A PRELUDE ?? DESTINY

January 1995

Between Christmas and New Year's Eve 1994, the four members of Manic Street Preachers saw quite a lot of each other. Whether it was to swap presents or just hang out at their parents' or Nicky Wire's house, it was as though the troubles of the year had been put behind them. Richey was refraining from alcohol and eating well, relatively speaking. One evening they gathered together to watch a video of their show at the Clapham Grand from the previous March. Part way through the evening, Richey asked for a bowl and made a show of slowly unwrapping two chocolate bars and breaking them up into pieces in the bowl. On one hand, he was showing that he was eating; on the other hand, his meal consisted only of a couple of chocolate bars. ?Among us we'd take the piss out of it, and you'd laugh. It still had an edge to it amongst us, as four people,' said James Dean Bradheld. 'And he would take the piss out of himself as well. So it wasn't all po-faced.' But others remember it differently. 'It was macabre, shall we say. That's the word,? added Nicky Wire, ?He knew what he was doing to us and we knew what he was doing to himself. It was just a terrible situation.'

Edwards had been seen walking around Blackwood and seemed to be in a good mood; he even ventured back into the Red Lion alone. 'He just seemed really friendly,' said a local who was in there that day. ?He wasn't ever a star in here. Only with the youngsters. Most people couldn't give a fuck. But he wasn't trying to be a star either. I can definitely state that. He wasn't patronising, it was as if he wanted something from us, I think he was desperate to belong.'

Over the Christmas period Richey had been writing furiously and by the time the band met up in early January for five days of practice and rehearsals, he had accumulated a thick wedge of lyrics and prose ? although he admitted that much of it wasn't exactly great. The band had booked the House in the Woods studio near Cobham in Surrey. There, Edwards presented Nicky Wire with a folder of around sixty song lyrics, which Wire photocopied and passed on to Moore and Bradfield. 'They were pretty heavy-going,' said Sean Moore. 'There wasn't a lot to pick out, to be honest. Most of it was pretty fragmented and rambling.'

The lyrics in the last file he gave us were more poetry of a sort,? explained Nicky Wire. 'There was a lot of ranting.? There was certainly some useful material, however, which relieved James Dean Bradfield who had been worried that Edwards' writing would be unusable.

Among the new things Richey had prepared were lyrics for what would become 'Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier', 'Kevin Carter', 'Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky', 'Removables'and 'The Girl Who Wanted to be God'. James Dean Bradfield worked up acoustic versions of Richey's lyrics for 'Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier' and a 'bit more salsa, a bit more chintzy' (Bradfield) version of 'Kevin Carter'. When he heard a tape of the latter, Edwards said, 'I don't want my lyrics to sound like that' Before leaving the sessions, Edwards passed a note to Bradfield suggesting that the next album sound like 'Pantera meets Nine Inch Nails meets Screamadelica'.

Richey seemed at ease during the week and was even described as being happy, something that he hadn't been for a long time. At the end of the stint he continued his end-of-sessions ritual with presents for the band, which included a copy of the Daily Telegraph and a Mars bar for Nicky Wire, and a CD for James Dean Bradfield.

The plan had been to tour America in the spring, with Richey and James going to North America ahead of the others to conduct interviews and drum up some advance publicity. Flights had been booked for 1 February, so they had a few weeks of down time ? Nicky Wire took the chance to take his wife for a short break in Barcelona. When he got back he received a phone call from James Dean Bradfield informing him that Richey had gone missing. While Wire had been away, Edwards' seventeen-year-old dog, Snoopy, had died on 14 January and Richey was naturally upset. He went with his sister to a local garden centre to buy a tree to mark the spot where the dog was buried. Rachel recalled that it was a really cold day and Richey gave his sister his bobble hat to keep warm. When he took off the hat he revealed a completely shaved head. Later, at his parents' house, Richey pulled out a little camera and took lots of photos of his parents. As he left that day he turned and took a long look at Rachel, eyeing her up and down to such an extent that she asked him if anything was wrong with her clothes. He left without replying.

