by Gordon Burn
Among his friends Gerry McCann enjoyed a reputation as a joker, the fiery centre of any social gathering; his loud Glaswegian accent would come out on those occasions. But the Gerry who presented himself to the television cameras and in the newspapers was the Dr Sobersides (with a certain Roy Keane-like truculence) his tremulous patients were ushered in to see about their arteriosclerosis and pulmonary infarctions and to have angiograms and cardiac ultrasounds and other fearsome procedures initiated. His hand in their chest, working under the rib-cage; Swan-Ganz catheters inside the heart, the pressure transducer at the tip of the catheter, the tube hoovering up the spurting blood.
After a lifetime of regenerating spare parts, the nerve and muscle cells’ capacity for rejuvenation gradually shuts down. One after another, cardiac muscle cells cease to live – the heart loses strength.
The maximal rate attainable by a perfectly healthy heart falls by one beat every year. The rapidity of circulation slows down: each heart beat pushes out less blood than it did a year earlier. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate, the blood pressure tends to rise somewhat. One third of people over the age of sixty-five have hypertension.
As the pump ages, its inner lining and valves thicken, calcifications appear in the valves and muscle.
The left ventricle, the most powerful part of the cardiac pump and the source of the muscular strength that nourishes every organ and tissue of the body, is injured in virtually every heart attack – each cigarette, each pat of butter, each slice of meat and each increment of hypertension make the coronary arteries stiffen their resistance to the flow of blood.
Digitalis, morphine, theophylline, ergot, adrenalin, stramomium, terramycin, coramine (the means to jump-start the heart).
‘Irregular squirming’ – the terminal condition called ventricular fibrillation, the agonal act of a heart that is becoming reconciled to its eternal rest.
Medicine is the profession most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying.
When the cadaver dogs, two liver-and-white springers – Keela, able to detect minute quantities of blood, and Eddie, trained to detect dead bodies – were flown to Portugal from Britain at the end of July at the request of the Policia Judiciaria, unverified stories were leaked to the press saying that the dogs had detected traces of Madeleine’s blood or bodily fluids on Kate McCann’s skirt and on her bible. The claims were dismissed by her friends on the grounds that her job had brought her into contact with half a dozen dead bodies in just the weeks prior to their family holiday starting.
Modern death in tiled hospital rooms, and silent technologised removal. The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.
Football for the spectator represents youth, vitality, community, spontaneity, the universal experience of acquiring a place in the world. Doctors, which both the McCanns are, serve as reminders of our inevitable personal, organic decay.
Something interesting occurred as the weeks and months of Madeleine’s disappearance lengthened: Kate McCann’s Scouser accent, not much more than an inflection at first, thickened and became what it must have been when she was still being shaped by Liverpool and she was young and being chatted up by Scally youths in the pubs (or maybe already the trendy eateries and health clubs and rugby-club bars).
The coarseness of the accent at times seemed at odds with the smoothness of her skin and purity of her complexion; the still unblotched colour – the mask-like, magazine-model good looks which had been widely commented on and were credited with the blanket coverage the case was being given compared to other previous and already forgotten snatched-child stories.
She had finally become pregnant with Madeleine in late 2002 through IVF, and in 2004 became pregnant again with twins. The McCanns spent that year in Amsterdam, where he was working on new heart-imaging techniques. Back in England they moved into their large house in the upmarket development in Rothley. They had family connections with the village: Kate’s uncle, Brian Kennedy, and his wife Janet lived there and the Kennedys were regarded as pillars of the community. In the weeks after the catastrophe in Portugal he took care of Kate and Gerry’s house, forwarded mail and fielded questions from local reporters and journalists who had been sent up to do backgrounders and ‘colour’ pieces in the area.
*
Many years before, following a series of rapes and violent sexual murders in villages on the other side of Leicester, an American, the LA policeman turned best-selling novelist Joseph Wambaugh, had come to the East Midlands to gather material for a true-crime book called The Blooding. With an outsider’s eye, Wambaugh had noted ‘cottages with bottle-glass leaded windows’ and ‘tall young villagers passing in and out of cottage doors, in a semi-genuflection’, but also that the city of Leicester itself, ‘like most of Britain’, had acquired a large Asian and East Indian population. ‘The people of Leicester have acquired an unfair reputation for being offhand’, he wrote. ‘Yet it’s hard to judge people harshly when they sprinkle their speech with endearments like “m’duck” (it sounds like “midook”).’
Wambaugh’s primary interest, and the subject of his book, was a scientific discovery that in the mid-Eighties had only just been announced: the technique known as ‘genetic fingerprinting’. It was Wambaugh’s conviction that DNA testing was going to transform forensic science as much as standard fingerprinting did in the 1890s that had brought him to Leicester University and the lab of the geneticist Alec Jeffreys.
In a fringe project spun off from his main project, which involved a study to determine how genes evolve, Jeffreys had unexpectedly hit upon a method of mapping human genes that produced a DNA image which was individually specific. By showing huge numbers of genetic markers resembling the bar codes used to identify supermarket items, Jeffreys proved that it was possible to positively identify a person using even the tiniest sample of blood or saliva or semen: the only people on the face of the planet with identical DNA would be identical twins. The little circumstances of no two lives anywhere in the world are just alike.
