Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “He seemed normal,” Tecwen later told the police. “A couple of kids. A dog.” When he later read that he and Marcus were supposedly involved in some Internet scam, he thought, “Uh-oh. Suspicious.”

  Tecwen introduced himself to Adrian, who was flattered by his curiosity. They went to the pub, where Adrian took on the role of Tecwen’s mentor, imparting his secrets. First, Adrian told Tecwen, keep calling Celador’s premium-rate phone line. Adrian had himself phoned 1,700 times. Second, when the random selector asks you a trivia question, try and answer it in a computer voice. Adrian had come to believe that Celador had programmed the selector to weed out certain regional accents.

  He took his mentoring of Tecwen very seriously. He and Marcus visited Tecwen’s home. They spoke on the phone twenty-seven times. Adrian even asked Diana to become Tecwen’s co-mentor.

  “What did you talk to him about?” asks Hilliard, when he cross-examines Diana about her relationship with Tecwen.

  “The closest-to question,” replies Diana.

  The “closest-to” is the question the Millionaire researchers ask you over the phone if you’ve been randomly selected and are now down to the last hundred possible contestants. It is always a numerical question: “How many radio stations are there in North America?” for example.

  “They can be quite hard,” explains Diana. “They’ve always got a numerical answer that could be anything, really.”

  “And that’s the kind of insight you were offering Tecwen Whittock, was it?” asks Hilliard. “That they’re quite hard and could be anything really?”

  In fact, shortly before the arrests, Adrian and Diana delivered a manuscript of a book to John Brown Publishing, offering tips on how to get on to Millionaire. Both Diana and Adrian had won £32,000 in the hot seat. John Brown was ready to publish, but the arrests changed all that.

  Meanwhile, over in Devizes, Wiltshire, Adrian had loaned his brother-in-law, Charles, his pretend mock-up Fastest Finger First console. Charles practiced being fast-fingered on it. He phoned and phoned the random selector. He didn’t, however, imitate a staccato computer voice. He thought Adrian’s conspiracy theory about that was far-fetched. In fact, he later tells the court, he really doesn’t like Adrian and Marcus.

  “I don’t like Diana getting involved in whatever it is they do,” he says, adding that Adrian and Marcus have a history of harebrained get-rich-quick schemes.

  Back in Cardiff, Tecwen repeatedly called the Millionaire random selector in a staccato voice. “Before I knew it,” he tells the court, “it worked. I was on.”

  Tecwen was booked to appear on September 10, 2001. Charles got on too—on September 9. Even though the prosecution says that some other plot was probably in operation that evening, involving buzzing pagers strapped to Charles’s body—or perhaps to Marcus’s body as he sat in the audience—Charles didn’t do well. He made it to £4,000 but lost two of his lifelines before the recording ended. Still, he survived to carry on the following night. Chris Tarrant announced the names of the Fastest Finger contestants who’d be joining Charles in the studio. Second on the list was Tecwen Whittock.

  Charles told the police that the first he’d heard of Tecwen Whittock was two weeks later, on September 25, when the Sun named him as the mysterious cougher. He says the first time he met him was just a few weeks ago, right here at Southwark Crown Court. Certainly, in the dock, they studiously behave as if they are strangers. However, Diana’s mobile telephone bill shows that at 11:02 p.m. on the night of September 9—as the Ingrams were driving home from the studio down the M4—she phoned Tecwen for just over five minutes. Diana says the call was simply to congratulate her fellow Millionaire devotee on getting on to the show, and that Charles was asleep at the time. The prosecution says the call was for the three of them to put the coughing plot into action, a plot that must have been vaguely hatched during the “mentoring” conversations of the previous weeks.

  When Detective Sergeant Williamson told me a few days ago that “proper criminals” plead guilty, I asked him what made the Ingrams and Tecwen not proper criminals. He said, “They may have engaged in a criminal act, but they don’t have criminal minds. They made too many stupid mistakes.”

