Who Trolled Amber? - The French Quarter | The Walkers Ep5

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

In the aftermath of her initial investigation, Chloe hears from a close family member of Moth’s. The story is one of deep divides…and another theft. But it takes her one step closer to understanding who Moth and Raynor Winn really are.Credits: Reporter - Chloe HadjimatheouProducer - Matt RussellMusic supervision - Karla PatellaSound design - Rowan BishopExecutive Producer - Jasper CorbettSubscribe to Observer+ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to binge listen to the entire series.To find out more about The Observer:Subscribe to TheObserver+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentHead to our website observer.co.uk  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Observer. In the week after my original investigation into the salt path was published, two things caught my immediate attention. One was something I'd been half expecting. Raina Wynne published a lengthy statement on her website contesting my article. She wrote how the investigation was... Grotesquely unfair, highly misleading, and seeks to systematically pick apart my life.

And how she... Can't allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories or the joy they have given so many. In particular, there was this line that she'd offered to discuss the allegations privately with me to correct the record, but that I'd refused her invitation. That wasn't true. I've wanted to hear from Raina from day one, but despite almost a dozen invitations from me, she's never accepted.

I say all this because the thing that has consistently been missing in this story is who Moth and Raina Wynne are. The story I've been able to piece together is to a large extent the story of what's not true, what didn't happen, rather than what really did. And I was starting to come to terms with the fact that if they wouldn't talk to me, I was unlikely to ever get closer to really understanding them.

Except that then, the second more remarkable thing happened. Days after my article came out, there was a post on the professional. professional networking site LinkedIn. It was from someone who said that Raina Wyn and Moth, or Sally and Tim Walker, were his uncle and aunt. And he was calling them liars. I messaged him privately and he immediately called me back.

In that call, this jumble of anger and hurt came tumbling out. When I tried to make sense of it all, he suggested I speak to his sister. She knows the whole story he does. told me. So, I dialed her number. Hello? Hi, it's Chloe. I just want to say first of all, thank you. Sorry. Quite emotional. So, thank you for exposing Tim and Sally. I hadn't expected her to be so emotional. Sorry, I'll pull myself together. Don't be sorry, don't be sorry, it's okay. I didn't realize this is so, this is so raw for you and so difficult.

It's been a very emotional subject for a long time and to the world she protects this image but she is a completely different person. She told me that for years she'd been infuriated because she could see these public figures, Rainer and Moth, receiving accolades, adoration and sympathy when in reality, she said, the real couple behind the public façade were very different people.

I've been waiting for the story to come out, hoping it would come out for years because I thought I have no proof. I'm Chloe Hajemotho and from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, this is The Walkers, the Real Salt Path. Episode 5, the French Quarter. I'm all right. Well, feeling a bit nervous, actually. Cecile's a single mum with two young kids and she lives in France. Her parents, Moth's brother and his wife, moved there when she was 19. It's about an hour and a half from Bordeaux, I suppose. And it's in the middle of the countryside, lovely little hamlets.

I mean, not the most picturesque of hamlets, I'll be honest. Cecile's quite open about all that's happened over the years. She's not hiding from public view. But at the same time, she doesn't want members of her family who don't want to take part in this podcast to be handed by the media, so she's chosen not to use her real name. Over the next two episodes, you're going to hear from people, including close family members, who've known Tim and Sally for decades.

I need to emphasise this is their side of the story. We don't have a detailed version of how Sally and Tim understood everything that happened, because they've declined to engage with us. When I started chatting to Cecile, the first thing she did is take me back to a time before the salt path, before the names Rainer Wyn and Moth had made it into the public sphere, to a time when they were just her aunt, Sally and Uncle Tim. Tim, he's got that character that, I mean, when you're a kid at least, he was very good at creating enthusiasm, creating energy,

and he loved to be the fun uncle. He was like, oh, Tim's here, we're going to have a great day. Sally tended to be a bit more quiet. She wasn't like a central player, I suppose. She made sure everyone was taking care of, and everyone always had, you know, there's always nice food, and everyone's got, there's always a cup of tea, you know, and cake and things. Tim Walker's the oldest of four, all of whom have their own kids,

so there are a lot of walkers. Very loving, it's a very large, loving family that's really good fun. It was three generations of a large family. So when there's lots of people around, there's lots of characters. The whole family would often congregate in Wales at Sally and Tim's house, Penny Mice. It was a kind of gathering place. The wider family would, often camp in the field next to the house.