Shortly afterwards, when Richey couldn't be contacted at his Cardiff flat, his parents assumed he was in London with the band. The band assumed he was in Blackwood with his parents. He'd actually gone to visit friends in Newport. While there, he called in at TJ's to see a gig by the 60ft Dolls. Dolls drummer Carl Bevan didn't recognise him. 'He had a loose expression,' he said. 'Like there was something loose in his head.? The day after Nicky Wire got home from Spain, Richey returned home and contacted the rest of the band. 'He did love his dog, that was a Manics thing,' explained Nicky Wire. 'We all had dogs. And they all died.?

?I wouldn't make too much significance out of it,? added James Dean Bradfield. 'He was always adept at too much symbolism. It wasn't a breaking point, to be honest. All of the bad things that happened to us in the past were almost like arbitrary disasters. That was a dog that had had a long life, a natural thing.?

?He was well on his way before then,? said Wire. 'It certainly didn't help, but something was gonna give. It gave in the summer, and it was just a question of whether he was gonna change it or not. He didn't seem to get enjoyment from many things by the end. He was upset, but I felt good, actually. When he cried naturally, it was nothing to do with the Priory, it was just his pet had died. It made him feel a real emotion, he was sad again. So he said.?

The band had earlier cancelled some upcoming shows in Japan but Richey still agreed to do an interview with Midori Tsukagoshi for the Japanese magazine Music Life on 23 January. Edwards collected the writer at the train station and Tsukagoshi was shocked at the sight of the man who greeted him. With the shaved head, Edwards was wearing striped pyjamas and the same Converse trainers that Kurt Cobain had been pictured wearing when he committed suicide. With his slight frame, he looked like he might have just stepped out of a concentration camp. He put Nirvana's In Utero in the tape deck and drove the writer back to his flat at Atlantic Wharf.

The interview that followed touched on many important subjects and is now known to be the last interview Edwards ever gave. As far as the general public is concerned, these were his last words. Tsukagoshi started with the obvious question about Edwards' appearance. The interviewer pointed out that the shaving of one's head could be taken as a very significant statement. ?I was bored with my old hairstyle, it was irritating me,? said Edwards. 'If I can't sleep I tend to have destructive ideas, and I have to do something to sort them out. I couldn't sleep and all I could think of doing was shaving my head. So I did. I'm very vain, and I was almost in love with my hairstyle. But in the end I just felt like abandoning things like that. I dumped a lot of notebooks, threw them in the river. They were full of notes, thoughts for lyrics, that kind of thing. Since Christmas I'd been writing a lot of stuff, but when I look at them again I realised eighty per cent of them just weren't good. Some people keep everything they write, but unless it's good, you shouldn't. I mean, you can see this flat isn't big enough to keep everything anyway. So I spent a whole night reading through it and then threw away what I didn't like.' Nicky Wire later disputed Edwards' statement about throwing things away, but with the waterfront right outside Richey's apartment he could probably have heaved them over his balcony and straight into the water. Wire couldn't possibly know what had been dumped and what hadn't. Later in the interview Edwards changed subjects abruptly and said, 'You know, I miss my dog. Snoopy. He died two weeks ago. That's why I shaved my head.?

Edwards was also questioned, and spoke candidly, about his decision not to get involved in any long-term relationships. 'I've never wanted to love somebody insincerely, and I don't mean only sexually but intellectually and mentally too,' he explained. 'For Instance, you might be watching TV with someone you loved and see an attractive person on TV. It'd be insincere to me to have any feeling about the person on TV. Most people are more mature than me in that sense but I still can't deal with it. If my partner said, ?That poster of River Phoenix looks gorgeous!" I'd have to say, "Bye". If I was in the street and my partner was thinking, "Wow! He's stunning!" I'd wonder why she was with me. Seriously, if I was in love with a woman, she'd have to be more attractive than Bette Davis, more than anyone else. I'd peel every picture off my walls.'

Late in the month, Richey was back to phoning Nicky Wire at night. He'd call on the premise of wanting to check the time or some detail about practice. He really just needed to talk and would spend two hours rambling about Apocalypse Now or the Mike Leigh film Naked. The conversation, or monologue, would ultimately end with Edwards being frustrated because he just couldn't get his point across.

