CENTRE OF MYSTERY BREAK SILENCE
THE BACK DOOR THE BEDROOM
MISSING Margaret Fleming’s carers have broken their silence to claim she was at their home on the night police began searching for her – and that they have seen her recently.
Vulnerable Margaret, who is understood to have learning difficulties, was 36 when she went missing a year ago.
She is not thought to have been seen by anyone other than Eddie Cairney and Avril Jones – who took her in after her father died – for 17 years.
A search of the couple’s rundown cottage in Inverkip, near Greenock, failed to find any trace of her.
Over the past 12 months, detectives have taken about 500 statements but no one other than Cairney, 75, and Jones, 56, can recall seeing her since a family gathering in December 1999.
The couple have never spoken of Margaret’s disappearance.
But now former deep-sea diver and hotel owner Cairney has claimed police were just seconds from seeing her when they arrived at their rundown cottage on October 28 last year.
The pensioner said frightened Margaret ran away when she saw flashing blue lights outside the cottage as they returned from a trip to Wemyss Bay.
He and his partner insist that she is still alive but “avoiding” them.
Cairney said: “Walking along the footpath, we could see all the blue lights flashing and she made to run away.
“I said, ‘Margaret, what’s wrong with you?’ She said, ‘They’re for me, they’re looking for me.’
“I said, ‘Don’t be silly, it’ll be an accident on that road, no one’s looking for you.’
“We went in the back door. She was very timid.
“When I opened the kitchen door to come into the hall there was this lunatic policeman.
“His voice had broken, he was shrieking, ‘Where’s Margaret Fleming?’ That was the trigger for her to take off.
“I says, ‘There, she’s there’ and I turned to get her in the kitchen but she was gone.”
Cairney claims police refused to look for Margaret despite his insistence that she had just left.
He said: “I told them, ‘That’s the way she had to go, if you move quickly you’ll get her.’
“She went through them. They must have seen her.”
Cairney even claimed the pair had seen Margaret recently, adding that she was “working as a gangmaster in London and Poland”.
He added: “She has been here once. Not here, not to the house, but we have seen her once.
“When we saw her she was just the way she left, contrary to earlier days, she was clean and behaved, she had stopped this shouting and bawling at you. She has come to no harm unless she has got harmed in the past couple of weeks.”
Margaret’s disappearance has become one of Scotland’s most mysterious missing person cases.
Cairney and Jones took her in after the death of her lawyer father Derek Fleming in 1995.
But police launched an inquiry last year after trying to visit her at the house with Department for Work and Pension officials to speak to her about a benefits claim.
The couple were forced out of their home for more than six months while forensic experts dug up the garden and carried out a fingertip search of the property, which was recently condemned and declared uninhabitable.
Jones has lodged an appeal at Greenock Sheriff Court to stop Inverclyde Council from bulldozing the house.
Standing beside a soiled and bare mattress on which he claims Margaret slept before her disappearance, Cairney said: “She came with a bag and left with the same bag. We’ve been told repeatedly we’re not suspects but if we weren’t, they wouldn’t have dug our garden up. Margaret is avoiding us, she’s not missing.”
Police have said they fear something “sinister” may have happened to Margaret and that they remain “very concerned” for her welfare. A spokeswoman said: “This remains a missing person inquiry and we continue to appeal to people with any information on Margaret’s whereabouts to come forward.
“The last independent sighting of Margaret was on December 17, 1999 and this, along with facts such as her having no trace of any job, few friends and no evidence of her contact with partner agencies and local services, has led us to become very concerned for her.”