I can still see a lot of it in my mind's eye now, even though I've not been for a long, long time. It was whitewashed on the outside with a large garden around it, like an old stone property, you know, the old beams, little doorways. It had character, very warm, well-decorated. It kind of felt like it was cut off on the world a little bit. It was like a little secluded little secret place

which kind of ended to the magic of it. Cecile has these incredibly warm memories from that time. You can tell it meant a lot to her belonging to this close extended family. Yeah, it felt special. It felt special. A lot of what she tells me actually resonates with what others have said too. Former neighbours and friends of Tim and Sally Walker, they've told me about how likable the couple were

and how devoted they were to each other. But Cecile also remembers that, even as a kid, she was aware that Aunt Sally and Uncle Tim would spoil her cousins. My cousins are a similar age to me, you know, so you both go to that same period where you want to start buying your own clothes and wear and make. But then when you go to your cousin's house, suddenly she's got these nice branded clothes and she wasn't afraid to show them off to us. You know, when we saw their cars, for example, he had a land rober,

which was really, to me, it looked very expensive as a child. It probably was. I remember asking as a child, what did they do for a living? Because how do they have this money? I remember even as a child thinking that was strange. Because Cecil knew that Tim was a gardener and Sally worked part-time as a bookkeeper. But she never got a straight answer.

In 2003, a few years before Cecil and her family moved from the Midlands to France, they bought a beautiful little stone pigeon tower in a tiny village near Bergerac in the south west of France. They'd go on holiday there and a few years later around 2007 an opportunity came up for Tim to buy the neighbouring building which had once adjoined their pigeon tower. Tim leapt at the idea.

I think Tim and Sally were equally on board with it. I think they both liked the idea of it. And so quite quickly they said, yeah, yeah, we'll do it. So they did. Yeah, they bought it. This would have been when Sally Walker was working at Martin Hemings estate agents. Roz Hemings and one of her co-workers remember how back then she'd come into the office one day and told them she'd bought a chateau in France. And so that year, 2007, Tim and Sally spent the summer out there with their kids.

This picturesque location full of wildflowers and vineyards nestled along a river, 90 minutes drive. from Bordeaux. It's very pretty. It kind of looks, it looks like your classic, picturesque, little rural French village, stonehouses, little wooden shuttered windows.

Last summer I flew over there to see Tim and Sally's house. Oh, I see it's behind these trees here. God, it's like overgrown and hidden behind the overgrowth. now. Village du Trot is lesser village, more a row of a dozen or so houses. Even so, it took a while for me and my producer to find the building. God, you can hardly even, that must be, is this the entrance, do you think? Maybe I'm going to pop in here. Do you reckon you can

brave it through? Yeah? Okay. Let's go. Really not much of a place left. It's scarcely a roof. I'm kind of scared to go in case something falls on me. I wonder what would this have been, do you reckon? Do you know. Like a mantle piece? Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Well, it's got the fire. It's got, I think I'll have been a bread oven actually. We, the team. Team, yeah, exactly.

You know, vaguely. Vaguement, but I know more the brother. They've got to buy them, they've been here. Oh, so. And, uh, well, maybe Natalia, she'll help you. A few doors away, a lady in a housecoat surrounded by geese and dogs leans over the fence to chat to us. She tells us she remembers Sally and Tim,

and also Tim's brother who had the pigeon tower next door. There's a pigeonier. D'clock. In which year? Oh, yeah. Oh, my, there's a moment. Plus two five years? The brother she's seen around, she says,

but Sally and Tim haven't been here for years. Back when they bought the house, it was definitely habitable. So what happened? Why would you leave a lovely little place like that to fall into rack and ruin? It was after their summer holiday here when the walkers got back to Wales that things started to unravel. Martin Hemings began uncovering all the money missing from his business and in the autumn of 2008, Sally was arrested for the theft of more than £60,000.

We'd received a message saying something's happened and we need to talk to you. The message was from a relative of Cecile's in the UK. Foreign calls were pretty expensive in those days, so they had to go down to the village to a phone box to receive the call there. Cecile, who was a teenager back then, remembers a whole load of them cramming into this phone booth to hear what the relative from the UK had to say. That was at the point when she'd gone missing,

so it was very, you know, in the thick of it really. And then that phone call we were told she'd been arrested. You know, she's gone on the run, but she hadn't been found yet. So it was before she'd turned up in London. She recall standing there with her jaw hanging open. Surely not, not Aunt Sally. She just seemed like such a nice woman, you know, just a country girl. who liked to walk and the most inoffensive, harmless woman.

I don't think any of us saw it coming at all. Their relative in the UK was trying to fill them in on as much as he knew. And he said, she's gone, we don't know where she's gone, could it be that she's hurt herself? And Tim was concerned. Yeah, it's quite a thing to put your family through. But that wasn't the end of it. Cecile's relative was still on the phone from the UK.