During January, Tony van den Ende was working on a Manics video at an editing suite in London. Rob Stringer and Martin Hall were with him when Richey Edwards arrived, apparently having driven himself up from Cardiff. Van den Ende was shocked by Edwards' appearance ? he hadn't yet seen him with a shaved head ? plus he was wearing only pyjamas, with a ribbon tied around them, and slippers. Edwards hung around for about half an hour and then departed, apparently to drive back to Cardiff. It had been at least a five-hour round trip to spend thirty minutes in the editing suite.

On 29 January, the band reconvened at the House in the Woods for two more days of practice before the US dates, which would be their first for three years. Sony's Rob Stringer visited the band there and reported that Richey was in great spirits and was saying how much he was looking forward to America. As with Ian Curtis, it was trip he would never make.[34]

If you closed your eyes and just listened you could hear nothing but a cacophonous din bouncing off the walls and the vaulted ceiling. With some concentration you'd realise that it was a hundred human voices meshed into one droning sound. Listen even harder and you'd recognise a multitude of languages and dialects all fighting to be heard above the others. Open your eyes and you'd find yourself not in the middle of a bustling marketplace or in the centre of a battle, but in line at a post office. The customers in this cavernous room were a mixture of East and West, turbans and long flowing gowns mixing easily with suits and ties ? but then this city had always been the proverbial melting pot.

This was Istanbul. The year was 1933.

Third in line to be served was the Russian. Under the Russian's left arm was a thick, crumpled paper packet, tied up with a couple of rounds of string. In his right hand was a pungent cigarette which was not being smoked; it just added to the smog, hanging idly to one side. The Russian watched as a hunched old woman purchased two stamps and shuffled away into the crowd. Then a well-tanned, healthy-looking Westerner handed over a white envelope and two coins before striding away. The Russian steppet up to the metal grille that separated the employees from the customers. In stuttering but proficient Turkish, the Russian asked for the parcel to be sent first-class to Paris. The fee was paid and he moved away from the counter, a wry smile forming on his face. The sending of this parcel would set in motion events that would gently echo through history. It would cause international outrage and form the basis of an enduring mystery.

Emerging from the post office, the Russian was met with a blast of searing heat that reflected from the whitewashed walls of the narrow street. Carefully negotiating a path in and around the stalls and shoppers, the Russian wandered along the packed thoroughfare before taking a right turn into a side alley, glad of the shade that greeted the exit from the main street and welcomed into the shadows that wouId cover him for the next seventy years.

Chisla, or Numbers, was first published in Paris in 1930. Run by, and for, Russian émigrés in their mother tongue, the journal ruffled Western feathers with its views on culture and society. Articles and opinions were sent in from exiled Russians scattered around the world. In 1933, the editor received a mysterious parcel from Istanbul, more a manuscript than an article, with little more information on the author than the non-gender-specific name, M. Ageyev. The text was titled Story with Cocaine and outlined the decadent coming of age of a Russian teenager during the time of the revolution. The journal printed an abridged versionof the story and the reception to it was so overwhelming that the publication of the full-length version, Novel with Cocaine, soon followed. The mysterious Ageyev was rumoured to be moving to Paris but he was never heard from again. Half a century later, the original Russian book was translated into French, and then English. The introduction to these later editions discussed how to carry out the perfect disappearance, such as that achieved by the author fifty years earlier. Numerous theories have since sprung up about the real identity of the author and what became of him or her. Reports of the writer being Vladimir Nabokov or the relatively obscure Marc Levi have hung around for decades, but the Russian seems to have slipped through the net.

