Each day for months during 2007, it seemed impossible to pick up a British newspaper without seeing the doe-eyed, slightly quizzical smile of Madeleine McCann peering out at you. Even now, two years after the blonde toddler vanished from her bed in a holiday apartment her parents had rented in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, the McCann family can still make headlines. Except not nearly as often. And sometimes in ways the McCanns do not like.
The tenor of the coverage has changed with little now being said about the continuing, worldwide search for Madeleine, perhaps because the results so far indicate that there is precious little to say. But parents Gerry and Kate McCann still try to make the news. They know it is the best chance they have of re-energising public interest that might one day help discover the fate that befell their daughter on that awful night of May 3 2007.
Which is why a week on Monday, the McCanns will appear on American TV in their first interview with Oprah Winfrey, unveiling an artist's impression of how Madeleine, who was nearly four years old when she disappeared, might look now. It will be one of a series of media events to mark the second anniversary, including a British TV documentary on May 7 that will recreate the night of the abduction and trace Mr McCann's return last month to Praia da Luz.
These days, though, many of the articles written, the words spoken and the pictures taken do not always reflect positively or even kindly on the McCanns and their quest. Mr McCann's latest trip to the Algarve resort, for instance, did not go as scripted. He was jeered by locals - the same locals who had turned out in their hundreds two years before to help scour the town, its beaches and the surrounding countryside - because of the damage the "Maddie" affair had done to the resort's reputation and, consequently, its tourist trade.
Two weeks ago, Goncalo Amaral, the Portuguese policeman originally in charge of the search for Madeleine until he was thrown off the case after five months for suggesting the McCanns had the British police "in their pockets", featured in a controversial TV documentary in Portugal. In it, he staged his own reconstruction, which suggested that the little girl had not been abducted at all but had died in a "tragic accident" in the holiday apartment and her death covered up.
Now the fund her parents set up to find Madeleine is running out of money. More than £2 million has been donated by the British public and benefactors, and another £875,000 has come in the form of libel awards from British newspapers who suggested the McCanns were involved in their daughter's disappearance. Much of the money has gone to private investigators around the world who continue to follow up even the slimmest, most implausible lead in the hope of getting a break that will lead them to Madeleine.
"We have spent and will continue to spend a lot of money with the aim of trying to enhance the chance of finding her," Mr McCann, a hospital consultant in Leicester, has said in recent newspaper articles. "It won't dry up in the next few months, but probably by the end of the year at the rate we are running. "It's a possibility we might never see her again, but until we have absolute definitive evidence of what happened to Madeleine, we can't stop searching."
On the evening that would change their lives two years ago, Gerry and Kate McCann were dining in the Ocean Club resort with seven friends at a tapas bar about 120 metres from Apartment 5A, where Madeleine and her two-year-old twin siblings slept. The children were unsupervised but the McCanns or one of their group of friends, who became known as the Tapas Seven, would walk from the restaurant, past the pool, to the ground-floor apartment to check that the children were OK.
At about 9.30pm, Matthew Oldfield, one of the friends, made the journey, unlocked the flat's front door and looked through to the children's bedroom. He saw the twins but, because Madeleine's bed was out of his line of sight, did not see her. It was all quiet and, assuming the children were all asleep, he returned to the tapas bar. About a half-hour later, Mrs McCann went over to check. She went into the bedroom and, to her horror, found that Madeleine's bed was empty and the bedroom window open.
Charlotte Pennington, an Ocean Club nanny who was nearby, later recalled hearing Mrs McCann scream: "They've taken her, they've taken her. Madeleine's gone!" According to the McCanns, the police were called within 10 minutes, making that phone call no later than 10.15pm. According to the police, the first call was made at 11.50pm, with Madeleine's disappearance recorded as being "by 10.40". Later, Jane Tanner, one of the Tapas Seven, remembered seeing a man carrying a child walking along the road bordering the McCanns' apartment. The man, who has never been traced, was described as 170cm tall and aged between 35-40. Chief police officer Olegário de Sousa said the description fitted that of a suspect being hunted by Spanish police for the kidnapping of two children in the Canary Islands.
For all intents and purposes the criminal investigation has not moved on from that point. Vital evidence may have been lost because forensic scientists did not begin taking samples from the apartment for several days, by which time dozens of people and even police dogs had trampled through the scene. The Polícia Judiciária pursued two main lines of inquiries, according to the Portuguese media. One was that Madeleine had been abducted by an international paedophile ring; the other that she had been snatched by criminals operating an adoption network.
