A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  After dinner he went to the Clermont, then downstairs to Annabel’s, where he met Andrina Colquhoun and arranged to see her the following day. ‘He was in normal spirits,’ she later said. ‘His behaviour didn’t suggest he was unduly worried or depressed. Like everybody else he was a bit down – things like inflation, money, the government – but nothing unusual.’33 Earlier, in the House of Commons, the MP who would soon become Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, had moved an amendment to the debate on the Queen’s Speech, stating that it ‘in no way measures up to the peril facing the country’.

  The newspapers on 7 November were filled with speculation as to what would be in the next week’s Budget, the third in eight months. The following day would be very different: full of rushed reports of the bomb that was thrown, at 10.17pm, into a pub opposite the Woolwich Barracks, killing two people and injuring twenty-six. Although the Evening Standard would cover the Belgravia murder, it was not until Saturday that the national newspapers, for the first time, made Lucan their story.

  On the Thursday, a dull and drizzly day, Lucan rose before his usual time and rang his lawyers. He also rang Frances’s headmistress. Frances had previously told friends that Veronica did not bother to take her to school on Sandra’s day off; Lucan asked if Frances had come in that day, but the headmistress did not know. Later she rang him back to say that Frances was not in fact at school. The call went unanswered.34 ‘On that day I didn’t go to school,’ Frances would say in her police statement, ‘because the bus didn’t come for me, so Mummy said I need not go.’

  At 10.30am Lucan was telephoned by Andrina, who asked about their plans that night. He was a little vague, but suggested a possible meeting at the Clermont. He did not appear at the club for lunch. At about 3pm Andrina went there to look for him. She then rang the Elizabeth Street flat, where there was no reply. At 4.30, after her working day as a photographer, she drove past the flat, where there was no Mercedes outside. She then left for the country. That, effectively, was the end of her contact with Lucan.

  Before this, at around 4pm, as the London sky was beginning to shadow, Lucan had been in Lower Belgrave Street. He had in the past visited the chemist at the end of the road and asked the pharmacist about different pills, presumably those prescribed for his wife. On the 7th he took in a capsule that was identified as a Limbutral 5, an anti-depressant. Possibly he also passed his house, as was his habit. It would have presented its familiar, reserved face: standing among its aristocratic kind, tall and seemly, its façade impregnable. And Lucan was doing the familiar things: the daily promenades from Elizabeth Street to Lower Belgrave Street, from Belgravia to Mayfair; the close circling of the brick and stucco house where Veronica sat, near-motionless, in her stately lair.

  At about 4.45pm Lucan rang a friend, a literary agent named Michael Hicks-Beach, whom he invited to come to his flat that evening at 6.30. Lucan had written an article about gambling for a student magazine: again, unexpected. He wanted Hicks-Beach to look it over with a professional eye. The men had a couple of drinks together, chatted convivially about the piece, then Lucan drove his friend home to Oakley Gardens in Chelsea.

  Presumably Lucan had used the Mercedes to go to Lower Belgrave Street that afternoon, else it would have been seen by Andrina. According to Hicks-Beach, however, Lucan gave him a lift in a different car: in other words, the Ford Corsair. He had also changed his clothes. The chemist described him wearing a blue suit. When he saw Hicks-Beach, he was dressed in flannels and a sweater.

  Lucan dropped his friend home at about 8pm, just as Hicks-Beach’s wife was watching the end of Top of the Pops. At Lower Belgrave Street, Lucan’s daughter Frances had seen the same programme on the television in the third-floor nursery. After her bath she had spent part of the evening there, playing a game on her own.

  Earlier, at about 5.15, the time when his children were having tea with Sandra Rivett and their mother, Greville Howard had rung Lucan and invited him to the theatre that night. Howard was living in the Eaton Row mews, having split amicably from Zoe two years earlier. Lucan replied: ‘That’s very kind of you, but I don’t think I will.’ Instead he invited Howard and his party of three for dinner at the Clermont at 11pm, after the show. Lucan rang and made the booking. The Clermont recorded Lucan’s request as a table for four people, yet the party was for five. An unintentional betrayal of the fact that his evening held other plans? When Howard and his friends arrived at the club, they asked for a fifth chair, which remained empty.

