Matthew Heawood

### Series

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Haunter of The Dark

### Last Appearance

THotD: "Episode 10"

**Matthew Heawood** is an entrepreneur, podcaster, and former freelance columnist. He is the founder and owner of Red Hook Stories and he produces and co-hosts the Mystery Machine podcast, which ran the stories of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Whisperer in Darkness, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Heawood’s current whereabouts are unknown as he disappeared in 2020 along with the whole of the village of Pleasant Green as a result of a failed occult ritual performed by Obed and Daisy Marsh. Heawood’s colleague and friend, Kennedy Fisher, has been searching for him ever since.

## Background

Heawood attended university and established a number of connections with people he would later call on when working on the Mystery Machine podcast.

Heawood’s background is in print journalism as a freelance columnist. It was through success here that he was able to pull together sufficient investment to start his own podcasting company, Red Hook Stories.

## The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

By the time Heawood and Fisher had started investigating the disappearance of Charles Dexter Ward, they had established a model of collaboration having done at least one season earlier focusing on a series of murders in 1890s Nottingham. While Fisher took on the role of an investigative reporter doing a lot of the fieldwork, Heawood took on the responsibilities of narration, editing and post-production for the podcast. However, this left responsibility for making content for the podcast a little too much on Fisher’s shoulders. Therefore, early on in the Charles Dexter Ward series, Heawood focused more of his time as a researcher of the archives and, by the nature of the case, the main investigator for the British side of their investigation. In this capacity, Heawood was responsible for conducting interviews with Dr. Eleanor Peck, Amelia Fenner and Dr. Jonathan Willett.

During the course of his investigations, Heawood was assaulted by men associated with Sir Godfrey Tillinghast as a warning for him to stop the podcast and cease investigations into the Tillinghast family. This left him in hospital for a few days but, despite his injuries, he kept to the production and release schedule for the podcast. Nonetheless, his beating made him far more cautious and he became less of a presence on the podcast during the middle of the season.

Unfortunately, Heawood’s caution proved well-founded when Fisher wound up in hospital herself and one of their sources, Dr. Mark Lyman, was brutally murdered on the phone while speaking with Heawood. Fisher then went missing twice, first having been kidnapped by Barbara Sayers and Dr. Allen in America, and then she was again taken by them with the assistance of Ezra Weeden in Iraq.

These incidents, along with the suspicious death of Sir Godfrey Tillinghast, left Heawood reflective on whether producing the Mystery Machine podcast was worth the obvious risk that he and Fisher had so far encountered. However, he was convinced to continue only by Fisher herself after she returned to Britain having apparently been recuperating in an Iraqi hospital from a hit-and-run accident.

## The Whisperer in Darkness

The Mystery Machine's next investigation took Heawood out of his comfort zone. During their search for a missing Henry Akeley, Heawood joined Fisher in the field as they both travelled to Suffolk. While Heawood was keen to stick to his voice-over approach, Fisher demanded that he record his audio live at the scene, at least while she was with him.

Heawood’s side of this investigation soon led him to make contact with clandestine government agents who were just as interested in Henry Akeley’s disappearance as he was. However, a warning from the Mystery Woman ultimately led Heawood to start investigating his own colleague, Kennedy Fisher, for two reasons. Firstly, Fisher had been the sole eye-witness to Tania Radcliffe’s suicide, and secondly his military contact, ‘Jasper’, had cast doubt on Fisher’s story about being in an Iraqi hospital. While not happy to be questioning the integrity of his friend, the circumstances forced Heawood to err on the side of caution.

Heawood’s investigation led to making the connection between Fisher’s ancestors and the Tillinghast family. However, as soon as Fisher called for help after having been kidnapped by Akeley and his associates, Heawood immediately put aside his doubts and gathered Dean Perry, Fisher and Albert Wilmarth to help him find his friend. Their search led Perry and Heawood to experience time slip and Fisher was ultimately able to escape her captors by herself but Heawood came clean with her about his investigations into her and her family history. More than just forgiving him, Fisher picked up the investigation herself and this formed the basis for their next season.

## The Shadow over Innsmouth

During this season, Heawood travelled to Iraq to investigate Fisher’s lost time and memory of when she was there with Ezra Weeden. This took Heawood further away from his preferred setting of the podcasting studio. However, this might have been motivated by guilt around doubting his friend in the first place, as well as Fisher tending to take on the more dangerous aspects of their podcast investigations. Heawood was accompanied by ‘Jasper’ and even though confronted by Fisher’s apparent appearance in Mosul, he quickly rationalised that it couldn’t be her (it was, in fact, the strikingly similar Daisy Marsh).

