When will the McCanns' tormentor in chief stop adding to their misery? The Portuguese detective whose book pointed the finger at Maddie's parents is now writing a second volume 

Goncalo Amaral is relaxing with an old friend at a brasserie in the Portuguese town of Portimao around midnight when he takes the call.

A three-year-old British girl is missing from a holiday apartment in the quiet resort of Praia da Luz, a short drive westward along the coast of the Algarve, and Amaral, a senior police detective, is being asked to issue instructions.

‘All precautions [must be] taken to preserve possible clues and elements of evidence,’ he tells the caller. ‘I demand to be informed of developments regularly.’

An inspector, and a forensics man are dispatched to Praia da Luz, and a watch put in place at Faro airport and at the border crossings between Portugal and Spain.

‘That evening, on arriving home, I see Ines, my younger daughter, who is sleeping close to my wife, Sofia,’ remembers Amaral. ‘In silence, in the dim light of the bedroom, I sit on the edge of the bed. Outside, far from her mother’s warmth, a child of the same age is lost.’

Aged 47, Goncalo Amaral is a veteran of Portugal’s Policia Judiciaria, the country’s serious crimes agency, with the rank of coordinator — equivalent to superintendent. During his quarter century on the force, this man from a working-class background in Lisbon has dealt with everything from drug trafficking to child murder. But this case will eclipse all others in notoriety — and in its impact on his life.

Scroll down for video 

It is the night of May 3, 2007, and Madeleine McCann has just vanished from Apartment 5A at the Ocean Club, snatched from her bed by person or persons unknown as her younger twin siblings sleep within feet of her and while her parents, Kate, a general practitioner, and Gerry, a cardiologist, from Leicester, dine with friends at a nearby poolside tapas restaurant. For Goncalo Amaral, the mystery of Madeleine McCann — one that continues to fascinate and appal as it approaches its tenth anniversary — is no mystery at all.

He made that clear in his book, Maddie: The Truth Of The Lie, written soon after he was hauled off the case in 2008 and took early retirement. He uses evidence garnered in the police investigation to question the kidnap theory and pin suspicion squarely on the McCanns.

He alleged that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment and the McCanns had faked the abduction. He was sued by Gerry and Kate McCann who told the trial of their ‘devastation, desperation, anxiety and pain’ at being accused by Amaral of hiding their daughter’s body.

Last week, after a nine-year legal battle, the McCanns finally failed in their attempt to have the book banned from sale in Portugal. They have always maintained that their aim was to stop Amaral spreading wicked and false lies which they felt hampered the search for Madeleine.

The Portuguese supreme court decision upholds the finding of a lower court last year, which overturned a previous libel win by the McCanns against Amaral when he was ordered to pay them £385,000 in damages.

Their initial victory in 2015 allowed them to block formal publication of the book, but could not stop its circulation on the internet. Now the supreme court has concluded that freedom of expression, in the shape of the Amaral book, must trump the right to protect the reputation of individuals (the McCanns).

What is perhaps worse for the McCanns, who have endured so much already, is that in its full judgment published this week the supreme court, though not a criminal law body, has signally refused to clear them of involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.

The court states that the decision in July 2008 to shelve — ‘archive’ — the initial police investigation and remove the couple’s ‘arguido’ (formal suspect) status does not mean they are innocent.

‘The archiving of the case was determined by the fact that public prosecutors hadn’t managed to obtain sufficient evidence of the practice of crimes by the appellants (the McCanns),’ says the ruling. ‘It doesn’t therefore seem acceptable that the ruling, based on the insufficiency of evidence, should be equated to proof of innocence.’

It also ruled that there were ‘serious concerns relating to the truth of the allegation that Madeleine was kidnapped’.

Now, the McCanns face a huge legal bill — as well as the agony caused by the book’s continued availability. Their feud with Amaral has become a running sore that may yet empty the much-depleted Madeleine’s Fund.

The ruling also raises questions about the impartiality of the Portuguese courts in a highly politicised case that saw prime ministers from Tony Blair onwards intervening at one level or another to assist in the investigation.

There is continuing widespread and bitter resentment towards the McCanns in Portugal because of the case’s impact on tourism in the Algarve.

Last year, Rui Pereira, a former Portuguese minister of internal affairs, condemned his own police force for not making Kate and Gerry McCann suspects for child abandonment.

He accused his countrymen of a sense of inferiority to the British that allowed the latter to push the kidnap hypothesis at the expense of something nearer to home.

‘At the beginning, there was an extraordinary and ridiculous theory that said the English have very peculiar cultural customs,’ said Pereira. ‘And, therefore, it was natural for them to leave the [children] alone in a bedroom for the parents to go out a few hundred metres away to socialise with their friends.’

For Amaral, however, the judgment represents a rare success following a decade of vilification by those who accuse him of cashing in on an innocent family’s suffering. The past nine years have seen his reputation as an investigator trashed, his career terminated, his assets frozen, his finances ruined and his marriage to Sofia, mother to two of his three daughters, dissolved.

He is said to have made some £300,000 from his book and an accompanying documentary, but the money appears to be long gone and, now 57, he attempts to make a living writing books from his father’s home in Lisbon. Counter-suing the McCanns, as he has threatened, may be the only way to restore his finances.

That, and writing a second book on the case — which is just what he is planning.

Few will weep tears for Amaral, seeing an angry man locked up in his own bitter and baseless theories. He continues to insist the long-running, high-profile campaign to find Madeleine, the vast fund accumulated for that purpose, the marathon inquiries into her disappearance conducted by first Portuguese police and then Scotland Yard are constructed on nothing but a lie.