  One stupid mistake, he said, was that they called each other on their own phones. Another was that, at the Millionaire studio on September 10, neither Charles nor Diana said a word to Tecwen. How suspicious for Diana “the mentor” not to say hello to her student, especially when they’d been on the phone with each other just hours earlier. Diana says she didn’t talk to Tecwen because she didn’t know what he looked like. The most stupid mistake of all—say the police—was that they made it so bloody obvious.

  The audience gave Charles a standing ovation after he correctly answered the million-pound question. Diana ran down the studio stairs to hug her husband. Her radio microphone picked up her saying, “How the hell did you do it? You must be mad!” As they walked to their dressing room, another Fastest Finger contestant congratulated them and said, “How did you get the Holbein question?” Diana turned to Charles, “Oh, that was one you knew, wasn’t it, darling?”

  CHRIS TARRANT: “The Ambassadors in the National Gallery is a painting by which artist: Van Eyck? Holbein? Michelangelo? Rembrandt?”

  CHARLES: “I think it was either Holbein or Rembrandt. I’ve seen it. I think it was Holbein.”

  “Cough.”

  CHARLES: “I’m sure it was Holbein.”

  “Cough.”

  CHARLES: “I’m sure it was Holbein. I’m sure of it. I think I’m going to go for it.”

  “Cough.”

  CHARLES: “Yeah, Holbein.”

  CHRIS TARRANT: “You’re fantastic, just fantastic.”

  • • •

  IT IS WEEK THREE of the trial, and the Ingrams’ case has been effortlessly torn apart by Nicholas Hilliard.

  “It’s not nice to watch, is it?” says one arresting officer to me out in the corridor. I’m starting to think it may be driving Charles toward some sort of breakdown. He’s already told the court about his year on medication since the arrest, how passersby yell, “Cheat!” when he’s in his garden having a picnic and how someone recently tried to shoot his cat, though this may have been unconnected. Personally, I think being cross-examined by Hilliard is punishment enough for a bit of cheeky deception on Millionaire.

  My relationship with Charles is becoming awkward. My upbeat smiles have involuntarily turned into pitying grimaces. Charles seems compelled to behave in a fake-laddish manner in front of me.

  “Oh,” he laughs throatily in the corridor during a break after performing particularly badly on cross-examination, “I knew I shouldn’t have gone out on the piss last night!”

  I play along. “Did you?” I ask.

  “Well,” he adds, theatrically massaging his forehead, “it was a supper party, but it was much the same thing!”

  “Charles!” calls Diana from down the corridor. “Come here!”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he calls back.

  Diana has gone off me. Yesterday I was staring into space for a long time near Starbucks, thinking about other things, when I realized that I was staring straight at Diana, who was looking back at me, horrified, as if I was an obsessed stalker glaring at her from afar.

  Today an incongruously suave stranger sits next to me in the public gallery. He is Robert Brydges, and he was in the Millionaire audience on September 10.

  “I kept looking round for where Charles was getting help from,” Robert says. “I knew the process was bogus—he was just so erratic—but I didn’t hear the coughs.”

  Robert thinks Charles should have stuck on £500,000. Celador might have been suspicious, but it would have probably honored the check. Even though Robert himself was suspicious, he was also inspired by Charles’s success. Over the next two days, while Britain reeled from the World Trade Center attacks, Robert repeatedly called the Millionaire random selector.

  “I worked out,” he says, “that if you call
three hundred and fifty times you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting onto a particular show.”

  He phoned more than a thousand times.

  “I read that Charles had been practicing the Fastest Finger First on a mock-up console, so I built one, too, on my laptop.”

  Robert’s plan worked. On September 25 he found himself in the same place Charles had been a fortnight earlier—in the Millionaire hot seat.

  The next day’s Sun headline read: MILLIONAIRE WORTH FEW BOB MORE.

  Super-rich Robert Brydges beamed with joy last night as he returned home after winning a million on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Banker Robert could not contain his excitement, even though he was a millionaire twice over before appearing on the quiz show. He declared with a grin: “Believe me I’m happy. I’m very happy.”

