A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Luther Tucker’s reply, clearly that of a friend but nonetheless filled with the polite alarm of somebody seeking to dodge a street chugger, asked if no other course could be taken but to buy back the children. ‘Only more court action,’ Lucan replied. ‘All the alternatives would involve legal struggles with a hostile and obstructive Lady Lucan.’ His loan application, as was becoming the norm, was turned down. The fact that he could couch his letter to the Reverend Tucker in such apparently rational and controlled terms, while asking for something so fantastic, says more than if he had openly begged. It implies a disconnection from reality: never something that Lucan had much liked.

  ‘I saw him from time to time,’ says Jane.

  He would always come and see us over here [in New York], and we stayed with him in Elizabeth Street as a family. I think we did some outings with Veronica and the children, in order that the cousins would see each other. I was aware at that time that John was taping the phone calls, and he was also quite edgy. He was just so obsessed by the whole – obviously – because it was wrecking his life.

  And he couldn’t see how he was going to manage. That was another cause for his tremendous anxiety. Certainly the children were the root of it. But then the practical part of living, and needing cash…

  With Jane, a family member, the façade was altogether dropped. That was not possible at the Clermont, where panic fossilized into a slow, slurred rigidity. ‘He was bombed,’ says the man who then worked at the club. ‘From eleven in the morning until four at night. Now you tell me if he was in his right mind.’ But with his friend from Eton a different kind of behaviour took over: not so much a dropping of the mask, more an outbreath of relaxation, a simple reversion to an earlier, happy self, as one can do with old friends, no matter what else is going on.

  The last time I saw him, I would think, was four or five months before the event. We had dinner together, it was in Hill Street, some gambling club [the Ladbroke] where the food was very good and didn’t cost anything. For obvious reasons. I didn’t think he’d changed at all. I really enjoyed that particular evening, at the time, and in retrospect. He was always the same, poking fun at himself, and people like me! Yes. It’s very, very sad.

  Anyway we had dinner, and I do remember one thing. Him talking about the custody of the children, all this complete shambles of the doctor [Flood]… we went through all that. And then he said, the problem about Veronica is that she is part perfectly wonderful person, but part evil. I remember him saying evil. And he said: from her interests, and from the children’s interests, she’s better off the hill. It’s what you say about a stag, you know, when they’re killed you take them off the hill. He did say that.

  But he didn’t say it in any way like he was going to do anything about it.

  One wonders what, if anything, Lord Lucan thought about his life, in the weeks leading up to the night of 7 November 1974. A once-unimaginable life can become all that there is, quite easily. Sometimes it happens by such stealthy degrees that a person can never tell how golden youth has dulled into hopelessness. In Lucan’s case it happened more dramatically, and it need not have happened. By his own semi-volition he brought himself to a position where, at nearly forty, he was without a family, a family home, any money that he could lay his hands on, any reasonable future. He might have escaped the consequences of his choices, which were scarcely choices at all, but instead they gathered together like furies to overrun the life he should have had. His nature led him to inhabit his aristocratic heritage in a way that was beautiful, in his eyes, but illusory; it brought great pleasure, but it was a mirage, like the lucent glory of the Clermont club. Now it was 1974, and reality lay inside every unopened bill. Lucan himself, as a gambler, might have said that it was fate that had brought him to this endgame. Still, as Charles Ryder said of Lord Sebastian Flyte, who lived out his days in a Moroccan monastery as the shambolic local lush: ‘It’s not what one would have foretold.’

  ‘I think about it quite a lot, and I just think, well, hell of a waste,’ says Lucan’s schoolfriend. ‘But he was a survivor, we thought, you know?’

  On 26 August 1974, Sandra Rivett took up her position as nanny at 46 Lower Belgrave Street. She was a good-natured and kindly woman, and in the short time that she spent with them the Lucan children formed an affectionate relationship with her. She brought a cat, Tara, to join the one belonging to Frances. She also brought a kind of normality, a warm presence that filled up the formal, almost museum-like rooms of the house.