  While Frances watched Top of the Pops in the nursery, on the second floor below Veronica was also watching television: The Six Million Dollar Man, then Mastermind. With her on the marital bed were her two younger children, George and Camilla, and their nanny Sandra Rivett, who had changed her night off. That evening Sandra had received a phone call from her boyfriend, and had spoken to her mother. A woollen blanket was spread on the bed. Veronica was propped up with three pillows, her cigarettes to hand. The women had the air of being curled up for the night, although they were dressed in their day clothes.

  According to Billy Edgson, the linkman at the Clermont, Lucan appeared outside the club that night at about 8.45pm; he was driving the Mercedes and pulled up by the door. He asked if ‘anyone was in’. The regular gamblers would almost certainly have been gathering, but Lucan drove away again.

  At Lower Belgrave Street, Frances had joined the others in her mother’s bedroom at around 8.05, then returned to the nursery at 8.30 after the ending of The Six Million Dollar Man. A few minutes later Sandra put the two younger children to bed. Frances, who had returned briefly to her game, heard her do so.

  What happened next is unclear. The one certain thing is that at some point before 9pm, Sandra went downstairs, to where a man was waiting.

  PART III

  The Investigation

  ‘Was it possible, even remotely possible, that the man’s statement was true? Was this that thousandth case where circumstantial evidence, complete in every particular, was merely a series of accidents, completely unrelated and lying colossally in consequence? But then, the thinness of the man’s story – that fundamental improbability!’

  JOSEPHINE TEY, The Man in the Queue, 1929

  Murder

  ‘Blunt head injuries inflicted by a named person. Murder.’

  FROM THE DEATH CERTIFICATE OF SANDRA ELEANOR RIVETT, REGISTERED IN JUNE 1975 BY THE CITY OF WESTMINSTER REGISTRAR

  Possibly the greatest pleasure of reading detective fiction is the illusion it gives that there is such a thing as omniscience. Hercule Poirot, who applies order and method and finds that no problem can resist them; Lord Peter Wimsey, with his ‘now we know how, we know who’; Sherlock Holmes, who realizes that the absence of incident, the dog that does not bark, is as important a clue as its presence. Not for them the ambiguity, the obfuscation, the lies that cannot be penetrated. Nothing remains unknown. Truth has its own natural force, and must come to light if a brain is able to perceive it.

  The surest means to find the truth is identified by Miss Marple. ‘So you see that if you disregard the smoke and come to the fire you know where you are. You just come down to the actual facts of what happened.’

  Although in detective fiction this is always possible, Miss Marple’s creator, Agatha Christie, knew perfectly well that it was not so easy, in real life, to perceive what really happened. Smoke thickens around facts until it is impossible to see them glinting in the darkness. Christie was almost tormented by fascination with the cases of two unsolved domestic murders: the death of Charles Bravo in 1876 from antimony, and the Croydon poisonings of 1929–30, in which three members of the same family were killed with arsenic. Christie wrote of the Croydon case ‘that if I die and go to heaven, or the other place, and it so happens that the Public Prosecutor of that time is also there, I shall beg him to reveal the secret to me’.1 She herself tried very hard, but could not quite trace the thread of truth. How she must have longed to inhabit the idealized minds of her two detec
tives, and enable that cerebral deus ex machina!

  Not long before her death she had made the sudden, questing remark: ‘I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan?’ Had she lived longer, her interest would doubtless have deepened. Like the Bravo and Croydon cases, this was her sort of crime. It was about the mystery behind the façade. It was about motive, character, concealment: the human dynamic, writ large by murder.