He had more to tell them. It was about Cecile's grandparents, Tim's mum and dad. They'd come and spend, you know, three months with us or so. So when they went back to the UK and they went to the bank and realised all this money had gone, yeah, that was the first they knew of it themselves. Her grandfather and grandmother were in their 70s. They'd sold their house in Staffordshire hoping to buy something in Wales near Tim and Sally. Meanwhile, they were renting.

But that summer, when they'd returned from a few months in France, they'd popped into their local building society and when they saw their bank statements, they got a huge shock. Their bank account was practically empty. My grandmother told me that Sally had transferred the money. They were sure Sally Walker had stolen the money from their account. I think we were all as shocked as each other. I don't think any of a story.

I mean, I know we were saying how, yes, they had money, which seemed to be more than they earned. But, you know, like, she just seemed like such a nice woman, you know. None of us could have expected it, I don't think. Cecile's grandmother told her, Sally had apparently helped them make online bookings in the past. I do remember my nana saying that she wanted to confront her face to face. And when she got there, Sally knew. Sally knew. from the look on my grandmother's face that she'd found out and basically ran away.

And when she did confront her, she would literally make out that she was incapable of answering questions, that she wasn't in her right mind. She would literally pretend to people. I remember my nana saying that she locked herself in a cupboard, pretending to be mad, anything to avoid answering the direct questions. Tim Walker's mother died back in 2018 and his father died last April.

So it's not possible for me to ask them about this directly. But Cecile says it never even crossed their minds to go to the authorities about the theft. You know, my grandparents really did love him and Sally immensely. They really loved her. They entrusted her with bank details, with helping them book things. I don't think they had any idea

that she could have, she could be capable or something like that. The thing that stings the most, Ceil tells me, is when she thinks about the quite profound effect the thefts had on her grandmother and grandfather, they weren't able to own their own property again, and so they ended up renting a place in Wales. He'd had a lovely house and a lovely garden back in the Midlands, and I think he'd gone to Wales hoping that one day he'd find a lovely property with a lovely garden and spend the rest of his days there. In reality, he spent his final years since the money was taken and he was forced to. He spent the rest of his years in a just a little place. It didn't

have a garden. My granddad didn't like it. I did go there. It wasn't particularly pleasant. It was quite a dark, small, far from the dream property, to be honest. And that's the best they could afford. It was sad, that was. Because it did dramatically change their lifestyle. The end of their lives, it shouldn't have been like that. Cecile says the apparent theft was widely talked about. I've spoken to three other people in her family who've all given me a very similar picture. Tim's parents did tell people that Sally had taken their money.

But as far as I can tell, it wasn't something anyone else in the family ever discussed with the couple directly. Cecil says because of that unspoken friction, Sally and Tim never set foot back in the village where their house was in France. And so the ivy slowly crept through the stonework And eventually the roof collapsed Some members of Tim's family Have drawn a line under the whole thing and moved on

From what I understand They still have good relations with Sally and Tim And they feel the past is the past Trouble is when things happen like this And it kind of splits a family It makes relationships a bit more difficult Whereas personally me No matter if she's famous now or whatever

that's got nothing to do with it. The point is that she did some really horrible things. Those special family get-together, Cecil remembers so fondly, they're over. Interestingly, when I asked Cecil and others in her family that I've spoken to about Tim's terminal illness, they tell me they were told about it, but that they didn't take it seriously. Tim was considered a fantasist by some. Put it this way, we never worried, they told me. The years ticked over, and before Cecil knew it, a decade had slipped past. And in that time, I just heard drips and drabs of information, feeding through from grandparents, whatever. Nothing didn't really give them much consideration, to be honest, I got on with my own life.

Then one day, Cecil's visiting her aunt, Tim's sister, here in England. My aunt said, what do you think of Sally's book? I said, I don't. but I don't really know what you're talking about. And she said, the Soul Path, Raina Win. Honestly, I had no idea. No idea. She said, look her up on the internet.

Look up Raina Win. I typed it in, Rainer Win. And I saw Sally's face. And I thought, what's going on? I was completely and utterly confused. There'd been so little contact between the families that Sally Walker's transformation into Rainer Win had completely passed Cecil by.

So she gets a copy of the book and she starts reading. Basically from the off, she's lying. It's not the truth. It's a memoir, but she's saying that she's a victim. Well, that was very far from the truth because she was actually the criminal. She was the con artist. She was the one who'd taken people's money. How can a woman who has done such terrible things and lied and committed fraud

and theft, and just been a coward since then and not dared to face us or have said, you know, not acknowledged anything except run and hide. How can this woman now stand up there and write a memoir in which she is a victim? Now she knew who she was, Cecil was seeing her aunt Sally appearing everywhere as Raina Wynne. She watched over the years as she grew in popularity,

and Cecil felt like she was going crazy. It looked like people had really been taken in. But what could she do about it? Raina Wynne was a superstar and Cecil didn't have any evidence. Tim's parents were dead. There were no bank statements or anything like that. I decided I had to do something. I just couldn't sit any longer and think, what can I do?

