The telephone rang at around 11pm at Trish Cameron's home near Glasgow. She picked it up to hear the voice of her younger brother. "He was distraught, breaking his heart," Mrs Cameron said. "He said: 'Madeleine's been abducted, she's been abducted.'"Hundreds of miles away in Portugal's western Algarve Gerald McCann, whose job as a heart surgeon demands a calm, steady nerve, had lost any semblance of control and was crying down the telephone to his older sister. Just an hour earlier he and his wife Kate had returned to their ground floor apartment in the Ocean Club holiday resort to find that three-year-old Madeleine, the little girl they had left asleep in her white pyjamas, had disappeared.
Their two-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie, lay undisturbed in their cots beside the bed, making the absence of the child they call Maddy all the more haunting. Nothing appeared to have been stolen from the room, but the shutters seemed to have been forced, the window was open and the main door unlocked, according to the family.
It was Mrs McCann who walked in first. Minutes later she ran out screaming, according to her sister in law. In the confusion and melee that followed, the police were called and other holidaymakers woken to carry out a search for the three-year-old, amid hopes that she was merely sleepwalking.
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