Surely she must have just sort of wandered off and we're just going to find her and she's going to be there, but, you know, she's like a four year old child and, you know, she, I mean, all the doors were shut, she wasn't really going to run off and then Jane said, the shutters up, and, you know, we sort of scarpered and Dave and Russell were just running off sort of shouting, so Fiona, I think, asked me to go and phone the Police, so I actually went down the route to where she would have gone for Nursery drop off, which his back to the, to the main reception essentially, so I went down that route looking for her at that time and I asked the reception to phone the Police, and that must have been about five past, it's difficult to know what time it was at that time, but maybe about ten past ten, five past ten, ten past ten'. (MO)
I looked out of the window to check, to see if I could see them still there, and that’s when the only person I could see still at the table was, erm, Dianne and everybody else seemed to have, seemed to have gone. Which I thought was a bit odd, because I thought even if Russell would have come back, you know, I wouldn’t have expected everybody else to, to have left at, you know, left at that point, so. So, I mean, that’s the first time I thought ‘Oh’, you know, ‘What’s happened’.
4078 “And what happened after that?”
Reply “Erm, I think that’s when I went back to the roadside, I sort of looked out of the roadside door. I think I heard some shouting, erm, so I actually went to sort of put my head out the roadside door. And I think it was Rachael that I saw first because she had run back I think to check that Grace was obviously okay. And then I think Rachael said, you know, she told me what had, you know she said ‘Oh Madeleine’s gone’ or, you know, something along those lines. And that’s, it was almost straightaway as she said that I sort of had that, this person sort of came into my head at that”.
4078 “It was that quick was it after you?”
Reply “It was almost, yeah, I was sort of like, oh, it just sort of seemed a bit, the connection made, you know, I thought ‘Oh that person was a bit odd’, he sort of seemed a bit, a bit odd. But I think at that point I was obviously, I think I actually might have wondered, wondered and, you know, I was sort of thinking ‘Well I’m sure it couldn’t have been’, but it did come that immediate into my mind”.
4078 “So what happened from then?”
Reply “Erm, well I think I was in a bit of a, I mean, obviously, erm, the next thing I can remember is seeing Kate and Fiona, they came running from the direction of Kate’s flat, say sort of along the, sort of it’s, I’ll try and describe how it is, but as you come into the flats there’s sort of a passageway and there’s flats above so there’s a roof and there’s a passageway, it’s really badly described, but they came running along there and they were shouting ‘Madeleine’ and they were like looking in the stairwell and what have you. And Fi started running upstairs and that’s when I ran to Fi and said what I thought, you know, I said ‘I think I’ve seen somebody’. I didn’t want to say to Kate at that point, which might sound odd now, you know, ‘Oh why wouldn’t you say straight away to Kate’, but, you know, the thought of telling the mother of a child that you might have seen being carried away is, it’s too horrible to even say. So I just said to Fi, erm, you know, ‘I think I might have seen somebody a bit odd when I came back to do one of the checks’. And I don’t know whether she, I mean, she was just sort of like, I don’t know whether she took it in properly, but, erm, and then they just carried on, carried on the searching. They were sort of running around, I mean, I just stayed, erm, me and Rachael just stayed with, in our own, but we were sort of out in the alley, in the sort of stairwell outside our rooms, and we were sort of staying with the kids at that point, so we weren’t actually involved in any physical running around, searching”.
4078 “What about Russell (inaudible)?”
Reply “Well him and Matt they were doing the, they were, I think they were sort of searching, I don’t know where they searched, but they, they were actually sort of running around actually looking farther afield, so didn’t really see them much at all. I think that they did come back and as I say I can’t remember when they came back but I remember them coming back and then they went off again. (JT)
