aerial shots of the McCann home (a term that always sounded more ominous than ‘house’ when used in captions) that started appearing online and in the papers.
Police began the excavation of bodies from the back garden of a house in the rundown south-coast resort of Margate soon after the McCanns returned from Portugal in early September. And there was a correspondence between the helicopter pictures of the crime scene with its canvas screens and fingertip searches and methodical police activity, and photographs of the McCann house in Rothley, sealed and silent and just as they left it as a family of five in late April.
The house had anyway already become contaminated by then, by association. The interrogation of apartment 5A at the Mark Warner Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine vanished on the night of 3 May, had been exhaustive and unrelenting. The inner life of the architecture had been forensically examined by investigators on the ground and by being made the subject of diagrammatic illustrations, scale models, computer graphics with X-ray perspective and fly-away walls.
There had been re-enactments using actors, grainy montages on YouTube, dimly filmed guided tours of other apartments in the block with a shifty pornographic ambience (‘And this here is the bathroom!’), the distancebetween apartment and tapas bar paced out by video sleuths and posted on the internet as a prompt for more superheated speculation and outlandish gossip.
The body dogs Keela and Eddie had sniffed out every inch of the interior; individual fibres had been identified and removed for investigation.
So there was that contamination of the McCanns’ otherwise blameless house in the Midlands caused by the generic scene-of-crime-style overhead pictures that had been put into circulation; caused too by the transference of the atmosphere of uncanniness from the holiday flat in Praia da Luz to the house in Rothley – from one place connected with Madeleine to the other; the spectre of demonistic or magic forces.
The connection, more a mood or a suspicion up to that point, was given concrete form when, on their return to Britain, the McCanns appointed a man whose face had once been familiar to millions of viewers from the Six O’Clock and the Ten O’Clock News as their press spokesman.
Clarence Mitchell’s was one of those television faces which had never registered as missing until it suddenly reappeared. For many years a thread in the broad tapestry of the national pageant, reporting mostly on the misfortunes of strangers but also the deaths of notable figures such as Jill Dando and the Queen Mother, he had eventually been reassigned to the BBC’s round-the-clock, rolling news operation, News 24 . Put on the graveyard shift newscasting through the night, one night he did the1 a.m. and the 2 a.m. but then closed his eyes and slept through the three o’clock bulletin, after which, having served the Corporation man and boy, he had severed his ties.
Clarence – the slightly antique name was matched by a personal manner of impeccable restraint and an old-fashioned, maître-d’-like sense of deference – had first turned up in the context of the McCann story shortly before they travelled to Rome at the end of May for their St Peter’s Square audience with the new Pope, Benedict XVI. He shepherded the McCanns into their place in the receiving line and in front of the cameras and fielded questions at the press conference which followed courtesy of the British Ambassador to the Holy See. For viewers, it was disconcerting to have him back on their screens as a participant in a story rather than in his accustomed role of non-aligned reporter. (This was mixed with the sense of guilt they felt at not having noticed he had gone missing in the first place.) After leaving the BBC he had taken the job of director of the Media Monitoring Unit at Number 10.
To many people Clarence Mitchell was the reporter most closely associated
Police began the excavation of bodies from the back garden of a house in the rundown south-coast resort of Margate soon after the McCanns returned from Portugal in early September. And there was a correspondence between the helicopter pictures of the crime scene with its canvas screens and fingertip searches and methodical police activity, and photographs of the McCann house in Rothley, sealed and silent and just as they left it as a family of five in late April.
The house had anyway already become contaminated by then, by association. The interrogation of apartment 5A at the Mark Warner Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine vanished on the night of 3 May, had been exhaustive and unrelenting. The inner life of the architecture had been forensically examined by investigators on the ground and by being made the subject of diagrammatic illustrations, scale models, computer graphics with X-ray perspective and fly-away walls.
There had been re-enactments using actors, grainy montages on YouTube, dimly filmed guided tours of other apartments in the block with a shifty pornographic ambience (‘And this here is the bathroom!’), the distancebetween apartment and tapas bar paced out by video sleuths and posted on the internet as a prompt for more superheated speculation and outlandish gossip.
The body dogs Keela and Eddie had sniffed out every inch of the interior; individual fibres had been identified and removed for investigation.
So there was that contamination of the McCanns’ otherwise blameless house in the Midlands caused by the generic scene-of-crime-style overhead pictures that had been put into circulation; caused too by the transference of the atmosphere of uncanniness from the holiday flat in Praia da Luz to the house in Rothley – from one place connected with Madeleine to the other; the spectre of demonistic or magic forces.
The connection, more a mood or a suspicion up to that point, was given concrete form when, on their return to Britain, the McCanns appointed a man whose face had once been familiar to millions of viewers from the Six O’Clock and the Ten O’Clock News as their press spokesman.
Clarence Mitchell’s was one of those television faces which had never registered as missing until it suddenly reappeared. For many years a thread in the broad tapestry of the national pageant, reporting mostly on the misfortunes of strangers but also the deaths of notable figures such as Jill Dando and the Queen Mother, he had eventually been reassigned to the BBC’s round-the-clock, rolling news operation, News 24 . Put on the graveyard shift newscasting through the night, one night he did the1 a.m. and the 2 a.m. but then closed his eyes and slept through the three o’clock bulletin, after which, having served the Corporation man and boy, he had severed his ties.
Clarence – the slightly antique name was matched by a personal manner of impeccable restraint and an old-fashioned, maître-d’-like sense of deference – had first turned up in the context of the McCann story shortly before they travelled to Rome at the end of May for their St Peter’s Square audience with the new Pope, Benedict XVI. He shepherded the McCanns into their place in the receiving line and in front of the cameras and fielded questions at the press conference which followed courtesy of the British Ambassador to the Holy See. For viewers, it was disconcerting to have him back on their screens as a participant in a story rather than in his accustomed role of non-aligned reporter. (This was mixed with the sense of guilt they felt at not having noticed he had gone missing in the first place.) After leaving the BBC he had taken the job of director of the Media Monitoring Unit at Number 10.
To many people Clarence Mitchell was the reporter most closely associated
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