Inside ‘troubled’ relationship of Tatler ‘Babe of the Month’ and rapist lover who vanished from burning car with baby
IT was a heartfelt appeal to his missing daughter, in an aristocratic voice that at times seemed utterly bereft – and left listeners to BBC Radio stunned.
Napier Marten, 63, a former page to the late Queen, was wracked with emotion yesterday as he pleaded: “I beseech you to find a way to turn yourself and your wee one in to the police as soon as possible.”
His child, society beauty Constance “Toots” Marten, 35, and her newborn are on the run with 48-year-old Mark Gordon — a convicted rapist and armed burglar.
Raiding Constance’s multi-million- pound trust fund, they have kept one step ahead of cops by paying cash for taxis and using fake names at hotels.
But what they are running from, and why, all remains a mystery.
They have been missing since their new car broke down and burst into flames near Junction 4 on the M61, near Bolton, on Thursday of last week, January 5.
There are suggestions their baby may have earlier been born in the vehicle — which they bought six days before their disappearance, with cash.
Police believe that, after losing their possessions in the blaze, Constance and Gordon walked with her baby to a nearby junction and flagged down a taxi to Liverpool.
Tortoise tattoo
In the early hours of the next day, at about 3.30am, they gave another driver a bundle of cash to take them more than 250 miles to Harwich, Essex, where they were believed to be looking to quit the country by ferry.
Constance was seen cradling her child under a big red shawl but there is no evidence they ever departed for the Continent.
They were also spotted in Colchester, Essex, where police visited “every hotel and bed and breakfast” in a bid to find them.
The latest confirmed sighting was then in East London last Saturday, January 7, after they took a taxi to East Ham Tube station.
CCTV footage showed them on a platform using hats and scarves to hide their faces.
They clearly do not want to be found.
Det Supt Lewis Basford, leading the Met Police’s inquiries, said: “As far as we are aware, neither Constance nor the baby have received medical attention since it was born.
“Our priority is to ensure the baby, and Constance and Mark, are safe and well.”
So how did a blue-blooded society heiress become involved with a sex offender who served two decades behind bars?
Born into wealth and privilege in 1987, Constance is the eldest child of film and music producer Napier and psychotherapist Virginie.
The family seat was 18th-century pile Crichel House — set in 5,000 acres of Dorset parkland complete with 50 cottages, four villages, a cricket club and an ornamental lake.
It featured in Holly-wood star Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1996 period rom-com Emma, based on Jane Austen same-titled novel.
Constance’s grandmother, Mary Anna Marten, was a British Museum trustee whose godmother was the late Queen Mother.
Her grandfather, Toby Marten, was a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy.
But in 1996, when Constance was just nine, her father did his own disappearing act.
He renounced his £115million inheritance for a life in Australia centred on whale-watching and spiritual discovery,
Napier said later: “Even with small children, I had to leave the house and go pretty much overnight.”
He added that, despite “great privilege”, he felt his life was “an empty shell”.
He first flew to Hawaiian island Maui — where he shaved his head as “two fingers” to his old life.
An encounter with whales made him cry “almost non-stop” for a week, and in Australia he had an out-of-body experience with some indigenous people on a clifftop.
He later returned but the family seat passed to his eldest son, Maximillian, now 34.
In 2013, Crichel House was sold to a US hedge-fund billionaire for £34million.
Known to pals as Toots, Constance attended the £30,000-a-year former St Mary’s Roman Catholic boarding school for girls, near Shaftesbury.
She seems to have always been one of life’s rebels.
In 2016, she posted a school photo on Facebook showing her pulling a face as more demure classmates looked on.
She captioned it: “Mrs McSiggan said she was going to edit my face out and charge my mother for the editing! Furious!”
She also shared on Facebook an image of her as a curly-haired kid with her mother — and a goose.
She wrote: “Those were the days of naked picnics, siestas amid hay bales, and tractor scoops. “
At Leeds University, she studied Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, during which time she spent a year in Egyptian capital Cairo.
Her social media accounts reveal glamourous time in Swiss ski resort Verbier and Washington DC.
Society bible Tatler named her in January 2009 as its Babe of the Month.
In an interview with the magazine, she said cider was “one of her five-a-day” — and that she wanted to get a tortoise tattooed on her foot.
She also revealed the best party she had ever been to was at Viscount Cranborne’s pile in Dorset.
She said: “There was a gambling tent, and grapes hanging from the walls.
“It was like a debauched feast from ancient Greece.”
After university she worked as a researcher for Arabic TV network Al Jazeera and took a course in journalism.
Then she enrolled on an acting course at East 15 drama school in Essex.
False names
Classmates there say she paid for the course from her trust fund, and was popular.
One said: “She was just beautiful, full of life, full of kindness — and very, very talented.”
But by 2016, they had noticed a change in her.
She quit the course and began a supposedly stormy relationship with a man they had never met.
It was around then she had begun dating Gordon.
His life is less well charted than hers but he was born in Birmingham and moved to the US as a child, with mum Sylvia and half-siblings.
Now a registered sex offender, he was jailed in the late Eighties in Florida after raping and assaulting a woman in her early twenties when he was 14.
He was convicted at 16 and served 20 years before being deported to the UK in 2010.
He then lived in a ramshackle terraced home in Enfield, North London, opposite an off-licence.
It is not known how he met drama student Constance but they moved in together in Ilford, East London, as she shut out her old life.
Her Facebook and Instagram were not updated from 2016.
She seemed to have fallen off the Earth.
But in early 2000, she broke cover with Facebook shots of her cradling a baby that seemed to be hers.
Other shots — labelled “My love sprogs” — suggest she maybe had more kids.
The posts drew comments. One read: “Toooots where in the world are you? I’ve missed your beautiful spirit in my life.”
Another read: “Where do I find youuu! Missing you lots angel.”
By August 2020, she and Gordon were living in South London on the Coldharbour Estate near Mottingham.
Neighbours said they some-times heard shouting.
They were evicted last year, reportedly for not paying rent and leaving smoke damage and a partly collapsed ceiling.
Their next known sighting was on January 5 this year, on the M61.
Gordon’s mum Sylvia, 83, who claimed the pair secretly wed “some time ago”, said from her Florida home: “I’m very concerned.
“I love my son, he is a good boy. I am worried for all of them.”
Meanwhile Napier, reaching out to “darling Constance” in his taped appeal yesterday via online paper The Independent, said they “remain estranged at the moment” but he is ready “to do whatever is necessary for your safe return to us”.
He revealed he had known of Gordon’s past for some time, and pleaded with Constance: “The past eight years have been beyond painful for the family as well as your friends, as they must have been for you.
“To see you so vulnerable is testing in the extreme.”
Police say the runaways could be anywhere, using false names.
They are said to be surviving on Constance’s money — from a world she has left far behind.