The telephone rang at midnight. He and Joan looked at it. They let it ring three times, trying to guess who it could be. Peter was startled to hear Bartleben.
“Peter, you owe me a call. I mean, now that you’re finished stomping through the tulips in Dorset.” No mention of the report. Peter waited. He looked over at Joan; she was smiling benignly, and he was tempted to put her on the other phone line.
“Peter, are you sitting down?” Bartleben said, in a flat tone.
“Yeah.”
“Peter, André Lasker has reappeared.”
“Where?”
“Malta.”
CHAPTER 24
On November 7, 1974, the seventh Earl of Lucan beat the family nanny to death in his wife’s London house, imagining her in the darkness to be his estranged spouse. Then, showing no imagination at all, he beat his wife in similar fashion and fled in several directions, eventually disappearing into the Channel.
The Lucan case had happened at the beginning of Peter’s career as a tenured Scotland Yard detective. Now, seated in the air raid shelter at the back of the cottage garden, he flipped through the yellow foolscap pages of the file and realized that the Lucan melodrama might have been the case that had convinced him to look at crime through a literary lens. The archetypes in this instance were not feisty lasses from Hardy or haunted seekers from a Thomas Mann novel. The template here was the domestic children’s tale from late-Victorian and Edwardian times, but made topsy-turvy.
The Lucan narrative was replete with nannies and devoted mommies, doting grandmothers, white Belgravia houses with many secret rooms, and party-giving friends who always answered the door when Mummy or Daddy Lucan knocked. The father in such stories is usually a hapless, one-off figure, a bit foolish, seen yielding to the children’s requests and laying his benign tolerance on thick. Except that on this occasion the drinking-gambling-philandering father slaughtered the nanny, bludgeoned the wife and left the children upstairs in the bedroom to fend with their dreams.
Although they laid claim to a patrician provenance, there wasn’t much to like in the Lucans. When they met and married, he had already dedicated himself to the gambler’s vocation. He reportedly worked at a poker school for a while, and perhaps she found this romantic. The files noted that the earl soon abandoned poker for chemin de fer and blackjack, which he pursued at private clubs in Mayfair. These games involved low skill and quick gratification, unlike the more complex, paced games of five-card draw and stud. It could be argued that when Lucan lost his poker acumen, he began to lose his wife.
They had three children, George, Frances and Camilla. In keeping with the children’s-story motif, Peter would have told the tale from Camilla’s viewpoint. George, who stood to gain the title of eighth Earl, was too seriously status-committed to tell it in a balanced fashion, and Frances, as it turned out, became an important witness to her parents’ exceedingly bloody brawl and was thus open to endless challenges to her depiction. Only Camilla, haunted by the irony of having slept through the whole fracas, could have been trusted to maintain some objectivity, and possibly return, deeply haunted, to the family tragedy with a memoir later in life.
As it turned out, it was the countess herself who first put an account on the record. Peter cut back and forth between his old files and her subsequent website version. From a legal point of view, and even aside from the inculpatory bloodstains, the evidence of premeditation likely would have doomed the husband in court. He was chronically in debt and hated his wife, to whom he had by then lost custody of the children. He had moved to a flat, while she retained the family mansion in Belgravia. At several dinners he was heard to say that he would be better off with her dead. In the confusion of that fatal night, his pop-up appearances at the Clermont Club and other hangouts smacked of alibi shopping.
Is character destiny? Peter believed that Lucan was undone by the shallowness of his plan. He couldn’t even get the victim right. Mistaking the young nanny for his wife in the darkened basement landing — it served him right, since he had unscrewed the bulb (a metaphor for stupidity if ever there was one) — he struck her down with a lead pipe wrapped in tape. The homicide began to resemble the board game Clue. By the time Lady Lucan came down to look for the nanny, he had her stuffed in a canvas sack. He then struck his wife using the same weapon, but she was not easy prey. She grabbed him by the testicles and forced him to back away. There followed a truly bizarre standoff, during which they lurched from the basement to their lavatory and paused, in a pseudo-conciliatory way, in the bedroom to review their options. Somehow, she managed to escape, running out through the white-pillared portal of the house on Belgrave Street.
