Authors: Gordon Burn
Gerry McCann was a heart specialist at the Glenfield Hospital in Leicester. But it was his background in sports medicine which had opened doors to the likes of David Beckham and Alex Ferguson and Manchester United’s Portuguese winger, Cristiano Ronaldo. Both teams at Celtic’s home game against Aberdeen on the last day of the Scottish season had worn yellow armbands to mark Madeleine’s fourth birthday. Four days later, on 16 May, Gerry’s brother John, accompanied by the former England rugby captain Martin Johnson, had launched the official
fundraising website dedicated to Madeleine, and the same day his sister Philomena – ‘Auntie Phil’ – had travelled from her home in Glasgow to meet the prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, in his office at the House of Commons; the ‘Iron Chancellor’ had apparently shed a tear as he held her hand.
Gerry McCann and Kate Healy were clever children from working-class backgrounds, in Glasgow and Liverpool respectively. Both their fathers earned their livings manually, as joiners, and they had both aspired to become, and after the long slog of study had eventually qualified as, doctors. Much of the hostility directed towards them from the early days of the search for their daughter seemed to stem from the fact that they had been educated out of their class. Their accents – Gerry’s in particular, which was heard most often – connected them to the backgrounds they had grown away from, while their profession was an unmistakeable sign of where they were heading.
In the meantime, in midlife – they were both thirty-nine – they were unrooted; they fitted nowhere. The sports-leisure wear that they wore for photo opportunities in Praia – Kate’s ghetto-style trainers, Gerry’s cropped trousers – seemed too up-to-the-minute for people who called themselves doctors; the names they had given their daughters – ‘Madeleine’, with its Proustian resonance; ‘Amelie’ rather than plain Emily – appeared pretentiously Frenchified and ‘European’ to people of their parents’ generation.
That was one difference between the McCanns and Steve and Melanie Jones: the Joneses were part of a community that they knew and that knew them; they belonged. And their belonging, given vivid expression in the way they were embraced by, first, the Goodison and then the wider Merseyside tribes – the hated ‘Johnny Todd’, for example, was played at a Liverpool game for the first time in living memory, a few days after their son’s murder; the red of Liverpool became as common as the blue of Everton bunted across his shrine – was seen to represent a kind of authenticity that in the McCanns was lacking. By August Kate and Gerry had already emigrated to the new territory established by the likes of Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson, where networking, influence and giving are inextricably intertwined.
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.