A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Outside the inquest, Veronica’s solicitor spoke on her behalf. He said that she was ‘neither pleased nor displeased with the verdict’, but had been ‘only concerned with establishing the facts’. Now she hoped to ‘continue to lead a family life’. The irony is that just a few years later she did lose her children.

  ‘My husband knew I’d won,’ Veronica later said. Certainly if Lucan had indeed intended to destroy her, what actually happened is that she destroyed him. ‘He was a bad sport. I’d won. He knew when I escaped and ran down the road: “She’s won.”’ That, she suggested, was why Lucan wrote the letter to Bill Shand Kydd, expressing the desire that he should have care of the children. It was his final attempt at revenge. ‘He didn’t like being beaten by a woman. Even at the last moment he undermined me.’42

  After Lucan’s disappearance, his sister Jane sought to maintain contact with her nieces and nephew.

  We would go, and try and be civil, you know, call Veronica and say will you come and have a cup of tea, or something. And we did, a couple of times, my husband and I. And my brother Hugh… Hugh almost befriended her, in a way. Not necessarily because he thought that she was guiltless, but I think he just felt very sorry for her. And she maybe thought that he was safe.

  We went once to a club – Hurlingham, I think. My family, Veronica and her children. The idea was the children would swim and play tennis together. It was as it always was… Very awkward.

  In 1976 the trustees sold 46 Lower Belgrave Street for £42,000. This now seems an unbelievable sum. ‘Wicked,’ Veronica later said. ‘It was worth far more than that.’ Quite true. It was worth at least £100,000; although perhaps not everybody would have wanted to live there.43 Veronica and the children moved to the Eaton Row mews, where Jane visited, although she says: ‘Many many times, you would call and you couldn’t get... Like the children, they would knock on the door, and no answer. Veronica was incommunicado, a lot of the time.’

  In 1980 Veronica gave an interview in which she claimed that she had ‘been shunned by her husband’s former friends and [was] estranged from her mother and sister’. She also said that ‘family and former friends have tried to have her committed to a mental home’.44 She was again receiving treatment, and by 1982 the Shand Kydds had assumed de facto care of the children. ‘They were pretty well living with us,’ says Christina. ‘We were beginning to look after them. Frances was older, of course [eighteen, with a place at Bristol University]. And they were very, very loyal to their mother. Very protective of her.’ Discussing this subject with a journalist in 1998, Veronica would say: ‘I was very hurt when my son aged fifteen said he preferred to live with his uncle’s family rather than me. I don’t think George or my elder daughter Frances was ever very keen on me.’45

  In 1983, Veronica was found wandering in Belgravia and taken to hospital.46 ‘There were reports of seeing her pretty wild, walking round Eaton Square,’ says Jane. She spent seven months in a mental institution at Banstead Hospital in Surrey. Christina visited twice a week, but Veronica refused to see the children if they came to Banstead chaperoned by her sister. From that point, the loss of their custody was inevitable, and this was formally awarded in 1984. ‘It was hard work,’ says Bill. ‘But we got there eventually.’

  In 1986 Veronica gave an interview, stating that she had gone to Banstead for a rest: ‘I am not undergoing psychiatric therapy.’47 Twelve years later she spoke more openly about her stay. She contrasted the behaviour of her children with that of ‘lots of other mothers who’d been involuntarily addicted to prescribed drugs, as I had been, and who visited them nonetheless’.

  I just used to think, ‘What have I done? Where did I go wrong?’ These children were younger than my children. They gave up long evenings to stay with their mothers in this ghastly Victorian place with no television, just to get them better. I was so frightened and alone. Not one word… they were going to get rid of me in that place, believe me.48

  Later, again in reference to her children, she said: ‘They were carted off to bum off some rich relations. That’s a vulgar way of putting it but that more or less sums it up.’49

