McCanns? We can't help being suspicious

Most under scrutiny was Kate. Not the mounting but still inconclusive haul of DNA that keeps us riveted. But Kate's behaviour, her demeanour and - incredibly - her earrings.

I'd heard it all before - in the hairdresser, on the bus. But here the same gossip and conjecture was being aired, in my kitchen, by my sensible, intelligent, friends. She looks so hard, they said, and so well turned out. It's suspicious.

They are not the only ones to think this way. Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize, has written a brilliant piece in the London Review of Books. It articulates our mass obsession with the story, how it has made sleuths of us all, ever analysing scenarios, suspicious even of the McCanns' language.

"I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone," she writes. "In fact ... I wanted them to grieve. In this, I am as bad as people who complain 'she does not cry'."

Kate McCann is only too aware of these criticisms. Her mother gave an interview this week in which she said Kate feels she has been denied sympathy because she is too thin, not "maternal" enough.

You could interpret this as a cynical, self-pitying attempt to manipulate public opinion. Or you could admit that yes, she's got a point.

Women bond by confessing imperfections. Feed most of us a bottle of Pinot Grigio and the truth will out. But Kate's façade has not cracked. She grows more stony-faced by the day. Other than her close, closed circle of friends, Kate has not let us in.

And now we are judging her for that.

As we reached for the third bottle, the most anti-Kate of my friends admitted to an imperfection of her own. Years ago, when her son was nearly four, she was on holiday in Croatia. While she ate dinner in the hotel, her sons played downstairs. She checked on them every 10 minutes or so. "It felt so safe," she told me.

Just after the coffee arrived, she went to check again. But her youngest wasn't there. Panic set in. Within half an hour the whole island was looking for him.

Some time later a local boy emerged from the darkness, leading her toddler son by the hand. She never really knew what happened. But she knew one thing when she saw Kate McCann - it could have been her.

Yet even with this memory so vivid in her mind, and the wit to know you can't tell guilt from appearance, she can't help thinking the worst of Kate.

"The McCanns left their children alone," observes Enright. "They cannot accept that their daughter might be dead. Guilt and denial are the emotions we smell off Gerry and Kate McCann, and they madden us."

She's right. It is not only the McCanns who are caught in the cleft stick of suspicion. We all are.