THREE agonising months into the search to find Madeleine McCann, baffled Portuguese police had no leads, no evidence and not a single arrest had been made.
The increasingly desperate squad of detectives were in the glare of the global spotlight and under mounting pressure to crack the high-profile case, they summoned the toddler’s distraught mum Kate.
To her horror, Kate – frantic at the unexplained abduction of her three-year-old daughter – suddenly found herself accused of the crime by the officers who were supposed to be out searching for missing Madeleine.
When she asked why she had been hauled in, she was given a simple but alarming answer: “Because we don’t believe you.”
Stunned, she replied: “Are you saying that I had something to do with Madeleine’s disappearance?” The detective said bluntly: “Did you?”
Now a powerful new TV drama, Suspect: Kate McCann, retells the intense interrogation she endured, with a harrowing script drawn directly from official statements and recorded testimony.
Madeleine had vanished from her bed in the McCanns’ holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, in May 2007.
And her parents, former GP Kate and heart doctor Gerry from Rothley, Leicestershire, found themselves wrongly accused of a cover-up.
That summer the initial wave of public sympathy had turned to suspicion and scrutiny as forensic evidence, leaked by the police, apparently implicated the McCanns.
Kate was suddenly confronted and bombarded with a barrage of 49 questions during a gruelling eleven-hour interrogation.
It was the most shocking and controversial moment in the case, as the police who had been working closely with the family suddenly became accusatory.
Until this point they had a friendly relationship – one officer even invited Kate, Gerry and their twins Amelie and Sean over to his house for dinner.
But at this stage their tone changed, and the next day Kate was named ‘arguida’ – a formal suspect.
The hostility and tension around the interrogation was palpable, with the couple’s public relations assistant, Justine McGuinness, describing the mood as “very nasty”, according to The Independent.
Not only were the traumatised family being put under scrutiny, but their surrounding circles were too. A Portuguese newspaper named the friends Kate and Gerry had been on holiday with, shamefully implying they were in a conspiracy of silence.
The police demanded a confession, and while she denied everything, Kate feared that without one, they may charge her with murdering her own child.
And being pressured into admitting a crime she would never dream of committing was truly terrifying.
Not only did it mean the chilling threat of a prison sentence, but it also diminished their hopes of finding Madeleine before it was too late.
If detectives believed Kate was guilty, she feared they could stop looking for the real culprit, who had snatched their precious toddler from her bed.
Using her right to remain silent, Kate denied every one of their flimsy accusations by answering “no comment” on her lawyer’s advice.
She was asked to relive the moment she returned to the apartment to find Madeleine missing, asked if she searched inside the wardrobe, and asked to describe its contents.
Other callous questions included whether it was true that “sometimes you despaired with your children’s behaviour” and why the twins were left alone as the couple raised the alarm over their daughter.
Kate was also grilled about the crime scene – particularly why a curtain behind the sofa had been tampered with – and, bafflingly, whether she had asked for a priest.
The only question she did answer was: “Are you aware that in not answering the questions you are jeopardising the investigation, which seeks to discover what happened to your daughter?”
She stoically replied: “Yes, if that’s what the investigation thinks.”
Kate emerged 11 hours later amid a media scrum, visibly exhausted, and Maddie’s father, Gerry, was questioned separately the following day.
While the distraught dad later admitted to have been brought to tears by the grilling, his wife was said to be “very angry and defiant”.
Faced with a clear lack of evidence, police lifted Kate and Gerry’s ‘arguido’ status in 2008. But it took 15 more years for cops to formally apologise to the couple for the way they handled the case.
The prime suspect in the investigation is now German Christian Brueckner, a convicted rapist who was released from jail last year.
The Met police are reportedly pushing for the 48-year-old to stand trial in the UK for the abduction and murder of Madeleine before the 20th anniversary of her disappearance next year.
The gripping new film, starring actress Laura Bayston as Kate, is based on official statements and recorded testimony from that harrowing day.
Although the Portuguese Policia Judicaria officers who interrogated Kate did not audio record their interviews, one of their team took detailed notes which were then translated into English for her to sign off once the interview was complete.
Mum-of-two Laura, 47, admitted that she was thinking about Kate throughout the claustrophobic fly-on-the-wall style filming.
“I have two children who were a similar age at the time and it terrified me,” she said. “It was shocking. It’s still shocking.
“I also felt a huge responsibility toward Kate, of course. I thought of her and Madeleine every minute of every day while filming.
“I approach the role as I would any – I try and get inside the human, but also that of a mother, a wife and a woman.
“I’m all these things and I’ve felt the pain of grief and loss, so I use that. But I think to truly understand the weight of such immense pressure and scrutiny of this scale is impossible.
“It was all emotional, but when Kate is presented with her offer by the police, which is to admit guilt, that was truly horrific and an absolute punch in the guts to film.”
Writer Philip Ralph added of the police approach: “I expected that they would be challenging and combative, seeking to catch Kate out and lead her to a confession of guilt.
“What did surprise me, on studying the interrogations and the direction of the enquiry, was how unbelievable their accusations were.
“To assert that Kate and Gerry McCann had somehow been responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance and even her death, based on highly questionable evidence, struck me as shocking and surprising as I imagine the McCanns themselves must have felt it to be.
“I wanted to cut through all of the noise and drill down to the precise specifics of what took place in that room on those days between Kate McCann and the officers.
“What were they accusing her of? What was their evidence? And how did she respond?”
