Kate McCann slept alone the night before Madeleine vanished because her husband had offended her at dinner, it emerged yesterday.Upset by Gerry’s ‘abrupt’ behaviour, she took to a spare bed in the children’s room at the family’s holiday apartment in Portugal.
In her forthcoming book, which was serialised in The Sunday Times yesterday, Mrs McCann also reveals she is haunted by the belief that Madeleine tried to tell her that somebody had tried to break into the children’s bedroom.
With hindsight, it could have been her ‘one chance to prevent what was about to happen’, said Mrs McCann, adding: ‘And I blew it.’
Madeleine, who was three, disappeared from her bed in the family’s apartment in Praia da Luz on the evening of May 3, 2007, while her parents were eating at a nearby tapas restaurant – as they did every night of the holiday.
The possible missed chance came at breakfast on the day Madeleine vanished, when the little girl disconcerted her mother by asking: ‘Why didn’t you come when Sean and I cried last night?’
Mrs McCann, 43, says: ‘Not for a moment did we think there might be some sinister explanation. But it is [now] my belief there was somebody either in or trying to get into the children’s bedroom that night, and that is what disturbed them.
‘So haunted have I been ever since by Madeleine’s words that I’ve continued to blame myself for not sitting down and making completely certain there was no more information I could draw out of her.’
In one extract, Mrs McCann describes her horror at discovering a predatory paedophile could easily have been tipped off that Madeleine was vulnerable, by a staff note on display at reception which revealed the McCanns ‘were leaving our young children alone ... and checking on them intermittently’.
WHY THEY HAD NO BABYSITTER
Leaving Madeleine with a babysitter who none of them knew would have been 'unwise', Kate McCann declares in her book.
Explaining why they did not make use of the babysitting service offered by the Ocean Club, she said the couple never even thought about it.
She said: 'I could argue that leaving my children alone with someone neither we nor they knew would have been unwise, and it's certainly not something we'd do at home, but we didn't even consider it.
'We felt so secure we simply didn't think it was necessary.' With the infamous tapas restaurant 'so near', the McCanns and their friends decided to do their own child-checking service, said Mrs McCann, adding: 'It goes without saying that we now bitterly regret it.'
However British police later told the couple their holiday apartment, being a corner flat on the ground floor, next to two roads and with secluded entrances, made it a perfect target for criminals. Read More
