A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Christina says:

  The police disliked posh people [again, Veronica herself was made an exception to this particular prejudice]. And they made that absolutely clear. They came to talk to us, they searched our house – they assumed we were all posh people who had closed ranks to protect a friend. But as Charlie Benson said, whether you’re posh, or whether you’re a teacher, or whether you’re a miner, you always protect your friends, it’s nothing to do with being posh. It’s friendship. And no one was lying for John. No one was saying he’s not in my house when he was in the attic.

  In fact the Shand Kydds and DS Forsyth got along amicably, away from the hospital. And Roy Ranson, says Christina, was ‘a perfectly polite, nice man. It was Gerring that was so ghastly. Chippy, vaguely sort of louche.’ David Gerring would later be dismissed for insubordination to his superiors. ‘He was a disgrace,’ says Bill Shand Kydd.

  Ranson later claimed to have become intensely frustrated by ‘the attitude of some of these people, trying to put one over on us, to take us on and beat us’. In the words of James Fox: ‘It was as if, day after day, Ranson and Gerring were chasing the guests at some nightmare charity ball.’13 Very soon this attitude was attacked not just by the press, but in Parliament: thus far had the notoriety spread of the Lucan circle. On 16 November, Charles Benson wrote to The Times, saying:

  I object to the suggestion by Marcus Lipton MP that some people are ‘being a bit snooty with the police’ over the search for Lord Lucan.

  As a still close personal friend of Lord Lucan, could I make my own position clear. As far as I know, all his friends have made themselves available to the police at all times. I personally rang the department concerned on the Friday morning following the murder, giving my name and address, and also offering other names, all of whom were in full agreement. I may add that we were not contacted for some days. Is this obstruction or non-cooperation by us?

  Benson might just as well not have bothered: the image of the circle was already immovably in place.

  It was later said that, when news of the murder was disseminated among Lucan’s friends, ‘a curious grouping process began to occur. People were dragged out of poker games and dinner parties, summoned from bars and clubs. Phones were taken off the hook; factotums were instructed to shoo the police away.’14 It all sounds very orchestrated, very MI5. In fact it was a good deal more chaotic and directionless. Certainly the news spread among Lucan’s friends like a fire catching dry straw; but then, it would. ‘I was working in a jewellery shop in Beauchamp Place,’ says the then girlfriend of one of the circle. ‘And I remember the buzzer went – and Dominick Elwes came in and said, “The most terrible thing has happened. Lucky Lucan’s nanny has been murdered, and he’s disappeared” – and you know, I’d never been part of a world like that before. Little did I know that it would turn into this huge thing.’

  The Shand Kydds were first given news of the murder by Kait Lucan, in the early hours of 8 November. A friend of Stephen Raphael’s saw the police breaking into the Eaton Row mews, and rang to tell him that something was up. Raphael, whom Lucan might reasonably have contacted that night, but who in fact clearly knew nothing, rang Benson and Daniel Meinertzhagen on the morning of the 8th. As recounted in his letter to The Times, Benson then contacted the police. Around the same time John Aspinall learned what had happened; the myth has it that he knew already, because Lucan had seen him after the murder, but this is almost certainly untrue. It is possible, of course, that Lucan rang Aspinall from Uckfield. If so, however, he would probably have rung other friends also; which their actions do not suggest.

  On the afternoon of the 8th, Aspinall hosted a lunch at Lyall Street for some of Lucan’s friends. Later Benson, a professional bon vivant, would say rather mournfully: ‘It wasn’t really a lunch, you know. It was just a few sandwiches.’ This occasion has acquired a mythic status: some have gone so far as to liken it to a counsel of war. It was alleged that the circle of men agreed to tell the police as little as possible about Lucan’s marriage, his children, his state of mind. There is some truth to this. A far graver allegation is that they also agreed upon a plan to help him escape. This, it was said during James Goldsmith’s libel action against Private Eye, was to suggest that ‘those who were present were parties to a conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice’; effectively, that these men were criminals, the aiders and abettors of Muriel Spark’s novel about the Lucan case.

  Accounts of the lunch, by those who actually attended it, are naturally very different from the accepted version. What was discussed, essentially, was not how to get Lucan away, but what to do if he turned up.

