This limbo that lasts a lifetime

After another 'sighting 'last week, the McCanns face a future of accusation and uncertainty, just like Ben Needham's family
    • The Observer,
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Rudimentary common sense, you might have thought, would have told us it was not Madeleine McCann. Smudgy tourist snaps notwithstanding, it is inconceivable that a blonde, four-year-old, English-speaking chatterbox is living openly in a far-flung corner of Morocco, hefted around by a brown woman who has enough trouble feeding four children of her own. Nevertheless, it took a posse of bounty-hunting journalists to swoop upon an alarmed family before reason kicked in to the most recent of four 'sightings' of Madeleine in Morocco - curiously, always in the grip of a 'swarthy foreigner'.

The McCanns are said to be devastated by dashed hopes; if so, they must get used to it, for there will be more sightings, more dashing and, to add to their misery, more harassment of more innocent families. I know this because, having investigated the disappearance of Ben Needham on Kos in 1991, the unfolding of the McCann case has felt like one long, wretched, groundhog summer.

Ben, recapped in a nutshell: his grandparents, Eddie and Chris Needham, moved from Sheffield to Kos with their teenage son Stephen, daughter Kerry and her boyfriend and their son, Ben. Eddie was rebuilding a local farmer's hillside shack, Kerry worked in a hotel, Chris cared for Ben. On impulse, Chris took Ben to have lunch at the shack, joined by Stephen on his scooter. Ben played outside; Chris and Eddie checked on him 'every few minutes'. (Hold that thought.) Even when they noticed him missing, they assumed he had left with Stephen and it was five hours before they discovered otherwise. Nobody, therefore, knows exactly when Ben disappeared; familiar, you will be thinking.

The singular difference between the Needhams and the McCanns is, crudely, class. Eddie has homemade tattoos on his knuckles, Chris was a grandmother at 38, Kerry and her boyfriend - a man known, as they say, to the police - lived in a council block. Perhaps this explains why, throughout their ordeal, nobody from the British consulate in Athens once got off their butt or went to Kos to help or support; surgeon Gerry McCann, by contrast, mobilised the world.

Much else, however, is disturbingly similar. The press interest, for instance - it helped that the missing children were both yummy bundles of photogenic, fair-skinned beauty - was, at least initially, sympathetic. In both cases, early investigation was hampered by scant co-operation between local and British police. (The recalcitrance is not necessarily always foreign: the Sheffield officer on Ben's case told me proudly that he'd never had a passport and didn't want one now; what good, he demanded, could he do in bloody Greece?)

There is consistency, too, in the eagerness of local police to blame the families. As with the mayor in Jaws, serving a district that survives on tourism involves ignoring home-grown sharks; if the family is guilty, at least the sin is not indigenous. Every time leaks spill from Portuguese police, I remember the Kos officers who fancied young Stephen for an imagined murder, but who also saw fit to tell me that Eddie and Chris took a drink too many and that unmarried Kerry was a slut, in a tone that suggested losing a child was too lenient a punishment for her.

Back in Blighty, armchair sleuths were then, as now, having a blast, albeit by parking accusation in the space reserved for whichever bogeyman was in vogue. In 1991, we were not yet in thrall to paedophilia, so favourites were body snatchers: hundreds of people, I was assured (here and in Greece) were taking children to harvest their organs. Ben may return alive, I was told ominously. But with bits missing. Now we're riddled with perverts, so rumours run easier still.

Back then, bad guys were traditionally gypsies, so everybody grabbed the chance to be extra horrid about them; now, it's Muslims.It is unlikely a coincidence that four 'sightings' happen in the nearest Muslim country to Portugal, while the Moroccan woman seen with the might-be Madeleine last week was not wearing religious clothing, nor was her name known, but she was widely described none the less as Muslim.

The biggest problem with amateur detection is the systematic evolution of preferred theories, which, by dint of popularity, come to override plausibility - and none tips the scales of sense more surely than this: crime is always preferred over accident, by all involved. That a child might wander off and come to a lonely end does not suit those who live nearby: whether in Kos or Praia de Luz, they are no happier to admit to risk by drain or quagmire than by the hand of a native nutter.

It does not suit the media: note how quickly an accident leaves front pages; note how long a murder stays. It does not suit the armchair sleuths: how can you enjoy your xenophobic prejudices without central casting's baddies to blame?

Most of all, it does not suit the families. Accident points not only to probable death but to more negligence than they have already admitted to themselves: what if checking on Ben 'every few minutes' wasn't entirely accurate; what if checking on Madeleine 'every half hour' meant listening but never actually seeing her; how far, really, could a 21-month-old propel himself in five hours? Or a three-year-old in two and a half?

I shall not presume to deduce Madeleine's fate; like you, I'm still in the armchair. But with Ben, I'm entitled. I have stood, three times, on the spot where he vanished, a lethal stretch of terrain, strewn with waist-high scrub, crevasses and old wells and I have crossed off every theory.

There wasn't a shred of evidence against the likable Stephen. No, Chris and Ben were not followed; the path was too exposed for cover. No, nobody drove there; a car would have been heard. No, Ben was not smuggled off the island; the first ferry was five hours after he was last seen and a kidnapper would have assumed the alarm was raised.

The only search for Ben was by the family in the dark with, next day, desultory help from local police (familiar, again?). Crucially, they only searched down the hill from the shack, based solely on the family 'knowing' Ben would head down towards home, just as the McCanns 'know' Madeleine wouldn't wander, especially without Cuddle Cat, and just as I 'know' this: that the only conclusion to hold a drop of sane water is that Ben did go up the hill, did fall, died or was concussed and heat and animals did the rest. Faster than you could possibly believe.

As I say, accident is an unpopular conclusion, so much so that no infrared body-tracking device was flown over Ben's bleak hillside and nor was it in Portugal. It might have been useless; it might, at best, have ruled out mishap. Nevertheless, if disproportionate time is always to be invested in theories popular with interested parties, other families will be where the Needhams are and where the McCanns are heading: towards more and madder 'sightings', almost all by tourists who get hyper after a few sherries. Nothing will come of any of them and the crazed limbo of family uncertainty, coupled with spiteful stranger speculation, will drag on for a lifetime.

And all the while, in remote foreign fields, frightened families with good reason to fear their police will be forced to prove their own children's existence. For that, as for much else, many of us have a lot to answer.

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