  In fact, as George would make clear, the children tried many times to contact Veronica after the stay at Banstead, but by her own admission she was not inclined to forgive the fact that they had gone to a stable life with the Shand Kydds (whose home they already knew very well, from prolonged previous stays). In 1984 it was reported that although Christina regularly visited Eaton Row, and kept in touch with the police station at Gerald Road, Veronica remained unreachable. ‘All attempts by the family of the Countess of Lucan to maintain contact are being shunned and when her younger daughter, Lady Camilla Bingham, 14, went to see her mother during the last school holidays, she was told from an upstairs window: “Go away, I’m busy.”’50

  In an interview in 1998, Veronica said:

  They had to suffer for what they’d done. It would have been wrong to let them turn up whenever they felt like it saying ‘We’re off to France next weekend… I’ve just passed sixteen examinations into Oxford and I’m terribly bright!’ and you’ve got to say ‘How clever you are’ and sit back with no role, nothing. You would be foolish to put yourself in such a situation and it’s better for them to know that I’m a strong person.

  The article in which these words appeared stated that Veronica had

  never recovered from the loss of her children, Frances, George and Camilla. Custody was transferred from her to the Shand Kydds, fulfilling her husband’s wish, in 1982. To Lady Lucan, it was the ultimate betrayal. But the whispers about her mental condition started by her husband have persisted and, she believes, have been used by his supporters to ‘write her out of the picture’ and undermine her evidence that he was the killer…

  Her anger towards her son was sealed in 1994, as the twentieth anniversary of the murder approached. Two books, written by the investigating officers, were published and there were three television programmes and a radio play. ‘People who were interviewed were personally abusive of me. One said “She wasn’t fit to be a mother.” Through all that agony in 1994 I had no support, not even a lawyer. It was appalling, but there was nobody to protect me or stand up for me. My son, if he had called himself Earl Lucan, which he could have in 1992, as his father was presumed deceased in 1992, could have said these people were writing trash. Why didn’t he say, “Even though I haven’t been close to her for a number of years she was a very good mother before that”? Even if he didn’t think so. After all, as a boy of 15 you may be made to do things which you feel are not quite right, but as a man of 30-odd there’s no excuse for it.’51

  ‘George had once just seen her in the street,’ says Jane. This was in 1995, when George was twenty-eight, had taken his degree at Cambridge, and was working as a banker. ‘And they walked around for a bit, and then she said goodbye and I’ll probably never see you again.’ Of this meeting Veronica would later say: ‘I thought “How sad that nothing of his father had been transmitted to him.” I had hoped that I would see or hear his father again. But his father had gone.’52

  In 1998 Veronica was seen outside St Peter’s Church in Eaton Square on the day of her younger daughter Camilla’s marriage. It was reported that she had not been invited, although Christina made it clear that she had. ‘No, I was not invited to Camilla’s wedding whatever anyone may say,’ Veronica told a journalist, while admitting that Camilla, who later became a QC, had written on the occasion of her engagement.

  She may have a double first in classics from Oxford but she certainly hasn’t got any manners. I think it’s absolutely disgraceful behaviour not to invite me. But then what do you expect, having been brought up by those people?

  ‘Sometimes I feel’, she said, ‘that nothing more can happen to hurt me.’53

  The following year it was reported that Veronica planned to sue her son. She told the press that he had removed family documents and photographs from her home while she was in Banstead, and that some of the photogra
phs had been sold to a newspaper (including one taken by Veronica herself: ‘My son is using my intellectual property’). George had also stated that he believed Lucan to be innocent of murder, which according to his mother was defamatory in the light of the evidence that she had given at the inquest. She did not want to see her children, she said, because she feared that they would persuade her to change her account of the events of 7 November 1974.

  I don’t trust them. I don’t want to hear that I am a liar or a bad mother. If I was a bad mother, too bad. I am so disgusted with them that I feel ashamed to be their mother. To be loyal to your own family is paramount. To be loyal to another family is despicable, especially as they know how I had suffered. I am not sentimental about children. They are just a hotchpotch of genes: me, my ancestors and him [Lucan] and his ancestors. I am just the birth mother. I have no feelings of wanting to see them.54