  ‘That lunch did take place,’ says Bill Shand Kydd, ‘and I was there. I was really the outsider of the group. And I said, if he turns up we must get the police. Afterwards it was said that we’d helped him escape. No.’ Also present were Benson, Meinertzhagen, Elwes, Stoop, Raphael and Aspinall. Both Private Eye and the Sunday Times Magazine (who got away with it) stated that James Goldsmith had attended the lunch, although this allegation was withdrawn by Private Eye: Goldsmith was indubitably in Dublin at the time. Inevitably a lot of boys’-own-adventure nonsense was spoken. ‘It was all a lot of talk,’ says Bill; mainly by Dominick Elwes, who was pacing about and ‘doing a Hamlet’. Meinertzhagen recalls his urgent, excitable demand: ‘Now what are we going to do about Lucky?’ Elwes suggested smuggling Lucan away on a banana boat to South America. Bill replied that ‘there was certainly no question of helping him flee. I said I certainly didn’t think he’d done it and I wanted to get hold of him as soon as possible before he did something silly like killing himself or pissing off.’15

  It is actually unclear how much Lucan’s friends even knew, at this point. An obvious assumption is that Susan Maxwell-Scott told somebody of the visit to her house. If so, this was not generally discussed at the lunch. Certainly Bill Shand Kydd, who did not know that Lucan had visited his own home, and was of the unwavering opinion that Lucan’s only option was to go to the police, would have moved straight into action had he heard that Lucan had been at Uckfield. He contacted the police as soon as he did know, when he saw the postmark on his letters on the morning of the 9th. Indeed the very fact that Lucan wrote letters at all implies that he did not speak to anybody thereafter.

  Later Ranson said: ‘They told me they were there to discuss ways of helping Lucan if he surfaced, and I believe them.’ This is disingenuous; not untrue, but not quite true either. What in fact emerged was a consensus behind Bill Shand Kydd, the most sensible of Lucan’s friends. As Daniel Meinertzhagen puts it, ‘I would have helped John: to turn himself in.’

  ‘The only one who would have helped him’, says Bill, meaning in the other, more lawless way, ‘was Aspinall.’

  Aspinall, again: that showman, who hated Veronica, who adored a bit of trouble and friction, and who would soon say:

  If a close friend of yours came in covered in blood, having done some frightful deed, the last thing that would have occurred to you is to turn him in. It goes against every last instinct of human loyalties, and to hell with the law or the common norms of civic behaviour or something. If he had begged asylum he would have had it. I would have helped him…

  What a loss Aspinall was to the stage! Not that his gigantic personality would have suited the theatre of his own times; he did far better to create his own dramatic arenas, his clubs and his homes; but he would have made a truly fabulous actor-manager in the days of Garrick. He continued:

  If he had turned up at Howletts [Aspinall’s house in Kent, where the police search was watched over by a gorilla] I would have taken him aside and had a long talk and looked at the problem. It may have involved him giving himself up or getting him funds to go to Costa Rica. He could certainly have had a lot of money. I had many people calling me and saying, if Lucan wants money, he can have it.

  Aspinall would have thought that getting Lucan out of the country was fun. He would have relished the notion of striding about in a sphere
of his own, somewhere above the law. And he would have loved the idea of getting back at Veronica, who had sat like a tiny ice statue inside his club and chilled its atmosphere with her unnerving gaze. Nevertheless it is quite a leap to say, as it would be later, that he was ‘the self-appointed staff officer for the great escape’.16

  After the lunch, Dominick Elwes went to see Veronica in hospital. Inevitably, this visit has been presented as something sinister. ‘It was agreed that someone should try to find out what Veronica had told the police. Dominick Elwes, as the nicest person present, was chosen for this task.’17 A further suggestion, made by Private Eye, was that Elwes had been sent under orders from Goldsmith. This seems unlikely, given that he was out of the country, and indeed the allegation formed part of his libel action.

