I am taking breakfast in an enclave of British tourism, evidenced by a menu of two languages, in a village of two names.

Sleepy Luz, in the southwestern Algarve, must have felt well-positioned to conquer the vitamin-D starved Northern Europeans when Portugal’s tourism opened up in the 1970s.

After all, ‘Luz’ means light.

But no.

It turns out that the Brits need assurances of sand and sea, as well as sun. And so, ‘Praia da Luz’ was invented.

The good people of ‘Beach of Light’ have had considerable success in their endeavour, it seems. Fifty years later, the hot beverage section of my hotel buffet features many options of coffee, and Tetley tea.

***

It is a curious thing, walking through a place both highly familiar, and fully unknown.

The power of news journalism is humbled by reality. A reader implicitly accepts that stories are filtered through the eyes of one, and the editorial judgement of many.

Reality knows no such control. And no accumulation of exacting description prepares the blind man for colour.

Built on a steep incline from the ocean, the architecture of Luz is a maze of triangles, echoing the Moors’ desire for shadow in the presence of intense heat. Most of those angles face south to the Atlantic, swollen and restless now in the winter light.

The lantana blooms cast a citrus punch in the air, peppered with an earthy undertow from rosemary, scattered here and there. Walking north, a little above the village centre and past the bustling Baptista supermarket, I approach Block 5 on Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva.

This is the locus of one of the 21st century’s most compelling mysteries.

In May 2007, three-year-old British girl Madeleine Beth McCann disappeared from holiday apartment 5A, ostensibly unsupervised as her parents dined and drank with their seven friends at the Tapas Bar of the adjacent complex.

There was a time when the street graffiti of Luz read ‘Stop McCann Circus’ – a protest notable both for its tone and its language.

But hints of what happened here are more subtle now.

Security grills newly cover the child’s bedroom window – the one through which an abductor was purported to have passed. Security notices regarding privacy and a night watchman service are posted at the entrance – more a deterrent to part-time sleuths than to full-time abductors.

Madeleine McCann became one of more than seven hundred children reported missing in Portugal in 2007. But hers was a case apart, destined for infamy.

Over the course of many years, it involved political and religious leaders of Europe, the mobilisation of considerable policing resources in Portugal, UK and Germany, and fundraising from a global audience as well as wealthy benefactors.

Madeleine’s Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned Limited is a private company. Despite its questing subtitle, the business has ceased its private investigatory activities, on the basis that the British Police now has an active unit on the case. The fund now dedicates itself to running its website and building awareness, eighteen years after the event.

Established twelve days after the disappearance, Kate and Gerry McCann (Madeleine’s parents) are among its six directors. In 2024, Madeleine’s Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned Limited reported almost £1,000,000 in investments.

***

For many years I accepted the dominant narrative of the devastating family tragedy which is any parent’s nightmare. Two hard-working doctors were away for a break with friends. Together, the group made the regrettable decision to place their sleeping children outside of the resort’s babysitting service, in favour of a surveilling rota as they enjoyed their adult company.

Over time, however, from my peripheral judgement – that place where journalism fears to tread – a discordant clash arose.

Why, I asked myself, were the parents so hungry for exposure, including in media markets such as Australia and USA where the benefit to Madeleine was hard to discern?

Why had they developed a combative relationship with the Portuguese police who, after all, had an obvious professional interest in eliminating them from their enquiries, all the faster to find Maddie?

Why, over the years, did they display a litigious fervour which suggested the principal victims were themselves, rather than their child?

And why do the McCanns substantiate their claim that Madeleine is alive to this day on the basis that there is no proof of her death? Surely these medics know that an absence of evidence of death is not proof of life, and thus that their argument risks circularity.

***

A child is gone and no court has determined what happened to her.

Beyond that, the case of Madeleine McCann splits into two narrative worlds.

The dominant story began at 10pm on 3rd May 2007 in Praia da Luz, when Kate McCann ran from her apartment shouting ‘They’ve taken her’.

This abduction claim has profound roots and permeates the perception of most to this day.  Indeed, Operation Grange, led by Scotland Yard, has a remit to find Madeleine and takes abduction as its premise. Every few years, a new suspect emerges in the press – but never, ever, has evidence been presented in court, leading to a conviction.

