Chapter And Verse by Dr Martin Roberts

A superb article and superb writing.

By Dr Martin Roberts

14 October 2009

CHAPTER AND VERSE

.........As a younger man I once enjoyed the company of a mathematically adept colleague, whose principal out-of-hours interest was the 'Sport of Kings'. He would study The Sporting Life assiduously, and wasn't so much in the habit of placing a bet as making a calculated investment. When assessing the odds, this individual typically thought 'outside the box', well before that phrase was ever coined. He had a sharp eye for the unusual, and one memorable observation of his has stayed with me ever since: 'You won't find a trainer in the North of England sending his horse all the way to a small track in the South if he doesn't have a very good reason for believing it will win.'

Now, this is not quite the irrelevant anecdote it may appear. Soon after attending at apartment 5A of the Ocean Complex on the night of May 3, 2007, the GNR decided they were out of their depth and called in the PJ, an organisation the McCanns would go on to criticise in no uncertain terms, Gerry making it perfectly clear that, in his view, the British had more experience in handling child abduction cases. So there he was, a visitor to the Iberian peninsular, whose child was inexplicably missing from a resort of little consequence and, as the local police, recognising the potential seriousness of the crime, defer instinctively to their senior investigative colleagues, what does Gerry McCann do? By way of bringing the full resources of the more experienced British police to bear, he encourages the PJ to collaborate, not with Scotland Yard, but a provincial constabulary.

Are we to suppose that the expertise to which Gerry McCann was necessarily appealing was particularly well represented by Leicestershire Police? Simply observing the law of averages, as well as the highly skewed distribution of the UK population, specialist expertise in all manner of things is most likely to reside in or around London and the South East. So was experience in the handling of missing child cases a Leicestershire forte or the criterion which singled them out as the most appropriate authority to co-ordinate the UK contribution? If not, what made their affiliation to the enquiry so important for the McCanns? Like the horse being sent a long way to compete in a small race meeting, the specific engagement of a provincial police force on a case with international parameters cannot have been without purpose. And that purpose cannot have been simply facilitating subsequent liaison back home in the UK, since no-one, outside of the protagonists, can pre-determine the length of time for which a missing person might remain so. It could all have been over inside a week. Still, there is no denying the quality of the liaison, with guidance, in the form of police manuals, later finding its way onto Gerry McCann's bedside cabinet. more