Well exactly - sorry I should have read your response before replying as I have pretty much repeated exactly what you have said.
I think the whole argument, like a lot of other things when it comes to Madeleine McCann's case is just too complicated to be workable; if we ever find out what happened to Madeleine we will probably discover that the explanation was the simplest one.
The suggestion that an individual would not immediately take action if a child arrived hypothetically at their doorstep in the middle of the night strikes me as being an odd one.
One Sunday morning some years ago an uncommunicative, sweet elderly lady arrived at our door. It was chilly and although properly dressed her outerwear was a light cardigan. She had slippers on her feet.
We of course took her in.
We assumed she had wandered from the nearby nursing home; actually, she hadn't ... but that is another story.
It was incumbent on us to
- find out where she came from by contacting and alerting the appropriate people, in this case not the nursing home along the road ~ we knew someone would be frantic about her whereabouts (and they were)
- if we had been unable to do that, we would have alerted the police
- we discovered where she had come from and arranged to take her home (we didn't have to do that as she would have been picked up, but she seemed OK with us doing so
We felt it was incumbent on us to help a vulnerable person to be returned to a place of safety. Can you imagine the situation had that been a vulnerable almost four year old child at our door that Sunday morning, and the lengths we would have taken to reunite her with her parents.
It is a non-starter to castigate Madeleine's mother for not thinking Madeleine was with a friend. In my opinion that is a situation that would never have happened.
However, had she done as suggested and wasted time by leaving the twins and going into the main entrance of the building and Jane Tanner's door ... I rather imagine she would have been criticised for that too.