  Yet upon Lucan himself, who by her own account had tried to kill her, Veronica bestowed a kind of absolution. Her feelings towards him were kindly, if anything. ‘There was no bitterness on my side. I have always called it a tragedy, a misunderstanding.’55 At times she could describe him with something like adoration. ‘A very good-looking man,’ she said, referring to a photograph that she had offered to the press. ‘Look at the way his collar fits – perfection.’56 Throughout their marriage Veronica had sought to turn a sense of inferiority into dominance, and had done so with extraordinary success. But the pride in having married him remained. Lucan’s portrait by Dominick Elwes,57 the paintings of his ancestors Lavinia Bingham and the 3rd Earl, the backgammon cups that he won at the Clermont, were still in her house. She still wore her wedding ring. ‘Even now’, she said, ‘I have a feeling of devotion to him in some way.’58

  She also said, in a long interview given in 1981: ‘Three years ago I woke in the night with the conviction that he was in my bed with me… I could feel his physical presence beside me, and I was suddenly full of happiness.

  “Everything will be all right now you’re back,” I told him. “I’ve missed you so much.”’59

  ‘She always said she still loved him,’ says Christina. ‘And she has always said, in all those strange outbursts, that she would have stood by him.’

  After Lucan’s disappearance, the force of Veronica’s anger was directed, not at the husband for whom she felt such a complexity of emotion, but at those around him; in particular the sister who fulfilled his wishes for their children. ‘It is easy’, she said, ‘to forgive someone who can no longer torment you, but it is not so easy to forgive people who are still a threat to you.’60

  ‘It sounds very strange,’ says Christina. ‘But I am, in my way, still extremely fond of her. And I really do believe that she did love the children.’

  ‘You have to give her some credit for those children,’ says Lucan’s schoolfriend. ‘They’re wonderful, all of them. They’re a very good lot.’

  ‘It is totally extraordinary, I always felt, how they turned out,’ says Jane. ‘I just wish John knew.’

  Solutions

  ‘I have known crimes that were artistic – they were, you understand, supreme exercises of imagination. But the solving of them – no, it is not the creative power that is needed. What is required is a passion for truth.’

  AGATHA CHRISTIE, The Hollow, 1946

  But imagine that Lord Lucan did get away by plane from the airfield at Headcorn, and that by some means he lived on. The facts are against it, but it could be true. Imagine that for reasons of cowardice or daring he had thought it preferable to continue, despite exile from his country, habits, rituals, friends, family, children. That it was still possible to be oneself, even though one’s self no longer existed. That one would be able to live half one’s years as a half-life, a kind of unending purgatorio. At first there would have been the thrill of escape, the anxiety of the fugitive. Then perhaps a sense of freedom that is beyond our comprehension.

  Imagine, too, a scene in which somebody entered the dusty bar in Gaborone, with the shutters against the heat, fell into conversation with a remote, patrician, elderly ex-pat, and by degrees realized who he was. Imagine that during the course of an evening this person, this old Englishman, conceived the desire to do the thing that was most forbidden to him: talk. Imagine that he felt compelled to empty his head, to tell his side of the story, while he still could. This, of course, is the fundamental allure of the belief that Lucan is alive. He could tell us what really happened.

  The Lucan story is about many things: class, marriage, lies, prejudice. But even to call it a ‘story’ is misleading. There is no one story in this case. Instead there are versions, theories, myths. It is a case that breeds stories, and these have acquired more substance than the elusive thread of actuality, which imagination grasps and loses by turns.

  Only two people know what happened on the night of 7–8 November 1974, and only one of those people has been heard. Veronica Lucan has told her story. It is officially accepted as the truth, although the contradictions within it have led to variations upon its essential theme; yet it is in fact only one side of the story, just as it was only one side of the custody hearing, and indeed almost everything else to do with the Lucan marriage. Truth requires that the other side is also heard. Otherwise the solution, however much of truth it contains, can only ever exist in the realm of fiction.

