by Muriel Spark
He detested his wife. She had defeated his lawsuit for the custody of his children, leaving him with a large legal debt and the mortification of being exposed by her as a sexual sadist, a wife-caner. In his eyes, his wife, Veronica, was expendable.
It was, according to the testimony, early in October 1974 that he actually told a friend of his decision to murder his wife, and of his carefully planned precautions. “I would never be caught,” he told his friend (according to Chief Superintendent Ranson who conducted the investigation into the crime).
Twenty years later Ranson wrote, “I believe that, rather than the much-quoted love of his children, it is his lack of money, all of it lost through uncontrollable gambling, that provides the key to this case.”
“I believe,” Hildegard had noted, “that this is very much to the point, if not altogether true. Another motive is spite.”
“Walker,” Hildegard has also put in her notes, “could be a hit man hired by Lucan, and Lucky is Lucan himself. Or it could be the other way round. But the evidence is all against this theory.”
Lucky, by Walker’s account, genuinely needed treatment by a psychiatrist. Not long after Walker started consulting Hildegard he had said, “I hear voices.”
By this he probably meant that Lucky “heard” voices, and equally he was covering the personage of Lord Lucan for a possible confrontation with the law. Establish the “voices” and Lucan could be found not fit to plead.
But was he fit to plead? Lucky, more so than Walker, Hildegard felt. But there was no doubt that in the weeks before the murder a certain madness had set in. “Uncontrollable gambling,” as the worthy policeman had cited as the main cause of his action, was in itself only a symptom. His hatred of his wife had been an obsession aggravated by the continual dunning letters from the banks to which he owed money.
Hildegard turned the pages of the Detective Superintendent’s account. A year before the murder, letters from the bank managers were moving in on Lucan daily. These letters sounded like the phrases of a popular music-hall song:
23rd October, 1973
Dear Lord Lucan,
I am extremely disappointed that I cannot trace a reply from you to my letter of the 10th October regarding the borrowing on your account . . .
And in December 1973, as his thirty-ninth birthday approached:
Dear Lord Lucan,
You will know from my recent letters how disappointed I am that you have not been in touch before this to let me know what arrangements are being made to adjust your overdraft here . . .
Lucan put the family silver up for auction at Christie’s. He took recourse to money lenders. Where, demanded Hildegard, did he say good-bye to reality? That he did just that is the only certainty in the case. For even if his plan had come off, even if he had succeeded in killing his wife and not the nanny, he could not have escaped detection. Was it the approach of his fortieth birthday combined with the shock of being a failure in life, irretrievably on the point of bankruptcy, that had removed him from reality? In the second half of the twentieth century, in any case, an inherited earldom was not very real. While it was a social fact, it did not relate to any other social fact of significance, especially in his case where there was little family property, no house with its land, no money. In reality, he belonged to a middle-class environment with upper-class claims in his conscious mind.
“He should have had a trade, a profession,” Hildegard said to herself. “The calling of a gambler is madness. Being an earl, full stop, is madness. Yes, he needed the help of a psychiatrist. He still needs one. He needs me.”
Hildegard’s notebooks were based on the published facts in the first place, and what Lucky had told her in the second.
Lucan had been married eleven years when the murder of the nanny and the savage attack on his wife took place that night at Lower Belgrave Street. He was separated from his wife. He had lost custody of his children. One way and another he had lost his mind. The jury at the dead girl’s inquest pronounced her cause of death as “Murder by Lord Lucan.” This was not itself a trial verdict, but it is impossible to conceive any other jury, on the known evidence, failing to convict him of murder. It is difficult to believe that his friends and family objectively believed his innocence, on the basis of the facts. To protest his innocence in public was the easiest thing he could have done. He had only to step forward and present his case. Surely there would have been some factors in his favor unknown to the investigators if he had not committed the crimes. His wife, covered with blood, had escaped to the nearest pub, from where she was taken to the hospital with head injuries. They were inflicted, she said, by Lord Lucan, and the police believed her. They had every reason, with so much corroborative evidence, to believe her.
