Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries Read online

  “No?” I say.

  “I think he—uh—died,” says Suze.

  “No,” I say. “That’s impossible. People keep telling me they just saw him.”

  “I’m sorry to break it to you,” Suze says, “and it might be the absence of Christmas decorations that allows me to say this, but I think Santa is dead. He passed away this summer.”

  There is a silence.

  “Well, the taxidermist did say he was hit by a car,” I say. “But he also said he recovered fine.” I pause. “Does everyone know and they’re not saying?”

  “They might know and they don’t want to say,” Suze says, nodding.

  “Like a town-wide conspiracy?” I say.

  “Maybe,” says Suze. She looks a little embarrassed.

  “I am amazed,” I say. “All this week people I’ve become good friends with have been looking me in the eye and saying, ‘I’m sure I saw him a couple of days ago.’”

  “I can’t believe I’m the only person to have owned up to it,” says Suze. She sighs. “The one that burst the bubble. I hope they don’t ride me out of town.”

  In the end I go to the library and find conflicting reports from the local paper. One report says Kris Kringle survived a car crash this summer and moved south. The other report says he died in the car crash. I never do find out for certain whether Kris Kringle is alive or not.

  • • •

  IT IS SUNDAY, my last day in North Pole. Today, finally, a new Santa will be occupying the vacant seat at Santa Claus House. He is a fantastic Santa. He looks just as Santa should. The setting is perfect: a red velvet chair, presents piled up under the tree, etc. Santa’s helper Cerys the elf is here, too, in a pink elf suit, with pink circles painted on her cheeks.

  I introduce myself to Cerys. My plane home is in a few hours, and so Cerys is my last chance of finding out whether Kris Kringle is alive or dead. She’d know, because she would have been his elf when he used to work here.

  “Cerys,” I say. “Do you know where Kris Kringle is?”

  “I do,” she says, a big smile on her face.

  “Oh!” I say.

  “He’s right here in Santa Claus House,” says Cerys.

  “Oh?” I say, looking around. “Where?”

  “He’s right on that chair over there,” says Cerys.

  She points at the new Santa.

  “That’s Kris Kringle,” says Cerys. “That’s Santa. They’re one and the same. OK?”

  “I understand,” I say.

  She introduces me to the new Santa. “Do you remember Jon when he was a little boy?” she asks him.

  “Oh yes,” Santa says. “I remember Jon. He took a little convincing that I was real.”

  “That’s true!” I say. “Very early on, when I was four, I told the rest of my class that you didn’t exist.”

  Santa gasps. “Come here,” he says. “Pull my beard.”

  I do. “It’s real,” I say.

  “And what town are you in?” Santa asks.

  “North Pole,” I say.

  “And this particular building is . . . ?”

  “Santa Claus House,” I say.

  “So,” says Santa. “If you’re in a real North Pole, in a real Santa Claus House, and Santa has a real beard, that must make me . . . real.”

  Most of the children here are very young, but there are two older girls in the crowd. I ask them how old they are.

  “Thirteen,” they say.

  That’s the same age as the plotters. I remember what Jessie said about how being a letter-writing elf at the age of twelve ruined her belief in Santa, and then I remember what Jeff Jacobson said about how kids of that age are savvy, and they know fact from fantasy.

  So I decide to put it to the test.

  “Do you believe in Santa?” I ask them.

  There is a long silence.

  “Half and half,” says one.

  “Yes,” says the other.

  Phoning a Friend

  In November 2001, when Major Charles Ingram, his wife, Diana, and another man, Tecwen Whittock, were arrested attempting to cheat the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? out of a million pounds using an elaborate system of audience-based coughs, my mother called me to say, “You know them! You were at school with them!”

  “With who?” I asked.

  “Diana Ingram’s brothers, Adrian and Marcus Pollock,” she said. “You must remember Diana Pollock. Their cousin Julian lived around the corner from us. You must remember them.”

  “No,” I said.

  The next day it dawned on me that this was an in that money couldn’t buy, so I wrote to the Ingrams, reminding them of our halcyon days together.

