A little blonde girl with a ruler-straight fringe and a direct gaze is in a hospital elevator, in the north of England.
She is in the arms of a woman who clearly, if judged by age alone, is not her mother.
Heads turn. This little girl looks so familiar.
Her face, after all, is everywhere. Something terrible has happened to her.
"She looks a lot like..." One person starts, leaning towards the child.
"That girl in Portugal..."
"That Maddie..."
"McCann."
It was 2007. My mum was holding my niece in her arms, taking the toddler to visit her baby brother for the very first time.
My niece, of course, wasn’t the girl on every newspaper's front page, every news bulletin, every news site. She was one of thousands of children who was being looked at just a little more closely than usual, that week, that month, that year.
The UK was in a fever about the disappearance of a Scottish girl who, on holiday in Praia de Luz with her family, had vanished without a trace. Taken from her bed.
It was the kind of story that captivated a nation. Eventually, a world.
My mum held her granddaughter closer. "It’s not her," she said. None of those examined little faces were her, then.
In 2023, we've now been looking for Madeleine McCann for almost 16 years. Every so often a spasm of viral excitement revives the search, pushes her name back into headlines, reignites theories.
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