Pathfinder do you remember about your post referred to here? Can you help me on this one?
First he cited video footage the police had shot of the reactions of the blood and cadaver dogs in apartment 5A and also around our hire car. I would be shown this on my return to the police station, he said. Presumably repeating what he had been told by the PJ, he explained how samples from both these sites had revealed Madeleine’s blood and one of them indicated a 15 out of 19 match with her DNA.
I was totally perplexed. Although this news, if true, seemed to add weight to the possibility that Madeleine had at the very least been physically harmed, unusually I didn’t dwell too much on the frightening implications. I can only assume this was because what we were being told didn’t make sense. If, as the PJ alleged, Madeleine’s blood was in the boot of our car, which we had not rented until 27 May, how on earth had it got there? Did this mean someone had planted it? I could see no other explanation. The police theory, it seemed, was that we had hidden Madeleine’s body, then moved it later, in the car, and buried it elsewhere.
Next came the matter of a crumpled page the police said they had discovered in my borrowed Bible. It seemed this was felt to be highly significant because the passage on that page, in II Samuel 12, dealt with the death of a child. I knew nothing about any pages being crumpled, let alone in which part of the Bible. The fact that I had asked to see a priest on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance was also seen as evidence of guilt. What? I was beginning to find my credulity stretched to breaking point. ‘Don’t people in Portugal talk to priests in times of need?’ I asked Carlos. Apparently not. They only called for a priest when they wanted their sins to be forgiven. Good grief. This was definitely not the faith with which I was familiar.
A witness claimed to have seen Gerry and me carrying a big black bag and acting suspiciously. This was absolute nonsense, but ‘evidence’ of this kind came down to one person’s word against another. And it appeared that, as far as the PJ were concerned, our word counted for little.
‘If you were Portuguese,’ Carlos said with an air of resignation, ‘this would be enough to put you in prison.’ (Madeleine by KM)
