I attribute death to blunt head injuries, inhalation of blood, and it was this that had made it clear that no further gain of consciousness had followed.
The police later stated that a light bulb, belonging to the socket at the bottom of the stairs, had been removed and placed on a chair. During the inquest into Sandra’s death, a newspaper quoted Sergeant Baker as saying that, when he returned to the basement, he ‘found a light switch’ and ‘switched the light on’;4 this may have referred to a different bulb, or have been reported in error. Certainly when the police first entered the basement the only light was a small red glow from a kettle in the kitchen, and the dusky stream that came in, through the slightly open slats of the blind above the sink, from the street lamp directly opposite the house. The outer door, at the bottom of the steps leading from the basement up to the pavement, was locked. The back door at the rear of the basement was unlocked. It led to a small garden, which contained some carved stone heads and was surrounded by a high wall. Sandra’s blood was later found on some of the ivy leaves in the garden.
It was one o’clock in the morning of 8 November when Detective Chief-Superintendent Roy Ranson first arrived at 46 Lower Belgrave Street. He had been telephoned at midnight at his house in Kent by David Gerring, the detective chief-inspector who was head of CID at Gerald Road. This charmingly homely police station, now no longer in use, stood in the middle of Belgravia; a white house like all the rest, except for the blue lamp that hung outside in place of the usual black carriage-lights. Inside the station were copies of Debrett’s, Burke’s Peerage and the Almanack de Gotha. Close by was the Duke of Wellington pub, ‘the Boots’, where the police spent much of their time (‘they loved us, we loved them,’ says Graham Forsyth) and would soon be drinking regularly with a mass of journalists. Some of the favoured press members would gain an entrée to Ranson and Gerring’s inner sanctum, complete with bottle of whisky. ‘We used the press, they used us. Two-way traffic. The media can be very useful.’ Over the weeks that followed, as Lucan’s disappearance became a running story in the newspapers, ‘Roy and Dave took opposing views,’ says Forsyth. ‘One said he’s dead, the other said he’s alive. That was deliberate. To keep the story alive.’ In June 1975, when Lucan was reported as having been seen in Cherbourg, the entire story was a police construct. ‘What we needed was a sighting. We’d ring them all up and say: this is on. So the world and his wife go to France...’
When Ranson arrived at the house, Graham Forsyth had already gone in preliminary search of Lucan. ‘My interest was: where is this jerk? He’s giving me a headache.’ Forsyth broke in to the Eaton Row mews through the upstairs window, and found some of the lights switched on. He also visited Elizabeth Street, where two constables would subsequently be stationed. The flat was sparsely furnished, unlived-in: it contained a piano, Lucan’s ermine robes, alcohol and a large number of unopened bills. Laid out on the bed were a suit, shirt and tie, some loose change, a wallet, and the keys to the Mercedes. Lucan’s passport was also in the flat.
At Lower Belgrave Street, Veronica’s bedroom had been examined: the light beside her bed was the only one left burning in the house. A blood-stained towel was found spread on a pillow. Upstairs, the uniformed officers had found George and Camilla asleep and Frances standing beside her bed. A television was playing loudly in the nursery.
At about 11pm, Kait Lucan arrived at the house. (‘Out of the blue appears Mummy,’ says Forsyth.) A little earlier Lucan had telephoned Kait’s flat in St John’s Wood, where she had care of the old family nanny Flora Coles, and asked her to collect the children. Forsyth made notes of Kait’s account of this conversation, some of which would later be disputed at the inquest. One phrase remained constant, however. Lucan had said to his mother: ‘There has been a terrible catastrophe at number 46.’ ‘I loved that word!’ says Forsyth. ‘Catastrophe.’
Kait then returned to her flat with the children, accompanied by PC Beddick. ‘I said, stick with her and see if he rings.’ Lucan did indeed ring his mother again. Kait relayed their conversation to the inquest:
He said, have you got the children? I said yes, they’re here in bed, and to the best of my knowledge and belief they’re asleep. He said, that’s all right, then. I said, what do you intend to do? I got nowhere. I also said, the police are here. Do you want to speak to them? He hesitated and then said no, I don’t think I’ll speak to them now. Tell them I’ll phone them in the morning, and I’ll phone you too. Then he rang off.
