In due course, a death certificate was issued.
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## What the Insurance Company Was Told
Within months of the disappearance, Anne Darwin filed a claim against the life insurance policy John had taken out in December 2001. The insurer was Unat Direct Insurance Management, part of AIG. The claim was for £250,000.
The insurer paid.
The couple applied the money toward their mortgage on the two Seaton Carew properties. A £130,000 mortgage was paid off. The financial pressure that had been building since the December 2000 purchase was, in the most immediate sense, relieved. The houses were now owned outright, or close to it. The business of renting them as bedsits—the original plan—could proceed without the debt servicing that had made the numbers unworkable.
What the insurer was not told, and what it could not have known, was that the insured man was not dead. He had not drowned in the North Sea on the morning of March 21, 2002. He had staged a disappearance, abandoned his canoe, and made his way back to land.
The canoe, the search, the missing-person report, the open verdict, the death certificate, the bereaved wife’s statements to the press—all of it was a mechanism for producing one outcome: a life insurance payout to a woman whose husband was alive.
The question of where John Darwin went after staging his disappearance has a somewhat unlikely answer.
He went home.
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## The House Next Door
For a scheme of such ambition—a faked death intended to collect £250,000 in life insurance and allow the couple to reinvent themselves—the hiding arrangement that John Darwin used for the first phase of his absence was remarkably simple, and remarkably close.