By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JOHN F. BURNS
BEIJING — At St. Mary’s Church in London’s Thames-side Battersea district, mourners who gathered for Neil Heywood’s memorial service a few days before Christmas were perplexed by the instructions laid down beforehand by one of Mr. Heywood’s classmates from Britain’s elite Harrow boarding school. He asked them not to approach Lulu Heywood, Mr. Heywood’s Chinese wife, and to remain in the pews until she and their two children had left the church.
The classmate’s eulogy made no mention of why a 41-year-old man in apparently good health had suddenly died. Nor could anyone ask the family.
“It was all very odd,” said one of those at the service, who, like many people connected with Mr. Heywood, asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivities surrounding the case. “There were a lot of questions, and a lot of tears. We’d all been to plenty of funerals, and none of us had ever been through anything quite like it.”
That now seems an understatement. Since Tuesday, when China’s Communist Party said that Gu Kailai, the wife of a suspended Politburo member, was under investigation for the “intentional homicide” of Mr. Heywood, all assumptions about his life in China are in doubt. The official account, still sketchy, says only that Ms. Gu and a household employee are suspected of murdering Mr. Heywood after he and Ms. Gu fell out over business dealings that have yet to be explained.
Mr. Heywood’s ties to Bo Xilai, the ousted Politburo member, and his wife and son — a relationship that set him apart from the scores of other foreigners seeking their fortunes in China — may have cost him his life and set off China’s biggest political scandal in a generation. But precisely why, or how, is no more clear than it was to the mourners who gathered last December.
After the police found Mr. Heywood’s body at a hotel in the southwestern city of Chongqing, officials told the British Consulate that he had died of alcohol poisoning. His family, who had been led to believe that he had died from a heart attack, says he was a teetotaler.
A maverick since his school days in England, Mr. Heywood appears to have met the Bo family in the northeastern city of Dalian, where he moved from Britain in the early 1990s and by some accounts taught English. He told one British journalist, Tom Reed, that he sent out a flurry of introductory letters to Chinese officials seeking a connection to the elite, and that Mr. Bo, then Dalian’s mayor, responded.
Mr. Bo and Ms. Gu, a charismatic and ambitious couple with a pedigree of influence from Mr. Bo’s ties to Mao Zedong, appear to have been looking for the same thing that many wealthy Chinese families are seeking — a path to a Western education for their child. Ms. Gu said in 2009 that she and Mr. Bo had picked the Harrow School for their son, but he initially failed to gain admittance. Mr. Heywood, a Harrow graduate, later told friends that he served as a “mentor” to the young man, Bo Guagua. Some who knew Mr. Heywood said he helped arrange Bo Guagua’s schooling in Britain.
Mr. Reed said that Mr. Heywood seemed genuinely fond of the young man and that the relationship appeared to be personal, not mercenary. But in disclosing that Ms. Gu is now the target of a homicide investigation, the Chinese government noted that both she and her son had some type of business relationship with Mr. Heywood and that a conflict had intensified before his death.
Speculation abounds about the nature of those business ties, with some suggesting that Mr. Heywood acted as a financial intermediary for the Bo family’s interests, including helping provide a way for them to pay for the son’s expensive education in Britain.
Whatever those ties were, Mr. Heywood appears to have become estranged from the family sometime in 2010. Mr. Reed, who dined with Mr. Heywood days before his death, said Mr. Heywood told him he had not seen Bo Xilai for about a year, and had only occasional contact with Bo Guagua, who is now a graduate student at Harvard. He said someone in Bo Xilai’s inner circle had become suspicious of Mr. Heywood’s influence with Mr. Bo, then party secretary of Chongqing, and had driven a wedge between them.
Mr. Heywood said the rift with such a powerful family had, at one point, caused him concern about his safety, even leading him to consider leaving China with his wife and children. But those worries seemed to have receded, Mr. Reed said, and Mr. Heywood appeared to have moved on to a life that no longer involved the Bo family.
