Close to Death

Sir Jack Barraclough and his wife, Greta, 59, were arguing over assets believed to be worth more than £500 million, including properties in New York, London and Grand Cayman. Their nineteen-year marriage came to an end earlier this year after Lady Barraclough

discovered her husband was having an affair, but he made headlines when he publicly announced that she deserved ‘the price of a fish and chip supper and nothing more’.

Greta Barraclough remains in the family home in Knightsbridge, London. The couple have four children.

Hawthorne was wrong. I wouldn’t have made a bad detective after all. I was fairly sure I had found the right name and after several more searches I came across an article in Hello! Magazine, that well-known shop window for the wealthy and famous, dated August 2009. The Barracloughs (‘socialites, philanthropists and entrepreneurs’) were showing off the house they had just bought and redecorated. Sir Jack was solid and pugnacious. His wife tended more to the glamorous and artistic. Were they already unhappy in each other’s company? It was hard to tell. They had been photographed together and apart in several of the rooms, surrounded by vast stretches of marble, gilt-edged mirrors, chandeliers and a grand piano that didn’t look as if it had ever been played. Everything, including them, had been airbrushed to perfection. There was no dust or dirty laundry anywhere to be seen. Their four sons – the youngest six months, the oldest eight years – had been arranged like stuffed toys on a velvet sofa, collector’s items, with even the baby displaying that easy self-confidence that comes when you know Daddy has millions in the bank.

Lady Barraclough loved the house. ‘It’s so marvellous being just a minute’s walk from Harrods,

’ she told the magazine, which provided me with the next piece of the puzzle. I launched Zoopla, the property website, and – street by street – searched for houses in the immediate vicinity of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. This took a bit longer, but eventually I came across a property in Trevor Square, just the other side of Brompton Road. It had sold for £18 million in 2008, and comparing it with the pictures of the Barracloughs’ home in Hello!, I could see that they were one and the same.

I went over there straight away.

3

‘You wrote this?’ Greta Barraclough asked.

She was holding a copy of The Word is Murder, the first book I had written about Hawthorne.

‘Yes. I thought you might like a copy.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’ She set it down beside her in a way that somehow told me she would never open it. Like the piano. It didn’t matter. The book had been the calling card that had got me in.

I’d been very lucky.

Lady Barraclough could have been in her second home in Barbados. She could have been in any one of the five-star hotels she frequented all over the world or cruising with friends in the Mediterranean or out riding in the countryside. But that same afternoon, I’d tracked her down to the five-bedroom, £18 million house that she had bought close to Harrods and which she had wrestled from her ex-husband. Not only that, I’d managed to talk my way past her unsmiling butler and even less amicable personal assistant and into one of her half-dozen living rooms, where we were sitting now, perched on velvet sofas, facing each other and separated by a monstrous Indonesian coffee table with an assortment of quite unappetising biscuits and small cups of tea laid out in front of us. But then she knew my books. Her children were all boys, now aged nine to seventeen, and at least one of them had read Alex Rider. It’s one of the things I’ve found throughout my career. Being a children’s author opens doors.

For a woman who had ended her marriage with £230 million in her pocket, she seemed extraordinarily damaged. Had Sir Jack’s betrayal really been that bad? The different parts of her body didn’t seem to fit together properly, her knees barely carrying her across the room and her hands swivelling unnecessarily as she sat down. She had the sort of self-awareness that suggested she might once have been beautiful, that heads would have turned as she entered the room – but that had been another room and a long time ago. What remained were sad, empty eyes, thin strands of colourless hair hanging down to her shoulders, a long neck and a hollowed-out throat. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Expensive jewellery clung to every possible part of her body – ears, wrists, fingers, neck – but only put me in mind of an Aztec mummy. Something in her had died.