by Muriel Spark
“I believe you,” said Jean-Pierre. He thought: I do believe her. She is magic. And when he thought of his life previous to meeting Hildegard he wondered how he had managed.
“We could put one of your Lucans to the test by asking him to dinner. Give him smoked salmon followed by lamb chops and see if perhaps he eats them eagerly. It says in all the books about him that he ate just that and only that,” Jean-Pierre said.
“If you prepared the meal he would of course eat it eagerly,” she said. Jean-Pierre was indeed a good cook and sometimes made their dinner on the nights-off of their two au pair young men. “Which one should we invite, Lucan I or Lucan II?” said Hildegard.
“Lucan II alias Lucky.”
“That’s what I’ll do. Invite Lucky and give him smoked salmon and lamb chops. That diet of his was a detail reported in all the books and articles about him. It would be of some interest to see how he reacts. I’d like to make him nervous. Perhaps I could ask him a question like ‘Suppose that Death is a male character, what would Death’s wife be like?’ ”
“From what I’ve read about him, that’s too imaginative. He could never grasp such a proposition.”
“Perhaps not,” she said. “In fact I am sure you’re right. Do you know he’s reputed to be very, very dull?”
“Yes, I know that. Perhaps I could lace his drink with something—we’ll see. I could get you a harmless loquacious pill,” Jean-Pierre suggested. “Something to last the evening and at the same time make him talk. I know a pharmacist.”
“How clever you are!”
Hildegard thought this over all the next day. The more she thought of it the more she liked the idea of a pill secretly administered to aid the patient to speak out. Unethical, of course. Illegal, no doubt. Neither of the Lords had hitherto bothered Hildegard personally very much, nor did they do so now. She only wondered how she could achieve a good result . . . “I could get you a loquacious pill . . .” She really adored Jean-Pierre; he was so very much of her own caliber. If you can comprehend a morality devoid of ethics or civil law, that was really the guiding principle of both people. And in their dealings with Lord Lucan it was on those particular moral grounds that they determined to deal with him heavily. What shocked Hildegard most in the Lucan story was his, and his set’s, lack of remorse over the dead nanny, a young girl of twenty-nine, full of prettiness, life, humor. When a relative called at the Lucan home by arrangement to collect her belongings, they were handed over at the door by Lady Lucan herself, stuffed into a paper bag, and that was that.
Hildegard and Jean-Pierre read through all the press cuttings together. “What strikes me,” said Jean-Pierre, “is how Lucan succeeded in antagonizing the police and the press without ever meeting them. This was mainly due, I think, to the attitude of his friends.”
“But he was really an awful man,” said Hildegard. “For one thing he was sexually violent. He beat his wife with a cane. Very sick, that.”
“He was sick, yes. All big gamblers are sick, anyway. And if he was also a sexual sadist . . . do you recognize any of that in either of your men?”
“I see it in both. The possibility is in both. The evidence in the lawsuit for his children shattered Lucan. He thought his wife would observe secrecy in the matter of his sexual sadism, but she didn’t. He felt betrayed. But as he was trying to make her out to be mad, obviously she had a moral right to reveal his mental condition. Besides, a bad-tempered man looking after children . . .”
“I suppose,” said Jean-Pierre, “you realize that, unlike most of your patients, the authentic Lord Lucan really is mad?”
“You think so?”
“I’m convinced. On the facts revealed in the inquest and the biographical research over the years, he is insane.”
“But which one is the real one?”
“Hildegard, I don’t like your being alone with him. Are you sure you are safe—I mean, physically?”
“I’m sure of nothing.”
“Except that Lucan I, Walker, is trying to threaten you, to obtain your complicity through blackmail. For which,” said Jean-Pierre, “I will somehow smooth him out, I will solve his problem.”
“Darling, he is very large.”
“And I, too. I am also clever.”
Lucky had consumed his smoked salmon, served as it had been with very fine slices of buttered toast. He was now working his way through the three lamb chops on his plate. The wine was from Bordeaux and he absorbed it like blotting paper.
