Double Take: As our fascination with Kate McCann darkens, we should be wary of the energy we, the mob, bring to her story, writes Ann Marie Hourihane.
The McCann soap opera continues and grows even more disturbing. It is not disturbing because the parents of the vanished Madeleine McCann are now suspects in their daughter's disappearance. Any adult who has taken a small child to the casualty department of a functioning hospital and has been asked to account for an alarming amount of innocently acquired bruises could tell you that the parent is always a suspect when a child is injured, however superficially.
No parent I have ever spoken to about these routine interrogations seems to resent them, even though some of the same parents report that the sweat was running down their backs as they struggled to remember how one healthy six-year-old could end up with so many bruises on her shins.
The star of the McCann soap opera is the beautiful Kate McCann, the child's mother. In a fortnight her public persona has moved on from that of grieving and saintly mother, who was given not only the keys to the local church in Praia da Luz so that she could pray there whenever she liked, but also - remarkably - access to the Pope.
Now Kate McCann is being criticised for not crying enough - or, at least, not crying in public. She has become a victim of what journalist Dominic Lawson this week called "our synchronised sentimentality, because she has denied the mob its vicarious pleasure".
The McCann soap opera is disturbing first of all because of the energy and the relish we, the mob, bring to it. Of course it is human nature to be fascinated by the grotesque and the horrific, and by crime of all types.
The fact that this tiny country has an insatiable appetite for home-grown true-crime novels, detailing gruesome and senseless murders and the exploits of completely uninteresting gangsters, demonstrates this truth.
In our defence it should be said that a great deal of our voyeuristic delight in tragic tales is mixed with relief that we are not ourselves involved in them. At least that is what the psychologists rather comfortingly tell us.
But it is hard to remember a time when a case was discussed so widely and for so long as the case of Madeleine McCann. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has a theory. It has become the real-life equivalent of Big Brother or Coronation Street, and it is difficult to remember, in the middle of extremely enjoyable discussions in the office, the pub or the ladies', that a real child, who is probably dead, lies at the heart of it. Every night, after the evening news, we are bombarded with Cold Case or Silent Witness or CSI: Miami or Law & Order. We have the vocabulary now to help us sweep fact into fiction.
It must have been like this when our Victorian ancestors were poring over reports from London about the Jack the Ripper murders (not that the Madeleine case necessarily is one of murder). But in the 21st century every television viewer thinks they know how DNA testing works, and what it proves. It takes Sir Alec Jeffreys, who is said to have invented DNA fingerprinting, to go on Newsnight and explain that the DNA traces found in the McCanns' car, hired three weeks after the child's disappearance, could have come from one of Madeleine's siblings, twins Sean and Amelie.
It is also a struggle to remember that the history of female relatives who did not cooperate with our ideas of how women should grieve is a chilling one. Only in the last week, since Kate McCann was named by Portuguese police as a suspect, has the case of Lindy Chamberlain been revived.
Chamberlain, who was deeply religious and thought to be a bit peculiar, maintained that her baby daughter, Azaria, had been taken by a dingo. She remained outwardly composed throughout the ordeal; so composed, in fact, that she was thought to be behaving in an unnatural manner and was convicted, on forensic evidence which was processed in a British laboratory, of her daughter's murder. She had been in jail for several years before Azaria's matinee jacket was found in the lair of a dingo.
Also in Australia, Joanne Lees, a British backpacker, was reviled when it was discovered that she had had a brief affair with another man before her boyfriend, Peter Falconio, was murdered by a deranged drifter. Joanne Lees wasn't even a suspect in a crime, she was an innocent witness.
In Ireland, Vanessa Meehan, girlfriend of Paul Ward and sister of Brian Meehan, was unlucky enough to be very pretty. Consequently she was more photographed and insulted and pursued by the press than either her boyfriend or her brother, who were accused and subsequently found guilty of very serious crimes. Catherine Nevin was found guilty of her husband's murder on the word of three witnesses, and no other substantive evidence whatsoever, as the current issue of Village magazine points out.
But the most difficult thing for us to remember about the McCann soap opera is that it may not have an ending. There may be no resolution, no answer to what happened to Madeleine McCann. We may never know. That doesn't happen in soap opera, but it does happen quite a lot in real life.