Anguished parents struggle in sea of despair</HEADLINE>

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HOLLOW-CHEEKED and red-eyed, Kate McCann grips her husband's hand tightly as she faces the television cameras. In her other hand she holds Cuddle Cat, her missing daughter Madeleine's favourite toy. "We are remaining positive. We still believe Madeleine will return to us," she says, her fingernails digging ever deeper into the pink, furry cat.

Her face tells a different story. Mrs McCann, a 38-year-old GP, is a woman tormented: a mother whose anguish knows no depths.

It has been 12 days since four-year-old Madeleine was snatched while she slept, tucked between her twin siblings, at her parents' holiday apartment in Portugal.

A lacklustre police investigation has seemingly made little progress in finding her, making the plight of her parents, forced to live out their anguish in public, all the worse.

Since her daughter's kidnap on the night of May 3, Mrs McCann has grown ever more gaunt, her frail frame stooped from her burden of grief. She appears on the verge of collapse.

Throughout the vigil that she and her husband, Gerry, a cardiologist, have endured, she has carried Cuddle Cat constantly. Pinning it to her handbag, twisting it through trembling fingers.

"Kate will be able to smell Madeleine on it," says Susan Healy, her mother. "That is why she cannot put it down."

Tragically for Mrs McCann, there is little else from which she can draw solace. Or hope.

Two streets away, behind the gleaming whitewashed apartment in Praia da Luz, where the McCanns were on a week-long holiday with Madeleine and their two-year-old twins, Amelie and Sean, two silver vans sit parked. Inside, locked in separate steel cages, four Alsatian sniffer dogs growl and bark in the midday heat. There is no sign of their green-uniformed handlers, officers from Portugal's Algarve Search and Rescue Dog team. They are down on the seafront, shopping for T-shirts.

Were it not for their uniforms they, too, might be on vacation. Instead, they are part of a 180-strong police search for the McCanns' daughter. But their shambolic, haphazard modus operandi symbolises the inept and bumbling investigation that represents the Portuguese authorities' efforts to find the toddler.

The police are wildly out of their depth, claiming that the rigidity of Portuguese law prevents them from disclosing any information. Olegario Sousa, their chief inspector, speaks English, but he rarely ventures more than one well-rehearsed speech. To every question he responds: "That is an aspect of the investigation we cannot talk about. It is the law, you know."

The police refuse to confirm reports of suspects, but neither will they deny them. Thus, this emotional and highly charged search for a missing child has become punctuated with endless red herrings and speculation.

Their ineptitude is, perhaps, inevitable: Praia da Luz is not a place one would expect a child kidnap. The village may be in Portugal, six kilometres from Lagos on the Algarve's south-western coast, but it could just as easily be south-east England in the 1950s.

The retired English middle classes have migrated here to re-create an image of a Britain that no longer exists, with its narrow cobbled streets, jammed with whitewashed apartments and quaint tea shops and boutiques. One rarely sees the Portuguese, especially not young people.

The gentle pace and child-friendly reputation of Praia da Luz convinced the McCanns that it was the ideal spot for a holiday.

It was five days into their break, at 10pm on May 3, that the nightmare began and this ordinary family was pitched into a maelstrom. From happy poolside holidaymakers, they have become the central characters in a bewildering, heartbreaking story of danger and despair.

Much has been made of the fact that the McCanns were only metres from their children and could see their apartment from the dinner table of the resort's tapas restaurant. But that is just not so. The McCanns' flat was outside the complex and, crucially, outside its security doors. Only the top of their accommodation could be glimpsed from the restaurant.

To check on the children, they had to leave the complex by the security doors, turn left up a main road, climb the back stairs of their end-of-row flat, go in through the rear french windows, which they had left unlocked, and walk to the front of the apartment where their children slept. That room overlooks a car park and another main road.

Their decision to leave the children alone, one that has astonished the Portuguese community, has been criticised. It is one, too, that Madeleine's devastated parents will be regretting with all their hearts. For Kate McCann's family, many of whom flew out to Portugal after the abduction, that criticism has been hard to bear.

"I have sat at that table, I know how diligent Kate and Gerry were about checking the children," Mrs Healy said. "They knew immediately that Madeleine had been taken, that she hadn't just wandered off. But it was difficult to get that across to the Portuguese police initially."

The McCanns raised the alarm when they found their daughter missing, but, while police responded quickly, they were not convinced she had been kidnapped. They neglected to protect the crime scene, allowing access to cleaners and failing to fingerprint the McCanns, so that their prints could be eliminated, until the following Monday.

As the family waited fearfully for news, they faced the agonising reality of trying to explain to their toddler twins why their big sister was no longer there.

"That was terrible for them," says John McCann, Mr McCann's elder brother, who has also travelled to Portugal to help search for his niece.

"Kate dressed Amelie in her sister's pyjamas and the baby said: 'Maddy's jammies. Where is Maddy?' But she is too young to understand. And how do you explain? All we know is that Madeleine needs her family. She loves us, we love her. It is time for her to come home."

That hope is becoming ever harder to sustain.

While the Portuguese police tried, initially, to play down the sickening prospect that an organised pedophile ring may have taken her, or that she has become another victim of the child-trafficking trade - stolen to order for a childless couple - with every passing day, those fears become more real.