Madeleine v the call that wasn’t

Kate McCann raised the alarm that Madeleine was missing at around 10.05pm on 3 May 2007.

According to Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter at the the Telegraph, on 29 Apr 2016,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/madeleine-mccann-latest-are-police-any-closer-to-knowing-the-tru/

“In the nine years since Madeleine McCann went missing from a holiday apartment in Portugal, myriad theories about what happened to her have taken root, but only one fact remains uncontested: that she was reported missing at 10.14pm on the evening of Thursday, May 3, 2007.

It was at that point, when police were called, that the clock started ticking on the biggest missing persons investigation for decades, a search which remains very much active to this day.

Facts, the hard currency of any police investigation, have proved almost uniquely elusive; every sighting, every timing and every witness statement has been disputed in the years that have elapsed since.”

Gordon Rayner’s bio says he joined the Telegraph in 2007, and I can date an article to him to Sep 2007, in which he is described as a Chief Reporter, so presumably he joined in that capacity.

This particular article has been running in the Telegraph for years, updated with a new line or two, as and when, but basically the same article.

What do Mr Rayner’s opening paragraphs tell us. First, that the police were called at 10.14pm on 3 May 2007, and second, that there are no other uncontested facts.

However, the telephone company records for the calls made from the Ocean Club to the GNR in Lagos show the first call was at 10.41pm, or about 35 minutes after the alarm was raised.

So where does Mr Rayner’s idea of a 10.14 call originate? The provenance can be traced back to around 9 Sep 2007. The Telegraph, via Chief Reporter Gordon Rayner, on 11 Sep 2007, came up with 10.14pm. The Times on 9 Sep 2007 made it 10.14 to 10.15pm, attributed the story to the McCanns, and fleshed it out with the tale that this call was organised by a friend.

This provenance almost certainly goes further back than this. The McCanns were made arguidos on 7 Sep 2007, and I doubt this non-call was top of their agenda around 9 Sep 2007. However, there is a Times report by Penny Wark dated 4 Sep 2007 which covers a lot of ground in the case but makes no mention of this alleged call.

Who was the friend who made this non-call? That seems to be Matthew Oldfield, the same person who made the non-check on Madeleine at 9.30pm. In Matthew’s rogatory, he says he went to OC reception to request that the police were called, but did not insist on it. He left the Ocean Club reception thinking that Madeleine might have returned after having wandered off, so presumably he was not yet convinced by the abduction angle.

This non-call to the GNR appears to be pivotal. In a building in Lisbon, Securitas Portugal would be the next to call the GNR in Lagos, to report an incident in Odiáxere.

This is a list of the calls to the GNR in Lagos on 3 May 2007. It’s in an odd order, but there is no record of a call from the Ocean Club until 10.41pm, with a second at 10.53pm. This can be labelled as the ‘hurry-up’ call to the GNR patrol officers. Greentrust is the name of the Portuguese company used by Mark Warner to administer the Ocean Club.

If you look at the list of calls you will see that there were 3 from Securitas Direct Portugal, 214147000, to the GNR Lagos, 282762809. After Matthew Oldfield’s non-call around 10.14 or 10.15, the next real call to the GNR was from Securitas, at 10.30.

Here is a map of where Securitas was located re Lisbon. The GNR training school and dog unit was at Queluz, about 2 miles to the north.

The call to the GNR Matthew Oldfield did not enforce at around 10.14 meant the GNR Lagos responded to the Securitas call at 10.30, and headed instead to an incident in Odiáxere, a fair distance from Luz.

The second call from Securitas to Lagos GNR was at 10.44. The hurry-up call from the Ocean Club to the GNR was 9 minutes later. Securitas made a third call at 11.19pm.

The responding officers said they were at Valverde when they were told to hurry up. I don’t know what delay there was between the incoming phone call from the Ocean Club and passing that information to the patrol car. The call from the Ocean Club to the GNR in Lagos ended around 10.54pm, so presumably it was after this time.

There is another call of interest on this sheet. 964098114 called GNR Lagos at 11.09pm, lasting 41 seconds. This mobile number was noted as belonging to Silvia Batista. That call I will park for another post.

Madeleine & the English enigma

Much has been made of the issue of people within the Ocean Club or within the Portuguese judicial authorities not speaking English. This is important, particularly with respect to the first two hours after Kate McCann discovered Madeleine was missing.

