A year on, we still can't quite forgive the McCanns.

Byline: Maureen Messent

THAT beautiful little face, a perfect oval, has stared at us for a year now.

And the mystery of Madeleine McCann still grips the world.

Newspapers, television and the internet have drip-fed us with information.

Few of us can deny we have been caught up in the missing child drama in a way not possible, when, in 1991, the 21-month-old toddler Ben Needham vanished from the Greek island of Kos, never to be seen again.

Perhaps we've been ghoulish in our efforts to rubberneck at every development, but, then, Kate and Gerry McCann became, early in the search for their daughter, iconic figures that invited comment.

I won't forget the Sunday morning when, a fortnight after the disappearance, I walked into my local newsagents to find four men chewing over the case as they read the front pages of piled-up newspapers.

All of them, it transpired, thought there was something "fishy" about the McCanns.

All of them were convinced they had courted disaster by leaving their children while they dined with friends.

By this time the search had yielded nothing in the way of leads and they wanted someone on whom to lay the blame.

Then came Robert Murat, a loner living with his mother and estranged from his wife and child back home in England - the latter almost the same age as Madeleine.

Murat was one of those meddlers to be seen on the fringes of every disaster, anxious for a piece of the action, anxious to be accepted as a good guy.

He acted as a translator for the Portuguese police in the early days and, for all his trouble, became known as the first suspect.

We didn't approve of Murat.

What sort of man leaves his child in Britain to run home to mummy?

Could it be, we whispered, that Murat was a secret paedophile?

He wasn't. He was alibied by his mother for the night Madeleine went missing and interest in him flagged - but we were all agog with the later revelation he had a married woman friend.

Murat paid dear for trying to help the police. He was hung out to dry by the tabloids, who wanted daily column inches to keep this spellbinding story on the boil.

This man, though, was small fry, overshadowed by the McCanns, who, each morning, would stride hand in hand and seemingly joined at the hip to the local Catholic church to pray for the return of their daughter.

Kate would carry, each and every day, Madeleine's pink Cuddle Cat toy and, as we watched their daily peregrination, we felt at this stage a certain exasperation.

Why was he so obviously the dominant partner? Was it necessary for a grown woman to clutch at a toy as if it were a comfort blanket?

More and more tiny scraps of information came our way.

Madeleine, said someone somewhere, was an overactive child. Which led us to the thought that Kate might have snapped while tending to her twin children and slipped the boisterous older child a sleeping pill.

After all, we told each other, wasn't it a bit selfish of Gerry to have spent the entire afternoon of the crucial day playing tennis while his wife baby-sat?

Then we looked at Gerry's rather stern features, at Kate's gaunt face and body and came up with a theory that she was domestically downtrodden.

What put that thought in our heads? Nothing at all beyond our national compulsion to put two and two together and make five - plus our tendency to love gossip.

Since both parents were doctors, went another theory, he a consultant heart surgeon, she a GP, wasn't the possibility strong that she could have attempted to soothe Madeleine with a sleeping potion and mistakenly overdosed the child?

By now, the rumour mills were running out of control and few of us failed to contribute.

In the absence of new developments, we turned to wildest speculation.

A couple of tabloids and a couple of Portuguese police who should have known better mooted the notion that, having overdosed their little daughter, the McCanns had hidden her body for burial later.

And, all the time, virtually every day, unnamed Portuguese police spokesmen revealed a spate of theories that must have broken the McCanns' hearts.

They wanted their child found and yet here were the police dabbling in farfetched scenarios that contributed nothing to the quest for Madeleine.

That Kate and Gerry had by now become suspects meant that, under Portuguese law, they were forbidden to comment on the mad and bad ideas tossed randomly around.

We didn't much like Kate and Gerry, it must be said.

Although able to empathise with their loss, it struck us as strange that this middle-class and wellheeled couple should take their young family on holiday, then leave them alone at night.

Surely, bearing in mind they travelled with a group of friends and enjoyed socialising, it would have been wiser to leave the children with grandparents and enjoy an entirely adult holiday?

Now, we feel we know the McCanns, know their children were born as a result of IVF and our finger-wagging at them has nearly stopped. They have admitted their sense of guilt at leaving their children, but are now settled back in Rothley, Leics.

Gerry has returned to work, Kate hasn't, wasting her university training in childrearing in the background.

She has aged 20 years in 365 days while her husband looks more upbeat: a minor miracle here is that Madeleine's abduction hasn't fractured their marriage.

A year on from that balmy Portuguese evening, we haven't quite forgiven the McCanns. And we think it's a bit rich that this oncethoughtless couple are currently campaigning for a cross-European alert system for abducted children.

And is their suffering any worse than the bereft parents of Sudan and Zimbabwe who lose children daily to hunger and sickness?

'In the absence of new developments, we turned to wildest speculation'

CAPTION(S):

SPOTLIGHT... Kate and Gerry McCann have become iconic figures since Madeleine (below) disappeared.