If Hildegard had only read about Lucan, and never met the probable man himself, she would have assumed that he was, like many obsessive gamblers, block-stupid.
The Lucky Lucan she knew, the Walker-Lucan she knew, were not stupid. Lucan’s mind must anyway have been sharpened by constant evasion. Hildegard was conscious that Lucky Lucan, however, had a mental problem. Walker, to her, was probably a plain criminal. She remembered Lucan’s loud laugh when he had made one of his jocular remarks. It was a laugh that filled the whole room. At her little jokes he merely gave a smile as if he were anxious about a waste of his time. Although he wore a smile, Walker seldom laughed, and if he did, it was a short, sharp, cynical “huh.”
Walker had said he “heard” voices.
What did they say?
“That Lucky is plotting to kill me.”
“But you didn’t believe the voices, or you would not have come to consult me.”
“In fact there was only one voice.”
“Male or female?”
“A female voice. I think it was the murdered girl, Sandra Rivett, who spoke.”
In the margin of the page where she had transcribed her recording of this interview, Hildegard had noted: “It is possible there is no ‘voice.’ It is poss. that Walker intends to kill Lucky and is establishing a coverup of insanity in case he is caught. It is possible—but anything is poss.”
Hildegard added: “Who is supporting these men? Who aided Lucan in the first place? Who aids and abets him now? He has friends somewhere.”
In the matter of the seventh Lord Lucan’s disappearance the public was more mystified than outraged. The more he was described, and his way of life outlined, by his friends, the less he was understood. The case of the seventh Earl is only secondarily one of an evasion of justice, it is primarily that of a mystery. And it is not only the questions of how did he get away, where did he go, how has he been living, is he in fact alive? The mystery is even more in the question of what was he like, how did he feel, what went on in his mind that led him to believe he could get away with his plan? What detective stories had he been reading? What dreamlike, immature culture was he influenced by? For, surely, he had thought his plan to kill his wife was watertight. Whereas, even if the nanny had taken her night off, even if he had murdered the countess, the plot leaked at every seam as truly as did the blood-oozing mailbag into which the body of Sandra Rivett was packed.
12
As Hildegard knew from her own experience as a stigmatic fraud, blood, once let loose, gets all over the place. It sticks, it flows, it garishly advertises itself or accumulates in dark thick puddles. Once it gets going, there is no stopping blood.
It was a description by Lucky, finally, of the blood all over his trousers, of the blood oozing from the mailbag, that had inclined Hildegard to believe that he was indeed the Lucan who was wanted for homicide. Walker, on the other hand, was reluctant to describe the murder. He had now told Hildegard that, yes, he had “performed the deed,” and he had even gone into some of the already well-publicized details. Walker sometimes sounded like a printed column out of a tabloid Sunday edition. “I thought it convenient at that stage to rid myself of a wife that I had come to loathe. She had custody of my children. A ridiculous mem
ber of your profession, Dr. Wolf, gave evidence in her favor in a court of law. I lost my children. I was allowed to see them twice a month—imagine! I could have sold the house at Lower Belgrave Street to pay off some of my debts. She was evil, she was mad, but the court would not recognize it.”
“Tell me about the murder.”
“Oh, I suppose it was a murder like any other murder.”
Perhaps these were the words of a hit man. Perhaps and maybe. But, Hildegard noted, they were hardly a killer’s words. And yet, their coldness might fit in with the Lucan known to the public, his mad-cold calculative mind.
But behind it all, at this stage, was blackmail. Blackmail between Lucan and Walker, with Walker the probable blackmailer, and now blackmail of herself: they needed money. What else did they need? Probably a psychiatrist’s counseling and comfort?—Yes, probably that, too. And perhaps a sympathetic psychiatrist to testify in the event of a court case.