  Robert is writing a book called The Third Millionaire about his and Charles’s parallel lives. What is it about the human condition that one good man can win a million pounds legitimately, when another has to resort to fraud? In the corridor, Robert introduces himself to Charles and mentions the name of his book.

  “If you don’t mind, I like to think of you as the fourth millionaire,” says Charles.

  “Can we agree on 3A and 3B?” says Robert.

  “Charles!” calls Diana, from down the corridor.

  “OK, sorry!” Charles calls back, and scuttles off.

  “I don’t care how many Mensa badges he’s wearing,” mutters Robert. “On the eight-thousand-pound question he could hardly remember that Emmental cheese was from Switzerland.”

  I laugh.

  “Does all this remind you of Macbeth?” says Robert. “The bluff soldier, with the pale, mysterious woman behind him?”

  We regulars spend much of our time psychoanalyzing the Ingrams. This is because their demeanors are so uncriminal. Even the police get involved in the speculation.

  “The major is a strange character,” says one arresting officer during a press briefing. “Puzzling. I can’t figure him out. There have been some comments in court about Diana being stronger . . .” He pauses. “I don’t understand that sort of relationship. I’m not part of a relationship like that.”

  “You’re a lucky man!” shouts a journalist.

  At 2:15 p.m. on March 23, a miracle occurs that might just save the defendants. Tecwen Whittock takes the stand, and he is brilliant. He begins with a tour of his harrowing childhood: born in a psychiatric hospital to a mother with behavioral problems, whom he never saw again, and an alcoholic father he never knew.

  “I have a recollection of seeing him once when I was seven,” he says.

  He was raised in foster care, and pulled himself up through hard work to become head of business studies at Pontypridd Polytechnic, now known as the University of Glamorgan.

  “Would you jeopardize all you’ve worked for to get involved in something like this?” asks his barrister, David Aubrey.

  “Of course not,” says Tecwen. “I wouldn’t do that. It’s against all my morals, all I do. I wouldn’t put my family on the line for this. I know I’d land up in jail.” It is a convincing moment. And then comes the bombshell. “Look closely at the photograph,” says David Aubrey—it was a long-lens photograph of Tecwen on his way to work, head bowed, that appeared in the Sun on September 25.

  “What have you got in your hand in that photograph?” asks David Aubrey.

  “Some work files,” replies Tecwen.

  “And in your other hand?”

  “Two five-hundred-milliliter bottles.”

  “Bottles of what?”

  “Water. Tap water.”

  “Why?”

  Tecwen has his entire life suffered from a persistent cough. Water helps. He carries some everywhere, and fruit juice, and inhalers and cough medicine. It’s a ticklish cough, like a frog in his throat, very phlegmy. A stream of doctors and friends take the stand, attesting to Tecwen’s irritating cough.

  Aubrey sums up by saying, “So, when was this plan supposedly hatched? During a late-night telephone call, on 9 September, lasting less than five minutes. Is it really likely that Mr. Whittock would take part in such a hastily conceived scheme? Wouldn’t he have said, ‘You can’t count on me. I’m liable to cough at any time!’”

  • • •

  MY RELATIONSHIP WITH the Ingrams has suffered a dreadful blow. Not only does Diana think I glower at her with a crazed expression, but the Ingrams have now appointed a media agent called David Thomas. These days, every time I bump into them at Starbucks or in the corridor outside Court 4, Thomas is there, saying “Hello, Jon” in a snarly manner. The rumor is that Thomas is going to handpick one journalist, and the rest of us will get nothing.

  “Can I have just five minutes with the Ingrams?” I ask him.

  “I’m mentally logging your request,” says Thomas.

  “All I want is for them to be able to tell their side of the story,” I say.

  “So your pitch is ‘I’m Honest Jon,’” he replies.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s mentally logged,” says Thomas. “You’ve batted your corner very well.”

  I tell him my one question: “What was that thing that happened back in our childhoods with the watch straps and the number plate APOLLO G?”

  “Your question is logged up here,” he says, pointing at his head. I spend the next three days sitting in the corridor, waiting for him to come back with an answer.

