The Walkers: The real Salt Path | Tortoise Investigates
The Missing Money | The Walkers Ep1
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What unusual tip-off leads to an investigation in Wales?
You've entered the car park for your destination. 2025 was a weird year for me. Most of it was spent following one tip-off. I get a lot of these tip-offs working in investigations, and I can tell you they rarely lead to a story. They hardly ever pan out. But this one, the one that came to me last spring, was different.
It's taken me from Wales to Cornwall to France, and then a few months ago... On a sunny October afternoon, I found myself parking up a few hours' drive from London... So we've just pulled in to a service station off the motorway in Gloucester. It all feels very deep throat and secret squirrel. I was there to meet a source. They are extremely nervous about talking to me.
So at the moment, this is all on background and completely off the record. And I can't even say who they are. All this secrecy for a story about a book... The tip-off that started the ball rolling on this whole thing was from a stranger who messaged me on Instagram.
Chapter 2: What secrets are revealed about Raina Wynne's past?
They told me they had some information about a memoir called The Salt Path. Art stories really aren't my thing. I'm more a sort of disinformation, Middle East, true crime kind of journalist. So I was about to reply that this wasn't one for me. But then they messaged again and said I should take a closer look at the author because they suspected she might have lied in her books.
I mean, I'm a pretty voracious reader, but I'd never come across The Salt Path and I'd never even heard of its author Raina Wynne. Turns out I must have been living under a rock because the minute I started looking around, I realised she was everywhere. On TV chat show sofas, splashed across magazine spreads and on the stage of every literary festival in the country.
I'm Sophie Raworth and I'm talking to you from the BBC newsroom. And it is a great honour to join you this evening to talk to Raina Wynne.
Thank you all so much for coming. Can I welcome to the stage Raina Wynne.
So please everyone, give another warm welcome to Raina Wynne.
Raina Wynne and her husband Moth, the main subject of her books, have become national treasures.
It is a proper phenomenon.
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Chapter 3: How did the couple's financial troubles begin?
I mean, one of the big sort of 10 books of the last five years or so. It's like this huge thing. Spent more than 90 weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller lists and changed thousands of lives.
For the last seven years, readers all around the world have been deeply moved by this couple's true story.
But, you know, anybody who's read the book, I mean, you can't fail to be touched by it.
You've helped a lot of people in terms of having hope. But the real gift is this book. It will change your life. People in the worst of times finding the best of themselves.
It's a heartbreaking story that Raina Wynne has told countless times about how deeply unfair life has been to her and Moth. And it starts with their house.
I'd been living in this place in Wales that I'd bought with my husband, Moth.
It was our dream home, a place we'd thought about for probably a decade before we actually bought it.
But someone they thought was a friend manages to trick them into a dodgy business deal that ends with their house being repossessed.
Saw us being served with an eviction notice from that place, that place that we'd put our heart and soul into, that had been so central to our lives.
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Chapter 4: What extraordinary decision do Raina and Moth make in response to their challenges?
In one week that changed our lives utterly and indelibly forever.
Then, Moth is told by a doctor that he's dying.
In that week, Mosby Moth had a hospital appointment and he was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease that had no treatment.
CBD is a very lonely existence. Terminal condition, no cure. Nobody gets it.
Faced with destitution and a terminal illness, the couple make an extraordinary decision. They're going to walk the 630 miles around the southwest coastal path while they're thinking of what to do next with the little time Moth has left.
That moment when we said, yes, let's walk, I think it was just the idea of following a line on a map.
They sleep rough in a tent and survive on less than Ā£50 a week. People they meet along the way scorn them for being homeless. But in the end, the healing power of nature and of walking helps Moth overcome his illness. And it helps Raina realise the only home she really needs is Moth. At its heart, this is a love story between two people who overcome anything and everything for one another.
The idea, the idea of letting go of that seemed utterly impossible.
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Chapter 5: How does the couple's journey on the coastal path unfold?
Reconnecting with that path, I know that this place holds a sense of home that I didn't think I'd feel again.
