Heavy recent rains left the toys limp and waterlogged.
Yet the weeks have since stretched on without any sign of Madeleine's return. Dozens of cuddly toys soon covered the pavement and the benches. Wellwishers - first from the village, then from Leicester and London, and finally from all over the world - descended to add their handwritten messages of support. In the weeks that followed, the dozens grew to hundreds. In the days following Madeleine's disappearance, the landlady at the pub opposite, the Royal Oak, caught the villagers' mood perfectly and organised a display of dozens of yellow ribbons around the five tall trees which encircle the tiny park.
Rothley's main square, centring on a gated war memorial, seemed strangely quiet - and empty. But in two very different villages, one a few miles outside Leicester in the Midlands and the other on the sun-scorched Algarve coast, the painful sense of Madeleine's absence was powerfully in evidence last week. 'I was screaming her name,' Kate recalled. 'Mummy,' she recalled Madeleine's bedtime words in a choked near-whisper, 'I've had the best day ever! I'm having lots and lots of fun!' Barely two hours later, Kate returned from dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant about 100 yards from their holiday flat to discover that Madeleine was gone. With the approach next weekend of that latest painful milestone, Kate has spoken for the first time of the final few hours before her daughter's kidnapping on the evening of 3 May in the holiday resort of Praia da Luz.
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