Tomorrow Madeleine McCann will have been missing for 100 days. Here her parents Kate and Gerry talk to Steve Boggan about their new website for missing children, and how they're coping - not only with the loss of their four-year-old daughter, but also with the barrage of speculation they've been subjected to over the past week
A potential sighting of her daughter Madeleine, this time on the Belgian-Dutch border, had come to nothing, so her day was just like the day before, and the day before that. "We can't afford to get our hopes up every time there is a sighting," said Kate. Tomorrow Madeleine will have been missing for 100 days.
In the apartment in Praia da Luz where Kate and her husband Gerry now spend their days, reminders of four-year-old Madeleine are everywhere. Yellow rubber wristbands with Look for Madeleine printed on them are tangled up in a plastic bag on the sideboard. On a coffee table, harried by the wind blowing from their sea-view balcony, are flyers that bear the girl's image, focused intently on that right eye with its unusual iris. For the McCanns, Madeleine is everywhere and nowhere.
This week, the largely positive media circus surrounding the couple, and their campaign to get their daughter back, turned sour. Fuelled by what appear to be off-the-record briefings from local police sources, the Portuguese media began publishing increasingly hostile stories.
With the discovery by British sniffer dogs of specks of blood in Madeleine's bedroom, parts of the press began suggesting that the McCanns were now the focus of the police investigation; friends of the McCanns felt it necessary to publicly dismiss such speculation. And yesterday things got worse when the McCanns were obliged to take their two-year-old twins out of a local playgroup because other parents had complained of the press attention they were attracting.
"The thing is that this is all speculation," Kate said on the phone yesterday. "We went through all this similar speculation right at the beginning and it doesn't help really. Until people know the facts, it doesn't help."
"It doesn't help [Madeleine], that's for sure," Gerry said. "The hardest thing is that we can't comment on the investigation in any detail because we are witnesses and so much of what has been written is pretty hard to see. Some terrible things have been written."
In the past week I have twice met the couple in their seaview apartment. When we first talked last Friday - two days before this latest storm of publicity blew up over the specks of blood - the couple went through the story of how their daughter went missing.
Madeleine disappeared from apartment 5a of the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz on the evening of May 3. Kate and Gerry, both 39-year-old doctors - she is a GP, he a consultant cardiologist - were dining with friends near the apartment, but had been popping back regularly to check on both Madeleine and her twin brother and sister, Sean and Amelie.
"We were checking on the children several times an hour," said Kate. "At one point I went back to check. It was quiet and I went into their bedroom and Madeleine wasn't there. I kept looking and thinking to myself, 'She must be here.' I thought she must be in her bed, but she wasn't.
"Then there was this horrible panic and fear. There was no shadow of doubt that Madeleine had been taken and that is why the panic was so immediate and so real. It was awful. I guess I just felt I had let her down and I was desperately sorry that we weren't there."
She and Gerry, from Rothley in Leicestershire, constantly held hands and comforted one another as they talked, she in her light Liverpool accent, he in his Glaswegian.
The reason they had agreed to talk to the Guardian was to publicise Don't You Forget About Me, a new internet site where parents will be able to post videos, images and information about their missing children.
The couple have formed a partnership with Google, YouTube and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) in the US to set up what they believe will become a global central database of missing children. If it works, youtube.com/dontyouforgetaboutme, which launches today, could become the focus of hope for thousands of families.
The two-bedroom apartment where they're living, and planning this new website, has been lent to them by friends. This is the spot from which an unprecedented missing person campaign has been conducted, but it isn't full of slick PR people on their mobile phones. There is a laptop owned by their campaign manager, former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate Justine McGuinness (paid for by donations), a fax machine and a kettle that barely gets time to cool. And that's about it.
Kate sat and clutched Cuddles the cat, Madeleine's favourite toy, while we talked. It is the same toy she is always holding in pictures; she hardly ever puts it down. She seemed thin and fragile, and at one point, trying to explain that one of the yellow bands on her wrist was made by the school Madeleine was due to go to in three weeks' time, she burst into tears.
Since Madeleine went missing, the two have learned a great deal about missing children around the world. "Because of what has happened to Madeleine we have become aware of so many other children that have gone missing, and also a lot about how many children are abducted, and the extent of child sexual exploitation," said Kate. "It's horrific. We are reasonably worldly people but I just couldn't believe it when we were told about the scale of the problem.
"In England and Wales alone - this is going back to 2003 - there were more than 1,000 attempted stranger abductions; 100 of those were actual abductions that led to the child being taken away by a stranger, not a parental abduction, and in more than one-third of these the child was not retrieved within 24 hours."
