The account in Dr Kate McCann’s book ‘madeleine’ (pp. 134-6)
“…we went round to see Fiona and David. Fiona told us she’d seen Robert Murat outside Apartment 5A on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. Then I began to feel panicky. It had belatedly begun to dawn on me that it probably wouldn’t be good news at all if someone living as close as Robert Murat was involved. As Fiona and David speculated I became more an more anxious. I didn’t want to hear it. Within the space of a couple of hours I went from feeling cautiously optimistic to very, very low. Another long, dark night followed.
It later transpired that on the evening before Murat was taken in for questioning, the police had summoned Jane to a mysterious rendezvous in the car park next to the Millennium area, refusing to say why they wanted to see her and insisting she told no-one. Their behaviour seemed so sinister that she was quite scared.
Russell walked her to the car park. On the way they passed Casa Liliana [home of Robert Murat], just as Murat was returning to his villa in his van. He stopped to speak to Russ, whom he must have seen around, eager to tell him what he and his mother were doing to find Madeleine. Jane, who had never met Murat, was not taking much notice. She was just anxious to get going and for this cloak-and-dagger meeting to be over with. When Russell managed to extricate them, Murat said he needed to be off, too, mentioning that the police wanted to see him.
From the car park Jane was driven round to a nearby street, where a PJ officer asked her to get into the back of a van disguised to resemble a refrigerated delivery vehicle (‘Like Sooty’s van’, she told us). The police took her straight back to the Ocean Club. They had wanted to park at the point where she’d seen the man and child on 3 May but there was another car there and they had to stop further down the road. She was instructed to look out of the window and tell the police whether she could identify anyone crossing the junction of Rua Dr Gentil Martins and Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva as the person she had seen that night. Three men walked by. Two of then looked nothing like the figures she had described: one was blond and tall and the other too fat. The third could have been him, but at that distance she couldn’t make him out properly and unfortunately, just as he crossed the road, he was obscured by the car in the space the police had wanted, which chose that moment to pull out.
The police moved the van to the car park opposite the Ocean Club entrance to try to give Jane a better look at the third man, but here he was walking along a path and her sightline was blocked by foliage. By now the van windows were steaming up, too. She told the police she could not be sure either way. One of the officers made a phone call to check whether she needed to sign a statement to this effect but then informed her it wouldn’t be necessary.
When Murat appeared on the TV news the next day, Russell pointed him out as the man who had stopped to talk to then outside Casa Liliana the previous evening. Jane was concerned that he might have been picked up purely as the result of the amateurish identity parade in which he unwittingly participated. Like Fiona, Russell declared he’d seen Murat outside Apartment 5A on the evening of 3 May, as, they discovered, had Rachael.
Jane phoned Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Small. She told him she’d encountered Murat before her rendezvous with the PJ and mentioned that Russell and Rachael had said they’d noticed him outside our flat on the night Madeleine vanished, on case either piece of information was important. Although at that stage it didn’t appear to our friends to be noteworthy for Murat to have been nearby when Madeleine was abducted - he lived juts along the road , after all, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t have been there - the police took further statements from Fiona, Russell and Rachael.
It was perhaps telling that Jane had not been required to sign anything, since the absence of documentary evidence to the contrary allowed claims to be made later that she had identified Murat as the man she’d seen on 3 May. This was completely untrue. Jane would’ve loved to have been able to make a definite identification, because it might have helped the investigation, but the fact is she couldn’t. The set-up was so inadequate that he was unable even to recognise Murat as the man she had met half an hour earlier, let alone say with any certainty that he was the one she had seen ten days before.