  Lucan approved of Sandra (‘she was a good kid,’ he told Susan Maxwell-Scott), and expressed his pleasure with her to the Official Solicitor. But according to the police he was inwardly distraught at her arrival. Through what Ranson called his ‘intelligence network’, he learned that Sandra and Veronica were friends. ‘She was very sweet,’ says Christina Shand Kydd. ‘The children were definitely very fond of her. Veronica liked her.’ Veronica was certainly happier and this, wrote Ranson, ‘marked a turning-point in Lucan’s attitude’. Here was a nanny who would stick, who could not be used as a connivance against his wife. If the police reasoning is correct, Sandra was Lucan’s nemesis as well as his victim, as she had unwittingly destroyed his dream of overturning the custody judgment.

  The police contention, therefore, was that in September 1974 Lucan gave up on this hope, and made other plans as to how he might reclaim his children. His demeanour reverted to its old dry good humour. He was feeling fine because he was plotting domestic murder.

  In fact, throughout the last few weeks of his known life Lucan seemed in some ways unchanged, and in others quite different; as though the façade had half-detached itself and was swinging back and forth on its hinges. He continued to see his friends, including Miss Colquhoun, and to visit the Clermont. On 29 October John Wilbraham, who had acted as best man at his wedding, stayed at Elizabeth Street and found Lucan in cheerful mood. On Sunday 3 November he had dinner with his mother, then studying for her Russian ‘A’ Level, and asked her to lend him a book called The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. Before this he had spent his access weekend at the home of his sister Sally. Earlier that year, in July, they had taken their children for a happy family holiday in Estoril.

  ‘During the last weekend we spent with Daddy,’ Frances would later say in her statement to the police, ‘Camilla told Daddy that Sandra had boyfriends and went out with them. Daddy asked when Sandra went out with her boyfriends, and Camilla said Sandra went out with her boyfriends on her day off. Then Daddy asked me when Sandra had her days off. I said her day off was Thursday.’

  Lucan returned the children to Veronica for the last time.

  This calm, collected behaviour all concurs with the police theory. Yet other things do not. Instead they suggest a continuation of the agitation described by Lucan’s sister Jane. On 24 October, for instance, Lucan had a meeting with James Comyn to discuss the weary subject of revisiting the courts. Earlier that month he had gone to Paris and asked James Goldsmith for a £10,000 loan with which to ‘buy back’ the children. ‘He told Jimmy’, wrote Annabel Goldsmith, ‘that Veronica was using the children to “torture” him.’32 It is hard to see how this sum could be deemed adequate, except as some sort of down payment; anyway Goldsmith, who disliked lending money, turned him down. Instead he offered a sum as a gift, which was refused, although Lucan did accept a guarantee of £5,000 for an overdraft at the Midland.

  In September, another friend agreed to guarantee a more dangerous loan: £3,000 for six months from Charles Genese, moneylender to the upper classes, who charged interest at 48 per cent. Genese was a familiar figure to types like Lucan: ‘They’d stop him on the street,’ says the former police officer, ‘ask him for a loan when they wanted a night’s gambling money.’ In fact Lucan went to Genese’s offices, where he asked to borrow £5,000, which was deemed too large a loan. According to Genese’s evidence at the inquest:

  [He] was reasonably open in that he told us that maintenance, school fees, bank over
drafts, rates and household expenses were on a par if not more than his income. He was living at what I knew to be a rather high standard. He told us that he had put some silver up for sale by auction and from the proceeds later in the year would be able to pay off what he had borrowed.

  Lucan paid Genese £120, the first instalment on the interest, two days in advance of its due date.

  On 13 September, Lucan visited the Trustees Office at Coutts bank and asked for capital to be released for the payment of school fees (although his son’s education was covered by a trust). This required approval from the Official Solicitor. Lucan took fright, fearing that the request might damage any chance of reversing the custody decision. He then arranged with Christie’s that the collection of family silver should be sold on 27 November. On or around 23 October, he had dinner with Michael Stoop at the Portland bridge club and asked if he might borrow a car. Stoop later told the inquest:

  I had a Mercedes, and I suggested that he might borrow that. I thought he’d prefer the Mercedes. My Ford is a pretty dirty old banger. But I imagined through natural good manners he didn’t want to deprive me of my better car. He wanted the Ford specifically for that evening. I didn’t ask any reason and he didn’t offer any. I was going home to change for dinner. I left the keys to the Ford in the car and said that he could collect it when he wished.