Did Ocean Club receptionist Helder Luis not understand Matthew Oldfield when he said a near-four-year-old child was missing and requested that the police should be brought in?

Did the first GNR officers to respond and who arrived as the first at the Ocean Club struggle with a language barrier?

Was Silvia Batista required as an interpreter in the first few hours?

The issue of whether interpreters were required later, when statements were being taken from witnesses who did not speak Portuguese, is not relevant. The law requires that such witnesses are afforded a translator.

So, in the period from 10pm on 3 May 2007 to midnight, how much of an obstacle was the language barrier in the Madeleine McCann incident?

We now need to turn to Portimão hospital, and the fact that my daughter is due to give birth shortly. A few days ago, she had what felt like early warning signs, so she was rushed from Luz to the hospital. And there she suffered.

No one appeared to speak English. At one point, in considerable pain, she pressed the call buzzer. A nurse duly arrived. My daughter asked if the nurse spoke English. The nurse replied that she did not, turned around, and walked out. If you are wondering whether the nurse went to get someone who spoke English, she did not. No one else came, and my daughter was simply left there.

There is more to that episode but perhaps we should fast-forward a couple of days. My daughter is now out of the hospital, is feeling a bit better, and was taken to Lagos to get her nails done. The Portuguese people running the salon speak excellent English, including jokes in English and four letter expletives. They are curious as to why my daughter has a bruise the size of a side plate on her left arm. That is the bit I cut out of the Portimão hospital story earlier on.

The tale of the visit to hospital was told by my daughter, and the salon people were livid. They explain first that this is not xenophobia, that all people get treated badly alike, and that everyone in Portimão hospital speaks English.

How can this be true?

For decades, it has been mandatory within Portugal that children in their first 8 years of school are taught English. Anyone under 60 would have been subject to this requirement.

After those 8 years, it is still mandatory that Portuguese schoolchildren learn a language, but it does not have to be English. The nail salon staff pointed out a pertinent fact. After spending 8 years learning English, not many schoolchildren then swap to a different language.

Let me dump in 3 possibilities.

First, the state schools, the ones that the general Portuguese public go to, are not highly rated here, quite the opposite. I do not know how true or otherwise this view is. However, a possibility exists that despite 8 years of teaching when kids are best at learning, little English went in.

Second, it is possible that no matter how good the education, the people involved in the Madeleine response were simply not good at learning languages.

Third, it is possible that despite learning Portuguese, the responders had little chance to practice it. This is by far the weakest suggestion. Those people who had risen through the ranks so that they were not front-line, whether in the Ocean Club or the GNR or the PJ, might get away with this, on the grounds that they conducted most talks with their staff in Portuguese i.e. their English was rusty.

However, there is no point in having a person working 24hr reception in the Ocean Club, a resort dominated by English tourists, if the receptionist could not speak English.

Equally, given the number of English tourists on the Algarve, and the number of incidents involving English speakers that GNR officers have to attend, it is difficult to comprehend that there was a major language barrier. Interpreter Silvia Batista was quite possibly a bonus, rather than a necessity.

Let’s return to the tale of Portimão hospital and the view of the staff in the nail salon.

One lady in the salon said she worked in the bombeiros. These are the people who provide fire-fighting services in Portugal, and also the ambulance service. Her role is to accompany the ambulance crew, as she speaks sufficiently good English to handle translation of medical terms.

Another person pointed out that 8 years of English is not good enough to qualify you as a nurse in Portugal. When a student nurse goes to university, it is mandatory to undertake further English. I do not know for certain why this is the case, but the obvious answer is that nurses need to be able to ask about and understand medical terms in English.

Just to wrap up, the English word ‘abduction’ translates as ‘abdução’ in Portuguese. My nearest phonetics would be – ab-douche-ow. Bear in mind that the standard way of translating a word ending in -tion in English is to replace it with -çao in Portuguese, and that this is so simple it would have been taught in school during those 8 years of English.

If anyone was stressing abduction in the earliest hours, it should have got through to the receptionist and it should have got through to the GNR officers, with or without a translator.

Madeleine – Golden hours 1

What happened in the first 2 hours after it was discovered that Madeleine was missing?

This may be irrelevant if the disappearance occurred earlier. Any abductor with a 15 minute head start could be well away, whether on foot or by car.

Kate McCann checked around 10pm and found that Madeleine was not in apartment 5A. What happened between 10pm and midnight?

