VICIOUS BRICKIE HID SECRET FOR My Costa lover was a violent thug on the run

6YRS

WHEN divorced expat Maggie Barnett met a good-looking man 13 years her junior on Spain’s Costa Blanca, she thought she had finally found true love.

Maggie, 52, admits she was so charmed by chirpy bricklayer Jason McFarlane, 39, she invited him to live rent-free in her home and ran up debts of £14,000 while building a life for them together.

But her dreams were dashed when she found her toyboy was a violent football hooligan on the run after savagely attacking a rival fan.

Maggie claims he kept his dark secret from her for six years. She only discovered the shocking truth when the law caught up with him and he called her from jail.

Speaking from her home in Alicante, Maggie, now 58, said: “I was devastated. The man I thought I’d loved turned out to be living a double life.

“Worse, I’d unknowingly given him a hiding place. When I’d heard what he’d done I was horrified. I couldn’t believe I’d been housing a violent criminal.”

Smitten

Maggie had been rununning a children’s home in Stafford when she andnd her husband moved too Spain in 2001.

But in 2003 the couple separated after 16 years together and d divorced in 2006.

In June 2009, she met Glaswegian McFarlanerlane while he was doing constructionnstruction work at the hotel where she had a job as a housekeeper. Maggie was soon smitten and for three months life was perfect.

She recalled. “Then one day he told me work was a bit slow and he couldn’t afford his rent, so I suggested he moved in with me.” But she lost her hotel job and money began to get tight. When she asked to borrow cash from McFarlane he allegedly claimed to be “skint”.

Maggie now accepts she should have seen the warning signs but life with her new lover still seemed perfect.

She said: “We’d spend the days l azing in the sun together, sharing a bottle of wine, and we’d go out for dinner. It was just bliss.

“But the bills mounted up so I joined a carer agency and started flying back to England every few weeks to do shifts.

“It was tough but I was prepared to do it to hang on to our life together in Spain.”

Maggie said t hat in February last year McFarlane returned to Scotland, saying