Portugal:The good will enjoyed by Madeleine's parents has been slowly slipping away, writes Mary Fitzgerald.
Any time Gerry and Kate McCann ventured on to the cobbled streets of Praia da Luz in the months after their daughter Madeleine vanished from a holiday apartment in the sleepy Algarve resort, people tended to keep a respectful distance. Locals looked on as the McCanns walked to the village church to pray. Journalists stopped short of pestering the couple for on-the-spot interviews as they took their twins to a nearby creche or jogged along the beach.
Last week's footage of Kate McCann walking through the scrum gathered outside a police station showed how much things had changed. Instead of sympathetic smiles, there were jeers, cat-calls and hissing. "How could you?" one onlooker shouted as photographers jostled to get the best picture of a haggard-looking Kate McCann.
She would face more than 10 hours of questioning by police during which they would put it to her bluntly: Did you kill your daughter? By Saturday both she and her husband would be declared official suspects in the investigation into their daughter's disappearance.
Four months ago, such a twist would have been unthinkable. The level of public engagement with the missing Madeleine story and the accompanying sympathy for her parents reached such a level that the BBC went as far as comparing it to the emotional outpouring that followed the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Thanks to the McCanns' slick publicity drive, the four-year-old's face was rarely out of the public consciousness.
On the recommendation of a small army of media advisers, the couple released a steady trickle of photographs, statements and, later on, lengthy TV interviews to ensure momentum was sustained.
Their campaign reached the Vatican - where they met the pope - as well as the White House and Downing Street. Business tycoons, footballers including David Beckham, and celebrities such as Harry Potter author JK Rowling joined in. Rewards for information totalled millions of euro.
From the start the story has been characterised by high emotion and endless, often lurid, speculation, all of which has obscured the paucity of hard evidence available to the public.
Because of Portugal's strict "secrecy of justice" laws, there are few concrete details about what happened the night Madeleine went missing. Information about the subsequent police investigation is also scant. The secrecy laws prevent anybody involved in the investigation from talking about it to the media or anyone else.
What is known is that Madeleine McCann went missing from the holiday apartment she shared with her parents and twin siblings at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz on May 3rd. Her parents had left the three children sleeping alone in the ground-floor apartment as they dined with a group of friends at a tapas bar about 100 yards away.
From here the picture turns hazy, with snippets from the investigation leaked to the media by the couple's relatives and friends mixing with unsubstantiated allegations.
Leaks from the investigation indicate Gerry and Kate McCann told police they arrived at the tapas bar at 8.40pm. The couple checked on the sleeping children at half-hour intervals after that. When Kate McCann went to check at 10pm she discovered the outside shutter and window to Madeleine's room had been opened and her daughter was missing. She said police were alerted within 10 minutes.
Similarly, when it comes to what led detectives to declare the couple suspects, nothing has been publicly confirmed by police.
Friends and relatives of the McCanns say police told Kate they had found forensic traces they implied came from Madeleine in a car hired by the couple more than three weeks after she disappeared.
The police are also said to have told the couple that a police sniffer dog brought in from Britain had detected the scent of a corpse in the car.
Even before last week's unexpected turn, there were signs that something had changed. As leads emerged only to evaporate days later, an element of fatigue set into what had been exhaustive media coverage. The story slipped down the headlines and Gerry McCann announced they would wind down their campaign.
But there were also indications that the immense goodwill and unswerving support the McCann family had received was starting to fray. As far back as July, the couple's local newspaper in Britain was forced to shut down its Madeleine website after several "spiteful and defamatory" comments were posted about them. In Portugal, a British solicitor living in Praia da Luz wrote a letter to a local English language newspaper questioning the couple's decision to leave their children alone.
Though in the early days of Madeleine's disappearance people had baulked at voicing similar criticisms, recently such remarks had become more commonplace in Portugal and Britain.
The lawyer for Robert Murat, the British man first classed as an official suspect, also weighed in, criticising what he said was the couple's "strange" behaviour the night Madeleine went missing.
Furthermore, people began to question Kate's and Gerry McCann's version of events. At a press conference in Berlin, a German journalist stunned the couple when she asked if they had anything to do with Madeleine's disappearance.
The growing hostility peaked with a Portuguese newspaper recently alleging outright that the McCanns had accidentally killed their daughter with an overdose of sedatives. The couple said they would sue for libel.
With the finger of suspicion now pointing at Kate and Gerry McCann, commentators have already started scrutinising their behaviour over the last four months for hints of anything remotely incriminating. The couple had been feted for their stoicism and courage, for the most part remaining calm and composed in the glare of the media spotlight.
The McCanns' family and friends have leapt to their defence since last week's developments. Gerry McCann's sister, Philomena, has dismissed the allegations against her brother and his wife as "ludicrous and utterly untrue".
Kate McCann told a Sunday newspaper yesterday that Portuguese police pressured her to confess that she killed Madeleine by accident.
She reportedly said that police "want me to lie - I'm being framed".
Her husband claimed in another paper that Portuguese police were looking for a swift conclusion to the case and were exploiting apparent discrepancies in the couple's account of what happened.
In Australia, news that Kate and Gerry McCann are now main suspects in the investigation into their daughter's disappearance has triggered memories of the so-called "Dingo Baby" case in the 1980s.
The trial of Lindy Chamberlain, whose months-old daughter Azaria disappeared on a camping trip in the outback, caused a sensation in the 1980s. Chamberlain was convicted of murder but later exonerated. She had always claimed her daughter had been taken from the family tent by a dingo. In an article headlined "Police must avoid mistakes that condemned Lindy", a writer in Melbourne's Herald Sunwrote:
"The McCanns could face a similar ordeal. In both cases police forces faced enormous pressure to make an arrest. With both Azaria and Maddy, there was no motive, no weapon, no body and no confession - four of the critical elements in any murder case."
The McCanns returned to Britain yesterday, pleading for privacy and an "ordinary life" for their family. No matter what the coming weeks bring in terms of the investigation, however, what is certain is the impossibility of the McCann family ever living an ordinary life again.