For the spine of this examination, I am starting with Kate’s book “Madeleine”. Comments in italics are mine.

Please note I have zero interest in looking at events from a ‘correct behaviour’ viewpoint. I don’t know what ‘correct behaviour’ is in this situation. Page numbers refer to the hardback version.

P71. At 10pm I went back to the apartment to check myself.

What did Kate see on her journey?

P72. Kate realised Madeleine was not in her bed. She went to the parent’s bedroom, and Madeleine was not in those beds either. She returned to the children’s bedroom, and saw that the window was wide open and the shutter was raised all the way up. She went to the bedroom window and looked out.

There is no mention of calling for Madeleine. Kate does not tell what she saw through the bedroom window when she looked out. Kate did not go out the front door to check the street.

P72 Kate then checked apartment 5A in its entirety, including the wardrobe in the children’s bedroom, all the cupboards in the kitchen, the wardrobes in the parent’s room and the bathroom. She did all this within about 15 seconds.

There is no mention of calling for Madeleine during this phase of the search.

P72 Kate rushed back to the Tapas restaurant to tell the Tapas 9 that Madeleine had been taken.

Kate did not check the garden, and did not call out for Madeleine.

What did Kate see on this journey?

P72 After the Tapas group was informed, they rushed back to the apartment. Dianne remained at the Tapas restaurant. (Jane was in her apartment looking after her children.) The group then re-checked apartment 5A.

No one appears to have called for Madeleine in this phase.

Kate did not say what she saw on this journey.

P73 Kate says she knew Madeleine had been abducted. She went into the car park and ran from end to end, shouting for Madeleine.

There is no mention of going onto the street to scan it up and down.

P73 Gerry lowered the shutter, then rushed outside and found it could be raised from that side too.

There is no mention of what Gerry saw in the car park.

P73 Gerry, David, Russell and Matt split into pairs. And dashed around the adjacent apartment blocks, meeting back at 5A within a couple of minutes.

There is no mention of who paired with whom. There is no detail of which adjacent apartment blocks they went around. There is no mention of whether they were calling or not. There is no mention of how far they went, in any direction. There is no mention of what they saw.

P73 Just after 10 past 10, Gerry asked Matt to go to the Ocean Club reception and phone the police.

The police were first phoned at 10.41, according to the records in the PJ Files. Did Matt go and ask?

P73. The screaming and shouting was attracting people to the the front and rear of apartment 5A.

There is no mention of who these people were or where they came from. There is no mention of asking them if they had seen a little girl as they went to 5A.

p73 . The Mark Warner people had rounded up as many staff as they could. Close to 10:30, they activated the company’s missing child search protocol.

P74. At 10:35 the police had still not arrived, so Gerry asked Matt to go to 24 hour reception to find out what was happening.

The PJ Files show the first call to the police was at 10:41.

P74. John Hill, the Mark Warner resort manager, arrived at the veranda to the rear of the apartment.

There is no mention of which route he took to get there, and what he saw on that route.

P74. Gerry had been over to the Mini Club above the 24 hour reception to see if Madeleine had been left somewhere, and gone to a place she knew.

Gerry’s route, what he saw, and whether he spoke to anyone is not mentioned.

P74 Our friends were running to and from the Tapas area, pleading with people to ring the police again from there.

P74 The friends discussed what should be done. This involved road blocks and informing foreign border authorities.

P74. Later Russell went off somewhere with our camera, with digital photos of Madeleine.

Where was the somewhere?

P74. Gerry asked Kate to remain in 5A with the twins, in case Madeleine was found. He was then running from pillar to post.

There is no description of where Gerry went or what he saw.

P75. At some point Emma Knight, the Mark Warner customer-care manager came in and sat on the bed near me.

There is no mention of where Emma came from or what she saw.

P75. Another British woman, in her late 40s or early 50s turned up on her veranda.

There is no mention of where she came from or what she saw.

P75. Then a lady appeared on a balcony above, about 11pm, before police arrived.

P76. It was not until about 11:10pm that two officers arrived, from Lagos. The language barrier was hampering communication. David talked about roadblocks and border notification, and Kate said her 3 children might have been sedated.

There is no mention of the route the police took or what they saw.

P76. Sílvia Batista had arrived to help out with translation.

P77 Jane immediately reported her sighting of Tannerman to the police. Gerry knew of this but kept it from Kate to the morning.

