Saltwater Μansions

(by David Whitehouse, 2025)

It is not clear how long Whitehouse’s investigation into the disappearance of a woman he calls ‘Caroline Lane’ took, but it was not a quick process. Compare that with the short time it took reporter David Jones of the Daily Mail, upon publication of “Saltwater Mansions”, to discover and disclose the real name of the woman who disappeared, the actual block of flats in which she lived and the identity of her family (one of whom is falsely and titillatingly described by Whitehouse as “a former pop star” who received “an intense level of attention” as “a regular fixture in the tabloids” for a short period. Whitehouse admits that this “blurring” is “an act of some hypocrisy on my part”).

Whitehouse says, “I had worked as a journalist before, though I’m hesitant to use the term and do so only in the loosest sense. I’d never done any serious investigative reporting”. Unfortunately, an admission of inexperience does not make 195 pages of description of frustratingly amateur sleuthing any more readable. Whitehouse makes himself and what he calls his “obsession” the story in this partially dramatised non-fiction account. The reader, however, is not breathless with anticipation along with the author (“As I opened the box I felt magnetised; the hair prickled on my neck and arms”) but bemused and annoyed.

The real “mansions” in question (pictured in Jones’ piece) are nothing like the Margate building on the cover photograph (above) which in turn is confusingly unlike the description in the book: “Saltwater Mansions was a fine example of the kind of quietly breathtaking Victorian architecture often found in British seaside resort towns. It would be an impressive place to live. The kind of place where you’d closely watch your visitors’ faces for signs of awe”. Does the block of flats on the cover take your breath away? Would it visibly impress your visitors? This sort of disorientation does not improve an already hole-riddled story. The reader suspects that Whitehouse has bent a great many facts to meet his narrative. One also feels that he is naive and, perhaps, he is sometimes taken for a ride, particularly toward the end of the story.

The reader is at first curious, like Whitehouse, about a woman who had not been seen or heard from at her usual residence for 13 or so years. She left, apparently never to return, shortly after an acrimonious building management company meeting in May 2009. Her flat is ultimately sold to pay debts, although her mortgage and other payments had continued automatically. Where had the money come from? Whitehouse obviously does not know. Nor does he seem to find it odd that Lane had not been declared dead if she really had ‘disappeared’.

So far so interesting, but ultimately this is a slight and unsatisfactory attempt at real-life mystery and citizen detective self-congratulation. There is a great deal of padding about the rise and fall of Margate, the British seaside town from which Lane disappeared, and the largely imagined stories of the family and friends of all concerned. The reader feels ultimately that Whitehouse just didn’t want to waste all that research.

It is also distasteful. While Whitehouse deplores the intrusiveness of social media he uses it himself. What is Whitehouse but one of the “grief junkies” he mentions, “‘citizen-journalists-cum-detectives, looking for a truth they were sure was being hidden from view” who gather at crime scenes, hindering the police and upsetting locals. But Whitehouse doesn’t stop there. Astonishingly, when he finally locates the missing woman’s family, he says, “it now seemed inevitable that I would need to break the news of Caroline’s disappearance – and with it the very real probability she was dead – to one of her siblings”. He sends an email along those lines, but carefully worded to be “compassionate and kind”, “in no way sensational or gratuitous”. He’s shocked when it turns out that Lane’s family knew a bit more about their sister’s fate than he, an inter-meddling stranger, did. To perfect his image though, he does feel “a little embarrassed highlighting the fact that [he’d] had some books published before as a reason to consider [him to be] legitimate”. This book is a gauge of his legitimacy.