With thanks to Astro for translation.
Here's another doggy-related bit.
- We will presume that the dog wasn’t wrong, ok? – says Francisco.
- Maybe it arrived in the Algarve and got his 201st case wrong – João Tavares replies, with a funny smile.
- Well, chief, what do you think about the notion that a body was in the living room where the dog detected the odor, instead of one of the bedrooms? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to hide it in a bedroom?
- That’s right, Francisco, but what if something happened precisely in the living room, and the body remained there until it was decided what to do with it?
- Just ‘being’ there is not enough. It had to remain there for at least one-and-a-half to two hours – Francisco concluded.
- Correct. And what did it take to get it out of there? At least, to wait for darkness. If it was risky to take it out at night, then during the day it would have been madness – João Tavares finalizes.
The two policemen conclude that there might have been an accident inside the apartment. There was no apparent reason for a voluntary crime. Maybe something unexpected had happened, and the parents decided that the best action would be not to assume the fact. It was a possibility that should be considered, taking into account the work of the English dog, and also the work that had been done by the GNR’s sniffer dog, that had detected the trail of Madeleine between apartment 5A and another apartment, and lost it there.
The same English dog found a series of clues that lead him to the beach at Luz, the beach where Krugel had found the presence of Madeleine, already a cadaver. The other dog detected small spots of blood in the living room, which the investigators could at least affirm that belonged to one of the three children of the McCanns. All of this put together, gave them a vision that was not enough as evidence, but certainly as an indication, supported by the theory that the child had been killed inside the apartment, transported from there into another apartment, and then taken to the beach of Luz.
The beach offered the sea as a possibility to conceal the body of Madeleine. But the interior of the Algarve also offers countless possibilities for someone who wants to hide something, to do so with relative ease and success.
- But then, chief, what about the residues that the dogs detected inside the Renaul Scenic? – Francisco questions.
- Well, that really messed the whole picture up, because finding that type of residues in the area that is located just beneath the spare tire is a complicated matter; come to think of it, it’s not really that complicated… or at least not to me – the chief replies, smiling.
- Sure – Francisco continues – one thing is to transport clothing that might have carried traces from the child. They did move house twice, after all, didn’t they? Another entirely different matter is the location of the dog’s findings. Precisely the spot where one would hide things inside a car, right? In the cavity for the spare tire, more precisely beneath the tire. What a strange thing, chief.
- Strange things happen here with the Portuguese, Francisco. When information was released that we had found these elements in the car, the first thing that happened was a voice from London saying that if something had been found, it could only be due to the fact that we had planted it there. Fantastic, isn’t it? – João Tavares protests with indignation, while he walks across the room, from one side to another and back.
- You know what, chief? I’m fed up with those half-profiles and people telling us that we need the CSI here. Those people have no idea how an investigation unfolds in reality.
Francisco is upset about the notion that a criminal investigation works like in the American tv shows. This is completely wrong. It is one thing to analyze great amounts of blood or other bodily fluids, and quite another to examine minuscule samples, that may even be contaminated, which was the case. Apartment 5A had been covered with digital prints of the dozens of people that had been through it, after the child had disappeared.
Even if some criminal had entered the apartment and taken the little girl, what residues would have been left behind? Unless the person had sneezed or grabbed the door handle without gloves, there would have been nothing.
With luck, some footprints might have been preserved, but by the time that the police arrived on location, tens of people had walked through the apartment, covering the footprints of a possible stranger with their own.
João Tavares did not lack ideas, what he needed now was to place them into position, in order to be able to produce a theory that could explain the events of that evening, and to sustain it on facts that could be proved in a court room. This seemed like a gigantic task to him.
