John and Anne Darwin, the couple at the centre of the back-from-the-dead canoeist case, spent last night in separate cells in the northeast of England as police prepared to question her on suspicion of fraud and put him before the courts.
Mr Darwin (57) will appear in court in Hartlepool today, charged with making an untrue statement to procure a passport and obtaining a money transfer by deception.
Ms Darwin (55) arrived back in Britain yesterday morning and was arrested by police when her plane touched down at Manchester airport. She was driven to the northeast where detectives will begin questioning her today.
The latest developments come nine days after her husband walked into a London police station saying he believed he was a missing person. Mr Darwin, who was thought to have died in a canoeing accident in 2002, told officers he could not remember anything about the last five years.
After police established who he was, he was reunited with his sons, Mark and Anthony.
Shortly afterwards it emerged that his wife had sold the family's two houses and moved to Panama six weeks earlier to start a new life.
Detectives began to have doubts about Mr Darwin's story and when a picture emerged of the couple posing in an apartment in Panama city in 2006 - four years after he was supposed to have died - he was arrested at Anthony's home on suspicion of fraud. Since then Ms Darwin has given several interviews in which she admitted she had known her husband was alive for the past four years and that he had been living in the family house for much of the time.
She said he had made the decision to fake his own death after his bedsit business got into financial trouble. She has repeatedly insisted she believed he was dead when he disappeared and his canoe was washed up near their home.
Ms Darwin said she had wanted to admit everything when he first reappeared, but her husband had persuaded her not to come clean. After days of arguments and discussions, she says she agreed to keep quiet.
She also promised that she would not tell their sons that their father was alive. This week, as the couple's story began to unravel, their sons issued a joint statement disowning their parents.
Last night Mr Darwin's aunt, 80-year-old Margaret Burns (80), said: "It's beyond satire. You couldn't make it up." - ( Guardian Service )