David Gerring later wrote that Beddick should have ‘snatched the phone’ away from Kait. He implied that the PC was frozen into immobility by a kind of deference. ‘You had to genuflect to her,’ says Graham Forsyth. Already, in the first hours of the investigation, it was clear that this case would be defined by class: by a sense of the invisible barriers that were erected around Lucan and his world, and by the police hackles that were raised in reaction.
As Ranson arrived at Lower Belgrave Street, Gerring returned to Gerald Road, where dedicated phone lines were being installed for the investigation. The news agencies, which monitored police radio frequencies, were by now aware that something wildly out of the ordinary was going on. Soon the press would begin to gather in the drizzle outside the house. On 9 November the national newspapers, whose first stories were of approximate but general accuracy, also carried this statement from Scotland Yard: ‘We are treating this case as one of murder and attempted murder and we feel that Lord Lucan should be told of the details as soon as possible. We are anxious to interview him.’
At around 2am, Ranson and Gerring went for the first time to see Veronica in hospital. She was a pitiable sight, tiny and frail, her head black with stitches. Ranson asked: ‘Does that hurt very much?’ She nodded. She asked if the children were all right. Then she said: ‘Have you found him?’ Asked if she had any idea where Lucan might be, her reply was characteristically dry: ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’5
The first interview was informal and necessarily brief. ‘It was obvious she’d taken a sedative because of her injuries,’ Gerring would later tell the inquest. ‘She looked as if she’d taken drugs.’ On the evening of 8 November, at about 6pm, the two policemen returned to the hospital, where Veronica made a verbal statement. ‘Her understanding was extremely good. I left Sergeant Forsyth to take the written statement. The written statement was remarkably close to the verbal statement.’
Quite understandably, the police felt a great and instant sympathy for Veronica, and this never wavered. Graham Forsyth, who would soon become her de facto bodyguard, and was described as ‘the only one who could handle her’,6 felt not just compassion but respect for her spirit. ‘I’ve got admiration for people who take kicks and stand up for themselves. Some people might lay down and die – but she didn’t.’ Her statement to him was twenty pages of longhand, nine sheets of typed foolscap. She was, wrote Gerring, ‘a highly convincing witness’. According to Ranson, she ‘never varied from the essential facts of her account of that night – to my mind a clear indication that she had told the plain, unvarnished truth’.
What Veronica told the police, and later the inquest, was as follows.
Until 8.30pm on the evening of 7 November, she had been watching television in her bedroom with the children and with Sandra Rivett. At about 8.55pm Sandra, who had gone upstairs to the third floor and had put the two younger children to bed, came down and asked Veronica if she would like some tea. ‘I had the habit of getting myself a cup of tea at that time, I had been doing this since our separation, but it wasn’t a very usual thing for her to put her head round the door.’
As Sandra went downstairs, Veronica remained on the bed with her daughter Frances, and began to watch the nine o’clock news on BBC1. Although Sandra was later found close to some smashed crockery, Veronica said that she did not recall her taking any cups downstairs. ‘She may have had them in her own room.’
At about 9.15, having heard nothing amiss, Veronica began to wonder about the tea. She wen
t down to the ground floor and looked towards the basement. There was no light on. At the inquest she was asked whether one could use a two-way switch, at both the top and bottom of the staircase, to turn on the basement light: ‘I believe you can, it may be possible.’ Veronica did not try the light switch, as it seemed obvious that Sandra could not be making tea in the dark. She did, however, call her name.
As she did so she heard a noise. ‘Just a noise of somebody, or something, in the downstairs cloakroom.’ The cloakroom was situated at the rear of the ground floor. In front of it was an ante-room, or half-landing, with a low ceiling of six feet six inches. Four steps led from it to the head of the basement staircase, where Veronica was standing, with the door to the basement secured back against the wall. ‘I walked towards the sound, or at any rate moved towards it,’ she said. ‘Somebody rushed out and hit me on the head.’