  It was also a case whose simplicity was deceptive. Classic domestic killing gone wrong? It certainly looked that way, but if Agatha Christie had written the story she would have argued that what seemed to have happened on 7–8 November could not have happened. Too many facts did not fit the official solution. Too much remained extraneous. If a fact does not fit a theory, then it is the theory that must be discarded, not the fact. Otherwise the solution is unsatisfactory. ‘Each of these unrelated facts must fit into its appointed place,’ says Hercule Poirot. ‘There must be no loose ends.’ That is the tenet of fictional detectives, and it takes them to truth.

  Again, of course, real life is different. Perhaps the unexplained is merely part of the story. The Lucan myth, certainly, is happy to bear the weight of inconsistencies within it.

  Yet the myth is not the truth. The truth of the Lucan case lies somewhere within a knot of contradictions, a list of unanswered questions. Just as there is an opposing version of so much that happened in the Lucan marriage, so there is of almost every event that took place on the night of 7–8 November. The story of the murder was also the story of the marriage; more so than in any other case of domestic killing. And because, despite the certainty of the myth, uncertainty still abounds, so too do alternative theories: the meta-fictions imposed upon what is unknown, but nevertheless was what really happened.

  To the police, what happened is known, and no smoke lingers to occlude it. The murder of Sandra Rivett and the attack on Veronica Lucan were deemed to be solved within an hour or so of their occurrence. Two uniformed officers, Police Constable Beddick and Police Sergeant Baker, entered 46 Lower Belgrave Street just after ten o’clock on the night of 7 November, followed a little later by the first CID officer. From that moment the case was over; all that remained was to find Lord Lucan. Every complexity was trodden into oblivion by the simple force of the police belief in his guilt. What they found inside the house would convince them that evil had been present, and in Lucan’s guise.

  The two officers had been patrolling Belgravia in a police van when, at 10pm, they received a call reporting an incident in the Plumbers Arms pub. A woman, subsequently identified as the Countess of Lucan, had entered the bar some ten minutes earlier. She was wearing a pinafore dress and jumper, and according to a later police account was barefoot. She was, as the head barman told the inquest, ‘head to toe in blood’. There were eight people in the pub, a small, square, intimate place with three tiny bars. In those days of regulated hours it was approaching closing time; when the door opened, those inside would probably have thought that it was somebody trying to get in a couple of last drinks. Instead what stood before them was a tiny creature with a soaked and defiled appearance, her head full of clotting blood, her white forehead striped dark red. The barman, Arthur Whitehouse, said:

  I caught her before she fell on the floor. I laid her on a bench. She was quite all right for a few minutes and then a state of shock took over. I covered her over, she then started shouting ‘Help me, help me, I’ve just escaped from being murdered’, and shouting ‘My children, my children, he’s murdered my nanny’. But no name was mentioned.

  Mr Whitehouse rang for an ambulance, which did not come for some twenty minutes. He also rang the police. PC Stanley Chapman arrived at the pub and went with Veronica to St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, where she remained for six days. At the inquest, Dr Hugh Scott, the Chief Casualty Officer at the hospital, reported that she had been ‘very distressed’ on admission. She had protested when staff cut away her jumper, saying that it was her ‘very best’. The doctor found evidence of about seven lacerations to her head, for which sixty stitches were inserted into her face and scalp. There were also lacerations at the back of her throat, more painful than the other injuries, and probably caused ‘by fingers being thrust forcefully into the mouth’. Her neck had been wrenched, although there were no marks on it. In reply to two further questions at the inquest, Dr Scott confirmed that Veronica’s injuries would be difficult to explain as a fall; and that it was ‘possible, but very unlikely’ that they were self-inflicted.

  When Beddick and Baker received the call to go to Lower Belgrave Street, they found the front door closed. The house was dark. It looked just as it always did, like all the other houses on the street. From 10.05 it began to look different: the policemen kicked down the door. It had a chain and four locks, one of which had been engaged. The chain was put up at night, except on Sandra’s days off. Veronica had expressed the fear that her husband could enter the house at any time, so this was a natural precaution; but, as she told the inquest, on the 7th she had forgotten to do this.2 In the hall the light bulb was burned out. Later Veronica would say that she practised economy by not replacing bulbs, ‘to fend off any suggestion of household extravagance from my estranged husband’,3 although she also said that both she and Sandra were too short to replace them easily. Baker sent Beddick for a strong torch. He himself moved towards the basement. At the top of the stairs leading down to it was a piece of lead piping.

