Collins - Madeleine McCann - The Disappearance

T en years have passed since three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared from her holiday apartment as her parents sat with friends nearby. Recently, I returned to the resort in which this took place.

Almost ten years ago, I had arrived in Praia da Luz after a 940-kilometre drive along the A-92 at the behest of my publisher who wanted the story of Madeleines disappearance recorded in time for the first anniversary. I had been working on the text of a book about an English married couple who had gone missing on the Costa Blanca (Nightmare in the Sun, John Blake Publishing, 2007). The journey took nearly ten hours.

Praia da Luz, which means Beach of Light, is a small, former fishing village and now thriving holiday resort, population 3,500, which lies six kilometres from Lagos in the Algarve of Portugal. Like most settlements it changed its livelihood to a holiday resort with the advent of tourism to south-coastal Iberia in the 1970s. It was the holiday venue chosen by the McCann and their group of professional doctors, a consultant friend and their partners and children for a ten-day holiday in the last week of April and the first week of May 2007.

The young British girls disappearance and the subsequent inquiry would cause a huge public and press furore, surpassing anything Id seen in nearly twenty years of journalism. Journalists gyrate around tragedy. We dont live off tragedy any more than radio or television newscasters, but the reader always assumes that we do.

The case of Madeleine McCann is a prime example of plot and counterplot, and of confusion laid by many of the players, each one of whom has resorted to a play on public emotions to win their point. But behind all of this lies the fate of a small child who was miserably failed by those who should have cared for her. Amidst all the talk of guilt and responsibility, of sexual predators who roam the shadows of a popular tourist resort, and of politicians and policemen who fear the smear that could be cast on their countrys tourism by such a possibility, the hunt for Madeleine McCann struggles for priority.

And so, as the tenth anniversary of Madeleines disappearance approached, I went back to the village. I found it structurally unchanged. The scene of the unsolved mystery, the Ocean Club holiday complex still stands, as does the tapa bar where her parents sat, taking part in a quiz night, unaware that their daughter would be gone when they returned to their holiday rental apartment at 5A, Waterside Garden.

I wandered around, noting the areas that figured in the inquiry, like the Rua da Escola Primria, where the Smith family stated to police that they saw a man resembling Gerry McCann carrying a child of Madeleines description at 10pm as they walked to their holiday apartment from Kellys Bar on the night she went missing.

I spoke to some locals in one of the bars. They all remembered the hordes of press that descended on the resort in the early summer of that year. But, apart from that, nothing much had changed in Praia da Luz since 2007. You can still eat the grilled, salty sardines in the Paraiso, the beach restaurant located on the pretty south-facing beach where Madeleine McCann played with her twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, on the morning of 3 May 2007, the day she was to disappear and pose the biggest mystery of the decade. The world asked, and is asking still, Where is Madeleine? Is she alive?

Questions like that are still asked in the police station at Portimo, where DCI Gonalo Amaral once held sway and oversaw the search for the missing three-year-old. It is the same police station that grief-stricken Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of the missing child, attended on 7 September 2007. They left the marble portal branded