Back-from-the-dead canoeist John Darwin hid from the world for years in a bedsit located next door to his family home, sneaking through a secret passageway to see his wife, it was revealed last night.

Anne Darwin said that for much of the five years he was presumed dead, her husband was in fact living at their home in Hartlepool and sharing her bed.

Mrs Darwin, who initially claimed that she thought her husband was dead until he walked into a police station last Saturday, now says that he began to plan his disappearing act in the beginning of 2002, when the couple were tens of thousands of pounds in debt.

However, she insisted that she believed that he had perished in a canoeing accident until he shocked her by knocking on her door just under a year later.

After a few days of “arguments and recriminations”, she told the Daily Mail, she became complicit in the scam and began living with her husband again.

She said that she was “on eggshells” when visitors — including their grieving sons — came to visit, and her spouse reportedly slipped through a wardrobe into the passageway and escaped into his hideaway.

The couple purchased the adjoining properties, at No 4 and No 3 The Cliff, in Seaton Carew, 15 months before Mr Darwin disappeared.

The Sun claimed that a 5ft high hole in the wall allowed Mr Darwin to emerge from a room at No 4 The Cliff and slip back into the master bedroom in the couple’s home at No 3.

An 18 inch wide connecting passageway was hidden behind a makeshift wardrobe with a false plywood back, the newspaper claimed.

John Duffield, the new owner of No 3, told how he found the secret passageway on Thursday: “It’s like something from [The Chronicles of] Narnia — The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . . . to think the bloke has been living just feet from his wife — it’s mind-bloggling.”

Mrs Darwin last night admitted that the couple were living as man and wife when an inquest had declared Mr Darwin, who is being questioned by police on suspicion of fraud, to be dead.

She said:. “I was always on eggshells when friends and family came to stay in case someone wandered into John’s room and saw him.”

Mrs Darwin has fled her new life in Panama and is believed to be travelling back to England, where she faces arrest.

At Seaton Carew the Darwins lived in one house and rented out 15 bedsits from the adjoining property, funding the venture with a £245,000 business loan. But the couple ran into problems with the business.

Mrs Darwin said her husband believed that the only way out of the mess was for him to “die” and for her to cash in on the life insurance. She told the Daily Mail that she knew her husband was alive when she cashed in on the £25,000 life insurance policy, and had their £130,000 mortgage paid off by another life policy.

Mrs Darwin said Mr Darwin would “come and go” for the first three months after he turned up, before moving back in for good.

“John said that if we got the money from the insurance payouts and cleared our debt, we could find a way back and then we could start over again.”

Mrs Darwin said the pair settled on Panama simply because her husband liked the look of it.

“Out there I didn’t feel like I was living a lie, we had freedom to go about the place as a couple and I felt normal for the first time in years.”

She said that her husband returned to England and turned himself in to police, claiming that he could not remember what he had been doing for the past five years, because he missed his sons.

“He had had enough of being dead. I think he thought he would get away with it, and he would come back and we would live happily ever after.”

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