The lady who vanished: One day in May 2009, Andrea, 54, disappeared from her Margate flat... 13 years later the door was broken down and what was inside raised perplexing questions

The handsome apartment occupies one corner of an ornate Victorian mansion block overlooking the seafront in Margate, Kent.It had lain abandoned for more than 13 years, since the mysterious disappearance of the owner, and as a locksmith prised the doors open, some of the building’s watching residents feared he might find her skeletal remains.Dark red stains in the bath and sink briefly appeared to confirm grisly suspicions that the woman who lived here had been murdered. Thankfully, however, this was hair dye, not blood. But while the onlookers’ trepidation proved groundless, the time-frozen scene that confronted them remained deeply perplexing.Everything about it suggested that the occupier – who had distanced herself from neighbours and had vaguely alluded to her work in Westminster’s corridors of power – had reason to flee in great haste all those years ago.Dishes remained unwashed in the kitchen sink; the fridge contained the remnants of food and drinks; the four-poster bed was unmade; racks of stylish vintage clothes (plus several pairs of leather trousers and what looked like a British Airways stewardess’s skirt) had been left behind, as had her Far Eastern furniture, arty books and family photos. All that she had taken with her, before leaving without warning, were the contents of her jewellery box and any money she may have had stashed away.Together with her apparently last-minute change of hair colour, all this led some residents to speculate afresh. Had she been an MI5 spy and vanished into the ether, all those years ago, because her life was in imminent danger?This gripping true story is related in an acclaimed new book by David Whitehouse, a Margate- based writer who heard about the missing woman from his hairdresser and spent a year investigating what became of her.To throw armchair sleuths off the scent, Whitehouse disguises her identity by giving her the false name ‘Caroline Lane’ and placing her abandoned apartment in a fictitious building called Saltwater Mansions, the book’s title. Andrea, 54, disappeared from Flat 17 in 2009 and was never seen againThe author also uses ‘creative licence’ to obscure the actuality in other ways. Dates, places and characters are changed, and certain details fictionalised.He even presents one of the woman’s brothers as a make-believe female pop star who made tabloid headlines in the 1980s.Nice try, Mr Whitehouse. However, compelling though it is, the story you tell contains so many unanswered questions and muddied waters that it cries out for further exploration.So I conducted my own investigation into the ‘Saltwater Mansions’ mystery. After several days’ work in Margate this week, I uncovered Caroline’s true identity, found the real building from which she disappeared, and uncovered fresh twists to a bizarre story that has all the makings of a summer bestseller.For the author has omitted to alter several telltale clues. For example, he mentions that, long after she disappeared, a disgruntled resident threatened to blow up the building.This a real incident, and I found a newspaper article about the ensuing court case which contained his street address. Though the would-be suicide bomber actually lived in a block opposite ‘Saltwater Mansions’, when I went there I recognised the correct building from Whitehouse’s detailed description of it.Let’s start, though, with ‘Caroline’. At the time she vanished, in May 2009, Whitehouse says she was 45, and purports to discover that she has a brother and sister, one of whom he calls ‘Meredith’ – the once well-known pop artist. In fact, the woman who disappeared is Andrea Pacey, and she was then 54. Her well-known relative is her brother, Steven Pacey, who achieved a brief degree of fame as Captain Del Tarrant in the 1980s cult sci-fi series Blake’s 7 (and a romance with his co-star Glynis Barber, which interested the News Of The World).Now 68, Pacey, who was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, also had parts in TV shows such as Lovejoy, The Sweeney and Casualty, and acts in theatre productions, but is more familiar as the voice behind hundreds of audio books and adverts. Carlton Mansions, a sprawling former Butlin’s hotel, converted into 20 flats, that overlooks the North Sea.Ms Pacey’s older brother, Peter, 77, is also an actor and appeared in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, while a younger brother, Shaun, 55, is a banker who has been a director of Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse.Their late father, Lawrence, was a successful builder, while their mother, whose looks were once compared with those of Hollywood star Natalie Wood, made the finals of a national fashion modelling contest called ‘Miss She’ in 1962 at the Royal Albert Hall.A high-achieving family, then. So