She recalled ‘about four’ blows. The assailant did not speak, although after a moment Veronica screamed. ‘The person said: shut up.’ The voice was instantly recognizable. ‘It was my husband.’
Lucan then ‘thrust three gloved fingers down my throat and we started to fight’. He also attempted to strangle her and to gouge out her eyes. The pair grappled on the floor of the ante-room, where Lucan continued trying to throttle her. ‘We fell into the basement doorway and on to the stairs,’ she said. A metal support on the balustrade was dislodged. According to the police, Veronica bit her husband. At the inquest, in reply to a question from her counsel, she explained how she had finally brought the assault to an end. She managed to sit up between Lucan’s legs and grab his testicles. ‘He desisted, yes.’
There was a suggestion that her counsel, in asking this question, was seeking to clarify how Veronica had survived injuries similar to those that had killed Sandra Rivett (who was described as having a ‘particularly thin skull’). Veronica’s own explanation was: ‘Good breeding.’
As the attack ended, Veronica asked if she could have some water, and Lucan escorted her to the cloakroom, in darkness, where she drank: only hot water was available. They returned to the ante-room staircase. At the inquest Veronica was not asked about any conversation that took place at this point: as Lucan’s wife she was unable to give evidence about the murder of Sandra Rivett, only about the assault upon herself, and this set stringent limits upon the questioning. To the police, however, she did offer more information. As soon as she was able, Veronica asked where Sandra was. At first Lucan said that she had gone out. Then, in Ranson’s words: ‘Standing on the staircase Lucan confessed to his wife that he had killed the nanny.’ He also told her that he had done this in error, and that she, Veronica, had been his intended victim. Later it would be said that the inquest had been favourable to Lucan, as well as to Veronica, in keeping this evidence from the jury.
In Veronica’s account, no timing was given for how long the couple spent in the ante-room, but at some point Lucan agreed that they should go to the bedroom and inspect Veronica’s injuries. They went up to the second floor, Veronica leading the way; perhaps a little surprisingly. In the bedroom they found Frances still watching television. She was sent upstairs, according to her own statement by her mother, and the set was switched off. To the police, Veronica said that she ran into the en suite bathroom so that Frances should not see her. To the inquest she gave a slightly different sequence of events. ‘We went together into the bedroom, before I lay on the bed, and together we looked at my injuries. After we had done that, I think I said I didn’t feel very well, and he laid a towel on the bed, and I got on it.’ According to Ranson, Veronica suggested to Lucan that he stay and look after her for a few days until her bruises had gone; this, presumably, was intended as a ruse to lure him into the belief that she would not give him away. At the inquest, again, nothing was asked about any conversation between the couple. Instead Veronica told the coroner: ‘Very vaguely I understood that he was going to get a cloth to clean up my face.’ Lucan went into the bathroom. ‘I heard the taps running and I jumped to my feet and ran out of the room and down the stairs.’
According to the barman at the Plumbers Arms, it was 9.50pm when Veronica entered the pub. This, by her account, was some half an hour after Lucan’s assault on her had begun.
‘You have no doubt that it was he?’ asked the coroner at the inquest. She said: ‘No doubt at all.’
Veronica then described her husband’s clothes. ‘He was wearing a sweater of sorts, no tie and grey flannel trousers. That’s the best I can do.’ The trousers would appear to have corresponded with fibres found at various sites in the house, and possibly with the fabric impression on the stair wall, although obviously no test was possible. Veronica also said that Lucan had worn gloves during the attack, which were removed at some unspecified point.
At the end of her evidence, the coroner asked if Veronica had seen anybody else during the course of the struggle.
‘Did anybody brush past you? Did you hear sounds?’
‘I saw nobody else.’
‘Nor at any time during the evening?’
‘Nor at any time during the evening.’
‘I am going to ask my officer to reiterate your evidence. Is there anything you wish to alter?’
‘No, there is nothing.’
Lucan’s own account, which emerged at the inquest through the testimony of others, was entirely different from that of his wife. It was a proclamation of innocence. His word against hers: as always. It is beyond doubt, however, that he was at Lower Belgrave Street that night, as he was seen by his ten-year-old daughter Frances.
