I was struck by what a strange view you could get of someone’s life from looking at their Facebook profile. I googled his name instead and got thousands of hits, starting with his company website, his LinkedIn profile, his other social media accounts and a range of stories in the media that mentioned him.

The first was a profile of him in the Evening Standard from late last year, not long after he’d moved to London. It was part of a series on young entrepreneurs in the capital, ‘40 under 40’, peopled by property developers and fashion designers, hedge fund traders, music producers and digital millionaires like Ben. His profile drew on Ben’s rags-to-riches story, which had taken him from his parents’ two-bedroom terrace in Sunderland to a seven-figure mansion in one of London’s most expensive neighbourhoods. The son of a dockyard worker from a tough working-class area, the only kid in his school year to make it to an elite Russell Group university, a first-class degree, first company at the age of twenty-two, first million by the age of twenty-five, three consecutive No. 1 games in the App Store by the age of twenty-nine as he rode the new wave of demand for smartphone gaming apps. The gushing profile even made a comparison with Steve Jobs, and concluded by asking Ben for the secret of his success in business.

Delaney admits he is an obsessive.

the article read.

I’ve always been able to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else – and I don’t stop until I get it. It’s what gives me an advantage. Most people get distracted. I don’t. Because no one remembers the guy who comes second.

Another story – a diary piece from the Daily Mail’s business pages – shed a somewhat less flattering light on Ben and his business dealings. It described an incident at an ‘exclusive Kensington restaurant’ a month ago where police had been called and arrested a man for assault and breach of the peace. The Mail story gleefully named the arrested man as Alex Kolnik, thirty, a former employee of Ben’s who had set up in competition with him and seen his company go bust in short order. Reading between the lines, it seemed Kolnik blamed Ben for the failure of his business and had gone to the restaurant for some payback.

Ben had mentioned it before, I remembered. Screw with the bull and you get the horns.

I clicked onto the third page of results. More guff about Ben’s company, his career and his rise to fortune. But there was something more interesting at the bottom of the page of results. A link to a four-year-old story in the Sunderland Echo, a court case involving a man named Steven Beecham who had been up for grievous bodily harm.

It didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the results. I clicked on it.

Beecham had been accused of breaking a local businessman’s kneecaps, ankles and elbows with an iron bar. Beecham was alleged to have been paid by a third man – Peter Haskell – to beat up the victim following a dispute over the sale of property in Sunderland city centre. The description of the injuries inflicted made for pretty grim reading, and I scrolled down the story further, wondering why this had appeared in a Google search for Ben Delaney. A picture of the defendant walking into Newcastle Crown Court showed a huge scowling man, the shoulders and arms of his grey suit stretched taut over the muscles beneath. His dark hair was shaved to a flat-top and there were swirls of sharp Celtic tattoos up the side of his neck.