About six weeks ago, one of their close-knit circle of family and friends had the idea of using YouTube as a vehicle for finding children. What if the site could be administered by the world's largest organisation dedicated to finding them, ICMEC in the US?
"My first approach to ICMEC was to see if they would take on the roles of administering and regulating the channel," said Gerry. "Technically, we could have had it ready in no time with Google's help [Google owns YouTube], but the key thing for us was the regulation ... of the channel.
First of all we have to verify that the child on any video is actually missing. The second thing is to check that the authorities have been notified that the child is missing. And the third thing is that the images themselves are not exploitative." The McCanns have high hopes for the project, predicting that it could revolutionise the way law enforcement agencies around the world look for children.
"There is no good data out there but the latest figures for missing children and runaways in the United States is 800,000 each year," said Ernest Allen, chief executive of ICMEC. "In the UK the figure is 105,000; Austria, 1,600; France, 39,000; Germany, 50,000; Greece, 500; Ireland, 1,250; Italy, 1,100; Portugal, 725; and Spain, 8,400.
"There is no international uniformity in gathering information or reporting it. I mean, the fact that there were 50,000 missing children in Germany and only 500 in Greece tells you something about the way each country deals with the problem. Some people aren't counting."
For more than 25 years, ICMEC has been forging partnerships with missing children agencies around the world. "We had set up missing children websites in 14 countries," says Allen. "And then Gerry came along with this idea. We hadn't thought of using YouTube. Now it will allow us to have one worldwide clearing house for all the information on missing children. There is no doubt in my mind, this will help to reunite abducted and missing children with their parents. It is completely revolutionary."
There has been criticism in some quarters that the couple's media campaign has been too slick, but the McCanns point out that less than £70,000 has been spent so far on staff, accommodation, transport and communications. McGuinness is being paid. So too are two others fielding thousands of media calls in the UK.
"The campaign really evolved by itself and just involved family and friends coming up with ideas and putting them into action," said Gerry. A stranger in France bought the domain name findmadeleine.com and donated it to the family. A former student of Gerry's sister set up the campaign website. Back home in Rothley, Kate's uncle, Brian Kennedy, became the chair of the fighting fund, which has raised £1m so far.
One of Madeleine's godparents produced pictures and a DVD of Madeleine and distributed them to the media. The husband of one of Kate's cousins approached large corporations to help with funding and the distribution of information. A second cousin of Gerry's produced 50,000 cards with information about Madeleine and circulated them at the Uefa Cup final in Glasgow. And so on.
"We have had politicians and famous people making appeals for us, but not, as it might have seemed, because we are well connected," said Gerry. "People just did these things off their own bat. For example, before I became a cardiologist full time, I used to do a bit of sports medicine. My old boss knew Alex Ferguson and asked if he could help. Before we knew it, there was David Beckham making an appeal for Madeleine. A lot of people who have helped have done it simply because they are good individuals with children of their own."
When Madeleine first went missing, reaction to the fact that her parents were not in the apartment that night was muted. It was perhaps felt that it would be in bad taste to criticise parents at such an awful time.
As time has passed, however, such reticence has evaporated. How have they coped with that? "The criticism is very hard and very hurtful," said Kate. "Considering what we are going through already, it seems very cruel. I know this is a small group of people. Most have been very supportive. We have had thousands and thousands of letters from people and every line of every letter they have written has helped us get through another day.
"I have had hundreds of people get in touch and say, 'We do exactly what you have done. Don't ever blame yourself; you have to remember here who has committed the crime. It was someone who broke in and took Madeleine from the bed.'" "For us it just felt like we were dining in the garden," said Gerry.
You wonder what they feel in their darkest moments, and I saved the hardest question for last. Would it be easier if they had some kind of closure? "In the first few days all we thought about was the worst and it was just the worst experience ever," said Kate. "Now we have more hope than we did in those first few days. Don't get me wrong - we are not blinkered. Obviously we still have those dark thoughts but they are not helpful. Sometimes you just have to blank them out."
The couple said they had no plans to return to England as yet. "I know it might seem illogical, but I feel closer to Madeleine here," said Kate. "Yes, there are probably things we could do even better from the UK, but just right now it wouldn't feel right to leave."
As I left the apartment after our second interview last Saturday, the police were about to begin a fresh search of the garden of Robert Murat, the only official suspect, less than 100 metres away.
That seems to have come to nothing; it is too soon to say yet what those specks of blood in the apartment might mean, if anything. Meanwhile the couple keep going, with sensational stories, apparently based on not very much at all, swirling around them. When I rang to see how they were doing yesterday, Gerry said: "It has been 14 weeks now and it is pretty apparent that there has been a shift in the investigation. We are not privy to why that is." And then with typical understatement, he added: "The last few days have been difficult."