Much bloodied but still alive, Lady Lucan tottered efficiently down the road to the nearest pub, the working class Plumber’s Arms. (In the margin of his original notes, Peter had written: “Who would call their pub that? Shouldn’t it have been ‘The Plumber’s Elbow’?”) She burst through the door and articulated: “Help me! I’ve just escaped being murdered. He’s in the house. He’s murdered my nanny!”
As his notes reminded him, Peter had doubted the wife’s precision at the time. If you are gushing blood in the sudden glare of an indifferent tavern, do you announce yourself in perfect sentences? The Countess had been under siege from the press and conspiracy sceptics for decades since.
As for Lucan, any premeditation collapsed into improvisation. Failing to prevent his wife from escaping, he began an evasive odyssey across southern England. First, he telephoned his mother to ask if she would mind picking up the children. No one knew what he really planned to do next, but his luck now failed him. He attempted to contact old friends, perhaps more for solace than for what they could do for him. Lucan sustained an ingenuous regard for the friendship of his circle, a coterie of hyphenated aristocrats whose main assistance in the long run was to give vague and grudging testimony to the police regarding Lucan’s last hours. Some observers hypothesized later that his reluctant friends had helped him out of the country using an expensive speedboat, but there was little sign that any of them knew how to turn an ignition key.
Whichever the case, all these peripatetic roads led to the sea. Lucan parked his borrowed Ford Corsair near the beach at Newhaven and was never seen again.
Over the years, the reports of sightings of Lucan became egregious. He was typically found living in the back of a van or holding down a bar stool in an African village. All identifications proved bogus. The Yard tracked a dozen sightings every year. André Lasker could have read about the case, but there was no way to be sure.
Peter had played a minor part in the investigation in the mid-seventies. Even then, the reports poured in of Lucan surfacing in South Africa, Goa and other classic havens for men desperate to avoid Interpol. Cammon himself, who had just started along his career path when the Yard mobilized to track down Lucan, was sent to Cherbourg to investigate a sighting at a popular resort hotel. An Englishman fitting Lucan’s callow profile had stayed there two summers in a row, and was known to take the train to Deauville, famous for its upscale casinos.
Peter interviewed the Cherbourg hotel manager, who was sure that the man wasn’t Lucan. Several British tourists had dutifully called the nearest British Consul to swear that they had found the fugitive on the Continent, at the hotel or in the town, but Peter noticed that few identifications were reported by the French residents in the area. Perhaps they liked the tradition of welcoming those who were unacceptable to their home governments. Peter had recently read Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, in which the Englishman Charles Strickland deserts wife and children to live a bohemian existence in Paris; Peter noted that Maugham regarded the neighbourhoods of Paris as more accommodating hiding places than the provinces.
The hotel guest in Cherbourg was certainly not the murderer. For one thing, he liked to have his picture taken, and there was even a snapshot of the man on the veranda. He was fifty pounds heavier than Lucan and had a large strawberry mark on his cheek. Lucan
was known to eat lamb chops several times a week; the suspect never chose them from the hotel menu. It was the off-season, and Peter remembered that the hotelier tried to persuade him to stay an extra couple of days. Peter, as a junior officer, worried about abusing the Yard’s expense schedule, and so refused; but he found out that he couldn’t get a train to the French coast until the next morning. The manager treated him to dinner that evening on the closed-in veranda.
Across the table, swirling his wine in the wide bowl of his glass (Peter stayed with a fine Bière de Garde), the manager related the following joke, which he said Parisians liked to tell on themselves.
