The overcoat referred to by Frances is rarely mentioned in accounts of the case. Gerring does allude to it, but in a confused way. He suggests, according to convenience, that Lucan was wearing it as a protective garment when he committed the attacks, and that he used it to hide his bloody clothing afterwards. Ranson, who dismissed Frances’s statement as much as possible, does not refer to it at all. On the contrary: he wrote, quite specifically, that there was ‘no indication that Lucan had anything other than light, casual clothes’. This sentence, which glides easily over the contention that these clothes were covered in blood, must have come from Veronica’s description. She did not mention a coat. Yet the coat could support her in an important way: it allows the possibility that the clothes beneath it were blood-boltered, and that he did therefore contaminate her with Sandra’s blood (although her shoes remain a difficulty). Did Lucan put on the coat before going upstairs, against the fear of seeing his children: because he was smothered in blood, or because he was bloodied to a lesser degree by innocent transference? Or was he simply wearing the coat anyway, because he had recently entered 46 Lower Belgrave Street from the outside?
Lucan arrived at Grants Hill House in Uckfield, at a time unknown. What happened there is also, mostly, unknown. Susan Maxwell-Scott gave evidence to the inquest, but much of it is clearly uncorroborated.
Her manner was cool and confident as she described to the court how Lucan had called up at her bedroom window and asked if her husband, Ian, was at home. Ordinarily this would not be the case, as Ian spent his weeks in London, but Susan explained this by saying that Ian had told Lucan he would be at Uckfield that particular evening. After she had let Lucan into the house, she gave him ‘a good measure of Scotch’, and listened to his story.
This, then, was the version of the events of 7 November that would form Lucan’s defence at the inquest. It had earlier, and in far less detail, been told to his mother.
According to Susan, Lucan began by saying that ‘he had been through a most nightmarish experience’, which was ‘so incredible he didn’t think anyone would believe him’. She described him as being in a state of shock, ‘but controlled shock’. He had, said Susan, ‘been walking past Veronica’s house on his way home to change for dinner’.
At this point, the coroner interrupted. ‘The word “walking”’, he said, ‘is very important.’ The reference was to the fact that Lucan, on foot, would have had a far better view of 46 Lower Belgrave Street than from his car. This was fundamental to his defence.
‘Well, I am almost certain,’ Susan replied. ‘He could have said he was passing, and I assumed he was walking. I don’t know what my police statement said but that is more likely to be correct.’
‘The statement says walking.’
Ah, well, that would be correct then. He said he saw through the blinds of the basement what looked like a man attacking his wife. He had been saying to me that it was all an unbelievable coincidence and I knew, because he had told me on the previous occasion, that he was in the habit of walking past the house [to check on the children]. He said he let himself in through the front door, to which he had a key, and ran down to the basement. As he entered he slipped in a pool of blood as he got down to the bottom of the stairs. He wasn’t, of course, telling it like a story. It came out in bits and this is my best attempt at a narrative.
The man he had seen attacking his wife ran off. Whether this was on hearing Lord Lucan running down the stairs, probably calling out, or whether it was on seeing Lord Lucan coming into the room, I don’t know, but the man made off. Lord Lucan, perhaps unfortunately, rather than chasing the man, went straight to his wife. He said the man made off. In my imagination it was probably out of the back door. He went to his wife who was covered in blood and very hysterical.
Susan was asked for further details as to what Veronica had said, to which she replied that: ‘She cried out to him that someone had killed the nanny. And then, almost in the same breath, she accused Lord Lucan of having hired the man to kill her, not Sandra. This, Lord Lucan told me, was something she frequently accused him of, having a contract to kill. He claimed she got the idea from an American TV movie.’
After this, Lucan calmed Veronica and took her upstairs. ‘His intention was to get some wet towels to mop up the blood and see how severe her injuries were. Then he was going to telephone for a doctor and for the police. But while he was in the bathroom Lady Lucan left the house. He told me he heard the front door slam and Lady Lucan out in the street screaming “Murder! Murder!”’ This sounds like dramatic licence, although Lucan may have caught the tail-end of Veronica’s exit. Ranson says that he called her name as she fled. That is not how Frances reported it: she heard her father say ‘Veronica, where are you?’, then go up to the third floor (the apparent implication being that he was looking for his wife). He may also have switched on the television in the bedroom, so that the children would not hear anything that might later happen downstairs.
