"British consul Bill Henderson and Ambassador John Buck were visiting us on a fairly regular basis and we were seeing the Leicestershire FLOs every day. The flow of information, however, was slow and limited. The Portuguese police were divulging very little to the British police and vetoing many of their suggestions – bringing out specialist dogs, for example, or staging a reconstruction."
"On Monday 4 June, we recorded an appeal to be screened the following evening on Crimewatch, the long-running BBC programme that has a good track record in helping the police to solve crimes using information supplied by the public. Our appeal was aimed in particular at any British holidaymakers who had been in the Algarve at the time of Madeleine’s abduction.
Frustratingly, Crimewatch was not allowed to film a reconstruction of the abduction. This was something we had wanted from the beginning, in the hope that it would encourage potential witnesses to come forward. In Britain the police often broadcast reconstructions through programmes likeCrimewatch and news channels, but we were told that this was not possible in either Portugal or Britain because of the judicial secrecy law. We were able to show a pair of pyjamas like Madeleine’s on the programme, which was particularly important since at the time it had been incorrectly stated in some press reports that her pyjamas were white."
"In the spring of 2008 – almost a year after Madeleine was last seen – the PJ decided they wanted to conduct a re-enactment in Praia da Luz of the night of 3 May 2007. The participants required were Gerry, me, Fiona, Dave, Jane, Russ, Rachael, Matt, Dianne and Jes Wilkins, to whom Gerry chatted in the street that night just after his last glimpse of Madeleine. They weren’t interested in using actors or stand-ins. So either everyone agreed or the reconstruction wouldn’t go ahead."
Madeleine by Kate McCann
Unless everyone agreed it wouldn't go ahead? That is astonishing. Who was running this farce - the Tapas 9 or the police?