The last witness to see Lucan after the murder gave evidence at the inquest on the death of Sandra Rivett that Lucan had told her how an unknown intruder had attacked his wife and presumably killed the nanny, he himself having passed the house by chance and intervened. According to the witness, she had the impression that he “felt rather squeamish about the blood and did not want to look too closely at the sack.”
All right, Lucky was squeamish. Hildegard’s story, also dripping in blood, had evidently given him further reason for his squeams. “You covered your hands, side and feet with your menstrual blood, Dr. Wolf.” He had found the courage to come out with that statement, squeamish or not. He had said it in an almost confidential way: we’re both in this blood-business together, he seemed to say. Walker, however, had merely referred to “Your past, Hildegard Wolf, or should I say Beate Pappenheim?”
When Lucky had first walked into her office, Hildegard was immediately taken with his resemblance to her prior Lucan patient, Walker. They were not indistinguishable, but they might have been brothers. And certainly, both were white-haired, aging photos of the thirty-nine-year-old Lucan which looked out of the pages of the quantity of books and press articles written about him from year to year since his disappearance in 1974. Was the real Lucan dead, as numerous people claimed? If he wasn’t, how did he materially survive? Walker himself had never claimed that he presented himself to Lucan’s friends. It was usually Lucky who periodically collected sums of money, deposited at certain places, with certain people, by rich friends. Friends—how could they be deceived if they had once known Lucan? “Easy,” Walker had explained. “They expect Lucan to have undergone surgical modifications to his features. They are right. Your other Lucan patient is a fraud, Dr. Wolf. He also goes collecting, as you can imagine.”
“But you work together.”
“Of course. If one of us were caught, it would always be the other, the absent Lucan who would be the real one.”
“And your voices? Don’t your friends suspect from the voice?”
“Lucan is known to be musical. We have coordinated our voices. Besides, people might assume that voices change.”
Years ago, there had been an arrest. Lucan is found in Australia! Indeed the suspect turned out to be a very-much-wanted missing man; but he wasn’t Lucan. And as far as Hildegard was concerned, neither, as yet, were quite proved to be either Walker or Lucky. She had a naturally objective set of wits. The men were each, to her, “a mere anatomy, a mountebank . . . a living-dead man,” as Shakespeare had put it long ago.
In manners, in speech, Hildegard had written, both Lucky and Walker could have based themselves on the Lucan of the historical case. Their methods of copying would have been fairly easy for the reason that Lucan himself had been a perfect bore, a cut-to-measure gentleman with a pack of memories very, very like that of many another man of his class and education. He does not appear to have had one original idea, ever, beyond that of attempting and planning to murder his wife. He was extremely average of mind. He could have been anybody. With a smattering of information about the past life and schooling of a man like Lucan, given the height and shape, it would not have been difficult to assume a personality that would convince his acquaintances of his identity. Oh, Lucan, Lucan, you hot potato.
The rain had stopped. Hildegard put away her notes. She felt a great longing for Jean-Pierre and regretted not being connected even by e-mail. Surely he would be looking for her, might even find her. But she didn’t trust his tact in evading the Lucans. Jean-Pierre lacked duplicity whereas they were altogether a double proposition. Sooner or later she would phone him.
13
Walker had a very fixed idea of what a gentleman should be. He had studied Lucky Lucan diligently for ten of the years since Lucan had been a wanted man on the loose. He had got most of his ideas about a hundred years out of date, as were the convictions and attitudes of Lucan himself, for Lucan’s conceptions of a gentleman were greatly distorted. This had been noted by his fellow guardsmen in the Coldstream regiment, where Lucan played the Earl from start to finish, outdoing the other earls in the practice of earldom.
Walker’s notion of a gentleman was further distorted by the reality of Lucan’s character. Lucan was, in fact, bent, a natural felon, a failed person. He was self-centered as a man, self-occupied as a nobleman; the mask of the upstart, strangely, was Lord Lucan’s favorite mode of self-expression. “Virtue and honor”: his family specifically claimed that these were guiding features of their fugitive kinsman. However, they were obviously not remotely attributes of his; they were the facade which Walker in his role of freelance gentleman had assiduously copied and assumed. Yes, he was now ideally Lucan’s doppelgänger, his other self.