XV

GONE

31 January to 1 February 1995

On Tuesday, 31 January 1995, an annoying single by Rednex, 'Cotton Eye Joe', was enjoying its fourth consecutive week at number one in the UK, while Celine Dion's even more annoying The Colour of My Love was in the midst of a six-week run as the number one album. It was on this gloomy Tuesday that James Dean Bradfield was a passenger in the silver Vauxhall Cavalier that Richey Edwards drove to the Embassy Hotel on London's Bayswater Road. Richey Edwards' own car was actually a white Ford Fiesta, the band owned the Cavalier, although only Edwards drove it. It wasn't a very rock'n'roll vehicle to own, plus they'd bought it second hand. During the journey, Bradfield played Edwards a demo cassette of a new song called 'Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky' on the car stereo. Edwards said he thought the song sounded great and was happier than he had been when hearing the initial demo of his lyrics for 'Kevin Carter'. At around teatime, Edwards pulled into the underground car park at the hotel and they checked in. After taking the lift to the fifth floor, they settled into adjoining rooms overlooking Hyde Park. They agreed to freshen up and meet in half an hour.

When Bradfield returned to Edwards' room thirty minutes later he found Richey taking a bath. Bradfield asked if Edwards wanted to go and browse around the Queensway area, but Edwards said he'd prefer to go and see a film. Bradfield agreed that this was a good idea and said he'd return at eight thirty. When he returned, Edwards said he'd changed his mind and that he would have an early night so that he would be ready for the flight the next day, Bradfield said that he'd meet Richey first thing in the morning and went out to meet a friend for a drink. He was back at the hotel and in bed by eleven thirty p.m.

Richey spent the evening in his room. He telephoned his mother and told her that he wasn't really looking forward to the American trip, contradicting what he'd been saying to others. He slipped this into the conversation casually: it didn't seem like a big deal to Sherry. Apart from that, there was nothing unusual about the conversation. They said goodnight and have not spoken since.

Edwards seemed to know exactly what he was going to do and kept this information completely to himself. He sat on the bed and removed some books and videos (including Equus and Naked[35]) from his bag. He carefully placed them in a box and wrote a note that simply said, 'I love you'. Then he wrapped up the box like a birthday present. He decorated the outside of the box with collages and literary quotations, plus a picture of a Germanic-looking house and Bugs Bunny. The package was addressed to Jo, the mystery girl that he'd mentioned (in the interview with Midori Tsukagoshi), but someone who the band has since refused to comment on. Writing in the Independent on 20 January 1996, Emma Forrest wrote, ?The night before he disappeared, Richey gave a friend a book called Novel with Cocaine, and instructed her to read the introduction. All the introduction can reveal is that Ageyev spent time in a mental asylum before vanishing.? After initially agreeing to talk for this book, Ms Forrest later withdrew her help after saying that she'd got 'cold feet'. If that was indeed was Jo whom Richey met that night while James Dean Bradfield was out of the hotel he probably didn't confide his plans to her. What he did appear to do was give her a book that contained a clue about his possible plans. By the time she received the parcel from his room he would be well away. When Bradfield was later asked about Jo, he replied, 'He never talked about it so there's no point in us talking about it.? End of conversation.

After wrapping the parcel, Richey got some sleep but was up early. He dressed, collected his wallet, car keys, some Prozac and his passport, then quietly left room 516 and took the lift down to the lobby at around seven a.m. The desk staff noticed him step out of the lift, pass the front desk, trot down three steps and then exit through the automatic front door. He didn't check out or speak t? them. He was carrying no luggage. He turned left and walked down to the car park. A minute or so later, he drove the Cavalier up the ramp onto St Petersburgh Place and then right onto Bayswater Road. He was soon on the motorway, heading west.

A couple of hours later James Dean Bradfield stood in the hotel lobby waiting for his bandmate. It wasn't like Richey to be late: he usually took great pride in being punctual for meetings, rehearsals and interviews. Bradfield soon decided to check Edwards' room but when he failed to get a reply he asked the duty manager to open it up. He was presented with a vacant room. The specially wrapped box was sitting on the bedside table, while the bed had clearly been slept in. Richey's toiletries and packed suitcase were still there, as was some of his Prozac. Bradfield contacted Martin Hall and it was decided that he would go ahead with the trip alone. Knowing that Richey had only recently gone missing for a couple of days, they assumed this would probably be something similar. Bradfield set off for the airport.

Exactly where Richey went during that morning may never be known, but he was doing something for eight hours before entering Wales. It seems likely that he drove to his Cardiff flat, arriving sometime around four p.m.