  “My family and I are experiencing a very real nightmare,” Charles wrote back. “I have no doubt that there is a case to prove against media manipulation after consideration of the content, its cyclical nature, the care taken to quickly undermine expressions of support, the outrageous leaking of privileged information, and so on.”

  Charles wrote that perhaps I was the journalist to prove that case. I reread the letter. Its cyclical nature? It seemed curiously over-erudite, as if Charles wanted to prove that he was the sort of person clever enough to legitimately win a million pounds. I had no idea what he meant.

  Still, it was odd. Diana, Adrian, and Marcus Pollock attended the same synagogue I did. They were well-to-do in an ordinary way. What happened to them? I did, in fact, have some vague memory, some Pollock-related to-do that rocked the local Jewish community when I was about ten. It was something to do with a car with the number plate APOLLO G and the manufacture of watch straps. But I couldn’t remember anything more than that, and neither could my mother.

  • • •

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON, March 20, 2003, Southwark Crown Court, is when it all goes wrong for Charles Ingram. He’s being cross-examined by prosecuting barrister Nicholas Hilliard about Particular Coughs 12 to 14. Those of us who’ve attended this long, slow trial from the beginning know the coughs so well we can mouth them: The tape of Charles’s appearance on Millionaire has been played nearly a dozen times. During Charles’s tenure in the hot seat, 192 coughs rang out from the audience: 173 were, experts agree, innocent clearings of throats, etc. But nineteen have been termed Particular Coughs.

  Perhaps the most devastating of all is Particular Cough 12. It arose during Chris Tarrant’s £500,000 question: “Baron Haussmann is best known for his planning of which city? Rome, Paris, Berlin, Athens.”

  “I think it’s Berlin,” Charles immediately, and confidently, replied. “Haussmann is a more German name than Italian or Parisian or Athens. I’d be saying Berlin if I was at home watching this on TV.”

  This is when Cough 12 occurred. It sounds, from the tape, like a cough born from terrible frustration. If the prosecution case is true, the plan was for Charles to chew over the answers out loud and for Tecwen Whittock—sitting behind him in a Fastest Finger First seat—to cough after the correct one. But now it seemed that Charles was going to plump straight for Berlin.

  “Cough. No!”

  (The first time this “No!” was played in court, every journalist and member of the public burst out laughing. Judge Rivlin threatened to clear the court.)

  “I don’t think it’s Paris,” he said.

  “Cough.”

  “I don’t think it’s Athens.”

  No cough.

  “I’m sure it’s not Rome.”

  No cough.

  “I would have thought it’s Berlin but there’s a chance it’s Paris,” said Charles. “Think, think! I think it’s Berlin. It could be Paris. I think it’s Paris.”

  “Cough.”

  “Yes,” said Charles. “I am going to play . . .”

  Now Nicholas Hilliard asks Charles why he changed his mind and opted for Paris.

  “I knew that Paris was a planned city,” explains Charles. “The center of Paris was cleared of slums during the nineteenth century, and it was rebuilt into districts and bouleva
rds. Prominent in my mind was the economic reason. In the middle of the nineteenth century France was coming out of the Revolutionary period and it was decided, I think by Napoleon III, that he would concentrate on Paris and thereby the remainder of France would flourish.”

  Charles looks hopefully at the jury. “But at the time,” sighs Hilliard, “you said you thought it was Berlin because he had a German-sounding name.”

  There is a silence.

  “Oh, Mr. Ingram,” says Hilliard. “Surely you can help us a little bit better than that.”

  Judge Rivlin calls for a break. We all file out to the corridor. Charles looks shaken. He lights a cigarillo. I notice he’s wearing a Mensa badge. He put it on as a special touch, but it is so tiny—just a little M on his lapel—that the jury surely can’t spot it.

  “Hilliard has got me all tied up in knots,” he says. “I just don’t want to say anything stupid.” I do an upbeat smile, even though I believe that only a miracle can save them now.

  “How does it feel to have to keep watching that tape?” I ask. I imagine it must be embarrassing. From the tape they look quite extraordinarily guilty, albeit in a sweet and funny way. It seems such a slapstick-type crime—a half-baked plot executed badly.

