IF YOU have had the stomach to read it, there is one line in Kate McCann’s searing book about the loss of her daughter, Madeleine, that stands out more than any of the others.

If you have read it, you already know what I’m going to say.

Talking about her fears over what might have happened to her baby, Kate says: “The thought of paedophiles makes me want to rip my skin off.”

And, one way or another, we know that every day since Madeleine was abducted, that’s exactly what has happened to this poor woman – Kate McCann has mentally ripped off her skin, torturing herself with images from the abyss.

I’ve often wondered how she managed to carry on.

And in a way, her book is absolutely no surprise. It’s a blueprint for all the horrors a parent would endure when their child vanished into thin air.

Kate says she found it hard to even sit down and eat at times because she felt she should be looking for Madeleine.

Even today she feels she can’t tell her twins off in public in case people judge her.

“Madeleine is there in my head all the time,” she says.

She tackles her critics, the evil scum who suspected her and husband Gerry of being complicit, who criticised her ‘lack of emotion’ (she had been told not to show any in case it gave pleasure to any abductor).

And heartbreakingly, because you can see how private they are, she lays bare the most intimate secrets of their life.

The row they had the night before the abduction, that caused her to sleep in with the children and the fact that she couldn’t even make love to Gerry for two years.

How she must have agonised over this. How she must have wept as she pulled her skin off yet again to earn the money from the book sales to fund the search for Madeleine.

She and Gerry wanted David Cameron to re-open the case, to fund a proper investigation into the disappearance because it’s quite obvious the Portuguese police are a bunch of incompetents.

And now it’s happening, the Met are taking over in the one good piece of news to come out of this story in the past four years.

In the end it’s hard to know what to say about this story because words are completely inadequate but don’t think the rest of us can’t help.

We can send money to the fund. We can refuse to holiday in Portugal – certainly I’d never go there with a small child, knowing their lax attitude to child abductions.

More than anything we need to pledge to ourselves that if we ever, ever see a child who we think is Madeleine, we won’t wander on and then wonder if we should have done something.

We will be that person who acts. We will try to save her.