What happened on the day Madeleine disappeared?

Angela Balakrishnan

10am: The sixth day of the McCanns' week-long holiday in the Algarve. The couple place their daughter, Madeleine and her twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, in the Ocean Club's Kids Club while they go for a walk.

12.30pm: After collecting the children, Kate and Gerry head to their apartment, 5a, on ground floor of block five of the Waterside Village Gardens, for lunch before going to the Ocean Club swimming pool.

2.29pm: The last photograph of Madeleine is taken at the pool. The camera clock reads 1.29pm but the family says it was out by one hour.

3.30pm: Children return to Kids Club.

5.30pm: Children eat dinner at Kids Club.

6pm: Kate takes children back to apartment while Gerry goes to an hour-long tennis lesson.

6.30pm: Gerry asks David Payne, one of the so-called "tapas seven", to check on Kate and the children at the apartment.

7pm: Gerry returns to the apartment and the children are put to bed in the front bedroom overlooking the car park and beyond it, the street. Madeleine is placed in the single bed nearest the door. There is an empty bed against the opposite wall beneath the window. Between the two beds are two travel cots containing the twins.

7.30pm: The McCanns shower and change.

8pm: The couple share a bottle of wine together.

8.35pm: The McCanns are the first of the group to arrive at the tapas restaurant, 50 yards away from their apartment.

8.55pm: The group has ordered starters when the routine of checking on the children begins. Matt Oldfield goes to check his own apartment. He also tells the Paynes, who are still in their apartment, that the group is waiting for them at the restaurant.

9.05pm: Gerry returns to the apartment through the unlocked patio doors to check on the children. Earlier that week, the McCanns had used a key to go in through the front door next to the children's bedroom but, worrying the noise might wake the children, they began using the patio doors, leaving them unlocked.

He enters the apartment and sees that the children's bedroom door, which they always left slightly ajar, is now open to 45 degrees. Thinking this is odd, he glances into his own bedroom to see if Madeleine has gone into her parents' bed. But he sees that all three are still fast asleep where the McCanns left them. Putting the door back to five degrees, he went to the toilet and then returned to the restaurant. This is the last time he would see his daughter.

9.08pm: Gerry sees Jeremy Wilkins, another holidaymaker at the resort, on the opposite side of the road as he walks back to the tapas bar and crosses over to talk. Wilkins and his partner are eating in their apartment since their youngest child will not settle. The two men spend several minutes talking.

9.10pm: Jane Tanner walks up the road, unnoticed by Gerry and Wilkins, although she sees them. She spots a man walking quickly across the top of the road in front of her, going away from the apartment block and heading to the outer road of the resort complex. He is carrying a sleeping girl in pink pyjamas who is hanging limply in his arms. The sighting is odd, but hardly exceptional in a holiday resort. Her daughter is fine; Tanner returns to the table.

9.30pm: Kate gets up to make next check on her children but Matthew Oldfield and Russell O'Brien are checking, too. Oldfield offers to check the McCann's children.

In the McCanns' apartment, Oldfield notices the children's bedroom door is open again, but this means little to him. He merely observes all is quiet and makes a cursory glance inside the room seeing the twins in their cot, but not directly seeing Madeleine's bed from the angle at which he stood. Afterwards, he could not say for sure if she had been there or not. Nor could he say if the window and shutter had been open.

He would later get a hard time from the police because of this. During his interviews, he was aggressively accused of taking Madeleine, coming under suspicion because he had offered to take Kate's turn.

10.00pm: Kate checks on the children. She becomes alarmed when she reaches out to the children's bedroom door and it blows shut. Inside the room, the window is open and the shutter is up. The twins are sleeping but Madeleine's bed is empty.

Shortly after 10pm: Rachael Oldfield goes to Tanner's apartment to tell her Madeleine has been taken. Tanner says: "Oh my God. I saw a man carrying a girl."

10.15pm: Oldfield goes down to the 24-hour reception at the bottom of the hill to raise the alarm. Police are called

11.10pm: Police arrive. They see there is a latch lock on the sliding glass window. The McCanns thought, but could not be sure they had locked it at the start of the holiday. Later it was discovered that it was common for cleaners to open the shutters and windows to give the rooms an airing, so there is no way of knowing whether the window was locked that night or not. With no forensic evidence either, it is possible the abductor could have easily used the front door.

3.30am: Detectives from the Policia Judiciaria leave. The McCanns claim they noticed no further police action that night.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/11/madeleinemccann