where does Ms Pacey (as she styled herself) fit into it? As Whitehouse discovered, this isn’t easy to answer because, unusually these days, there is no trace of her on the internet beyond an out-of-date electoral register listing at her parents’ home in Brighton.Soon afterwards, she moved to Margate, buying a ground-floor flat in ‘Saltwater Mansions’. This is really a building called Carlton Mansions, a sprawling former Butlin’s hotel, converted into 20 flats, that overlooks the North Sea.Since it stands in Cliftonville, then ranked among Britain’s most deprived areas, and rife with crime and drug addiction, this sophisticated woman’s decision to move there was rather odd.The more so because the rail link between Margate and London was notoriously slow and, in fleeting exchanges with neighbours they vaguely recalled her saying she had worked in the Houses of Parliament, the Foreign Office and at the Italian embassy.Then again, she had cheaply acquired the leasehold to the largest flat in Carlton Mansions, with three big bedrooms, and Margate was being gentrified with trendy restaurants and bars, renovated period houses, and the promised arrival of the Turner Contemporary gallery.All this may have appealed to Ms Pacey, who filled her new flat with art books and trinkets acquired on exotic travels, installed wicker and bamboo furniture, possessed an eclectic CD collection with a Latin American vibe, and slept in a four-poster bed surrounded by candles.In the book, we learn that she also wrote and received letters in at least three languages – French, Spanish and Italian – which were scattered about when entry was forced, and that she was frequently away for long periods. But these are not the only pointers to the occupant’s curious, and possibly secretive, ‘other life’. Her well-known relative is her brother, Steven Pacey, who achieved a brief degree of fame as Captain Del Tarrant in the 1980s cult sci-fi series Blake’s 7Intriguingly, Terry Smith, who works for the building’s management company, told me that when he entered the abandoned flat, he found many sensitive ‘government documents’ that had to be shredded. This is a detail you won’t find in the book. ‘It was all House of Commons stuff,’ Mr Smith said this week. ‘She certainly worked in that environment. She seemed to be working in high places in government.’Did he mean as a spy? ‘I’m not saying she was, but possibly that’s what she did – some sort of spying or undercover work. There was certainly no way of tracing her.’Ms Pacey remained in Carlton Mansions for five years, during which she was seen to entertain few if any visitors.Her exchanges with neighbours were confined to curt morning and evening greetings interspersed with complaints, particularly about the bins outside her window in Flat 17 (not No 9, as Whitehouse says).A man who lived in the flat above Ms Pacey’s, and spoke with her more than most, says she never mentioned her family, much less her well-known actor brother, but said she’d previously worked for a Brighton theatre company.‘She came across as a bit aloof and posher than us,’ the source told me. ‘It was if she didn’t want to engage and we were beneath her. It was like, “Oh, the peasants upstairs!” ’According to Hazel Russell, 70, who is disguised as ‘Mrs Bennett’ in the book and is the only remaining resident who was there in Ms Pacey’s time, she was simply ‘rude’. But could it be that, in her need to compartmentalise her life, she adopted this stand-offish persona to avoid people finding things out about her?Matters came to a head in May 2009, when she caused ructions at Carlton Mansions residents’ annual general meeting. As the minutes show, among the nine people present she was alone in voting against or abstaining on every motion – reportedly dissenting in such an unpleasant manner that the meeting broke up in disarray and the secretary resigned. Ms Pacey remained in Carlton Mansions for five years, during which she was seen to entertain few if any visitorsShe particularly objected to the proposed repair of the antiquated metal fire escape – an expensive job that others considered essential but did not concern her, she sniffed, because she lived on the ground floor. A few days later, a demand for £2,380 – her share of the repair cost – was posted through her letterbox, but she would never read it.It lay at the bottom of a mound of unopened mail that stretched out for two yards behind the door of her abandoned apartment. Since Ms Pacey vanished just a couple of days after the AGM, some wondered whether this had something to do with her disappearance. But Mrs Russell – the last person to see her in the hallway – thinks not.For months afterwards, she tells me, nobody gave much thought to her absence. After all, in seaside apartment blocks, residents often do a moonlight flit only to reappear after a lengthy absence. But Ms Pacey didn’t reappear. As the months turned into years, some whispered darkly that she might