Just four days after the idea first struck him, businessman Harry Gordon disappeared. The sea was his escape route, a boating accident his cover. One winter’s evening seven years ago Mr Gordon, returning from a lunch in his speedboat (“as you do”), sidled into mangroves alongside the Karuah estuary near Port Stephens in New South Wales. He left his wallet, his mobile phone and some tellingly empty champagne bottles in the boat, then used a small dinghy to putter off into the night. Chartless and torchless, he found himself out in the ocean. “It cut up a bit rough, it was a bit dicey,” he recalls. Eventually he made it back to shore, where he had a van, prestocked with clothing and A$100,000 (£42,000) in cash, parked near his holiday home. He drove away.

“Right from the moment I was doing it I thought ‘This is a silly thing to do – this is certainly going to end in tears’,” says Gordon, 57. But after his first night in hiding – he slept in the van in a lay-by – he awoke invigorated. “The first thing, the most profound relief, was to be free of the mobile phone. How wonderful is that? I started to think about what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.” Gordon’s disappearance was prompted partly by a money-making scheme gone wrong: he claims there were some “wretched” gangsters involved, demanding money with menaces. And then there was his wife of 25 years, Sheila: “incandescent” at the arrival in Gordon’s life of a long-lost love child from a teenage affair. “Dying” suddenly seemed desirable. So he bolted.

That decision led to five years on the run in Australia, Spain, Britain and New Zealand (where he became a bigamist), before his eventual capture and imprisonment.

The first few months were easy. He slept in his van on a Sydney campsite, then in a cheap hotel, as police investigated his disappearance. It made quite a splash in the local media: “There were half-page photos in the press. I’m what I appear to be, a balding, boring, middle-aged businessman: I hadn’t expected any interest.” Gordon kept doing what he liked doing anyway: “I went to the opera, went to the movies, went to restaurants. You’re invisible when you look like me. Who’s interested in a middle-aged man in a suit? It’s a wonder that wives don’t take the wrong ones home sometimes.”

Harry even bumped into an acquaintance in a cinema, and she recognised him. “She said ‘Aren’t you dead?’ I said, ‘Well, yes’.” He told her he was on a witness protection programme, and she swallowed it. “That was a story I used over and over again after that. I was so conventional, people believed me.”

Sheila had been on holiday in Egypt when he disappeared. After six weeks he contacted her and told her he was still alive. He sneaked back to their house in the city – it was next to a brothel, and there were plenty of shifty-looking men around – and left a note saying he was in the laundry building in the garden. “I didn’t want her to shriek with surprise when she saw me. Sheila was very angry. Six weeks had passed and she’d been through the grieving process – and [here, over the phone, Gordon’s tone becomes mischievous] taken to the role of gay widow with abandon! All my companies were operating smoothly, well and profitably and she was enjoying a substantial income. If she’d dobbed me in, that would have ended.

“We couldn’t live together, but we would meet. Sometimes I would stay for a few days, sometimes we would meet at the holiday home, and we would try and talk through the issues.” In July 2001 Gordon was in a café in the beach suburb of Manly when he read of his death. The coroner had pronounced him dead despite the lack of a body. “It was a shock. I thought it would be an open finding.” His solicitor duly filed a life insurance claim: the policy was worth A$3.5 million. “I knew about it and she knew about it. At this time we entered the realm of criminality.”

The insurance company, clearly suspicious, didn’t pay out and Sheila didn’t press the issue, but they both decided it was time for him to leave the country. He met a man in a hotel, a yachtie whose passport was due for renewal. For a payment he agreed to apply for a new passport using Gordon’s photos. Gordon flew to Spain, where Sheila was due to follow him, having sold their assets, and begin a new life running a small hotel.

But when Sheila arrived, Gordon says, she brought no cash and “was becoming more and more awkward”. She returned to Australia. Running low on funds, Gordon came to Britain and ended up in Wigan working as a quality control inspector in a food factory, after a “little fiddle” to obtain the necessary documents. He says he loved it: “I had the life of Riley. English people are so lovely and soft and gentle. The English countryside is so bountiful and beautiful.” His daughter by Sheila, who now knew of his nondeath, lived with him for a while. Then, in 2002, Sheila came to Wigan and announced that she had found a new man. “Notwithstanding that I had a very difficult wife, it had never occurred to me that the marriage would end. The only real adult I had a relationship with had abandoned me and I thought my heart would stop beating, I was so terrified.” So Gordon returned to New Zealand, where he was born, and started to work in Auckland selling garages and doing construction deals, still using his false identity.

And so it could have continueduntil this day – had Gordon not fallen in love. He courted Kristine Newsome, a social worker, telling her nothing of his real identity. He determined to marry her. One day, when he was walking with Kristine down a trail on Mt Manganui, another rambler walked past them – and then doubled back. It was Gordon’s older brother Michael, who thought him long dead. “Is that really you?” he said. Gordon said yes, but walked on, after telling Michael he’d call him back in a few days. He told Kristine that the man was an old friend.

Back in Sydney, Sheila confessed to Michael when he confronted her. And, says Gordon, having heard of his impending nuptials she decided to go to the police.

Meanwhile, using his fake identity, Gordon married Kristine in September 2005. The couple headed straight for Rarotonga in the Cook Islands for their honeymoon. On their return, his passport was not accepted. “I couldn’t get back on the plane. My new bride was distressed, and I sent her home alone. I know now the insurance company had sent a private investigator.” Eventually, via Fiji, he returned to New Zealand and confessed (albeit only “some of the facts”) to Kristine, before heading for Sydney to face the music.

The police arrested him at Kingsford Smith airport: Gordon was back. He was sentenced to 15 months for insurance fraud and false representation. Sheila was sentenced to eight months’ home detention for deception and fraud for helping her husband.

Gordon has been out for a year now. He wrote a book inside (The Harry Gordon Story: How I Faked My Own Death, published by New Holland) and has an agent. There is talk of a movie. He’s back in the coast north of Sydney, living with Kristine (who put him on a year’s “probation” when she finally learnt the truth) and doing deals again. His friends, he says, have been staunch in their support. He seems a happy man.

Now he’s back out on the other side, what would Gordon’s advice be for any other “boring, balding, middle-aged man” playing with the idea of fleeing the coop? “Leave a note – that’s the key. Say, ‘I’m going off to start a different life’. There’s nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with profoundly changing the direction of your life. The problem is deceit. That’s the only issue.

“At no stage have I said I had amnesia or I was unwell or suffering depression. I am one of the few people who has come back and just admitted, ‘I’ve been a goose’. I said I’ve made this mistake, but look at the body of my life, what has happened here doesn’t define me. Sometimes we just make mistakes.”

Gordon doesn’t sound to me like a man who dwells much on mistakes.

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