found himself reflecting on her parents' agony. "I just cannot imagine what it would be like to have a child and bring up a child and then to have that child taken from you."
ROBERT MURAT
"A year in hell" is how friends of Murat describe the experience of the Briton, raised in Portugal, who had been helping the police with translations for the case and suddenly found himself declared a formal suspect. He, his mother and other relatives in Praia da Luz and the nearby beach village of Brugao have had to come to terms with police questioning. Murat's mother Jenny, 72, says that she, her son and others in the family have tried to stay positive and have kept a daily diary of their ordeal in an effort to help them to cope. Now, with the police having returned Robert Murat's possessions and agreed to his going to England, she says they are holding out hope that he may soon be released from arguido status. "When all is said and done ... what matters [is] the fate of this poor little girl."
THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS
Metodo 3 is a Barcelona-based agency that built its reputation on corporate fraud investigations before the McCanns engaged it on a six-month contract last year to follow up reported sightings of the missing girl throughout Europe and in Morocco. Metodo 3 remains on a monthly retainer of £8000 ($20,241), Mitchell says. "The agency are very good on the ground. They're very passionate and committed to the search for Madeleine." The family's hope is that the Portuguese police will ultimately close their investigation and pass on all the relevant papers to Metodo 3 to reinvigorate the search.
THE FAMILY FRIEND
Jane Tanner has been haunted by the thought that she could have prevented Madeleine's disappearance. Tanner, 38, was among the seven friends with the McCann parents at the restaurant on the night in question. She had gone back to check on her own children and is certain she saw a man carrying a pyjama-clad child nearby. Generally, Tanner has avoided making public remarks but, in a recent BBC documentary, she said: "It's important that people know what I saw, because I believe Madeleine was abducted."
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