Approximately eleven months after his disappearance, according to Anne Darwin’s later account, John turned up. He had presumably been somewhere in the interim—the specific details of the gap between the staged disappearance and his return to the house are not fully established in the public record—but by around February 2003, he had come home. Not to number 3, where Anne lived and where his sons might visit. To number 4: the adjacent property, the one they owned, the one they had been using as bedsits.
The two properties shared a wall. At some point—again, according to Anne’s account—a passage was created between them. The passage ran from a cupboard-style opening in Anne’s bedroom, behind a piece of shaped hardboard painted to look like the back of a cupboard. A “coffin-shaped doorway,” as one contemporary account described it, with painted skirting board and sickly green walls on the concealed side. Behind the false back, a short passage, blocked with breeze blocks set in cement—apparently hurriedly—and carpeted to muffle footsteps. The passage connected number 3 and number 4.
John Darwin, officially dead, lived in the property next door to his wife, connected to her by a secret door.
This arrangement is so strange that it bears sitting with for a moment. A man who had staged an elaborate disappearance at sea, who had triggered a sixty-two-square-mile coastguard search, who had an official death certificate issued in his name—was living, within months, in a bedsit a wall’s width away from the house in which his officially widowed wife continued to live. He could, and apparently did, pass between the two buildings through the concealed doorway. He was there, accessible, while the world believed him gone.