It was an accident of history that a scientific discovery made in their adopted home city twenty years earlier would lead to the McCanns being declared arguidos by the Portuguese police. There is also the odd coincidence of the McCanns’ friend Dr David Payne, one of the ‘Tapas 7’ who was having dinner with them on the night Madeleine disappeared, being a senior research fellow at Leicester University in the laboratories where Sir Alec Jeffreys, enormously wealthy now from the patents he holds, still works.
*
Media mouthpiece was a new role for Kate McCann’s uncle, Brian Kennedy, but not entirely unfamiliar: he was a recently retired headmaster and so used to keeping unruly elements in check. He knew the protocols from many years’ exposure to victims’ families on the television news, and the questions in the first few weeks tended to be of the human-interest sort and politely reticent rather than probing. (It would take a full month from the disappearance for a German reporter to break rank and ask the McCanns how they felt about the fact that ‘more and more people seem [ed] to be pointing the finger’ at them, during a press conference in Berlin.)
Brian Kennedy was usually filmed against the war memorial in Rothley where several hundred people, including the new classmates Madeleine was due to join in September, had left soft toys and flowers and tied yellow ribbons to the railings. Nevertheless, in those early days when the story was still breaking, welcome back-up was provided by Esther McVey, a media-savvy schoolfriend of Kate McCann’s from Liverpool and another high achiever. In her twenties she had been a presenter for BBC children’s television and a talking hair-do on the breakfast show GMTV before becoming involved with numerous charities and active in party politics: she was the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Wirral West in the 2005 General Election. (Justine McGuinness, the McCann family spokesman in Praia da Luz, had fought West Dorset for the Lib Dems in 2005 and come second to the Conservative front-bencher Oliver Letwin.)
By the summer
of 2007 Esther McVey was the managing director of her own company Making It (UK) Ltd, as well as the founder of Winning Women, an organisation described on her website as being ‘about Fun, Information, Infrastructure and mixing with Influential People, capturing opportunities that come your way in life’. Her biggest scalp and the most impressive IP she had met so far that year, she blogged, was Barack Obama, the man chasing Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. As somebody who had followed Obama’s ‘political fairytale’ and watched ‘his mesmeric performances’ on the news, she had jumped at the chance to have lunch with him – ‘I flew out at the weekend to meet this political phenomena [sic]’ – when an old friend left a message inviting her to meet up in Washington with him ‘and a couple of guys’.
‘Billy and a couple of guys turned out to be: the chairman of NBC, the publisher of People magazine, various senior CEOs of business, all very successful business people and family people, Kelly Rowlands of Destiny’s Child who provided us with some beautiful acoustic songs before lunch, myself and Barack Obama!’
Invited to review the papers on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning politics programme on BBC1 some months after becoming one of the seven directors of the fundraising company Find Madeleine: Leaving No Stone Unturned, as well as its official spokesperson, she reprised her Obama encounter: ‘He exuded a calm warmth. If he’d been a musician he’d have been a laidback jazz singer – not pop, not punk, but steady and worldly, not singing the blues but he knew what the blues were and wanted a way out of there. He was tall and slim, athletic long-distance-runner physique – no doubt a discipline he’ll need in the presidential marathon to come.’
A rumour ran around the online forums and chat-rooms for a while that Gerry McCann’s father had been a leading light in the Labour party and that this explained his access to Gordon Brown and, through him, to the Browns’ good friend in Scotland, J. K. Rowling. Jo Rowling was among a number of public figures who had quickly come forward with offers of rewards totalling two and a half million pounds for information leading to Madeleine’s safe return; she also asked booksellers to put up posters of Madeleine when the seventh and last in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, went on sale at the climax of a global publicity push at midnight on 21 July.
The chatter and twitter about Gerry McCann’s father wasn’t true. It was a minor squall in the blizzard of rumour that blew through that summer. But Gerry – somebody used to riding the high of sleep deprivation, dressed day and night in surgical scrubs, banks of beepers on his belt, pockets cluttered with pen-lights, EKG calipers, haemostats, stethoscopes, seven-gauge, seven-inch needles, with a twelve-inch trail of tubing carried casually in its sterile packaging, ready, should he be the first at a cardiac arrest (a CODE BLUE) to slide needle under collarbone and into the great subclavian vein, feeding the serpent tubing down the vena cava in a cathartic ritual that established medical mastery over the human body – Gerry was increasingly featured in the papers ‘striding purposefully between meetings with senior politicians and religious leaders, zealously banging the drum for missing children’. To his supporters, he was an inspiring example of somebody who (in the well-known alliterative of the self-help mantra) was turning adversity to advantage, transforming personal tragedy into something positive and finding in his own catastrophe a cause.
Like their friend Esther McVey, it did seem to be the case that Gerry was able to command access to famous and powerful people such as Rowling and Richard Branson and the owner of TopShop, Sir Philip Green, who put his Learjet at the McCanns’ disposal for their tour of European capitals in early June.
