McCanns' anguish: police should be in the dock

Shame on the Portuguese police force. It emerges from the investigation of Madeleine McCann's disappearance with its credibility in tatters. Where to begin? It has failed to find Madeleine or even to establish whether she is alive or dead, yet it has shelved her case.

It named Kate and Gerry McCann as official suspects. Imagine it: for 10 long months they've been subjected to that pressure as well as their grief. Now the Portuguese attorney general says there is "no evidence of a crime by them".

If there was no evidence of a crime, why was the police force focused on them instead of searching for their daughter's kidnapper? When attorney general Fernando Jose Pinto Monteiro shelved the inquiry yesterday, he was not obliged to remove the taint of "arguido".

Having established the lack of evidence, he clearly had no credible option. It is outrageous that a professional force allowed the situation to trail on unexamined for so long.

Robert Murat, the other arguido, was also exonerated. For him, the experience has been traumatic and destructive (though his loss of earnings has been balanced by a £600,000 payout from 11 newspapers for defamation). For the McCanns, it has been beyond cruel. When in September they described their situation as "unbearable", it was clearly an understatement.

They know better than anyone how incompetent the investigation was from the start. They called the police within 10 minutes of finding Madeleine missing on the night of May 3, 2007.

In June, the police admitted that forensic evidence had been destroyed because the holiday flat was not protected properly from contamination. They also failed to close the border with Spain.

By July, we were hearing that a hire car rented by the McCanns 25 days after their daughter's disappearance was contaminated with her blood. There was a suggestion that they had killed her, hidden her body and then retrieved it for burial. They were supposed to have achieved this in the height of summer and under the noses of the international media.

In August, there were leaks about blood spots in the apartment. Shortly afterwards, police expressed doubts that Madeleine would ever be found. A month later, Kate McCann was questioned for 11 hours before being named as an official suspect. Within a day, Gerry McCann became an arguido, too. When the couple returned to the UK, the terrible tragedy that had befallen them was obvious to see. At the airport, in a voice breaking with tears, Gerry denied that either of them had anything to do with the disappearance of "our beautiful daughter".

They had been in the UK for a month when the police officer in charge of the case was replaced. He has since written a book called True Lies, outlining his conviction that Madeleine was killed in the holiday apartment. So, having utterly failed in his investigation and having falsely branded her parents, he now plans to exploit them and their missing child to line his own pockets.

How have the McCanns remained sane in the face of such frustration when their daughter's life is at stake? Their dignity in the face of this incompetence is as astonishing as it is impressive. They have carried on their relentless search (in part financed by a £550,000 pay-out from a national newspaper, following an assertion that they killed Madeleine).

So counterproductive have the police been, that they might even welcome this shelving of the case as an opportunity to break through the secrecy and gain access to the evidence. Their private investigators might pick up a trail from it, however cold. But how extraordinary is that? Imagine for a moment that your child is kidnapped and 14 months later you have to take up the case yourself. It's beyond outrageous that a missing child case is simply shelved.

Meanwhile, in the middle of this mayhem, these embattled parents held their focus and kept faith with Madeleine. They sent out a Christmas message to her and, more recently, had a small party to celebrate her fifth birthday. When we think of Madeleine, she remains three-and-three-quarters frozen in time.

We see her casting her eyes upwards in the video that is played to display the tell-tale stripe in the iris of her right eye. She will smile forever from the group shot taken with her parents and little brother and sister that was released when she first went missing. It's the one that looked like an advertisement for the perfect family of our time: beautiful mother, handsome father and pretty children - all bursting with health and happiness.

In sharp contrast, the most recent portrait of the McCanns was so filled with pain that I found myself hastily turning the page. Kate McCann now stares out at us with empty eyes. The last time I saw an expression like it was on the day Sally Clark was released from prison after her conviction for killing her children was overturned. It was obvious that while her body was free, her spirit hadn't survived the experience.

Standing behind his wife, Gerry McCann's eyes are anguished. It is hard to look into them because you know that the suffering of this couple has no end in sight. Closure is a fashionable buzzword but if ever people needed closure, it's them.

Yesterday's statement is a small step forward but we need to see it in context. They don't know where Madeleine is, who has her and in what circumstances. They don't know if she is still alive. And they will always carry the burden of their decision to leave her sleeping while they met friends for dinner.

I can't imagine that they will waste much time on recrimination when there is the possibility of gaining access to information that has been concealed until now. They must feel that, far from furthering the search, the police investigation has held them back.

It is only fair to say that missing children cases are difficult. We had a three-year-old to stay shortly after Madeleine's kidnap. While playing a game with her, my son carried her about in a sports bag. It's that easy to conceal a little girl. Police forces across Britain struggled for years to identify Robert Black, who left a trail of child murders. In the end, it was an observant man cutting his lawn who spotted him snatching a child.

Failure is unfortunate, but false accusation such as the McCanns have been subjected to, should be a criminal offence. It is fuelled by prejudice, not evidence. Parents seem particularly vulnerable to it when their children are in harm's way. It is a small mercy that the McCanns had the UK to retreat to, that the case against them never got as far as a court room, much less a prison cell.

Though yesterday's announcement is but the end of a false accusation, there will be relief that they can drive forward unfettered on their never-ending search for Madeleine.