I just had to take action. And obviously writing a book is a very long-winded way of going about it. Her answer for combating a true story that's made up was to write a made-up story with truth in it, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Maybe because it does take a long time, but it was the way that I thought I could tell the world what she'd done. Because when someone's got so famous,

you don't think anyone's going to believe you. I find it amazing that all of this has been caused by a book, And that you thought the solution to it all was another book? Yeah, well. I had so much emotion to pour into it. It really fed from the anger that I'd had for all these years. The anger, you know, I'd think about my grandmother in the last years of a life and how sad it was and what she'd done to everybody.

And all of this emotion just flooded out of me. I think because I was so determined that I wanted to. expose her in a way it was quite therapeutic. When I started chatting to Cecile last summer, she was still writing her novel. But at the same time, she told me she knew it would almost certainly never get published. Still, she hoped that the rest of her story would somehow get out. But really quite quickly, I realised that I was going to add to her frustration. Because without any hard evidence, it was going to be really difficult for me to publish her claims.

Even though at that point I'd also spoken to two more of Cecil's relatives, the allegations were just too big for me to rely on the word of a few members of one family. I discussed it with my editors at The Observer and we agreed. This was a story that would have to stay in the family. But then something pretty extraordinary happened. I managed to get in touch with someone new who changed everything. And so I called Cecil. which seems to be evidence about the theft from your grandparents.

It's quite surprising. I never ever thought that would ever happen. Yeah. Let me tell you what I've got because in the salt path there's somebody who, Sally calls Polly. We searched and searched and we found her. Okay. And I met her on Friday last week.

And she has three letters written by Sally Walker to her mother. Right, okay. And one of these letters, she confesses to stealing money from her employer. Wow, okay. And then she says, I also took 25,000 from Tim's parents. Wow. I can't believe it. Cecile had met Sally Walker's family in Wales when she was a child.

There are photos of them together, although she was too young to remember any of it. But the woman I was telling Cecile about was about to blow open a whole new window on the story. She told me she was a character in the salt path. Someone Raina Winnard called Polly. But in reality, she was Sally Walker's niece. She'd shown me those letters I'd told Cecile about. and now I just needed her to agree to go public with them. She could make life very difficult.

These are the thoughts that go through your head in the middle of the night. Is it worth actually coming out and saying, look, this is the truth, I know what happened, or should I just carry on burying my head under the stone and be the person they believe I am? Coming up in episode six. Never in a million years did she think that a daughter had had it. It was dreadful.

Absolutely dreadful. What she'd done. How else do I prove that how she's depicted herself is fiction? And how she's depicted everybody and everything that's happened with her being perceived as a victim is quite the opposite. Raina Wynne responded to the observer's investigation with the following. statement. The salt path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of

our lives. This is the true story of our journey. On her website, Raina goes on to say, As with most people's lives, there will always be someone willing to criticise you. That's part of life. However, it is a great source of sadness that Tortus Media's observer is now seeking to drive a wedge between our family members. The family have always been able to share their concerns privately and they still can. I did not steal from family as others can confirm, nor have I confessed to doing so and I did not write the letter suggesting I did. What we own in France is an uninhabitable ruin in a bramble patch on the boundary of a family member's property bought in 2007 by remorgeting our home to prevent a developer buying it. It has missing walls, a collapsed roof, no running

water, drainage or electricity. We have never lived there. That would be impossible. And we haven't been there since 2007. The insinuation that we were not homeless, the central premise of the book, is utterly unfounded. Thanks for listening to The Walkers, the Real Salt Path. It was reported by me, Chloe Hageemothay, with additional reporting by James Urquhart. The series producer was Matt Russell, additional production by Amalia Sautland. Field producing by Leone Thomas. Music supervision was by Carla Patella and the sound design was by Rowan Bishop. The editor was Jasper Corbett. Thank you for listening to The Walkers. We hope you're enjoying the podcast so far. You can listen to all seven episodes today by subscribing to The Observer. By subscribing,

not only do you get all our podcasts before anyone else, you also get access to our premium food and puzzles newsletter, exclusive offers from our partner Mooby, free tickets to our events and much, much more. Subscribe today at observer.com.ukuk slash subscribe or via the link in the show notes.