“What was remarkable,” he said, “was that there was so much blood. If I had got my wife as I thought I was doing, there would never have been so much blood, so much. But I will never forget the blood that flowed in such quantity from that girl, Sandra Rivett. There must be something about the lower orders, they bleed so. I cannot forget that blood. It got everywhere. Pools of it.”
They had decided to dine in a bistro, to give Jean-Pierre time to focus his full attention on Lucky. All round the walls were signed photographs of old-time actors wearing hats, and actresses greatly be-furred. Hildegard found these reassuring, they predated the memories both of her guest and of herself, and were something solid to be surrounded by in this moment of testing and confessing. “Blood,” she said, “is nothing new to me. As you probably know.”
“I should probably know?”
“Yes, your accomplice, the other Lucan, has no doubt informed you that I was the stigmatic of Munich, Beate Pappenheim.”
“I seem to remember the name,” said Lucky. “But I have no accomplice. Are you crazy? My information comes from the late Reverend Brother Heinrich in whose prayer-hostel I lodged for some months.”
“I was covered with blood, endless blood. And I effected countless cures. I am not crazy. Heinrich was a poor little student. He took my money, plenty of it.”
“There was a scandal, though, I seem to think.”
“You seem to think right. I am wanted for fraud as you are for murder. Heinrich knew that I changed my name.”
“Murder plus attempted murder,” he said. “My wife didn’t bleed so much, you know. It was the nanny. Blood all over the place.”
Hildegard felt almost sympathetic towards him. “Blood,” she said, “blood.”
“They say it is purifying,” he said.
She thought, immediately, Could he be a religious maniac?
“It is not purifying,” she said, “it is sticky. We are never washed by blood.”
“It is said we are washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” he said, sticking his knife into lamb chop number three. “I sang in the school choir.”
She was exultant in her suspicion. A religious maniac. The possibility consoled her. She had not, after all, found the clear opportunity of slipping Jean-Pierre’s talking pill into his wine but still Lucky was talking, talking. She assumed it was the psychological effect on him of his old menu, salmon and lamb, which in fact he must have been deprived of for most of his clandestinity, lest the police should be on the watch for just that clue.
6
Generally speaking, Scotswomen who do not dye their hair have a homogeneous island-born look, a well-born look, which does not apply in the south. The man who called himself Lucky Lucan, who was a snob from his deepest gust, sat with his whisky and water in the lounge of the Golf Hotel at a small village outside Aberdeen, and greatly admired the young fair good-boned waitress.
He had picked this spot, as he always picked spots when it was time for him to move on, with a pin on a map open before him. It had always worked well. Nobody was looking for him at a place he had picked out with his eyes shut and a pin in his hand. This time he had, however, picked from a map of North Britain. He had business there.
“Christina,” she said when he asked the girl her name. “Do you want a table for lunch?”
“I do. And I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you have smoked salmon or lamb chops on the menu?”
“We have both.”
“Good. I like lamb chops.”
He was not really aware of the fact that he was sizing up the girl in a certain way that related to Hildegard Wolf. She was younger than Hildegard. Her hair was light gold. She was decidedly skinnier. Lucky then realized, all of a sudden, that he was really thinking of Hildegard, and had been all through his nine holes of golf.
“What is your name?” he said again to the Scottish waitress.
“Christina. They call me Kirsty.”
“Kirsty, I want a double malt whisky. I want smoked salmon to start followed by lamb chops and the trimmings.”
“Your room number?” she said.
“I’ll pay the restaurant bill in cash.”
He paid everything in cash, on principle. His source of cash was here in Britain. Nowadays, he came twice a year to collect it personally from his old friend, rich Benny Rolfe, who always, since Lucky’s operation to change his features, had a fat package of money ready for him on his visits. Benny on this occasion was abroad, but he had arranged for the package of pounds sterling to be placed in Lucky’s hands, as he had done twice a year since 1974 without fail. Most of the cash came out of Benny’s own pocket, but there was always a certain amount contributed by Lucan’s other old friends and collected by Benny Rolfe.