In conversations about Mr. Heywood, friends depicted him as charming but elusive, and in some ways a contradictory character. He was, they said, outspoken in his pride in Britain, its imperial history, its monarchy and its culture, and he was contemptuous of socialism.
But he was a wanderer, too, and seemed drawn to the breezy, every-man-for-himself culture he found in the United States. After graduating from Harrow, he spent a year driving cross-country in a camper he named “the mule.”
Another year, a friend said, he worked in the crew aboard a yacht that crossed the Atlantic and ended up working for hourly wages at a small seaside business in Florida that made fishing nets. On his return to England, he reveled in stories of living rough in cheap hostels, keeping company with drug addicts and experiencing a side of life as far removed as possible from his cosseted days at Harrow.
If there is another clue to the intrigue that has enveloped Mr. Heywood in death, it might lie in what friends describe as his tendency to a Walter Mitty-like embrace of a fantasy life.
“The truth was, and he knew it, he was always going to be more Hugh Grant than Clint Eastwood,” the friend said.
It is not clear how long Mr. Heywood lived in Dalian, where he met his wife or when he moved on to Beijing, where he joined the horde of expatriate business consultants working to ride the Chinese economic wave by using their local contacts to smooth the way for foreign businesses. He taught his two children, George and Olivia, to sail on the Bohai Gulf off China’s northern coast and seemed devoted to his wife.
He earned enough to live at Le Leman Lake, one of the capital’s suburban gated communities, and to educate his children at the Chinese campus of Britain’s Dulwich College. The private intelligence firm Hakluyt, founded by former officials with MI6, the British secret intelligence service, said Mr. Heywood had occasionally worked as one of its associates, helping prepare due-diligence reports on Chinese companies for investors. That association, even if it had ended months before his death, inspired speculation that he was a spy, although an official with the Foreign Office in London effectively denied that.
He held a number of other jobs as well. He worked as an adviser to the Aston Martin car company in Beijing, and for several years he ran Heywood Boddington Associates, a consultancy for British businesses in China.
Some who met Mr. Heywood in China said they considered him as a dilettante who hid behind a screen of pretenses, and he was known for turning up in a rumpled suit of beige linen.
“He liked to give the air of having a secret hinterland, to give the impression that he might be an intelligence officer, that what he was up to was all hush-hush,” said one China analyst who met him several times. “But I came to the conclusion that the only thing that really sustained him was his connections to the Bos.”
Acquaintances said he was always careful not to disclose how precisely he was tied to the Bo family. And no one has explained why, after a yearlong estrangement from the Bos, he turned up last November in Chongqing, the provincial level metropolitan region where Bo Xilai presided as party chief.
At that time, Mr. Bo, who was angling for a seat on the nine-member Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s highest-ranking body, had been under investigation by China’s Commission for Discipline Inspection. His handpicked police chief, Wang Lijun, who sowed fear in the city with an unshackled crackdown on organized crime that won Mr. Bo national attention, was also under scrutiny.
According to one account, Mr. Wang was summoned to Beijing to give evidence against Mr. Bo that was then leaked or disclosed to Mr. Bo. That may have been what set off a high-stakes vendetta between the two men and Mr. Wang’s decision to seek refuge in an American consulate about 200 miles from Chongqing in early February, bearing information on the investigation into Mr. Heywood’s death — and the sensational accusations that Ms. Gu had plotted to poison him.
In the months since Mr. Heywood’s death, some of his friends have turned to Facebook, and one possibility they have raised, mostly to dismiss it, is that he was an agent for Britain’s secret intelligence service.
“That would have worked for him, in a strange way, the idea that he lived a life of intrigue,” one friend said. “I think most of us who knew Neil felt that the truth was probably much more mundane, and that whatever happened to him will turn out in the end to be the result of some kind of romantic venture, something that took him into a realm that others hadn’t been, that ended up getting out of hand.”
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