Then there is the narrative based on the Police Files released by Portuguese Officials once the case was archived in 2008. Here, across thousands of pages, you can read all of the interviews, interrogations, lines of enquiry and evidence amounted.

Chief proponent for this alternative, evidence-based theory of the case is Gonçalo Amaral, the lead detective of the original investigation. Experienced, intellectual and earnest, Amaral became a subject of criticism and mockery in British tabloids which tended to view the McCann case as an antagonistic football match in which the opposition was not the perpetrator of the crime, but rather any foreigner who ‘threatens our McCanns’.

In 2022, Amaral won a suit initiated by the McCanns which led all the way to the Portuguese Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. At issue was his right to publish his views on the case, in a book called ‘The truth of the lie’. These latter courts decided he should indeed have such a right, but it took seven years of legal battles to get there.

It is noteworthy that the McCanns’ dogged pursuit of Madeleine is matched only by their dogged pursuit of the professional once responsible for finding Madeleine.

’He deserves to be miserable and feel pain’, wrote Kate McCann.

***

Many salient points emerge from my plunging in the dark waters of a disappeared child, as related in those police files.

I will mention three.

(1) There is no evidence of an abduction. None. Indeed, the story as asserted by the McCanns fails to add up. No unknown fingerprints were found around Madeleine’s bedroom window; its roller shutters, which the McCann family claimed had been jemmied, were undamaged.

Their friend’s sighting of a faceless man carrying a child in an easterly direction away from Apartment 5A was a dominant part of early investigations, and gave enormous weight to the abduction narrative.

Five years later, the sighting was dismissed as irrelevant. British police interpret that the man was a fellow-tourist and fellow-medic of the McCanns, and in fact carried his child in a westerly direction.

Of course, an abduction without evidence is still possible – but is also an invitation to widen the aperture of possibilities.

(2) There is evidence of injury and death in Apartment 5A. Sniffer dogs detected scents of both human cadaver and human blood in a dozen alerts associated with the McCanns. DNA traces lay behind two. Similar sniffer visits to their friends’ holiday apartments and belongings yielded nothing. The DNA markers were consistent with Madeleine’s but not dispositive. Hence they are not strong enough for presentation in Portuguese courts. And although dogs do not lie, nor do they do well on the witness stand.

Such evidence, nonetheless, invites a serious reappraisal of what happened to Madeleine – exploring why she may have died in Apartment 5A, and under which circumstances.

Indeed, the sniffer dog findings triggered the McCanns’ nomination as official suspects. Soon after, Amaral was dismissed from his role in the case.

(3) The behaviour of the McCanns has not always comported to parents who believe their child snatched, and in serious danger. In Kate McCann’s second formal interview, as a suspect, she chose to answer ‘no comment’ to 47 consecutive questions. Having vowed to stay in Portugal until Madeleine was found, the McCanns left for Britain two days after being deemed suspects. Having castigated the Portuguese forces for their sloth in searching for Madeleine, the McCanns and their friends refused to participate in a police reconstruction – a reliable investigatory means of sorting out inconsistencies and revealing what actually happened. The files relate that the chief justification for not participating was the feared reaction of the media circus; the circus the group of friends themselves began entertaining within hours of the Apartment 5A calamity beginning.

From a Portuguese perspective, perhaps some stones were left unturned. Indeed, although the case is shelved, the Portuguese Supreme Court points out that this does not equate to the McCanns being cleared.

***

No.

We do not know what happened to Madeleine McCann. But nor are we clueless. There is a difference between being open-minded on an open case, and committing to a myopic chase some might deem worthy of wild geese.

The disheartening result of thinking about Madeleine’s case is a reminder that, when the stakes are high and the stakeholders are powerful, things are seldom as simple as they seem.

***

I am writing these final words sitting at the Baptista Café, paces from the bar from which, in 2007, a disappearance was announced.

There has been intermittent drilling sounding from that direction, and I know why. The Tapas Bar is being dismantled, and its innards are now being stacked on the interior wall of the resort, awaiting collection. This initiative is part of a wider construction resurgence which is everywhere to be seen in Luz. A page, finally, is turning.

I linger over a sparkling water, with British and German retirees chatting from the tables which surround me. The winter sun emerges and casts its reflection on the sea, dazzling the village in double light.

But for those angled Moorish walls of Luz, I might imagine myself in a world without shadow.

***