  Elwes was accompanied to the hospital by Christina and Lucan’s brother Hugh. As he entered Veronica’s room, she fixed him with a black eye and said: ‘Well, now who’s mad? Now who’s the one with paranoia, eh?’18

  It may have been straightforward (if reluctant) courtesy that lay behind this visit from Elwes; if he had indeed been sent, this was probably because he was judged to be the person least inimical to Veronica. A similar suggestion was made the following week. On Monday 11 November, Lucan’s uncle John Bevan held a gathering for some twenty-five people, mostly family, at which the situation was discussed in detail. Also present was Lucan’s old friend from Eton. ‘And halfway through John said, you know, someone’s got to make contact with Veronica. She’s in hospital, and all. Somebody has got to say, we’re all thinking of her. And it can’t be a relation, it just can’t be.’ The person selected was a cousin of Sally Gibbs’s husband, who took the precaution of asking a neighbour to listen as a witness to what was said. Veronica’s first words were: ‘All Gibbses are evil.’ The reason for her saying this, says Lucan’s friend, was that ‘everybody was sort of involved in it, and not being supportive of her. The girl listening in was very surprised – that I do know.’

  Veronica’s words to Dominick Elwes sprang from the same source. He reacted by bursting into tears, and it was later asserted that ‘unusually among Lucan’s friends, Elwes was certain of Lucan’s guilt from then on’.19 This appears to contradict Elwes’s own words to the Daily Express in June 1975: ‘We are all prepared to accept his alibi and help him in any way possible’, although that may, of course, have been a confused attempt to say the right thing. Actually, if Elwes did believe Lucan to be guilty, he was far from alone. In reference to the lunch at Aspinall’s house, Christina says: ‘I think they all considered that he’d done it, didn’t they?’ Bill responds: ‘Oh, absolutely.’

  ‘I could understand what he did,’ Daniel Meinertzhagen now says, ‘but I didn’t approve of it.’

  Christina reiterates:

  They all thought that he’d done it. But remember that everybody knew the true reasons for anything going wrong, things that we’ve told you, and you can imagine there’s a great deal more. That was the main closing ranks, you see. We didn’t say to the press or police what we really felt. To protect the children, as much as anything. And so the press put it that we just didn’t like Veronica.

  Indeed the newspapers were strident in their assertion that Lucan had been protected for two reasons; not merely because he was ‘one of us’, but because Veronica was not. ‘She didn’t fit,’ as Graham Forsyth puts it. Thus the sympathy for her continued to grow. On 21 November her ‘minder’, Mary-Geraldine O’Donnell, told the Daily Mirror: ‘Not one nice thing has been said about Veronica. Not one of her so-called friends has come to her defence. She feels hurt – hurt that her family and friends have been against her during the last two years.’ The Sunday Times Magazine article, published in June 1975, wrote of how ‘her detractors had the monopoly on the gossip, which intensified after the disappearance of Lucan. Even her close family provided little support.’ Two weeks later, after the inquest, the Daily Mail wrote of the ‘mounting campaign by [Lucan’s] friends of innuendo and vilification’. Veronica, who ‘despite her efforts did not hit it off with her husband’s circle’, was being destroyed by gossip, a grotesque escalation of the rumours that had circulated the Clermont since the late 1960s. ‘Doubts have even been cast about her mental state, which is in fact sound.’ Yet the police, ‘who are concerned only with facts’, held her in the highest regard. ‘If the detectives had not been neutral professionals, some of them would have sent a bouquet of roses out of admiration for the way she stood up to the strain and hostility.’20

  It was, the press suggested, an irrational victimization. Like Mr Justice Rees before them, the police – and thus the press – placed such an absolute trust in Veronica, in her version of every aspect of her life with Lucan, that the logical obverse was to mistrust everybody who supported him. Nothing that they said could be believed; indeed, it never really has been.

  ‘Some time,’ wrote Bill Shand Kydd, in an ice-cold letter of response to the Sunday Times Magazine, ‘the whole story must be written, exposing the misleading allegations made in the Press.’

  ‘Nobody’s ever wanted to understand it,’ says Christina. ‘But the police – they bought the whole thing. They looked at one side, and they listened to everything she said, and from that minute on he was finished. It was just such an appalling time. The frustration. You wanted to get up on the rooftops and yell.’