Every last detail about Richey Edwards' movements in January and February 1995 ? and especially this last trip ? would later be closely scrutinised. The trip should have taken three hours at most, which leaves several hours unaccounted for. Why would he have gone to his flat at all? Was it really Richey that made that trip? If it was Richey, did he go home for the purpose of collecting something? If so, what? These do not seem like the actions of someone who was about to commit suicide. What might he have been planning?

BOOK 2

'It's a rock and roll myth. I think what people miss is that he was in Vauxhall Cavalier.?

? Nicky Wire

"We just wanted some conclusive evidence of what actually happened because we had nothing, even with private detectives and the police coming up with nothing. We had to come up with a decision or be in limbo for the rest of their lives.'

? Sean Moore

?We had nothing left to say about it.?

? James Dean Bradfield

'Are disappearances classified and labelled, then?' I laughed.

Japp smiled also. Poirot frowned at both of us.

'But certainly they are! They fall into three categories: First, and most common, the voluntary disappearance. Second, the much abused ?loss of memory" case ? rare, but occasionally genuine. Third, murder, and a more or less successful disposal of the body.'

'You might lose your own memory, but someone would be sure to recognise you ? especially in the case of a well-known man like Davenheim

?In the same way, the absconding clerk, or the domestic defaulter, is bound to be run down in these days of wireless telegraphy. He can be headed off from foreign countries; ports and railway stations are watched; and as for concealment in this country, his features and appearance will be known to everyone who reads a daily newspaper. He's up against civilization.'

?Mon ami,' said Poirot, 'you make one error. You do not allow for the fact that a man who had decided to make away with another man ? or with himself in a figurative sense ? might be that rare machine, a man of method. He might bring intelligence, talent, a careful calculation of detail to the task; and then I do not see why he should not be successful in baffling the police force.?

? from Poirot Investigates ? ?The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim' [1924]

MISSING

You'd think it would be very difficult to go missing in this day and age. If you live in the UK you are more likely to be filmed by CCTV than if you live anywhere else in the world. In the last decade and a half, more than £200 million has been spent by governments on CCTV installation. If you're in London, you could conceivably be filmed every second you spend outside your own home. There are more than 100 cameras at Heathrow, 260 at the Houses of Parliament and thirty-five on Oxford Street (not to mention the in-store ones). Over two thousand cameras cover the nation's railway stations and if you drive along a major road you'll be picked up by camera after camera, allowing your journey to be accurately mapped. Since the events of 11 September 2001, the number of CCTV cameras has grown larger still. They can be found in bridges, tunnels, alleyways, shop fronts, schoolyards and car parks.

What if you wanted to drive from, say, London to Cardiff? And let's just say that you also wanted, for whatever reason, to then slip away from any prying eyes? On the drive from London to Cardiff, your car would be filmed almost constantly and an accurate path of your journey could be plotted using software that can read car number plates and place them at a particular location at a particular time. In the cities of Cardiff and London, you'd be filmed almost constantly while on the roads, so for anyone wishing to trace your movements it should be relatively easy. That wasn't quite the case back in 1995, however, when the number of CCTV cameras was far smaller.

Today, away from the glare of the omnipresent video eyes, you would also be leaving a trail of physical evidence that could be scrutinised by DNA-identification techniques. Even if you did manage to evade detection and slip away, this would only be the first step.

Once you had vanished, you would have to try and stay vanished. This would present a crucial choice: either retain your original identity or adopt a new one. The former option would only really be possible if you wanted to fend for yourself in a remote location, living where the world doesn't usually look (in a monastery, for example, or perhaps a private religious retreat). The latter option is also possible, but you'd have a lot of paperwork to extricate yourself from. Your life is carefully documented from the outset: birth certificate, baptism, first communion, school records, passport, dental records, exam certificates, driving licence, medical records, wage slips, tax records, National Insurance number, census returns, banking records, credit ratings, mortgages, utility bills, electoral registers, mobile phone records, and so on. Only when the paperwork trail comes to a stop has a person really gone missing.