Walker’s physical resemblance to Lucan had grown over those years since they had met in Mexico. Its initial advantage was the two men’s precisely identical height of six-foot-plus and the curious melonlike shape of their heads. Lucan’s head was described by an acquaintance as “bony,” and so was Walker’s. Their dark coloring had been more or less the same. Only their separate features had differed. This had been attended to gradually in the more recent years by plastic surgery, so that it was now difficult to tell the two men apart.
Lucan, however, had a certain charm, not a great deal of it, but enough to be all the more charming. Walker had none and was always at a loss how to achieve it; was transparent, which at times was in itself quite appealing. Where they resembled each other most in character was in their aptitude for cold indifference; on that level they never failed to be in harmony.
Walker had come to Lucan’s notice on a ranch in Mexico, one of Lucan’s many places of refuge in the years following his disappearance. His host had been a small spare man, nut-brown, a horse-racing old-time friend; the hostess had been a film star, now retired into a life of retaining her wonderful looks day by day, and keeping her clothes, which she changed frequently, fresh and ironed all the time.
“It’s remarkable,” she said, “how much Walker resembles you. I thought he was you last night when he walked across the lawn to the house.”
“So strange,” said the host, “I thought so too.”
After two months it was nearly time for Lucan to move on to his next aiders and abetters.
“I will give you Walker,” said the kindly Mexican. “You may take Walker with you. He’ll come in useful.”
Walker was a butler-keeper and head groom (for the establishment was constituted on hierarchical lines).
“I don’t know,” said his wife, “if I can manage without Walker.”
“I give him to Lucan,” said the man, very casually, as if he was presenting the Earl with a silver dish.
“What should I do with him?” said Lucan the comparative blockhead.
“You can use him a thousand ways,” said the all-knowing, all-experienced host. “He could be arrested in your place, if necessary. You must train him up a bit, make him more your double, teach him your voice.”
“He is very intelligent,” said the wife.
“
If he was very intelligent,” said the sage brown fellow, “he wouldn’t be working for us. However he will do as I say. Besides,” he said wearily, “I will of course make it worth his while. I give him to Lucan. Get his chin modified, Lucan, and his nose straightened a bit. He’s the very image.”
That had been ten years ago. Walker had not needed to make frequent trips to Mexico to collect his former employer’s bounty. Unlike Lucan, he was safe with bank transfers. As Walker, no one was looking for him, although as Lucan he had several times fallen under suspicion. As Lucan he had been “sighted” on the beaches of the world, in cafés. He had been a temporary secretary of a sports club in Sydney, and sighted there. He had been a riding instructor at a school at Lausanne, from where he had to flee from a “sighting.” Interpol never caught up with him, and if they had, he was, after all, Walker, with Walker’s passport, Walker’s birth certificate, Walker’s own blood group. Lucan, meanwhile, was always elsewhere, in and out of jobs, or lounging in hotel gardens. He painfully avoided the casinos, where he knew he would be looked for.
The Mexican was not his only patron, but he was the richest. When he died in 1998, Lucan was left with only two firm friends of the past, the actress-wife having cut off Walker’s allowance and Lucan’s handout without explanation. Walker and Lucan went to Paris.
Lucan was always anxious about Walker’s voice. Walker had adopted the slightly plummy full-fruited accents of Lucan’s speech, but still it was not quite right. Lucan knew that although Walker’s looks could pass for a twenty-year-later Lucan with his old friends, the voice, perhaps, could not. So far, he preferred to go “collecting” by himself.
But money was getting short for both of them. Walker made it plain to Lucan that they were not, ever, to separate. By the time they hit on Hildegard and her past, they needed her more for genuine psychiatric help than for what she could yield through blackmail.