Rainer Wynne won and was shortlisted for prestigious literary awards. And then, last summer, Hollywood came knocking.
Are you walking the path? Yes, we are. That's a long old hike. Yeah. Retired, are you? Open up, Mr. Bayliss. Hello. Homeless, actually.
We lost everything. Look me in the eye, coward.
Our home, our livelihood. Maybe we should just follow a line around the coast.
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Chapter 6: What shocking discoveries are made about the missing money?
We just walk. Gillian Anderson went full Raina Wynne with Wild Frizzy Hair.
I fell in love with the book. I thought it was extraordinary. I think it's an amazing story.
And Jason Isaacs was playing the sick and limping moth.
They are amazing people. They describe themselves as very ordinary. Well, certainly something extraordinary happened to them. And it's real.
In July, I published an article based on some of the initial findings I'd made from that tip-off. It highlighted some of the ways Raina Wynne had misled her readers about her origin story, how they'd lost their home, how and when they'd walked the coastal path and her husband's illness. The next day, every newspaper in the country and many around the world had latched onto it.
It's the continuing controversy around the hit novel The Salt Path, the supposed real-life story of Rainer and Lorne.
A fantastic investigation in The Observer came out by journalist Chloe Hadjimatay.
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Chapter 7: What happens when the police get involved in the embezzlement case?
Within hours of publishing, I had a tsunami of emails and social media messages from members of the public. In the more than 20 years I've worked as a journalist, I've definitely broken more important stories, but none has had the impact this one has. After the article, I was being inundated with fresh leads, and suddenly I found myself trying to piece together a sprawling mystery.
Who really were Moth and Rainer Wynne, and what happened on that walk?
Did we know them though? Did we honestly know them for what they were?
She used that to create divides and I don't think it will ever be the same again. That someone who's so dishonest and so horrible is getting so much. That's my aunt and she's a liar. Mocked and humiliated for it and lied about. For a fleeting few days I had a little bit of hope and then it's gone.
All of which brings me back to that motorway service station. I'd suspected how important that meeting might be because the person I was hoping to talk to that day was a family member of Raina Wynne's. I feel like the public persona that they've put on, the image that they've shown their readers, that's not really them.
I don't know who they are yet, and I really hope that the person I'm about to meet has the key and might agree to share it.
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Chapter 8: How does the story of the Walkers differ from the narrative in The Salt Path?
I remember willing this woman to somehow find the courage to show up. It's the beginning of a conversation, but if I can get this person to go on the record, essentially I think it will blow the whole story open. So here goes... Listening back now, I can actually hear that I suspected I was about to uncover something big. It turns out I had no idea what was coming.
Inside that cafe, I sat across from this very ordinary-looking, middle-aged blonde lady. But it quickly became clear that what she wanted to share with me was really quite extraordinary. I watched her reach into her bag and pull out a clear plastic folder. As she slid it towards me, I could see that inside was a letter, written by Raina Wynne. I sat there reading it with my mouth hanging open.
There was one thing I knew for sure. It definitely wasn't over. This is a story about one of the biggest celebrity deceptions in modern times. About a couple who persuaded the world they were victims when they were nothing of the sort. And, like the emperor's new clothes, looking back now, the signs were always there.
Because this is a love story, not the one Rainer sells about love conquering illness and destitution, but about the lengths people will go to to cover up for one another. A story about an industry willing to look the other way, and crucially, about how desperate we all are to buy into hope. I'm Chloe Hedger-Mathieu, and from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, this is The Walkers.
Episode 1, The Missing Money.
Good morning, Sean. Hello, how are you? I'm all right, and you? I'm fine, thank you. This is the man that took us over. Hi, nice to meet you.
This story starts months before the motorway service station in a small windswept town in North Wales. The place where Rain or Wind would be made and broken. It's about as far as you get from the bright lights of multi-million pound book deals and Hollywood film adaptations. But this is where my investigation starts.
I'm here to meet a woman who was a witness to the first chapter of the salt path as it really happened.
Now, I love this place. I'm very much part of this place. It's lovely. It is lovely. As long as your family don't want to go out and do city things.
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