have come to harm, yet there was nothing to support this theory.No smell of death seeping beneath the door to Flat 17. No telltale swarm of flies. Nothing seemed awry. Indeed, though her fire-escape charge remained outstanding, Ms Pacey’s Brighton bank continued to pay her mortgage and other bills, including a twice-yearly £500 maintenance fee. And since no one had come looking for her, neighbours thought she had probably gone off somewhere. They saw no point in reporting her missing. The police would only add her to a database containing thousands of names.As time passed, all those who remembered her – except Hazel Russell and her husband –departed from the mansions. Some sold up and moved away, others died. Though some newcomers pondered the fate of the locked-up flat’s owner, no clues were ever forthcoming.  It was only in 2020, after Ms Pacey had been missing for 11 years and the building was being run by a new firm, Queens Carlton Management Company Ltd, that strenuous professional efforts to find her began. Though her maintenance fee had risen considerably since 2009, she was still paying the old rate. Other bills for repairs and painting had also accrued, so she owed almost £20,000.The management company employed a tracing agency to find her. When that approach failed, it obtained a county court judgment, granted on September 2, 2020, for Ms Pacey’s unpaid debt.When she still failed to pay, they got an ‘order for sale’ allowing the flat to be repossessed and sold.So in 2022, after 13 empty years, they could break in and venture inside. As the doors were drilled open, some residents clamoured for a peep and one videoed the scene, which looked so normal that it was almost as if aliens had descended and abducted her.‘We did think we might find Andrea under the floorboards,’ says Mrs Russell. ‘But it was all so weird: as though she had just got up one morning and vanished into thin air.’Another who tiptoed into the time-warp flat was Maria Curley, of the Queens Carlton Management team, whose job was to collect all of Ms Pacey’s belongings and sell them off. ‘I expected to find cobwebs everywhere but strangely there were none at all,’ she tells me. ‘There wasn’t even any dust or a bad smell. The whole place was quite clean.’ She had cheaply acquired the leasehold to the largest flat in Carlton Mansions, with three big bedroomsHer colleague Tom Smith recalls a disquieting detail, again not in the book. The hair dye-stained bathtub and sink were both partly detached from the wall, he says, as if they might have been wrenched away in some sort of struggle. Other eyes fixed on the photos Ms Pacey had displayed: one of herself, tanned and brown-haired; another of two young children on a woman’s lap: probably her nieces.Then there was the ornate four-poster bed, whose rumpled sheets eerily still held Ms Pacey’s body shape. As Whitehouse writes, some thought this unusually elaborate bed, which she also lit with candles, might have been used as part of ‘a sex thing’.However, this was wild conjecture – there was nothing to suggest that she even had a partner.Soon after this search, the apartment was sold to a young couple who are still there. It fetched £195,000, £19,539 of which was deducted for Ms Pacey’s debts.The remainder – more than £175,000 – was held in escrow for her, but it is not known whether she has since claimed it.What Whitehouse appears to have established is that, though she has yet to materialise, she is very much alive. For, having found an email address for Ms Pacey’s brother Steven (disguised in the book as the female pop star) the writer outlines the story to him, hoping she might meet him and unravel the enigma.Oddly, we might think, Mr Pacey appears to have been unaware of his sibling’s disappearance. Expressing ‘tremendous shock’ at her fate, the actor replies that he first needs to speak to her. But he later tells the author she doesn’t wish to talk, adding poignantly: ‘I just want you to know that “Caroline” is a nice person.’This week, Mr Pacey didn’t respond to my request for further comment. Frustratingly, then, the trail ends here, at least for now, and tantalising questions about this extraordinary saga remain unanswered. Far-fetched as it may seem, was the inscrutable Ms Andrea Pacey really a government spy? Might she even have gone incognito to escape the crosshairs of a Jackal’s rifle? Or is there a more prosaic reason behind her dash for obscurity? Perhaps an affair of the heart, or some unforeseen personal mishap?Either way, in this all-seeing age, how has she effectively evaporated – so thoroughly that, but for the photo left on her bedside table, nobody has found a single picture of her? Maybe in time the sands of secrecy will shift.Then we might discover what spurred a woman of unfathomable mystery to dye her hair red and steal away from ‘Saltwater Mansions’, never to return.Additional reporting: Tim Stewart

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