Rose Rouse is a journalist who lives in North West London with her 20-year-old son. For the past 25 years, she’s written about everything from jazz eccentric Sun Ra in Harlesden, to rave parties in Goa, and from belly dancing in Turkey to fathers’ relationships with their teenage sons, from publications like the Face, the Guardian and the Daily Express.

Missing

By Rose Rouse

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Rose Rouse
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84454-497-4

Contents

Title Page,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Madeleine McCann,
I Miss My Sweet, Gorgeous Son,
I Just Want My Husband to Come Home,
Why Hasn’t Anyone Found My Mum?,
I Loved My Mum and Dad, but I Missed My Birth Parents,
My Son Did Not Run Away From Home,
I Didn’t Know If My Little Girl Was Dead or Alive,
I Found My Dad 30 Years Later,
We’ve Never Stopped Waiting For You To Walk In,
My Big Brother Is Out There Somewhere, Living Like a Saint,
My Dream Came True When I Found My Half-Brothers,
I Ran Away and Hated It,
Your Mother and I Think About You Every Day,
I Was Reunited with My Mother and We’re So Alike,
Epilogue,
Resources and Helplines,
Copyright,

CHAPTER 1

Madeleine McCann

It’s Madeleine McCann’s fourth birthday, 12 May 2007. A white card with the words MUMMY, DADDY, SEAN AND AMELIE WILL SEE YOU SOON is tied to a pink balloon and released into the pale blue sky in Leicestershire, not far from the village of Rothley where the McCann family live. Her great uncle, Brian Kennedy, is responsible for releasing that balloon and the 39 others, which fill the sky with their pinkness and their prayers of hope.

The awful truth is that Madeleine isn’t actually with her mummy, daddy and twin siblings to celebrate this birthday because she was abducted nine days earlier.

The McCanns are a modern 30-something, middle-class couple with three children. Gerry McCann is a consultant cardiologist; Kate McCann is a GP. At home, they have a nanny because they both work. At the end of April 2007, they flew to the Algarve in Portugal with a group of friends and their children for a two-week holiday. They were all staying in apartments at the Mark Warner Ocean Club Resort at Praia da Luz. Everything was wonderful – the kids had activity clubs, there was a beach nearby, the adults could mix playing with their children and having some time on their own – until the unimaginable happened.

On Thursday, 3 May, the McCanns were eating dinner with their group of eight friends in the resort’s tapas restaurant, which Gerry described as ‘like having dinner in your garden’. What he meant was that the restaurant was a stone’s throw away from their apartment. As usual, the children – Madeleine and the two-year-old twins – were asleep in one of the bedrooms and the McCanns were checking to see that they were fine every half an hour. Just as they had done most evenings. Just as their friends were all doing. They had decided not to use the resort’s babysitting service because they didn’t want strangers to be involved with caring for their children. They also left the patio doors open, which allowed easy access to the bedroom where the children were all sleeping. Viewed retrospectively, this may appear to be a strange decision to make, but the McCanns thought they were in a secure haven and they considered it less of a fire hazard to leave the doors open.

At 9.30pm, Gerry checked on their three children and found they were all sleeping peacefully. However, at 10pm, when Kate went to check, Madeleine had disappeared. She was no longer in her bed. Gerry and Kate were immediately plunged into a terrifying new universe; a dark, dark place that they had never in their worst nightmares imagined. Their gorgeous little girl – who would become famous through the photograph released showing her blonde and smiling by the swimming poo