  “I still get a thrill,” Charles replies, “when it gets to the part where I win a million.”

  Corridors outside courtrooms are exciting places. The players all stand together smoking cigarettes—defendants, barristers, clerks, ushers, solicitors, journalists, police, and victims—as if there’s a victim in this crime! Celador, the makers of Millionaire, has signed up almost every witness for a documentary to be shown across the world after the verdict. This will, of course, earn them far more than the million pounds they say Charles almost cheated out of them. Sometimes I think that whoever masterminded this harebrained plot should be given a cut of Celador’s documentary profits. I wonder who the criminal genius was. I don’t think it was Charles.

  The only major players who’ve not been signed up by Celador are the defendants. Three thousand journalists have approached the Ingrams for interviews. Although I am way ahead, being a close family friend, I note that many other reporters have their own ingratiating tactics, and I’m not resting on my laurels. On Day One, for example, Charles entered court and gave his solicitors a kind of victory salute: a punch in the air. Half a dozen journalists, me included, thought he was punching the air at us, so we performed slightly awkward victory salutes back. It was a little embarrassing.

  A few feet down the corridor, the reporters gather in a circle, comparing notes. “I liked it when Charles said the charges were ‘absolute rot,’” says one journalist. “Do you think we can get away with having him say ‘tommyrot’?” says another. Everyone laughs.

  It is agreed that Hilliard is a brilliantly scathing cross-examiner. A passing barrister on his way to Court 5 tells me that Hilliard “trounced me in a murder trial once.” I didn’t think to ask him whether the convicted murderer did it or not.

  Tecwen Whittock sits far down the corridor, sometimes alone, sometimes with his son, Rhys. He’s so unassuming that I never once see him enter the dock. He just seems to materialize. I wander over to him.

  “I’m from Cardiff too,” I say.

  “That’s a coincidence,” he says.

  “And my mother went to Howell’s,” I say.

  Howell’s is the private school Tecwen sent his daughter to, running up a £20,000 bill. This debt, say the prosecutors, was Tecwen’s motive.

  “See?” says Tecwen. “That’s another coincidence. Coincidences do happen!”

  “I was at prep school with Adrian and Marcus Pollock,” I say.

  “That’s another coincidence!” says Tecwen. “I’d like to see what Hilliard would do to you, with all those coincidences, if he got you on the stand.”

  I don’t tell Tecwen the fourth coincidence—that Judge Rivlin is a distant cousin of my mother’s.

  I wander down the corridor to talk to the arresting officers. “Is this trial really worth it?” I ask Detective Sergeant Ian Williamson. “I mean, come on, in the end, what exactly did they do? Why didn’t Celador just settle their differences with the Ingrams in a civil court?”

  This is the worst question you can ask an arresting officer. They hate ambiguities. The police have a lot to lose if this trial goes badly for them. Some of the arresting officers were Paul Burrell’s arresting officers. They really need a success after that fiasco.

  “This trial,” Williamson replies, crisply, “is about protecting the integrity of the Millionaire format. Millionaire is the most popular quiz show in the history of television. Celador has sold it to a hundred countries. Thousands of jobs depend on its success. . . .”

  This is true. In fact, a BBC reporter down the corridor has just returned from Jordan, where she was meeting Palestinian leaders. They asked her why she was going back to Britain. “It’s to do with a quiz show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” she said. The Palestinian leaders got really excited and said, “The Coughing Major! You’re going to that trial?”

  So I understand what Williamson means, but another thought occurs to me. The prize money Charles allegedly tried to cheat out of Celador came from the revenue generated from the premium-rate phone lines—the calls the viewers make in their frequently fruitless attempts to get on to the show. So it is revenue generated from the far-fetched hopes and dreams of the viewing public, which seems like a cheat in itself. And how much is this trial costing? The answer is around a million pounds. If there’s a guilty verdict, we the viewing public stand to lose a million pounds. If there’s a not-guilty verdict, Celador will be forced to give Charles his check back.

  “Watching that cross-examination has taught me,” I say to Detective Sergeant Williamson, “if I’m ever in a situation like that, I’m going to plead guilty.”