More than 200,000 people go missing in the UK each year. The vast majority of these cases are cleared up quickly, and usually involve children. I was invited to Cardiff Central Police Station to discuss Richey Edwards and missing persons cases in general. In short sleeves on a lovely summer's day I was welcomed by Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Davies, and he showed me the Missing Persons set-up in Cardiff. We discussed the differences in approach and technology today in contrast to the way things were done back in 1995.

'There is a desire by the police to sight a missing person,' he explained. 'Otherwise it just sits on our records. Our records go back twenty and thirty years with people still listed as missing, and they're still a problem to me because every now and then I have to pay them some attention; it's a drain on resources.' At the time of my visit, Cardiff Central had nine 'long term' missing persons cases on its books (the oldest dating back to 1988), but they had recently been able to close a case that had been seventeen years old. My visit, which had started so promisingly, soon left me deflated whten I was told that none of Richey Edwards' records were held in Cardiff. All of the paperwork had long since been transferred to London under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police, who had primacy in the case because they had taken the initial missing person report. I would have to start again.

The earlier statement that over 200,000 people annually go missing in the UK, while not meant to be deliberately misleading, is nonetheless probably inaccurate. There are many problems with correctly determining the total number of missing persons, despite the perceived benefits of advanced computer technology. The main reason for these difficulties is the lack of a central organisation to collate all of the data. The police collect reports of missing persons in a standardised way but some forces only add the names to the national database after they have been missing for a certain length of time. If one person goes missing three times in a year, this is counted as three different people going missing. The Missing People Helpline charity also collects data, but often finds itself dealing with a case that was never reported to the police: this further complicates any official statistics. On top of this, many missing persons simply aren't reported at all. The reasons for this are complex and varied. In extreme cases, a person may go missing without anyone even noticing, or it could be that questions are only asked after someone has not been seen for a long period of time. Disappearances can be a slow 'drifting away' or a sudden vanishing. It's when the questions are asked that the pain for friends and family really begins. Not knowing what has happened to someone may be even harder to take in than the truth about what actually occurred, but it should be noted that the number of missing persons who are eventually found dead is small (less than 10 per cent), but the longer they are missing, the more likely this outcome is. According to figures issued in 2003, less than 0.02 per cent of missing persons were found to have been murdered.

Typically there are more than 1,100 long-term missing persons in the UK at any one time ? that is, people who have been missing for twelve months or more. Those people who are found often wish to remain 'missing' ? after all, these are usually people who deliberately disappeared in the first place. Any adult in the UK has the right to go missing ? be it for personal, financial or professional reasons. Some missing persons are people with mental health problems who might not even realise what has happened to them. In 2003 the Missing Persons Helpline database revealed that of all the missing persons that were located, only 20 per cent of them decided to return home. A further 39 per cent made contact with those looking for them but did not return home. The remaining 41 per cent decided not to make contact with their friends and family. No one has the right to insist that a missing person make contact; by law, the family can only be informed that the missing person is alive.

***

Once someone has decided to go missing ? assuming it isn't an off-the-cuff resolution ? how would they go about pulling it off? I found only two books which covered the issue and neither was especially helpful. How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found was written in 1986 and so has limited relevance in terms of avoiding modern surveillance techniques and data trails, although it does contain some amusing anecdotes (wives disbelieving that their husbands could walk out on them, husbands upset that their model train sets were destroyed, and so on). Cover Your Tracks Without Changing Your Identity sounded a little more intriguing but petered out in about seventy pages and was more concerned with helping people into the wilderness of North America. A few websites offer more up-to-date advice regarding ways to disappear, along with warnings that they don't condone any criminal or terrorist activities. I wondered later whether my IP address might now be stored on some government database, indicating me as a potential terrorist because I'd visited these pages.