An Englishman moves to the City of Light with a firm determination to become a great lover, in the French model. (“Beware the man or woman fanatical to live out a cliché,” the hotel manager interjected in his own story.) He courts women like a Scaramouche, wines and dines them relentlessly from the moment he arrives. He remains mysterious and nameless, except for the adopted prénom Jacques, and is all the more romantic a figure for it. One night, he suggests to one of his amours that they go for a walk along the quay that edges the Seine. He kisses her in the moonlight as the Bateaux Mouches sail by. Sweeping her into his arms, he slips on the wet cobbles and she falls into the fast-flowing Seine. He is consumed by remorse. But not quite consumed . . . Within days, his desires overcome his guilt and he seeks out another lover. Again he risks the bord du fleuve, and the second girl falls to her watery death. But his ardour — only temporarily dampened, so to speak — wins out, and our Englishman finds yet a third lover and, wouldn’t you know it, she drowns as well. There is nothing for it: the man writes a final letter, an ode to Paris and lost loves, and jumps into the river from the Pont Neuf. The body is never found. Thus, he gains an immortal reputation as a romantic, more Parisian than the locals.
The hotel manager leaned across the linen tablecloth towards Peter to deliver the punch line: “Who would have guessed that the man also enjoyed the kill?”
Peter had no doubt that Lord Lucan would have emerged soon after his escape, had he survived. He had planned his crime poorly and mismanaged it from the beginning. The dissolute seventh Earl was descended from the notorious third Earl, who had sent the Light Brigade down that deadly valley in the Crimea, a fact that led Peter’s colleagues at the Yard to speak of “generations of screw-ups.” Lucan was a hapless mastermind at best: he would have returned to gambling almost immediately. As a titled man, he could never have withstood a life of anonymous penury. As dawn approached, his plan disintegrating, he must have seen the ocean as his only resolution.
Peter knew not to overdo the analogies to André Lasker’s disappearance as he read through the musty dossier, but they had one thing in common, and that was the challenge of identity. Lucan didn’t know, had likely never known, who he was: in Brett’s he was listed as the seventh Earl and in the birth records he was Richard John Bingham; to Lady Lucan he was simply John, and to the kids he was Dada; at the Clermont Club his self-chosen moniker was Lucky, although near the end he called himself Blue Lucan. Was he content to depart knowing that his son, George, would inevitably inherit the title of eighth Earl, and an empty bank account?
André Lasker may have been an ordinary man in a provincial town, but he dreamed of a new identity. He had put his affairs in order. He would find his true self in an exotic hideaway on the other side of the world. But the world is a circle, and Anna’s self-destruction had put the lie to that dream, and that was why André Lasker would come home.
As Michael had told his father, it was the monkey that she had left him to carry.
CHAPTER 25
The Air Malta daily landed at Luga Airport in the blasting light of late afternoon. The flight was stuffed with pasty vacationers, all anticipating that curative sun. Peter struck up a conversation with a Gloucestershire cab driver who made the trip six times a year and now planned to emigrate. Like most other Mediterranean spots, Malta had attracted the gamut of partygoers and elderly couples, many of whom were buying into the condo boom on Malta and Gozo, its secondary island. His seatmate recommended the view from the starboard window as they swooped to three thousand feet and approached the airport from the south. Even through the limited porthole, Peter could see the full dimensions of the main island. Malta was a battleship of limestone, fixed in a sea of unchanging blue. The hill towns at its centre formed a ship’s bridge from which an admiral could observe the Mediterranean in all directions, or so Peter imagined. The man beside him identified the highest plateau on the island, which was topped with castle battlements, as the old capital of Mdina.
But Valletta was Peter’s destination, and he glimpsed it off to the left as the plane came in to land. The airport was small but crowded with tourists. The Home Office, under whose aegis New Scotland Yard operated, issued all detectives the equivalent of diplomatic passports, and Peter was immediately fast-tracked through customs. He paused to look over at the regular lines, where the other passengers from his flight were queuing up. He was curious about the rigour of Passport Control’s vetting of ordinary travellers. He wasn’t about to patronize this country; he had no doubt that the Maltese officers were using the latest passport scanner mandated by the European Union, of which Malta was a recent and proud member. But documentation was not the only challenge; that could be faked, and a good customs man learned to read faces and interpret travel patterns. Also, like every other tourist destination, Malta tried to process its cash-loaded guests as rapidly as possible. The line was moving quickly. With a good false passport, Lasker could easily have slipped into the country — and out again.