  The jury retire to consider its verdict, and the corridor outside Court 4 becomes a frenzied bazaar. While everyone else crowds around Thomas, telling him how much they love dogs too (Thomas is a dog lover) and explaining that all they want to do is let the Ingrams tell their side of the story (he tells them they batted their corners well), I sidle up to Diana.

  “I’ll tell you the one thing I really want to know . . .” I begin breezily.

  “Have you met David Thomas?” she replies, looking frantically around for him.

  Robert Brydges hears that John Brown Publishing—the company that had once planned to publish Diana and Adrian’s book—is now interested in reading the manuscript of The Third Millionaire.

  Suddenly, there is drama. Judge Rivlin calls us all back in. “A very serious matter has arisen that does not concern the defendants,” he says. The jury is temporarily discharged. We file back out into the corridor, bewildered. It turns out that a juror was overheard holding court in a pub, saying how fantastic it was to be on the Millionaire trial jury. For a day and a half, the various parties debate whether to start the trial again with a new jury. In the end, Judge Rivlin decides to allow the eleven remaining jurors to continue.

  “Well, that,” Charles mutters to himself, “amounted to the square root of fuck-all.”

  So this trial, which was all about entertainment, is almost chucked out because one of the jurors found it too entertaining.

  When the guilty verdict comes in, after nearly fourteen hours of deliberations over three days, Diana closes her eyes and looks down. Charles holds her hand and kisses her on the cheek. Tecwen doesn’t respond in any way. The only noises in court are tuts—the kind of tuts that mean “It’s all a bit of a shame.”

  Charles and Diana have three daughters, two with special needs.

  Judge Rivlin has the reputation of being tough when sentencing, but says, “I’m going to put you out of your misery. There’s no way I’m going to deprive these children of their parents.”

  The defense barristers stand up to make their mitigation pleas. In the public gallery the defendants’ family members strain to hear what’s being said. We can just make out, “His career in the army is at an end. . . . Their home was provided by the army, so they’ve lost their home. . . . The children are suffering from panic attacks. . . . All three will have to leave their schools. . . .”

  The reason why we can only barely hear this is because three pensioners in the public gallery are coughing uncontrollably.

  Judge Rivlin says it was all just a shabby schoolboy trick. He sa
ys he doesn’t think this crime was about greed, it was about wanting to look good on a TV quiz show. He says the fact that their reputations have been so publicly ruined is appropriate punishment—and I remember what Charles said about how he hates to be thought of as stupid. Judge Rivlin hands out suspended sentences and fines totaling £60,000. On the courthouse steps, the paparazzi cough theatrically when Tecwen and his quiet son, Rhys, walk out.

  The scrum is even more dramatic for Charles and Diana. Cameras and tripods and photographers crash to the floor in the violent scuffle to get pictures. “I’ve seen child murderers get more respect than that,” says one journalist. Other journalists and some nearby builders scream with laughter at Charles and Diana and chant, “Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!”

  (An Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup is at home watching the news reports on TV. Suddenly he has an idea for a novel. He will call it Q & A. The movie adaptation will be called Slumdog Millionaire. Later Swarup will explain his moment of inspiration to the Guardian: “If a British army major can be accused of cheating, then an ignorant tiffin boy [urchin] from the world’s biggest slum can definitely be accused of cheating,” he’ll say.)

  I phone David Thomas to ask if Diana can give me the answer to my question. He says, “You’ve not fallen off my mental list.” I never hear from him again.

  Instead I phone childhood friends to ask if they can remember anything about it. Most of them can. There were two Pollock brothers, they tell me. Bill and Arthur. They were in a family business together, making leather watch straps. There was a big falling-out in the family, and Arthur left the company. Bill became rich, driving around in a fancy car with the personalized number plate APOLLO G. His family were the ones who lived near me, in a big house in Lisvane. They had a son called Julian. Arthur Pollock never really recovered. He was left penniless and in ill health. His children vowed to pull themselves back up and never suffer the indignity their father endured. They would make something of their lives, they promised themselves. So Adrian and Marcus set up an estate agency together, and Diana married an army major. The estate agency failed. In fact, the whole thing failed.