What did these websites actually tell me? A lot of the guidance was common sense: don't use your own car, pay for everything with cash, wear a baseball cap when you have to go into shops or areas with CCTV, change your clothes, haircut and hair-colour, and do things that you wouldn't usually do (start or stop smoking, for example). Readers were also encouraged to write in with tips and suggestions. The overwhelming message was that running away is the easy part: hiding is harder and staying hidden is by far the hardest part. Saving up money, in cash, before you vanish was also, not surprisingly, recommended, as was using your own car as a decoy. The simplest decoy may be driving a car in one direction before abandoning it and doubling back. Doubling back and then taking a tangential route is confusing to any trackers, as is leaving a car just over a border (international or otherwise) to increase the number of agencies involved in the pursuit and to add the complication of their need to share information.

One other decoy method that crossed my mind was to get someone else to dump your car for you. By then, you could be anywhere else in the world and if you were to leave it near to a possible suicide spot the implications could confuse your pursuers even more. This would form what is known as either a ?Reggie Perrin' or a 'pseudocide', depending on where you come from. The former refers to the 1970s BBC comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, in which Leonard Rossiter (in the lead role) despairs of the daily monotony of life and fakes his own suicide by leaving his clothes on a beach. While a 'Reggie Perrin' has an air of comedy and sympathy to it, the use of 'pseudocide' is not only more clinical but often reserved for cases in which the perpetrator is staging his or her own disappearance for more sinister reasons. High-profile cases in recent years include Keith Hackett, Graham Cardwell, Andrew Hoy and John Darwin (the 'canoe man'). Each case highlights a slightly different take on the process.

Hackett was eventually given a five-month suspended jail sentence for wasting police time after he tried to fake his own death in connection with the Paddington rail disaster in which thirty-one people died. He had a police record as a sex offender, dating back to 1987, and in 1999 he used the rail crash to kill off his original persona and re-emerge as Lee Simm. This was a case in which the subject saw the news and reacted quickly to take advantage of the situation. Hackett called the police and, using the name Simm, pretended to be Hackett's landlord. He reported that he thought Hackett might have been on the ill-fated train. He then called again ? claiming to be a brother of Hackett ? and said that he thought his brother had been in carriage H, which had been burnt out in the tragedy. Hackett's father and sister attended the memorial service for the victims while unaware that Hackett/Simm was alive and well. Police later became suspicious of Simm, and when they took Hackett's cousin to visit Simm they were able to confirm that Hackett and Simm were one and the same person.

Another, more Perrin-esque, pseudocide was 46-year-old Graham Cardwell, who left personal items on a beach near Grimsby and gave the impression that he'd been swept out to sea. He left behind a wife and three children. Eight months later, the police were tipped off and Cardwell was found living two hundred miles away in the West Midlands with a new name, a new job and a new home.

Essex salesman Andrew Hoy, a 31-year-old father of two, is suspected of faking his own murder to escape paying back the £20,000 he owed a local gang. Hoy had received death threats and moved his family to another town before we went missing. Two days later, his car was found with his bloodstained clothes in the boot. Forensic tests proved that he hadn't died in the clothes, and the police suspected that he had tried to make it look like murder. But murderers would have been unlikely to leave clothes and other potentially incriniinating forensic evidence for the police to easily find.

The most famous British episode is the case of Lord Lucan, who vanished in 1974 on the night that nanny Sandra Rivett was killed in his family home. Some people believe he might have drowned in the English Channel while trying to escape, while others have suggested he could have slipped away to start a new life, assisted by wealthy friends and associates.

Another attempted pseudocide became embroiled in the Lucan story when former Labour MP John Stonehouse left his clothes on a beach and relocated to Australia under a new name, John Markham, with his secretary. Australian police suspected that he might be Lord Lucan and ? after taking him into custody ? discovered his real identity. Stonehouse was deported to the UK. Despite this failure, the number of people around the world who have successfully started a new life under a new name runs into the thousands.

Another method might be that of withdrawing to a spiritual retreat: whether you did this under your own name or an assumed one, it's likely that few questions would be asked. Unless you had committed a serious crime, the police would probably go no further than making the briefest of enquiries. If you went missing of your own free will, they would probably not bother to waste time contacting such institutions, and even if they did, they might be denied private details of the inhabitants. Even a famous person might not be recognised in a monastery or retreat, where media figures and notions of celebrity are of little consequence.