While in Iraq, Heawood was rescued from a gathering of the Esoteric Order of Dagon by Melody Cartwright. Heawood was initially quite sceptical of Cartwright but helped her in discovering the location of her imprisonment at the hands of Dr. Allen, Daisy Marsh and Barbara Sayers. After hearing her story and seeing the conditions of her captivity, Heawood allowed Cartwright to join him in travelling to Paris and visiting the Levesque Institute. However, Cartwright went missing after they found Edward Landsdale’s journal and it became apparent that he had been duped by someone who wasn’t who she appeared to be.

Heawood managed to reunite with Fisher in London soon after this but their investigations led them to team up with Dr Eleanor Peck and Department agents Parker and Silence as they travelled to the village of Pleasant Green to prevent Obed Marsh from summoning Azathoth. It was here that Heawood was captured by his former ally, ‘Jasper’, who had accepted a €2m contract on Kennedy Fisher’s life at the behest of Obed Marsh.

Heawood managed to escape his captors but had to return to rescue a now-captured and soon-to-be-sacrificed Fisher. He managed to frustrate their effort when, in a physical altercation with Daisy Marsh, he threw and sacrificed her into the portal to the Dreamlands. This destabilised the portal and ended the ritual in a way similar to the failed Melusine and Roanoke rituals before it. Unfortunately, Heawood was also lost during this event and disappeared along with the village of Pleasant Green, leaving Fisher and Peck with a new mystery: where was Matthew Heawood?

## Personality

Heawood has shown himself to be resilient. Like his colleague, Heawood has been subject to a number of traumatic events since starting his investigations into Nyarlathotep in his various guises: enduring physical assault that led to his hospitalisation, hiding from clandestine agents again seeking to prevent his publicisation of esoteric matters and the machinations of secret societies, and having been a helpless earwitness to the murder of Mark Lyman and his secretary. Despite all this, he’s rarely wavered from his objective of reporting whatever story he’s focused on.

Heawood has a deep loyalty to his friends. He placed absolute trust in ‘Jasper’ when he travelled out to Iraq, a country of tenuous political stability and one where he spoke none of the language. He started looking into Henry Akeley’s disappearance out of an obligation to Dr Eleanor Peck after she’s helped in the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. He’s also put himself in harm’s way on at least two occasions to protect Kennedy Fisher. However, this isn’t at the expense of his pragmatism when, on some occasions, he’s had to follow the evidence presented to him despite its apparent indictment of Fisher.

Heawood is also reflective and honest about his flaws, having admitted being less than an equal partner during the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Once reading between the lines of Fisher’s concerns about that investigation, he re-prioritised the story ahead of the administrative tasks that had been drawing so much of his attention.

## Skills

Heawood has proven himself adept at managing the varying obligations of being the co-founder and, presumably, manager of Red Hook Stories overall, as well as the increasing obligations of his role as co-host, editor and producer of The Mystery Machine podcast specifically.

## Relationships

Over the course of the Mystery Machine’s investigations into Nyarlathotep, Heawood has grown close to his colleague, Kennedy Fisher. While neither of them acknowledges any romantic attachment, Parker has described their chemistry on the podcast as a “‘will they, won’t they’ thing”. Parker is also the first person to have noticed a mutual attraction between Heawood and Eleanor Peck.

## Appearances

* *The Lovecraft Investigations*
	+ The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
		- All episodes except "Episode 6"
	+ The Whisperer in Darkness
		- All episodes except "Episode 9" and "Urgent Update from Kennedy Fisher"
	+ The Shadow over Innsmouth
		- All episodes except "The Somerton Man" and "Who is Mary Lairre?"
	+ The Haunter of The Dark
		- All episodes except "Episode 1"

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 TCoCDW: ”Episode 3”
2. ↑ WiAK: “The Black Windmill”
3. ↑ K. Fisher, voice memo, Paris 2022
4. ↑ TCoCDW: ”Episode 1”
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 TCoCDW: ”Episode 4”
6. ↑ TCoCDW: ”Episode 7”
7. ↑ TCoCDW: ”Episode 10”
8. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 1”
9. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 3”
10. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 4”
11. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 5”
12. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 8”
13. ↑ TSoI: "Footsteps"
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 TSoI: "Haumea"
15. ↑ TSoI: "Apartment 6"
16. ↑ TSoI: "Melusine"
17. ↑ TSoI: “Harlequin”
18. ↑ TSoI: “Rubaiyat”
19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 TSoI: “Pleasant Green”
20. ↑ TSoI: “Who is Mary Lairre?”