questions from local reporters and journalists who had been sent up to do backgrounders and ‘colour’ pieces in the area.
*
Many years before, following a series of rapes and violent sexual murders in villages on the other side of Leicester, an American, the LA policeman turned best-selling novelist Joseph Wambaugh, had come to the East Midlands to gather material for a true-crime book called The Blooding . With an outsider’s eye, Wambaugh had noted ‘cottages with bottle-glass leaded windows’ and ‘tall young villagers passing in and out of cottage doors, in a semi-genuflection’, but also that the city of Leicester itself, ‘like most of Britain’, had acquired a large Asian and East Indian population. ‘The people of Leicester have acquired an unfair reputation for being offhand’, he wrote. ‘Yet it’s hard to judge people harshly when they sprinkle theirspeech with endearments like “m’duck” (it sounds like “midook”).’
Wambaugh’s primary interest, and the subject of his book, was a scientific discovery that in the mid-Eighties had only just been announced: the technique known as ‘genetic fingerprinting’. It was Wambaugh’s conviction that DNA testing was going to transform forensic science as much as standard fingerprinting did in the 1890s that had brought him to Leicester University and the lab of the geneticist Alec Jeffreys.
In a fringe project spun off from his main project, which involved a study to determine how genes evolve, Jeffreys had unexpectedly hit upon a method of mapping human genes that produced a DNA image which was individually specific. By showing huge numbers of genetic markers resembling the bar codes used to identify supermarket items, Jeffreys proved that it was possible to positively identify a person using even the tiniest sample of blood or saliva or semen: the only people on the face of the planet with identical DNA would be identical twins. The little circumstances of no two lives anywhere in the world are just alike.
It was an accident of history that a scientific discovery made in their adopted home city twenty years earlier would lead to the McCanns being declared arguidos by the Portuguese police. There is also the odd coincidence of the McCanns’ friend Dr David Payne, one of the ‘Tapas 7’ who was having dinner with them on the night Madeleine disappeared, being a senior research fellow at LeicesterUniversity in the laboratories where Sir Alec Jeffreys, enormously wealthy now from the patents he holds, still works.
*
Media mouthpiece was a new role for Kate McCann’s uncle, Brian Kennedy, but not entirely unfamiliar: he was a recently retired headmaster and so used to keeping unruly elements in check. He knew the protocols from many years’ exposure to victims’ families on the television news, and the questions in the first few weeks tended to be of the human-interest sort and politely reticent rather than probing. (It would take a full month from the disappearance for a German reporter to break rank and ask the McCanns how they felt about the fact that ‘more and more people seem [ed] to be pointing the finger’ at them, during a press conference in Berlin.)
Brian Kennedy was usually filmed against the war memorial in Rothley where several hundred people, including the new classmates Madeleine was due to join in September, had left soft toys and flowers and tied yellow ribbons to the railings. Nevertheless, in those early days when the story was still breaking, welcome back-up was provided by Esther McVey, a media-savvy schoolfriend of Kate McCann’s from Liverpool and another high achiever. In her twenties she had been a presenter for BBC children’s television and a talking hair-do on the breakfast show GMTV before becoming involved with numerous charities and active in party politics: she was the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Wirral West inthe 2005 General Election. (Justine McGuinness, the McCann family spokesman
*
Many years before, following a series of rapes and violent sexual murders in villages on the other side of Leicester, an American, the LA policeman turned best-selling novelist Joseph Wambaugh, had come to the East Midlands to gather material for a true-crime book called The Blooding . With an outsider’s eye, Wambaugh had noted ‘cottages with bottle-glass leaded windows’ and ‘tall young villagers passing in and out of cottage doors, in a semi-genuflection’, but also that the city of Leicester itself, ‘like most of Britain’, had acquired a large Asian and East Indian population. ‘The people of Leicester have acquired an unfair reputation for being offhand’, he wrote. ‘Yet it’s hard to judge people harshly when they sprinkle theirspeech with endearments like “m’duck” (it sounds like “midook”).’
Wambaugh’s primary interest, and the subject of his book, was a scientific discovery that in the mid-Eighties had only just been announced: the technique known as ‘genetic fingerprinting’. It was Wambaugh’s conviction that DNA testing was going to transform forensic science as much as standard fingerprinting did in the 1890s that had brought him to Leicester University and the lab of the geneticist Alec Jeffreys.
In a fringe project spun off from his main project, which involved a study to determine how genes evolve, Jeffreys had unexpectedly hit upon a method of mapping human genes that produced a DNA image which was individually specific. By showing huge numbers of genetic markers resembling the bar codes used to identify supermarket items, Jeffreys proved that it was possible to positively identify a person using even the tiniest sample of blood or saliva or semen: the only people on the face of the planet with identical DNA would be identical twins. The little circumstances of no two lives anywhere in the world are just alike.
It was an accident of history that a scientific discovery made in their adopted home city twenty years earlier would lead to the McCanns being declared arguidos by the Portuguese police. There is also the odd coincidence of the McCanns’ friend Dr David Payne, one of the ‘Tapas 7’ who was having dinner with them on the night Madeleine disappeared, being a senior research fellow at LeicesterUniversity in the laboratories where Sir Alec Jeffreys, enormously wealthy now from the patents he holds, still works.
*
Media mouthpiece was a new role for Kate McCann’s uncle, Brian Kennedy, but not entirely unfamiliar: he was a recently retired headmaster and so used to keeping unruly elements in check. He knew the protocols from many years’ exposure to victims’ families on the television news, and the questions in the first few weeks tended to be of the human-interest sort and politely reticent rather than probing. (It would take a full month from the disappearance for a German reporter to break rank and ask the McCanns how they felt about the fact that ‘more and more people seem [ed] to be pointing the finger’ at them, during a press conference in Berlin.)
Brian Kennedy was usually filmed against the war memorial in Rothley where several hundred people, including the new classmates Madeleine was due to join in September, had left soft toys and flowers and tied yellow ribbons to the railings. Nevertheless, in those early days when the story was still breaking, welcome back-up was provided by Esther McVey, a media-savvy schoolfriend of Kate McCann’s from Liverpool and another high achiever. In her twenties she had been a presenter for BBC children’s television and a talking hair-do on the breakfast show GMTV before becoming involved with numerous charities and active in party politics: she was the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Wirral West inthe 2005 General Election. (Justine McGuinness, the McCann family spokesman
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