“Aren’t you disgusted, ever, by what I did?” Lucky had asked Benny on one of these occasions. “Aren’t any of you horrified? Because, when I look back on it, I’m horrified myself.”
“No, dear fellow, it was a bungle like any other bungle. You should never let a bungle weigh on your conscience.”
“But if I’d killed my wife?”
“That would not have been a bungle. You would not have been the unlucky one.”
“I think of Nanny Rivett. She had an awful lot of blood. Pints, quarts of it. The blood poured out, all over the place. I was wading in it in the dark. Didn’t you read about the blood in the papers?”
“I did, to tell you the truth. Perhaps murdered nannies have more blood to spill than the upper class, do you think?”
“Exactly what I would say,” Lucan had said. He was disappointed that Benny himself was not available on this visit. He ate through his lamb chops. He studied Kirsty and compared her to Hildegard. From the window of the dining room the North Sea spread its great apparent calm. Benny Rolfe was now in his mid-seventies. Nearly all Lucky’s old staunch aiders and abetters were over seventy now. Who would provide him with money when his benefactors were gone? So mused Lucky, never letting his mind embrace an obvious fact: one of these days he, too, would be “gone”: a solution to the cash problem. But Lucky did not think along those lines, and he was now filled with nostalgia for Hildegard, that dear doctor. “We are washed in the Blood of the Lamb.” He looked warily over his shoulder at this thought.
After dinner he went for a stroll, stopping at a little arts-and-crafts shop which was open late, precisely for people like Lucky to stop at. Among the hideous Scottish folk jewelry he found a fine piece of carved crystal, a pendant, for Hildegard, for Hildegard. He waited while the bearded young fellow wrapped it up for Hildegard, paid over the price and tucked the little parcel in his breast pocket.
7
All along the shelves under the three windows of Hildegard’s consulting room was placed her collection of miniature cactus plants. It was of such an extreme rarity that Hildegard was quite annoyed when one of her patients innocently presented her with another cactus. It was never of an equal rare status as her own ones, and yet she was obliged to have the new little plant on show at least for a while.
Walker had brought her such a plant; it was good but not quite good enough. She placed it with pleased carefulness on the shelf, quite as if it was of the last rarity.
Hildegard waved Walker to his chair.
“There are two of you,” Hildegard said.
Walker looked put out. “Oh, there has to be two of us,” said Walker. “One who committed the crime and one who didn’t.”
“And which of the two is the real Lucan?”
“I am,” he said. His eyes shifted from the window to the door as if entrapped.
“Well, you’re a liar,” she said.
“I often wonder about that,” said Walker. “After years of being me, it’s difficult, now, to conceive being him. How did you know there was a pretender?”
“A man called Lucky Lucan is one of my clients. He claims to be the seventh Earl.”
“What a sneak, what a rotter!” Walker was really upset. “The seventh Earl is myself.”
“Sneaks and rotters hack children’s nurses to death, you mean?”
“It was a mistake. Nanny Rivett was killed in error.”
“And the hack-and-bash job on Lady Lucan?”
“That was different. She should have died. I was in debt.”
“God, I’d like to turn you over to Interpol,” said Hildegard.
“You won’t do that, Beate Pappenheim. Don’t forget that I’m a professional gambler. I know when the odds are loaded against me. That’s why I’m on the run, that’s why I’m here, in fact. All I am asking for, Beate Pappenheim, is free psychiatric treatment. Nothing more. Just that. Your secret, your blood secret will be safe with me if mine remains safe with you.”
“And Lucky Lucan—my other client?”
“He shouldn’t have come to you at all. He’s a swine.”