  There is a small silence.

  “Proper criminals do,” he replies.

  Every morning sees a scrum for the public-gallery seats. I secure my place each day because I arrive an hour early and I don’t budge, even though I often very much need the toilet. Charles’s father, himself an army man, sits next to me. He wears a tiepin shaped like a steam train. Unyielding pensioners with flasks of coffee mercilessly nab most of the other seats. One regular keeps passing me notes. I tend to open them with great anticipation. It is exciting to be handed a note in a courtroom. Today’s note reads: “Is your suit made out of corduroy?”

  The pensioners spend much of the day noisily unwrapping packets of Lockets and readjusting their screeching hearing aids. A young man behind me cracks his knuckles from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Each time the barristers mention the word “cough”—and the word “cough” is mentioned very frequently—many people sitting around me involuntarily cough. We are like a comedy-club audience, determined to enjoy ourselves even if the comedian isn’t very funny. Even Chris Tarrant’s reading of the oath gets a loud chuckle from a man behind me.

  Chris Tarrant may not be the world’s greatest superstar, but within the context of this grubby building we’ve come to call home, the wallpaper peeling, the soap in the toilets as hard as rock, the evidence dragging on and on, he is a vision of paradise entering Court 4.

  “Has anyone ever got the first question wrong?” asks one defense barrister.

  “It’s happened in America,” replies Tarrant, to huge laughter around the court. Tarrant looks surprised. He was just giving a factual response. During all the merriment, the fact that Tarrant heard no coughing, suspected no foul play, and even said to the show’s producers, “Don’t be stupid,” when he was told of their suspicions, seems to have got lost.

  Rod Taylor, Celador’s head of marketing, gets a big laugh, too, during his evidence about how he frisked Charles shortly after he’d “won” the million. Taylor offers to frisk one of the barristers to show him how he did it. That gets a laugh. In the dock, Charles begins to cry.

  “Why then?” I ask him at Starbucks the next day. “W
hy did you cry at that moment?”

  I often meet Charles and Diana at Starbucks. I discovered early on that if I happen to be there at 9:05 a.m., this is exactly when Charles queues up. We make small talk. Five minutes a day. That adds up, in my reckoning, to a substantial exclusive interview.

  “It was when Mr. Aubrey [Tecwen Whittock’s barrister] was cross-examining Rod Taylor and he said something and everyone laughed,” replies Charles.

  “What did he say?” I ask.

  “He made a joke,” says Charles. “Here I am, this cataclysmic event, my family on the line, and everyone is laughing. And you know how I feel about not wanting to look stupid.”

  “What was the joke?” I ask. “What was the exact thing he said that made you cry?”

  Charles pauses. Then he says, “It was when Mr. Aubrey said to Rod Taylor, ‘Did you search his privates?’”

  • • •

  THIS STORY BEGINS in 2000. Tecwen Whittock was watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? one night when he recognized a contestant but couldn’t remember where from. I could have told him. It was my old school pal, Diana’s brother, Adrian Pollock.

  “That’s the same guy,” Tecwen realized, “who was on a few weeks ago. He’s been on four times now! I think I’ll track him down and ask him what his secret is.”

  Tecwen is a quiz-show veteran. He keeps a journal of trivia, of random facts and figures accrued over the years. He’s been on Fifteen to One, although he was eliminated in the first round. He didn’t fare much better on The People Versus. He managed to Beat the Bong, whatever that means, but still only won £500. Sale of the Century was another disaster. “I convinced my wife I’d win a car, but in fact I won the booby prize of a world atlas,” he later tells the court. He had, however, once made it to the semifinal of Brain of Britain.

  Tecwen hoped to buy a silk bed for his dog, Bouncer, and a Reliant Robin for his son, Rhys, who was a member of the Only Fools and Horses fan club and wanted to drive the same car as the Trotters. Plus, he had credit-card debts from his children’s private education. He wondered if Adrian Pollock might give him tips on becoming a contestant, so he tracked him down to St. Hilary, a village near Cardiff, and staked out his home.