Veronica’s account was, as Roy Ranson put it, ‘broadly confirmed’ by the forensic evidence at 46 Lower Belgrave Street. The area at the head of the basement stairs was sloshed and sprayed with her A group blood. The carpet of the four ante-room steps was stained with blood. On the wall to the left of the ante-room was a radiating pattern of blood, said at the inquest to have been caused by strikes on an already open wound. The blood had flicked off sideways, as had a piece of Veronica’s hair. Repeated strikes had also created a necklace pattern on the ante-room ceiling and its lampshade, and on the cloakroom door behind. This blood was said to have been ‘trajected backwards’. There was extensive bleeding found on the wall near the top of the staircase, and some on the basement door, as well as some hair. There was also a small amount of blood on the wall beside the third step down. Inside the cloakroom, more hair was in the basin, as well as a mixture of A and B group blood. The hair also tested positive for both A and B groups, A being dominant.
There was a further mixture of A and B group blood in the basement. A small drop of A group blood was found on the kitchen floor, alongside a drop from B group. On the sack containing Sandra’s body, from which six blood samples were taken, two were found to contain a combination of A and B group. In all, six instances of non-B group blood were found in the basement at Lower Belgrave Street, including a droplet of A group on a work surface at the front of the kitchen. There was also a mix of blood on Veronica’s clothes. It was mostly A: heavy bleeding on the neck and sleeves of her jumper, heavy on the right shoulder of her pinafore dress, light on her tights. More A group was found on her skirt. At the back of the skirt was some B group blood, and an AB mixture. There was B group on her shoes.
At the inquest Dr Margaret Pereira, senior scientific officer in Biology Division at Scotland Yard and described by Ranson as ‘first rate’, stated: ‘In my opinion, Lady Lucan was battered on the stairs by an attacker standing in the ante-room.’ Michael Eastham, for the Lucan family, asked the doctor about the anomaly of the blood on Veronica’s shoes. How, he said, could this have happened? Dr Pereira thought that Veronica might have gone into the basement, something that she herself strenuously denied. ‘That’, said the doctor, ‘is a likely explanation for the Group B blood on her shoes.’ Straightaway the coroner intervened. He asked if an alternative possibility was that the blood had come from her struggle with the attacker. ‘Yes, if Lord Lucan had been covered in
Sandra Rivett’s blood.’
Michael Eastham then asked which was the more likely explanation of the two.
‘It’s a difficult question. Perhaps if I could have the shoes…’
Dr Pereira examined them. Then she said: ‘No, I can’t tell. The blood staining could have come from either source.’ Roy Ranson’s own explanation for the incidence of B group blood on Veronica’s shoes and clothes was that ‘Lucan’s clothing would undoubtedly by that stage have been soaked in the dead nanny’s blood’.
The doctor was also asked by Eastham about the A group blood found on the mailsack. For this she had no easy explanation, other than that the sack had brushed against the wall at the top of the stairs when it was carried from the basement. (Dr Pereira did not examine the sack in situ, but at Scotland Yard on the morning of the 8th.)
Surely, said Eastham, the blood would have dried by the time the sack was removed? The reply was that ‘blood is still capable of making smears if it is clotted or not. It’s difficult to say how long blood remains wet. It could take a few minutes or a few hours to dry.’
A press photographer would later say that the mailsack had been wrapped in polythene sheeting when it was taken from the house. If it was covered after it was brought up to the ground floor, then Dr Pereira’s theory becomes a possibility. Roy Ranson’s own account, which does not mention the polythene, describes the sack as having been hard to manoeuvre up the stairs; contact with the stair wall, went the implication, was almost impossible to avoid.
The presence of blood was fact. The deductions from its presence should therefore lead to truth. The women who were attacked had two different blood groups, and the significance lies in the presence of those groups where they should not have been. Why was blood group A found in the basement and on the mailsack? Why was blood group B found on Veronica’s clothes? Did the presence of A and B groups in various sites imply a mixture of blood from the two women, or from a third party whose blood group was AB?
A Different Class of Murder Page 24