“He looks awfully like the original.” Hildegard opened the file she had already placed on her desk in preparation for the interview. “See here,” she said, “Lucan aged thirty-eight on the beach, Lucan in his ermine robes, Lucan in his tennis clothes, Lucan at a dance, and playing cards at the Clermont Club with his notorious friends. And,” she said, “I have also a photo kit of what he should look like now, based on computer-devised photos of his parents at your age, and here’s another police identikit which allows for plastic adaptations to the jawbone and the nose. Look at it. Look.”
“But look at me.”
“You look the same height. Your eyes are spaced convincingly. Your English voice is very probable. Yes, but you don’t convince me. How did you get together with Lucky Lucan?”
“I hired him. There were so many occasions when I was nearly caught, especially when collecting the funds that my friends have put at my disposal, that I thought I would take on a double. He effectively fools my friends when he goes to collect. Strangely enough Lucky, so-called, resembles me when I was in my forties more than he does now. And of course, they hardly want him to linger.”
“And suppose it’s the other way round? My other client is Lucan and you are the hired substitute?”
“No,” said Walker.
“Well, I can’t take you both on as patients.”
“You won’t need to. I’ll deal with Lucky, so-called. People like us know how to deal with people like him.”
These last words of that afternoon’s conversation hovered over Hildegard’s imagination. “People like us know how to deal . . .” Of course Walker had meant to disturb her. She was aware of that. Once before he had said, when she had asked him why he had not taken the simpler course of giving himself up and standing trial for murder, “People like us don’t go to prison.” He was overfull of his aristocratic qualities, as he supposed them to be, and this was what had led Hildegard to assume he was a fake. “People like us know how to deal with people like him.” Perhaps, after all, he was the real Lord Lucan. “People like us know how to deal . . .” Did Lucan have that conviction in mind when he “dealt” with the woman he thought was his wife, when he “dealt” with the knowledge of his blunder that he had killed only the children’s nurse? People like us . . . people like them . . . It was almost melodramatic, but then, as Hildegard told Jean-Pierre that night, the very situation of Lord Lucan and his disappearance had a melodramatic touch. It was this very naive approach to his personal drama that had probably confused the police in the days after the murder. They were looking for upper-class sophistication, but they got nothing but cheap showbiz from Lucan’s friends. Lucan had been drinking heavily, Luc
an was hopelessly in debt. But no, Lucan is a friend of ours, he is one of us and you don’t understand that people like us . . . Lucan had sent letters to a friend while he was still so covered in blood that the stains appeared on the envelope. Lucan had turned up in a panic at a friend’s house that night of the murder, with a bloodstain on his trousers.
Blood. “What I’m afraid of,” Hildegard said when she discussed it with her lover, “is that Walker will murder Lucky. It would be in character.”
“But you say that you believe Lucky to be the real Lucan?”
“There is always a doubt. I could be wrong. But Walker sticks in my mind as an unscrupulous fake.”
Jean-Pierre had been making notes. It was an hour before they would sit down to dinner. Jean-Pierre gave Hildegard her preferred drink, a small quantity of whisky dowsed in water, took one for himself, a dry martini, and got out his notebook. He read:
After twenty-five years of playing the part of the missing Lord Lucan he surely is the part. The operative word is “missing.” If indeed he has been Lord Lucan in an earlier life he had never gone missing before. After the murder he went without money apparently, without decent clothing, without a passport. He just disappeared.
If he was the real Lord Lucan the clandestine life must have meant a loss of innocence—that he had not known he possessed. The spontaneous pleasure, for instance, of just being in Paris, as so many English people experience. The boulevards, the banks of the Seine, the traffic, the bistros, the graffiti on the walls—all lost in the new life of careful watchfulness. The odds would be against him, as he must have known if he was Lucan the professional gambler. The police were active in those early months of his clandestine flight.
And as the years piled up with nothing achieved but his furtive travels in South America, in Africa, in Asia, between intervals of quick, dangerous trips to Scotland and Paris to pick up his old friends’ money, what had he become? Someone untraceable with blood on his hands, in his head, in his memory. Blood . . .