KEY POINTS:
The imposing red-brick home, in an exclusive cul-de-sac in the Leicestershire village of Rothley, lies empty now.
The grass is kept cut by neighbours. The kitchen table is piled with letters from wellwishers around the world. One is addressed simply: "To Madeleine, the little girl missing."
The window shades in The Orchard - home to 4-year-old Madeleine McCann, her 2-year-old twin siblings Sean and Amelie, and parents Gerry and Kate - are drawn.
All but one. It reveals a ground-floor windowsill brimming with cuddly toys, awaiting the return of a little beaming, blond girl snatched from her bed on a family holiday in Portugal 100 days ago next Saturday.
With the approach of that painful milestone, Kate has spoken for the first time of the final few hours before her daughter's kidnapping on May 3 in the resort of Praia da Luz.
"Mummy," she recalled Madeleine's bedtime words in a choked near-whisper, "I've had the best day ever! I'm having lots and lots of fun!" Barely two hours later, Kate returned from dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant about 100m from their holiday flat to discover that Madeleine was gone.
"I was screaming her name," Kate recalled. "It was just total fear ... panic and fear."
The initial jolt may have passed. But in two very different villages, one a few kilometres outside Leicester in the English Midlands and the other on the sun-scorched Algarve coast, the painful sense of Madeleine's absence was powerfully in evidence last week.
Rothley's main square, centring on a gated war memorial, seemed strangely quiet - and empty. In the days after Madeleine's disappearance, the landlady at the pub opposite, the Royal Oak, caught the villagers' mood perfectly and organised a display of dozens of yellow ribbons around the five tall trees encircling the tiny park.
In the following weeks, the dozens grew to hundreds. Wellwishers - first from the village, then from Leicester and London, and finally from all over the world - descended to add their handwritten messages of support. Dozens of cuddly toys soon covered the pavement and benches.
Yet the weeks have since stretched on without any sign of Madeleine's return. Heavy recent rains left the toys limp and waterlogged. And some villagers became increasingly alarmed over what Friday's Leicester Mercury, the local paper, dubbed "grief tourists".
With Gerry signalling his support, a decision was taken to find a more low-key way of demonstrating Rothley's shared sadness over the McCanns' ordeal. The toys have been washed, packaged and donated to charities.
A single symbolic yellow-and-green ribbon now adorns each of the trees around the park. A small candle in Madeleine's honour burns in front of the memorial.
Still, in The Crescent, the quiet road 2km away which has been home to the McCanns for 18 months, the sense of private loss still clearly runs deep.
"We so miss the hoots and hollers of joy from the kids and Kate and Gerry when the weather was nice," remarked Brian Davinson, a retired businessman who with his wife, Jane, are the family's nearest neighbours.
Eighteen hundred kilometres away, on the Portuguese coast, Kate confided last week: "I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to go back into our family home. I can't bear the thought of it ... We have so many happy memories in that house." Then, after a pause, she added: "Madeleine's room is shocking pink! She chose the colour."
It seemed a rare admission - away from the relentlessly "positive" focus that she and Gerry have sought to bring to the worldwide campaign to bring Madeleine home - that the worst may have happened.
"I still have moments of panic and fear," Kate said, holding back tears.
"It's not as intense and unrelenting as the first five days. Now, obviously, we have hope - and it's important to hold on to that."
Doing so cannot have been easy. In the weeks since Madeleine's disappearance, Portugal's largest police investigation - backed by forces throughout Europe, North Africa and beyond - has thrown up repeated leads that have turned into dead-ends, "sightings" that were later dismissed, hopes raised and then dashed.
Kate and Gerry, meanwhile, have signalled their determination to continue to keep their daughter's plight in the public eye. They travelled to Spain last week to help to distribute a new series of posters in the hope that local residents and the summer influx of tourists might provide what Gerry recently called the "one phone call" that might bring Madeleine back home safely.
For Kate, who has made only a few brief trips away from Praia da Luz since Madeleine's disappearance, the main focus has been on caring for the twins.
"They know she's not there, and they do miss her," Kate said, adding that at times a passing comment from Sean or Amelie about their missing sister "catches me in the throat".
Recalling her first visit back to Britain since the kidnapping, for a christening in mid-July, she recalled boarding the plane with the twins. "There was an empty seat on the plane and Sean said: 'That's Madeleine's."'
Amelie, she added, will occasionally make a sudden reference to Cuddle Cat - the pink soft toy, Madeleine's favourite, which Kate now keeps almost constantly at her side. "Amelie will point at Cuddle Cat and say: 'Madeleine. Her Cuddle Cat. Looking after it.' She's probably heard me saying that."
Gerry, for his part, has been concentrating on explaining and expanding awareness of the "Madeleine campaign" worldwide - most recently at the White House, where he met aides of first lady Laura Bush.
"Gerry's way of coping is to keep busy and focused," Kate reflected. "He's a very optimistic, positive person."
Alan Pike, brought in by Mark Warner from the Yorkshire Centre for Crisis Psychology to help the McCanns within days of Madeleine's disappearance, said last week that he was heartened by how well both Gerry and Kate were coping. Yet even Gerry, he said, "like most people who go through an abduction, find that positive thinking is something very, very difficult to sustain 24/7".
The forthcoming 100-day anniversary, he added, would be particularly difficult for both parents. Any such milestone "gives rise to a lot of the physical reactions associated with the early days - the shock, the feelings of anger and the helplessness and, in this case, a lot of the feelings of guilt".
He said: "The hope is what keeps them going ... But there are still those bad days - what Gerry has referred to as the dark places - and they are not pleasant."
- Observer