There are numerous establishments in the UK ? including traditional Benedictine monasteries, Cistercian gatherings and Buddhist assemblies, plus several less formal spiritual centres and congregations ? where it might be possible to exist in relative anonymity. If you were to travel overseas, the choices would increase further. There are approximately thirty to forty Benedictine monasteries in the UK alone, and these are home to around one thousand monks and nuns at any one time. There are fundamental criteria that must be satisfied in order to join a monastery: the candidate should be unmarried, free of responsibilities and not in debt. Being a Catholic is not essential before applying, although conversion to Catholicism often occurs in due course. Almost anyone with a strong religious calling could enter a monastery and ? if they so wished ? never directly encounter the outside world again.

I met my agent, Tim, at Marble Arch and we began to walk along the Bayswater Road. We were looking for the Embassy Hotel, which didn't seem to exist any more. Had it vanished into the ether like Richey Edwards? All we had to go on was a grainy black-and-white picture, which I'd printed out in low quality from my computer. Google hadn't helped and now we were looking at the print-out and wondering what angle it was taken from and whether we would still recognise the building if it had been renovated during the past thirteen years. As the walk went on and on, my agent seemed convinced that we wouldn't find it; in fact, he seemed more interested in stopping by the Café Diana at the end of the road. It's his favourite retro cafe, with each wall covered in pictures and memorabilia of the princess. I was starting to resign myself to his pessimism and turn my thoughts to a nice grilled sandwich when I spotted it. Just as we were reaching Notting Hill Gate, it was over the road from Hyde Park, and was now called the Ramada Jarvis Hotel. The photo we'd been following showed a view from a side street by the car park entrance, and we could easily have missed the building and walked on by.

As we approached the main doors we realised that we hadn't actually decided what we were going to do once we found it. I was doing my duty as a diligent researcher, while Tim was just along for the ride (he worked not far from here and liked a good detective romp).

We ambled down the car ramp but soon decided there was nothing much to see there and turned back just as a couple of hotel porters on a cigarette break turned to watch us ? not that either of us looked much like a car thief. As we walked back out I wondered what was on Richey's mind as he drove up the ramp that February morning? Was his plan set in stone? Was it a loose idea that might change as he went? Did he just want to get away from the hotel as quickly as possible without being spotted? Was he alone?

We walked around to the entrance and into the lobby. We knew we wanted to look at the fifth floor, and headed confidently past the front desk to the lifts. Feeling like a couple of naughty schoolboys we pressed 'Five' and started our ascent. What would we do if someone challenged us or asked what we were doing? Just our luck, the cleaners were working along the fifth floor ? a narrow, dark corridor. We looked at the numbers. Where was room 516, the room Edwards had departed from? It didn't exist. The numbers jumped past where it should have been. He would have had a view of Hyde Park if the room was where it was supposed to be. And if he had just wanted to end it all, he could easily have jumped from his room. He would have made quite a scene by doing that. No, he wasn't going to just kill himself ? of that I felt sure.

After a swift exit we stopped to eat at Café Diana. Richey would have hated the place, but when he vanished he wouldn't have known about her suicidal tendencies, her eating disorders and her self-harming. Would he have felt a sense of connection to her then? With my stomach filled I said goodbye to Tim and set off on my drive, trying to recreate Richey's last movements, based on what is known about them. It wasn't totally 'authentic'; we hadn't been that keen for me to set off at seven a.m., and it wasn't quite 1 February, but I was off. Past the flyovers, the pharmaceutical towers and concrete. Past the turn-off for Heathrow, where he should have been going that morning en route to America. My car was being filmed by numerous cameras, charting my journey along a stretch of road on which, back in 1995, cameras had been few and far between.

I hit 'Play' on the car's CD player and In Utero burst into life. Richey was most likely listening to this as he drove. Nirvana's vast, majestic music gives extra air to the lungs as you speed away, leaving ten million people behind you, but the schizophrenic nature of the album moves, song-by-song, through pain and anguish. Kurt totem's opening words ? 'Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I?m bored and old' ? mirrored sentiments expressed by Richey in various interviews. It was the perfect soundtrack to his journey.

XVI

THE SIGHTINGS,

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 295