“We’ve got some critical lines of inquiry, those link to particular hypotheses, but I’m not going to discuss those because those are very much live investigation,” Rowley said.
The Metropolitan Police opted to reopen and fully fund a new probe into Madeleine’s disappearance in 2013.
Madeleine was one week from her fourth birthday when she went missing from the family’s vacation apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal. The little girl had been left with her 2-year-old twin siblings in the unlocked rental while Kate and Gerry dined at a restaurant just 130 feet away.
“No parent is going to give up on their child, unless they know for certain their child is dead, and we just don’t have any evidence,” Gerry – who, along with Kate, was cleared as a suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance – said.
Echoed Kate, “My hope for Madeleine being out there is no less than it was almost 10 years ago. I mean, apart from those first 48 hours, nothing has actually changed since then.”
Both have full faith in the Metropolitan Police’s work: “They’ve managed to pull so much together and sift through so much information, so now we do seem to be on just several lines of enquiry rather than tens/hundreds,” said Kate.
Gerry and Kate said that they’ve tried hard to make life somewhat normal for their twins, Sean and Amelie.
“I think before Madeleine was taken, we felt we had managed to achieve our little perfect nuclear family of five,” said Gerry, adding, “At some point you’ve got to realize that time is not frozen and I think both of us realize that we owed it to the twins to make sure that their life is as fulfilling as they deserve, and we have certainly tried our best to achieve that.”
“I think every kind of event that we do, whether it be a birthday or a family occasion or even an achievement or something that is kind of when you really feel her absence,” said Kate, adding that she still buys birthday and Christmas presents for her daughter – including for Madeleine’s upcoming 14th.
“I think, that there is still hope really, there isn’t a new appeal, most of the media that we’ve done in the previous years is usually around that – so this is unusual,” said Gerry. “So, we are marking the anniversary. I think it’s been good for the general public to hear police say there’s no evidence that she’s dead, and that there is still an active investigation, and there is still hope. So certainly from my point of view, somebody knows what’s happened.”
This story originally appeared on PEOPLE.com.