  The police, who tended the image of the circle as if it were a precious orchid, at the same time undermined it continually when it was broken into separate components. ‘I thought a lot of John Aspinall,’ says Graham Forsyth, a fellow animal-lover. Gerring, who wrote tersely that ‘if Lucan had been from the underworld the gangsters would soon have shopped him’, went on to describe James Goldsmith, of whom he himself was slightly afraid, as straightforward, helpful and ‘irritated to be involved at all’ (you bet he was). He also referred to Dominick Elwes, who had informed the police about the lunch on 8 November, visiting Gerald Road and talking very freely. Ranson praised Bill Shand Kydd as ‘a most helpful and forthright man’, and described others who had attended the lunch as ‘courteous, charming and helpful’, which leaves: who?

  The word ‘helpful’ recurs in these descriptions. Nevertheless the press continued to be fed criticisms of the tight-lipped and obstructive circle. Lucan’s schoolfriend says:

  The day after it happened, I was summoned by Chief-Inspector [sic] Ranson to Gerald Road police station, and I spent two and a half hours with him. He said one of the people he’d interviewed that day was the most unpleasant individual he’d come across in his police career. He said, you know, we had John Lucan’s diary – endless names – and this chap, he happened to be available, and I got him in. [It is not known who this man was, although the implication is that he was not a close friend.] We got to know each other, talking that day. And Ranson ended up by saying, ‘I’ve met some of the nastiest and nicest people I’ve ever met in my police career.’

  This remark by Ranson, which has an air of absolute honesty, is a long way from his public portrayal of an indistinguishable gaggle of upper-class monsters. During the interview Ranson also offered the view that ‘obviously John Lucan had two lives. One touched the worst side of the gambling world, and the other side was, you know, the most charming, thoughtful, kind, lovely fellow. It was extraordinary.’

  Even more extraordinary is the gulf between this frank analysis and the way in which Ranson, some twenty years later, described his anger at the ‘platitudes and praise heaped upon Lucan’. He was, says Lucan’s friend, ‘much more fair-minded in private’.

  Meanwhile Graham Forsyth, who unlike Ranson and Gerring has never publicly endorsed the myth of the bond of silence, now destroys it entirely. ‘The idea is that aristos don’t grass, they don’t like to be seen to be saying things… They talked all right! Most of them anyway. They just didn’t want it known that they had talked.’

  Greville Howard, for example, had the police rubbing their hands in glee when he revealed that Lucan had c
onfessed a desire to murder his wife. As his former wife Zoe makes clear, Howard had been questioned very closely at Gerald Road, possibly more so than on any other of Lucan’s friends. He told the police that he had been drinking with Lucan not long before the murder, and that Lucan had confided in him about his financial worries. Howard suggested a declaration of bankruptcy. Lucan said that there was another way out: killing Veronica. He mentioned dumping her body in the Solent, off Southampton. Howard’s reaction, naturally, was that Lucan was being absurd, and that it would be infinitely worse for his children to have him arrested for murder than to be made bankrupt.

  Lucan had, of course, said something like this to his old schoolfriend, with his remark that Veronica would be better ‘off the hill’. People do say these things. If everybody who had ever longed for another person’s death actually acted upon their wish, the murder rate in Midsomer would be quite accurate. Later the columnist Taki, who gambled at the Clermont, made merry in print with his inside knowledge of Lucan’s plots. One version had Lucan making ‘two trial runs to Newhaven before the murder, one in the company of a friend of his who is very much with us today’.21 Other stories were more elaborate: Lucan had bought a speedboat, gone fitness training in Hyde Park, taken a sack weighing eight stone on his dummy runs, travelled to the deepest part of the Channel where the body could be lost forever. ‘A lot of people wanted to climb on the bandwagon afterwards,’ says the girlfriend of one of the set. ‘They probably liked lots of publicity.’ Although Taki’s words about Lucan are sometimes quoted as damning fact, it is quite difficult to take them other than with a cellarful of salt.

  Later it would also be said that Lucan told John Aspinall’s mother, Lady Osborne, that he wanted to kill his wife; to which she replied that ‘he must do whatever he thought was right’.22 Again, it is hard to take this terribly seriously.