  Lucan’s own Mercedes, for which he was paying £85 a week, was found outside his flat with a cold engine on the night of the murder. In January 1975 it became the trigger for the declaration of Lucan’s bankruptcy, when a hire purchase company and repair firm claimed a total of £1,552, stating that ‘with intent to defeat or delay his creditors he departed out of England on or about 8th Nov 1974’. At the time that the Ford Corsair was loaned, the most likely reason seemed to be that Lucan wanted to carry out his surveillance of 46 Lower Belgrave Street in an unknown, nondescript, seven-year-old car. Stoop’s evidence suggested that Lucan needed the Corsair for one particular evening, so it is possible that his Mercedes was temporarily faulty; although he did not return Stoop’s car thereafter. Then there is the explanation put forward by the police, that the Corsair was to be used to transport Veronica’s body.

  In October at the Clermont, Lucan lost £10,000 in one night at dice. This was the gambling of somebody positively hastening towards the end. Lucan arranged to pay back the debt in instalments of £200 a month: thus the list of financial commitments stretched out a little further.

  He did not stop visiting the club, but his credit was threatened. The nonchalant earl who had once commanded the Clermont, bestowing his presence as one who could get away with murder in there, was now a supplicant. Aspinall might have helped him out, but Aspinall was gone, and without his ambivalent protection the veil of illusion was removed. Lucan was just a mug gambler. He was a better-dressed version of the shambolic North Londoners who shovelled their lot on the last race at Harringay dogs. He was Lord Hastings, told by the bookmakers: ‘Now mind, I’m to be paid this.’ Like Hastings, he had begun to stagger under the repeated blows of his losses. The formerly ice-cool gambler was said to sweat when he played. Charles Benson later recalled an evening, about a week before the murder, when he himself was playing in a backgammon tournament. Lucan ‘started slumping over our board and making silly comments and actually touching some of the pieces, which is absolutely not done’. Almost anybody else, said Benson, ‘would have been slung out. It was undignified and very sad…’

  In those surroundings, it was a transgression akin to chucking a glass of wine in somebody’s face. What had caused it was the fact that Lucan had chucked the wine, and rather more than one glass of it, down his own throat: his intake was steady and remorseless. It was now illegal to drink at the tables, but in every other way Lucan needed booze to keep going. ‘He was drinking more heavily,’ says Christina Shand Kydd. ‘He was so worried about the children. Well, everybody was.’ Drinking in that way has an odd effect: although occasionally it slops over, as in the incident described by Benson, the body becomes so accustomed that much of the time the effects are contained. One appears as normal. Stuart Wheeler recalls that ‘two days before he disappeared I was playing backgammon and Lucan was sitting behind me, and occasionally in an amused way giving me a bit of advice. And I had not the slightest inkling of what was to come.’

  Unable now to depend upon credit at the Clermont, Lucan spent the last week or so gambling at the Ladbroke Club, whose proprietor Cyril Stein was engaged in a steely rivalry with Victor Lownes. Let it all go, seemed to be the fatalistic idea. When the details of bankruptcy were disclosed, ‘Ladup’, or the Ladbroke Club, was found to be Lucan’s chief single creditor: five dishonoured cheques totalled a debt of £11,800.

  He also owed £3,000 to Charles Genese; £3,608 to Coutts; £1,124 to the Midland; £5,091 to Lloyd’s; £5,400 to the National Westminster, a debt that was cancelled by the cashing of Lucan’s life insurance policy; £1,890 to the Inland Revenue; £1,037 to his landlords at Elizabeth Street, who repossessed the flat in December 1974; £2,257 to utilities companies; £227 to military tailors Cooling, Lawrence and Wells for the storage of his coronet and ermine robes, a claim that was withdrawn; and £183 for a flight to Munich, presumably to visit the Reverend Luther. There was also £66.57 to Harrods for cigars and wine; £163 to Boss and Co. for repairs to two guns; £9 to Cartier for a crocodile watch strap: these last show that Lucan was still, malgré tout, seeking nothing but the best. In for a penny, and all that. There was also a collection of private loans, amounting to £13,000.