The appointment of Michael Caplan, QC, and Angus McBride of the fashionable London firm of Kingsley Napley as their legal advisers set tongues wagging and sparked a whole new chain of real and frenziedly Googled-up connections. The results showed that Tony Blair was reported to have contacted Kingsley Napley at the beginning of the year over the threat of arrest in the cash for honours scandal. Other recent high-profile clients included the England football captain, John Terry, over an alleged nightclub brawl, and the self-styled ‘rogue trader’, the dodgy banker Nick Leeson.
Michael Caplan (described in Chambers legal directory as ‘the weapon of choice for battleship cases’) was best known for two things: his obsession with secrecy, and for representing the repressive Chilean dictator Pinochet who was arrested just after having tea with his friend Lady Thatcher and faced extradition to Spain. When he was freed on the grounds of his deteriorating health, Caplan personally saw Pinochet onto the plane back to Santiago and made sure the General took with him the inscribed plate that Margaret Thatcher, having made it clear that he was the only person she trusted to carry out her wishes, had placed in Caplan’s safekeeping.
The Blairs spent the summer at their friend Sir Cliff Richard’s villa in Barbados. Around the time Caplan and McBride were photographed stepping through the front door at Orchard House in Rothley for the first time, Cherie was snapped on the Côte d’Azure with her best new friend, Bono. It was the dog days of the summer, and the Blairs were by then staying as the guests of Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior and other luxury brands, on his yacht on the Riviera.
For a long time – for much of the last century, in fact, wrote Richard Schickel – social commentators have been decrying the steady erosion of our old sense of community. In this context, the celebrity community, which has about it aspects of the extended family, offers a kind of compensation. There is a widespread belief that there is a small and seemingly cohesive group of well-known individuals who share close communal ties with one another at the high centre of our public life – ties that are enhanced by the fact that they share the pleasures and problems inherent in their celebrity status, no matter how disparate their routes to that status have been.
‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition – a hotline to senior members of the government, for example – were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia. ‘We don’t have amazing contacts or anything, we just have strong friends. Everyone brainstormed and became very creative. They did what they could and if that meant asking well-known faces, celebrities, it was done. They are normal people too. They wanted to help.’
*
The house, backing on to fields, surrounded by countryside used by the local hunt, so close to the properties the Sunday Times had singled out as the most expensive in the East Midlands, their private pools and tennis courts screened behind dark bosks and bushes at street level but clearly visible from the air, downloadable on Flash Earth, zoom in, zoom out, the burglars’ bible, was a statement of what they had achieved.
Gerry had spent three weeks building a climbing frame in the long back garden, an expanse of lawn laid by the developers where forested orchard had once stood, all trace of that old part of the village erased, before they left for their holiday in the Algarve. Along with a children’s slide, the coloured Jungle Gym frame was just visible in the aerial shots of the McCann home (a term that always sounded more ominous than ‘house’ when used in captions) that started appearing online and in the papers.
Police began the excavation of bodies from the back garden of a house in the rundown south-coast resort of Margate soon after the McCanns returned from Portugal in early September. And there was a correspondence between the helicopter pictures of the crime scene with its canvas screens and fingertip searches and methodical police activity, and photographs of the McCann house in Rothley, sealed and silent and just as they left it as a family of five in late April.
The house had anyway already become contaminated by then, by association. The interrogation of apartment 5A at the Mark Warner Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine vanished on the night of 3 May, had been exhaustive and unrelentin
g. The inner life of the architecture had been forensically examined by investigators on the ground and by being made the subject of diagrammatic illustrations, scale models, computer graphics with X-ray perspective and fly-away walls.
There had been re-enactments using actors, grainy montages on YouTube, dimly filmed guided tours of other apartments in the block with a shifty pornographic ambience (‘And this here is the bathroom!’), the distance between apartment and tapas bar paced out by video sleuths and posted on the internet as a prompt for more superheated speculation and outlandish gossip.
The body dogs Keela and Eddie had sniffed out every inch of the interior; individual fibres had been identified and removed for investigation.
So there was that contamination of the McCanns’ otherwise blameless house in the Midlands caused by the generic scene-of-crime-style overhead pictures that had been put into circulation; caused too by the transference of the atmosphere of uncanniness from the holiday flat in Praia da Luz to the house in Rothley – from one place connected with Madeleine to the other; the spectre of demonistic or magic forces.
The connection, more a mood or a suspicion up to that point, was given concrete form when, on their return to Britain, the McCanns appointed a man whose face had once been familiar to millions of viewers from the Six O’Clock and the Ten O’Clock News as their press spokesman.
Clarence Mitchell’s was one of those television faces which had never registered as missing until it suddenly reappeared. For many years a thread in the broad tapestry of the national pageant, reporting mostly on the misfortunes of strangers but also the deaths of notable figures such as Jill Dando and the Queen Mother, he had eventually been reassigned to the BBC’s round-the-clock, rolling news operation, News 24. Put on the graveyard shift newscasting through the night, one night he did the 1 a.m. and the 2 a.m. but then closed his eyes and slept through the three o’clock bulletin, after which, having served the Corporation man and boy, he had severed his ties.