Outside the main immigration office within the airport stood a short man in a dark blue uniform. Malta Police Headquarters had been forewarned by Bartleben personally; it was a case of deputy commissioner contacting deputy commissioner. The similarity likely stopped there, Peter mused. His host wore the colourful insignia suited to his elevated rank, and his dyed, razor-cut hair and recently trimmed moustache completed the aura of someone parochially important. Peter had expected nothing less from an official named Antonio Albanoni. He reminded himself to choose his words carefully.
The deputy commissioner arched an eyebrow discreetly when he saw Peter approach. Peter had once flown into a tiny airport on the Greek island of Samos to pick up a suspect and found himself greeted in the waiting area by a hand-lettered sign that read, Welcome Chief Inspector Cammon; he had prayed that the fugitive wasn’t in the airport at that moment. Albanoni extended a hand and offered a pearly smile. Peter was reminded of the Claude Rains character in Casablanca.
“Chief Inspector, I am Antonio Albanoni.”
“Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice,” Peter responded.
The Maltese deputy commissioner squared his shoulders and this time raised both dyed eyebrows.
“The prisoner has escaped,” he said.
So much for jet-lag recovery, Peter thought. The latest email from Malta Police, transmitted to him via Bartleben’s office, had informed him that Lasker was being watched at his tourist hotel in Sliema. How had he escaped the island?
Peter retained sufficient aplomb to fake a benign expression. “Is he still on the island?”
“We don’t think so.” Albanoni began to explain the situation in a rushed, high voice that took on an Italian rhythm as he speeded up. Peter could barely understand him. “We know that he had a false passport. We now suspect that he had a second false passport.”
Peter now had to face the prospect that he and André Lasker had just passed each other at thirty thousand feet.
“Is it too late to meet at your offices?” he asked.
“No, no, not at all! The detectives who were watching Mr. Lasker are on shift until eight o’clock.”
Albanoni drove his own official car, an unmarked Saab, into the heart of Valletta. Malta had been one of the countries to which Lasker had exported his used cars, and Peter assumed that this was not one of his vehicles. They passed through
an impressive stone arch and into the older part of the capital, where many of the buildings were constructed with soft, yellow stone, giving them an Arabian feel. He caught a glimpse of the fortifications ahead just as Albanoni took away the view by veering down a side street. A minute later they parked next to a modern four-storey office building. Peter observed that it housed both the Police Service and the Security Agency.
The Home Office shared its country briefings with New Scotland Yard; indeed, the Yard provided the crime sit reps for these profiles. Peter knew that since 9/11 Malta had expanded its security capacity, with a new anti-terrorism act to back it up. He wondered if officers from both the police and the Security Agency had been inputting to the Lasker case, since the crossover in manpower and in skills was sometimes useful, although it just as often held the potential for confusion. Many in the police professions believed that the distinctions between policing and counterterrorism were artificial, and Peter agreed, but he was certainly willing to respect jurisdictional lines in a foreign country.
The deputy commissioner led him down a long hallway to his corner office. “You can store your valises here,” Albanoni said, “and someone will transfer them to the Marriott.”
The usual framed citations hung from the walls, each of these bearing official stamps with the Maltese cross in red. Peter, in his time, had never hung anything in his office at New Scotland Yard. He wasn’t impressed by those who did, although the photograph of Albanoni standing beside Pope John Paul II was unnerving.
After washing up in Albanoni’s “executive” washroom, Peter repaired with his host to a meeting room on the same floor. Two tough cops, tired and unshaven, wearing their street clothes, slouched on the far side of the table, looking defiant and very unhappy; their dressing-down had already been applied. Albanoni introduced Detectives Bahti and Korman. Peter shook hands, but only Bahti, the younger but evidently the senior of the pair, made eye contact. Scotland Yard was mythical to them, and Peter, in his dark suit and tie, was an alien curiosity. Accordingly, he decided to keep the entire discussion at the factual, procedural level, no matter how the deputy commissioner tried to add a flattering gloss to his descent from London. He was comforted by having two obviously streetwise detectives to work with on this manhunt.
Walking Into the Ocean Page 31
