BY IAN BELL

OF all the questions asked of Kate and Gerry McCann, official and unofficial, wise or wantonly cruel, since the disappearance of their four-year-old daughter, one is never likely to be answered.

It is not one of the obvious questions. It features in none of the many inquiries, spurious or otherwise, made by journalism and the law. It has nothing to do with the how, what, when or why. It is more baffling even than these mysteries.

Better for an atheist to ask, perhaps, than anyone: how have this plainly devout couple managed to retain their faith?

If God was around when Madeleine was taken, most would question his motives. If a Christian spirit animated any of the hundreds of media who reported and commented upon the case, how was it manifested?

And where was charity - and the rest of that stuff - when the pious freaks were flooding the message boards with their dark conspiracies, their moral certainties and their vile fantasies?

To go on believing in a God of love in such circumstances, to pass through a Christian Christmas without a daughter, burdened by the loss, afflicted by a knowledge of what is bestial within humanity, is actually baffling. Does a believer then say that this is, of course, the point? Perhaps.

The fact remains that there is only one fact: the child is missing still. Portuguese investigators have come and gone. Newspaper theories have appeared, disappeared and reappeared half a dozen times.

DNA "evidence" has turned out to be flimsy or worthless. The McCanns have neither "cracked" nor confessed. "Suspects" have not yielded to suspicion. Endless re-examinations of the circumstances in which Madeleine was taken have failed to illuminate a dark night. No progress has been made. None.

Still there are those who will tell you that Kate McCann is no sort of mother, that there is something "not right" about Gerry McCann's stoicism. The need to believe that the child will be found was long ago replaced, in some parts of God's creation, by the need to believe the worst of her parents.

To repeat, as the friends of the McCanns go on repeating: there is no evidence for any accusation. That means, can only mean, that there is no right to draw a conclusion or to judge. For the nastier obsessives, fingering their keyboards, that sort of logic is no deterrent whatever.

A paradox is created. Now we talk about the fact that some people go on talking when there is nothing to talk about. Why does the McCann case still return to the headlines? Other children, many children, are lost daily. Other parents have their faith and their identity tested.

Somehow, the McCanns represent the perfect moral storm. If you trust what you believe, some people will never believe them, even if the truth is beyond doubt or question. It will always be the couple's fault for failing to attain absolute perfection in parental behaviour.

And does anyone think they don't already know that?

Still they pray, still they believe. Even to wonder what they ask of their God feels like voyeurism. The sense is unpleasant, but not half as unpleasant as those who "know" guilt by instinct, and grasp the truth without a need for facts. Other terrible tales are digested and forgotten within the space of hours. Not this one.

Blame the media? If you like. Blame the McCanns for attempting to use the media to find their daughter? If you must. Blame common malevolence, witless sentiment, sick thoughts in a sick world? Why not?

Christmas come and gone with a four-year-old still missing is hard to imagine. God too.

The world in which all of this happens does not need to be imagined.