Searches of the area, including the sewers beneath Praia da Luz, revealed nothing and, after 11 days, the investigation turned to the house of Jennifer Murat, a British retiree living near the Ocean Club. Her son Robert, now 35, who lived in England but who had dual UK-Portuguese nationality and visited his mother often, had been helping the police as a translator in the search for Madeleine. Mr Murat was said to have been deeply concerned about the disappearance because, following his recent divorce, he had lost custody of his own three-year-old daughter, who bore a striking resemblance to Madeleine.
A British journalist, however, became suspicious of Mr Murat's motives and informed the police. On May 15, Mr Murat was arrested along with Sergey Malinka, then 22, a Russian who had helped design a website for Mr Murat. Although Mr Malinka denied having contact with Mr Murat for more than a year, phone records showed that the two had spoken at 11.40 on the night Madeleine vanished. Mr Murat was formally named as an arguido (suspect) on May 15. No evidence, though, was ever found against him and he was formally cleared of any involvement last year.
The weeks passed amid mounting international media coverage, much of it based on bogus rumours. There were supposed sightings of Madeleine in Morocco, Argentina and various parts of Europe, in addition to an apparently credible tip-off in the Netherlands that she was buried on a hillside 14 kilometres north-east of Praia da Luz. But nothing was found and then, in September, Gerry and Kate McCann were formally named as arguidos by the Portuguese police, allegedly after traces of Madeleine's blood were found in the back of a car they had rented more than three weeks after the disappearance.
"The police don't want a murder in Portugal and all the publicity about them not having paedophile laws here, so they're blaming us," said Mrs McCann at the time. There was, of course, no evidence against the McCanns. Tests later conducted in Britain on the samples found in the car turned up nothing conclusive. Still, the McCanns had to endure their arguido status, and the public suspicion that came with it, until July last year. The Tapas Seven were reinterviewed and sections of the tabloid press, in both Portugal and Britain, began running lurid and wholly erroneous stories alleging involvement by Madeleine's parents and their friends.
"To see a front-page headline insinuating that you were involved in your own daughter's disappearance was incredibly, unbelievably upsetting," says Mr McCann. "We saw pressure particularly on journalists to produce stories when, really, there was nothing much to report. Madeleine was made a commodity and profits were to be made." More reasonably, perhaps, the McCanns have been widely criticised for leaving their children alone in the apartment while they ate with friends. The Ocean Club had a crèche and a babysitting service but the parents took advantage of neither.
Then, last summer, the Portuguese police admitted there was no evidence against anyone and effectively closed down their search for Madeleine. For Kate and Gerry McCann, however, there can be no end to the search. A website and support group have been set up in Britain, along with a fund to finance a worldwide effort to trace the little girl. At one time, it stood at more than £2 million. Now it is down to about a quarter of that.
At least five groups of private investigators have been involved at various times but, still, the final sighting of Madeleine by a third party remains one by Miguel Matias, a restaurant manager. He saw Mr McCann dancing with his giggling daughter when the family had a meal at the beach-side Paraíso restaurant earlier in the day on May 3 2007. Since then ... nothing. British journalists now question how long Maddie - a name her parents never use - can continue to command space in their pages.
Two people, though, are determined not to give up: Gerry and Kate McCann. "As Madeleine's parents, we cannot and will not ever stop doing all we can," they said in a statement this week. "As the second anniversary of Madeleine's abduction approaches, we continue to remain focused on our aim - to find Madeleine and bring her back home safely. "The search for Madeleine continues with the same strength and determination and, thankfully, there are many people who are continuing to help in a variety of ways.
"The reduction in media reporting does not signify a lack of effort - far from it. If anything, the search for Madeleine goes on with renewed vigour and great experience. "We have quietly and persistently been working very hard: exploring all possible avenues in order to get that key piece of information. Someone, somewhere knows where Madeleine is. "It is impossible for us to ignore the day-to-day heartache of missing Madeleine but there is a very important and positive fact that remains - in spite of all the investigative work done, there is still absolutely nothing to suggest harm to Madeleine and, therefore, a very real likelihood that Madeleine is alive and well.
"It is vital that we never, ever give up on Madeleine." * The National