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!’”