Amaral points in his book to what he claims are inconsistencies in the McCanns’ account of events that night, when the meal at the tapas bar was interrupted by a distraught Kate returning from a check on her sleeping children to announce that Madeleine was missing.

In an interview he claimed the witness statements and depositions of the McCanns ‘reveal a major level of imprecision, of incoherence and contradiction . . . the existence of blood traces behind the sofa in the apartment, which was confirmed by preliminary analyses.

‘One can presume that the little girl fell behind that piece of furniture . . . The same for the finding of odours and traces of blood in the vehicle that was rented by the McCanns, three weeks after Madeleine’s disappearance. It was the only vehicle among 11 that retained the dogs’ attention. There is equally the witness statement of an Irish couple that states they saw Gerry McCann carrying a child on the evening of the events.

‘Finally, there’s Kate McCann’s fingerprint on the window of Madeleine’s bedroom, which clearly indicates that she opened that window, undoubtedly to make us believe in the abduction theory, while stating that the window was already open when she arrived on the spot at 10pm, the time at which she noticed Madeleine’s disappearance and raised the alarm.’

These allegations were aired during the 2015 libel case in Portugal and it is important to point out that the blood traces were never identified as human, nor are fingerprints on a window evidence of any wrong doing on the part of Kate McCann.

As for the Irish couple Amaral cites, the man who was in his 70s admitted he was not wearing his glasses at the time, while dozens of witnesses confirmed Gerry McCann was at the holiday complex at 10pm when the man and his wife ‘thought’ they saw him.

Goncalo Amaral insists he is not obsessed by the case but frustrated that lines of inquiry were not properly followed through because of what he claims were political pressures emanating from Lisbon via the British government.

An associate of Amaral’s said this week the detective has been motivated in his legal battles purely by a desire to ensure evidence relevant to the case is available to the public, and not locked away in official archives.

‘He is a man with a strong feeling of justice,’ says the source. And that is the enduring theme of his personality. He has the right to have an opinion about what happened to Madeleine McCann, and the right to justice.’ But his many critics believe Amaral’s fury at his own treatment, both in Portugal and by the media worldwide, is a more likely driving force in his apparent refusal to allow the McCanns some sort of peace.

He was singled out for criticism — many would say justifiably — from the start over the faltering investigation and had his career and private life raked over. 

In a recent interview, Amaral said he wrote this book partly to answer criticism against him in the British media.

‘They called me — the British press — 418 times “shameful”, 440 times “outrageous”, 140 times “torturer”, 45 times “disabled”, 37 times ‘incompetent’, 23 times “libertine cop”, 20 times “sacked”.’

For their part, the McCanns have made their frustration at the court’s decision clear in comments made to the media last week by ‘friends’. ‘It was never about winning big libel damages, but all about them silencing him to stop him spouting his untruthful and malicious lies,’ said one. ‘Any award made would have gone into Madeleine’s Fund to help find their daughter, and would never have been used for Kate and Gerry’s own use.’

Maddie: The Truth Of The Lie appears destined to remain on the shelves, in Portugal at least, for years to come. And despite fresh legal warnings from the McCann camp, Amaral is hoping to have his second tome published in English and possibly by a British publisher.

One book could be interpreted as a genuine attempt to air one’s views on aspects of the investigation, but a second looks like cashing in.

Meanwhile, the McCanns — now both 48 — must assess the damage inflicted on the Madeleine Fund. Some £4.2 million has been raised since 2007, be it donations from celebrities and ordinary well-wishers, earnings from Kate’s book Madeleine, or in the form of libel settlements by British newspapers that questioned the couple’s innocence.

Only a fraction remains, the rest consumed by private detectives, campaign material and travel. Now, that dwindling rump sum, £700,000 or less, may be threatened by yet more legal bills not to mention the possibility of a counter lawsuit from Amaral.

Whether donors are happy that some of their money has been used to fight libel actions in foreign jurisdictions is unknown, but accounts show the fund has always allowed this kind of expenditure.

‘Goncalo can argue that he is entitled to sue Mr and Mrs McCann for both material and emotional loss as the result of their campaign to stop his book,’ a close associate told the Mail this week.

‘There is material loss because publication of his book was suspended for a prolonged period, and emotional loss because of the stress he endured . . .’

As Madeleine’s Fund declines, so too does the Home Office grant sustaining Operation Grange, the Scotland Yard investigation into the disappearance launched in 2011. Once occupying 30 full-time detectives, it has now dwindled to just four, its budget due to run out in April.

After the fruitless pursuit of numerous theories and leads, the team is now investigating just one: that Madeleine was abducted by a European human trafficking ring.

No one is holding their breath after so many false dawns.

What happened to Madeleine Beth McCann appears destined to remain one of the great unanswered questions in the annals of crime.

Two hundred miles south of Lisbon, Praia da Luz is in semi-hibernation. The annual influx of families who still favour this small resort despite its notoriety is months away.

This place is dead — except for the cameramen scouting locations. Television journalists have been spotted again in the resort after years of absence. Crews from Britain, the U.S. and Australia are preparing items for that sad tenth anniversary in May.

The Ocean Club is now called the Garden Club, but its layout is the same. Apartment 5A is shuttered and empty, like most of the holiday lets in this white-painted ghost resort. It looks unloved, the small back garden slightly overgrown, history lending it a brooding, melancholy air.

Come May 3, the people who own homes and businesses in Praia da Luz will grit their teeth and wait for the media hurricane to abate. Why endlessly rake over a case beyond solution, they argue?

‘People feel they are victims of this case,’ says Paul Luckman, a British resident of the Algarve and editor of the English-language Portugal News. ‘Their home has been tarnished for years by this. They just wish it would all go away.’

That is something Goncalo Amaral will not allow.