  There is, of course, the version that Lucan offered at the time, about the fight seen through the blinds in the basement, the man who ran off into the night. But even he would admit that this is insufficient. Again, although it may hold something of the truth, it remains a story. So what would Lord Lucan say, if somebody were there to listen to it all? What images would be inside his head? Most are unknowable. A few are not. There would, for instance, be a memory of Belgravia, which on the night of 7 November is a disconcerting place: the unnatural stillness, the spacious empty streets, the great stucco houses that loom like icebergs, with the cold and unforgiving separateness of wealth. Black sky slanted with watery floodlights; white shapes fretted with black porticos, punctuated by narrow black cobbled mews, gaping with dead black windows. A soft, shadowy, chiaroscuro gleam as he approached Lower Belgrave Street, like walking through a giant silent film. And then?

  The unsolved, or even partly solved, murder case holds this painful fascination: one will never know for certain what really happened. Nevertheless, and despite the near-certain knowledge that Lucan has been dead for forty years and thus can never tell his story, it should still be possible to do as the fictional detectives do. If there is a story into which all the facts fit, then logically this is not a fiction.

  In real life, of course, facts are not immutable. They slip and slide like eels. ‘We want proofs. We want facts. How? How? How?’ says Lord Peter Wimsey; and he gets them, because the genre demands it.

  The facts in this case are remarkably few. The identity of the assailant is assumed to be known, but is actually unproven. The weapon is assumed, but not definitely stated, to have been the length of piping found at the house. The extent and accuracy of the forensic evidence is very far from certain. The timings of events are imprecise, because the statements of Veronica and her daughter contradict each other.

  Their statements can, however, be conflated to form a timeframe, thus:

  At some point between 8.35pm and 8.55pm, Sandra Rivett went downstairs at 46 Lower Belgrave Street and entered the basement.

  At some point between around 8.50pm and 9.15pm, Veronica Lucan went downstairs.

  At some time after 8.35pm, Sandra was killed in the basement.

  At some time after 8.50pm, Veronica received blows to the head, delivered in the area between the ground-floor cloakroom and the basement stairs.

  At some point before 9.05pm, Lord Lucan entered the house.

  At 9.50pm, Veronica Lucan entered the Plumbers Arms: this is corroborated by the barman in the pub.

  There is then the conflicting testimony from the Lucans, thus:

  Lord Lucan told
a story of passing the house, seeing his wife being attacked in the basement, and going in to interrupt the fight. He ran into the basement. His wife’s assailant ran away. His wife accused him of hiring a hitman, and told him that Sandra had been murdered.

  Veronica Lucan told a story of going to find Sandra, hearing a noise in the cloakroom and being attacked at the top of the basement stairs. The assailant was her husband. He told her that Sandra had been murdered.

  There is also the evidence at the house:

  Blood from Veronica’s A group was found in the kitchen and on the mailsack containing Sandra’s body.

  Blood from Sandra’s B group was found on Veronica’s shoes and on the back of her skirt.

  Blood from Sandra’s B group was found in the back garden.

  Blood from A and B group was found on the piping, in the cloakroom, and on both the driver and passenger sides of the Ford Corsair abandoned at Newhaven.

  The door to the garden was found unlocked.

  The chain on the front door was left off that night.

  From which the following possible inferences can be made:

  Sandra Rivett was killed before Veronica Lucan was attacked.

  Veronica Lucan entered the basement. This has been denied so vigorously that it cannot be stated as fact. Nevertheless there is evidence to imply it. There are two obvious possibilities: first, that the attack on Veronica began in the basement, where she stepped in Sandra’s blood and left small amounts of her own; and that it continued as she ran up the stairs, making contact with Sandra’s blood on the stair wall, spraying her own blood on the wall above the third step. The second possibility is that Veronica went downstairs after she herself was attacked, with or without the assailant. In The Times on 9 November, and again on 11 November, it was stated that the killer of Sandra Rivett had been discovered by Veronica in the basement. ‘Police have been told that Lady Lucan… disturbed a man as he was attempting to carry Mrs Rivett’s body from the basement to a waiting car.’ It is unclear where this rather precise image came from; but it suggested that Veronica had gone into the basement, and the attack upon her had begun there. On 14 November, the Daily Express reported Veronica as having participated in a ‘reconstruction’ of the crime in the presence of detectives. The article, written by a journalist who was particularly close to the police, described the attack on Veronica as having begun ‘halfway down the basement steps’: not in the ante-room.