The scheme that had begun with a canoe paddled out into the North Sea on March 21, 2002 was over.
—
## What the Police Found
Detective Superintendent Tony Hutchinson, speaking for Cleveland Police in the days immediately after the arrests, said something that addressed one of the most obvious questions the case raised: had police known Darwin was alive, or had they been fooled along with everyone else?
The answer was unambiguous. Hutchinson said that police had no idea Darwin was alive until he walked into the London police station nine days earlier. The police announcement also said there were no plans to arrest the sons as part of the investigation—making clear that Mark and Anthony, whatever role they had unwittingly played in the scheme, were not suspects.
The investigation that followed the arrests had to reconstruct five and a half years of concealed activity. The investigators—Cleveland Police and the Metropolitan Police working jointly—had a number of threads to follow: the false passport in the name of John Jones, the property purchases in Panama, the money transfers from England to Panama, the pension and benefit payments, the insurance claim, the sale of the Seaton Carew properties.
They also had the physical evidence of the hidden passageway. When officers searched the Seaton Carew properties, the new owner of number 4, John Duffield, showed them the concealed opening in what had been Anne’s bedroom. The passage between the two houses was found. It confirmed, in a concrete and peculiar way, what the documentary evidence was establishing through financial records: that John Darwin had been present in the Seaton Carew property well after his supposed death, and that his presence had been deliberately concealed.