Villa where Freud cooked risotto for Maddie parents
McCanns ‘horrified’ at revelations about paedophile Liberal MP
THIS is the £1million Algarve villa where paedophile Sir Clement Freud entertained the parents of Madeleine McCann to ‘keep them smiling’ during the search for their missing daughter.
He cooked them risotto and plied them with brandy and vodka at his retreat Casa da Colina in Praia da Luz.
It is just a few streets away from where three-year-old Madeleine was snatched on May 3, 2007. Freud’s family say he was in the UK at the time.
Neighbours yesterday recalled Kate and Gerry McCann – who are said to be ‘horrified’ at discovering that Freud was a predatory paedophile – visiting the villa.
And one of his victims, Vicky Hayes, 64, whom he groomed before raping her when she was 17 in 1969, came forward this week to reveal she reported him to the Madeleine police investigation two years ago because she felt ‘uneasy’ when she read an account of the visits written by Mrs McCann.
‘It needs investigating if Freud had any involvement or knew anything. Nobody else would have thought Freud capable of abuse and rape, but he did it to me,’ she said.
Another woman, now in her 50s, also came forward to reveal that the late broadcaster and MP got her sister drunk and molested her in his bathroom when she was 14.
Police are compiling a dossier of claims against Freud for the Goddard Inquiry into historic abuse after he was revealed as a paedo- phile by two victims who spoke out in an ITV documentary. One of them was just ten when Freud, 24 at the time, began abusing her.
The McCanns’ first visit to Freud’s villa – no longer owned by his family – came two months after their daughter was snatched, when they received a letter out of the blue. They initially thought it was a hoax, but went to his home with their twins and three friends. Freud, who died in 2009, offered them strawberry vodka, then cooked chicken and mushroom risotto – ‘the best risotto we’ve ever tasted before or since’, Mrs McCann wrote in her book Madeleine.
Describing how she was won over by the raconteur, Mrs McCann said: ‘Clement cheered us up with his lugubrious wit, and would continue to do so by email after his return to England.’ By August 31, after spending a few weeks in Britain, Freud returned to his Algarve home and phoned the McCanns as soon as he arrived, joking about newspaper reports that Mr McCann was close to a breakdown. ‘Thank God for people like Clement who kept us smiling,’ Mrs McCann wrote.
On the day the couple were made suspects in the bungled Portuguese police inquiry in 2007, they had been due to go to dinner at Freud’s house again, but cancelled. Nevertheless, he rang that night to invite them for a drink, warning them: ‘You’ll have to forgive my nighttime attire.’ Mrs McCann recalled: ‘We found Clement watching a cookery programme, dressed, as promised, in his nightshirt. It was so ordinary and comforting, a bit like going to see your granddad after a horrible day at school.’
Shakespeare – Pages 44 & 45