  Together with the money owed to the Clermont, and the residue of what was still to be paid on the custody case, the entire debt was some £65,000. Much of it had been run up in the last two months before the murder. Lucan’s position, in a way, was that of anybody who has ever descended into a vortex of debt. In other ways the situation was different. It was essentially self-inflicted. And Lucan was worth twice what he owed, although the costs of settling the bankruptcy eventually pushed the debt to around £90,000. A sum of £118,000 was finally taken from the estate. Furniture and jewels remained: ‘I don’t want to unnecessarily remove anything from Lower Belgrave Street immediately,’ said Dennis Gilson, the accountant who was appointed trustee in bankruptcy in August 1975. ‘I just want to discover what I can take to sell.’ Veronica was told that she could pick what she wanted to keep, ‘the wife’s share’, and the rest would be sold. This included personal items such as Lucan’s coronet and robes; his Cartier watch inscribed ‘Lucky, God bless him’; gold cufflinks engraved with the letter ‘B’, for Bingham; and gambling chips embossed with a coronet.

  Most of Lucan’s assets, it is true, were not disposable. The Lower Belgrave Street house had been deemed Veronica’s place of family residence. Anyway the house was owned in trust. So too was the Eaton Row mews. There was, however, some money in overseas bank accounts in Switzerland and Bulawayo, and gold items found stored at Lloyd’s. ‘He’d get a couple of grand, and squirrel it away,’ as Bill Shand Kydd puts it. His sister Jane recalls a particular visit to America:

  He came over here then went to Las Vegas, and made a lot of money and shipped it home. Which seemed to be a sensible move. Whether he had any savings, or thought about the future – I don’t know. I would imagine less so than most normal people, who set aside something for a rainy day. If you’re a gambler by nature, you almost don’t have that in you.

  That, too, is perfectly true. Nevertheless some thousands had been set aside, although the larger part of this, an estimated £14,000 in the Bulawayo account, was frozen owing to the sanctions then in place against Rhodesia. The money in Switzerland was considerably less, thought to be no more than £4,000. There was also said to be an account in the Bahamas, although this is unconfirmed. ‘His affairs were in a dreadful jumble,’ said Gilson. When the Lucan estate was finally proved, after the High Court declaration of death in 1999, it totalled just £14,709: left to his wife.

  In the autumn of 1974, however, there was the imminent
sale of the silver, expected to realize some £35,000. Lucan had been proferring that sale, left, right and centre, to all his banks and creditors, rather as a poor soul pawns and redeems the same piece of family gold; but, again, the situation was not the same. Lucan had the safety net of the privileged. The gaping financial holes could have been repaired, the custody judgment calmly revisited, if he had changed his life into a sensible one. He was only thirty-nine. He might still have got straight, if he had found the will to do it; or found the humility to discuss his problems openly, rather than hedging and boozing, trying and failing not to be a bore. But he could not. Only the pasteboard life of an earl remained.

  On Wednesday 6 November, a dry, cool and sunny day, Lucan did something unexpected: he had a piano lesson. He had played Bach on the piano at Lower Belgrave Street, which stood in the basement breakfast room and the next day would be splashed with Sandra Rivett’s blood. Caroline Hill, who taught him, had also been giving lessons to Frances. Veronica had now decided that her daughter should no longer attend and Lucan, not wanting to lose the slot, had gone in her place. ‘My goodness,’ Caroline Hill later said, ‘how he loved those children! He talked about them constantly.’

  In the afternoon he went to the Heywood Hill bookshop in Curzon Street, as he did regularly. There he ordered two detective novels (significance has sometimes been read into this taste for crime fiction, which if true implies murderous tendencies in a very large number of people), and bought a book about Greek shipping millionaires.

  He visited his uncle, John Bevan, had a drink and seemed his usual self. Accounts differ, even between Roy Ranson and his deputy David Gerring, as to where Lucan spent the rest of the evening. Ranson says that Lucan dined at the Ladbroke Club. Gerring, whose version is the more likely one, says that he attended a large supper party at Selim Zilkha’s house in Portland Place, where the 4th Earl of Lucan had had his London home. John Aspinall and Charles Benson were also present. At the party Lucan offered to deliver a parcel for one of the other guests, saying that he would do so on Friday or Saturday of that week. Was this an attempt to establish that life, for him, would be going on as normal? Both accounts of the evening say that Lucan’s friends found him in good form.