There is no mention of the time at which the police were informed, nor whether any of the party decided to search further in the direction taken by Tannerman.

P77. The GNR officers looked around. Gerry phoned his sister Trisha to tell her what had happened. Trisha and her husband phoned the Foreign Office in London, the British Consulate in the Algarve and the British Embassy in Lisbon.

P77. At 11.52pm Gerry spoke Kate’s uncle Brian and his wife. Brian then phoned the Foreign Office in London.

It is not clear why this timed precisely to 11:52.

P77. Just after midnight, Gerry phoned Kate’s mum and dad.

P78. The GNR escalated the case to the PJ around midnight. It took over an hour for them to arrive.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

In this timeline, the British diplomatic services in the UK and in Portugal were informed before the PJ were made aware of the case.

With two hours elapsed since Kate’s discovery, an abductor could be 8 miles away on foot, across the border with Spain, approaching Lisbon, or have set sail from Lagos, Portimão or several other marinas. The golden hours were already gone.

Kate’s book “Madeleine” does not mention the deployment of dogs that night or giving the officers something with Madeleine’s scent. The dog team arrived shortly before 2am on 4 May 2007, so that is outside the time span of interest here. This simply points out that Kate’s version of what happened that night omits elements that are significant.

Madeleine – Sílvia Batista

The next person to be interviewed in Dec 2014, Sílvia Maria Correia Ramos Batista, makes more sense.

Her first statement was made on 7 May 2007.

Sílvia was Head of Maintenance and Services and had worked in the Ocean Club since 1986. She was responsible for taking on employees and looking after the functioning of flats, pools, gates etc.. Her husband, João Carlos Silva Batista, was responsible for the same, but when that work was sub-contracted out to other companies.

She left for home in Lagos around 18:00 on 3 May 2007. At about 22:30, George Robin Crossland, called to inform her what had happened, and she headed for the resort. A search was started throughout Luz, and later the GNR arrived.

Her first statement is fairly uninformative. Her second statement moved things on. It was given on 15 May 2007, the day after Robert Murat was made an arguido.

She had known the Murats for about 30 years. Mr Murat had worked in construction and had died some years ago. She did not know if the Murats had a son.

Again, she says she was called by her boss (Crossland) about 22:30 on 3 May. When she arrived, there were about 60 people around 5A, looking for the girl. There was a man there, helping to search, and she found out later he was Robert Murat. She makes no mention of this man doing any translation at the time, but goes on to say he helped the GNR in Lagos, and the PJ, as a translator. She thought 3 other people would be able clarify if Robert was there.

She then says she first spoke to Robert in a break between translating statements. She was not sure if this was on 5 May, 6 May or 7 May.

It is clear from the time of Sílvia’s second statement that the PJ officers were trying to get independent verification as to whether Robert Murat was present on 3 May.

Sílvia Batista then went on to make a third statement, on 26 July 2007.

This time round, she was alerted between 22:30 and 23:00, and headed for the Ocean Club. She arrived shortly before the GNR. She went to apartment 5A, where there were several people inside the flat with a similar number outside. She entered the apartment but left straight away without speaking to anyone as she was told the GNR were at the Ocean Club 24 hour reception.

Gerry was there with another man she does not recognise. Gerry made a gesture like an Arab praying and he screamed twice. Gerry, the man and Sílvia went in the GNR car to apartment 5A. The she translated between the GNR and the family, and in that time postcard sized photos were obtained and passed to the GNR commander.

She says that she was aware the group insisted on ‘abducted’ rather than ‘disappeared’ and discussed calling the press, from the beginning.

She went into the bedroom with Gerry and the GNR, and Gerry described the state of the room when it had been discovered.

Sílvia goes on to explain the scene in the apartment, with many people entering and exiting. The PJ arrived and the twins were taken upstairs to apartment 5H (the Paynes). Sílvia was asked by Kate McCann to get some of the twins’ items from their bedroom in 5A, and she did.

At some point, Sílvia translated information from a lady (Jane Tanner). The lady had seen a man walking in the street, carrying a child.

By the time of her interview in December 2014, both Sílvia and her husband had been made redundant by the Ocean Club.

Sílvia appears to be in a position to provide information about a number of aspects of the case, including some of the people interviewed and the working procedures of the Ocean Club. However, this still seems like a methodical grind rather than surgical precision.