  Detective-Sergeant Graham Forsyth was the first CID officer to arrive, at 10.20. ‘I was going a bit potty,’ he says, ‘because there was no bloody light. But I knew that skulduggery was afoot. There was blood all over the shop. When I saw the girl, I thought: oh Christ, they’ve beheaded her.’

  Sandra Rivett was doubled over, bundled with her head and feet outermost into a mailsack. She lay at the bottom of the basement stairs, in the open space between the kitchen at the front of the house and the breakfast room beyond. There was a great pool of her B group blood in the area behind the body, and another at the bottom of the stairs, where lay some crockery. Her blood had also splashed across the breakfast room to the left of the stairs: onto a rosebowl, the children’s encyclopaedia that lay on the piano, the pictures and portraits. To the right there was more B group blood, against the stair wall and trickling down to the skirting board. This ‘directional splashing’, as it was described at the inquest, was said to have come from a wound that was already bleeding. The ceiling was sprayed, again from repeated strikes. DS Forsyth told the inquest that he had seen ‘what appeared to be footmarks in the blood, which led to a room containing a centrally-heated boiler [behind the staircase]’. There was also blood from a fabric impression halfway up the staircase, thought to have been smeared on the wall by the assailant.

  The divisional surgeon for the Metropolitan Police, Dr Michael Smith, arrived at 10.45pm. He would later tell the inquest: ‘On the floor I saw a large canvas bag, which appeared to contain a human body. I also noticed bloodstains on the floor. I didn’t disturb the bag in any way. I was satisfied that the body was dead, and that the death was not due to natural causes.’

  Sandra was wearing a flowered smock over her dress. Her black shoes, described as ‘sensible working shoes’ by Roy Ranson, although in fact patent courts with a neat heel, were placed beside her. The mailsack, of American origin, was pulled loosely together by a cord with the top folded over. Sandra’s left arm, on which she wore a little gold watch that was later given to her son, had fallen out.

  Her injuries were terrible: ‘a fearful amount of violence’, as was said at the inquest into the death of Marie Riel, found in the basement of her nearby Park Lane home one hundred years earlier. The pathologist Keith Simpson, who performed the autopsy on Sandra Rivett, described ‘six splits from heavy blunt injury to the scalp’. There were also ‘three areas of heavy bruising’. The first of these was the face, and Simpson detailed the injuries thus: ‘One lay over the right eye, one and a half inches; the second lay on the right corner of the
mouth, three-quarters of an inch, close to the end of the upper lip; and the third lay over the eyebrow.’ The second area of bruising was ‘on the top of both shoulders, without splitting the skin’. The third area was on the front of the right upper arm: ‘a series of four in-line bruises, as if fingers had been gripping the arm heavily’. There was also some superficial bruising on the back of the right hand, ‘likely to result if the hand were placed between the blunt instrument and the body. These were protective injuries.’ Lastly were some minor injuries to the face, the ‘left eye and mouth’. These were not caused by a weapon, but by a fist or hand slap.

  The heavier injuries were described as:

  Four splits in the scalp on the right side of the head, above the right ear. Two lay in front of the other two, towards the right eyebrow in the hair margin. In no case did I find the scalp fractured beneath these splits. On the back of the head there lay the fifth and sixth splits in the scalp. These lay above the nape of the neck, two and a half inches apart.

  Simpson’s report continued:

  There was a great deal of blood, mainly from the nose and mouth into the air passages and the skull. This was not fractured, but there was a good deal of surface bruising to the brain, and these injuries must have caused the unconsciousness. It was these injuries, together with the bruising of the brain, that had caused death.