Like many people around the world, I was gripped by the apparently miraculous reappearance in 2007 of John Darwin, who, five years previous, had been declared dead after what was believed to have been a canoeing accident in northeast England. His wife, Anne, later confessed that John had continued living with her in the family home, before the couple embarked on a new life in Panama.
I was fascinated by the story, and by the sheer audacity of John Darwin, who had adopted a disguise in order to move undetected around his hometown, and who had frequently eavesdropped on his two grown-up sons as they visited their supposedly distraught mother. I wondered how it must feel to discover your parents had deliberately caused you the pain of bereavement, and how you would begin to rebuild a relationship with them. I found it hard to understand how any parent could treat their children in such a callous manner.
As I wrote Let Me Lie, I found the following publications particularly valuable for the detail behind the Darwins’ extraordinary story: Up the Creek Without a Paddle (Tammy Cohen) and Out of My Depth (Anne Darwin); however, the events and characters in Let Me Lie are fictional, products of my imagination, and not based on any stories I have read or heard about.
In researching suicides at Beachy Head, I was very moved by Life on the Edge (Keith Lane)—the autobiography of a man whose wife jumped to her death from the Sussex cliffs. Keith Lane dedicated the next four years of his life to patrolling the cliffs, preventing twenty-nine people from taking their own lives.
The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team provides more than one hundred hours of patrol on Beachy Head each week. They support the police and coast guard services in search-and-rescue endeavors, and they specialize in suicide and crisis intervention; they have saved around two thousand people since their inception in 2004. The team relies entirely on public support, so please do follow them on Facebook at @BeachyHeadChaplaincyTeam and support their work if you can.
According to the charity Mind, one in four of us will experience mental health problems this year, and more than twenty percent of us admit to having had suicidal thoughts at some point in our lives. Every day, sixteen people in the UK and more than one hundred people in the US die by suicide. If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised in this book, or would like to speak to someone about how you’re feeling, I encourage you to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.