The questioning moved to Susan’s judgment as to Lucan’s state of mind.
My words are that he obviously panicked. He put it another way. He said he felt there he was with all that blood, with the body, a murderer who had got away and with a wife who would almost certainly try to implicate him. He said he was sure she would try to implicate him. After all, she had already accused him of hiring this man. He told me he reckoned no one would believe his story. I did my best to convince him that people would believe him. It was quite incredible that he should have had anything to do with it.
During their talk, Susan suggested to Lucan that Sandra Rivett might, in fact, have been the intended victim of the crime. ‘But Lord Lucan said it wouldn’t be anyone wanting to kill her. He said she was a good kid or a good girl. He told me he’d spoken to the Official Solicitor and said the children had got a nice girl for a nanny, at last. He was very pleased with her.’
Under hostile cross-examination from Brian Watling, representing the police, Susan was asked about her training as a barrister; this was to suggest that she was sharp enough to put over a story. Watling then said:
‘Is it right that Lord Lucan at no time described to you this man he had “seen” attacking his wife?’
‘Not entirely right. Lord Lucan did not see him clearly enough to describe him.’
‘Did he describe him at all?’
‘Yes, he said he was large.’
Watling asked if Lucan had seen the mailsack, to which Susan replied that he had.
‘Did he examine it?’
‘No.’
‘But when Lord Lucan left that house he knew that the nanny had been killed?’
‘Veronica had told him that the nanny had been killed. She told him that the man had killed the nanny and had attacked her. He saw the man attacking his wife, anyway.’
To the coroner, Susan said:
‘I think Lady Lucan indicated to him the nanny in the sack. He described to me the basement area as being horrific, covered in blood and he assumed she was in the sack. I assumed he was squeamish and did not want to look too closely.’ By this account, the group A blood on the sack did not come from Lucan.
The questioning as to whether Lucan had been ‘walking’ past the house, and thus able to see through the window, would be examined again when Kait Lucan gave evidence. It was implied, very strongly, that both Kait and Susan were using the word ‘walking’ in full knowledge of its helpfulness to Lucan.
Graham Forsyth, who met Kait when she arrived at Lower Belgrave Street, had made notes of their conversation, in which she related what had been said on the phone by Lord Lucan. DS Forsyth reported her words to the inquest: ‘He said he was driving past the house, and he saw a fight going on in the basement between a man and Veronica. He went in and joined them.’
This word, ‘driving’, was obviously very damaging.
When Kait herself testified at the inquest, she agreed that DS Forsyth’s report of the conversation was ‘substantially correct’. But ‘her impression’
was that Lucan had said he was passing, not driving past. He had, she said, ‘interrupted a fight in the basement’. How, she was asked, had he seen this fight?
‘He told me he was passing. This didn’t indicate whether he paused and peered in or whether it was so obvious on passing. I know he frequently did go past the house and look at it. It was very near his own flat.’ She also said that he had been muttering incoherently during the conversation. He was ‘in a state of immense shock. As if he’d been knocked for six.’ He said: ‘Oh mother, there was something terrible in the basement. I couldn’t bring myself to look.’
Brian Watling’s cross-examination was, again, highly aggressive. Did Kait know, he asked, that one could be prosecuted for giving a false statement to the police? Yes, she replied calmly, she knew it.
Watling then questioned her about the discrepancies between her police statement and the evidence that she was now giving. Firstly, she had told the police that Lucan had rung her at 10.45pm, whereas she now thought the call had come earlier. Watling’s idea, a slightly twisted one, was that Kait was suggesting that Lucan had had no time to invent a defence before ringing her, and therefore must have spoken the truth. (Against this, Ranson later wrote that ‘within a few minutes of the killing, Lucan had come up with an account that sought to explain away some of the most damning evidence against him’.)
Kait replied: ‘I’m sure the statement must be correct, because that is what I said at the time. But I’m still under the impression that the hour mentioned was unduly late.’
‘Did you also say in your statement that you “had the impression there was a third party present at number 46 during the attack” but that you “couldn’t be exact about this”?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Yet you’ve just told the court that your son “interrupted a fight between Veronica and another man”.’
‘Yes. And when I was asked by the police to repeat the conversation in which he said he had interrupted a fight, I quite unaccountably failed to mention this.’
‘You see, you didn’t say anything in your statement about your son interrupting a fight. You’re just saying that now. At the time you merely said that you “had the impression that someone else was present”.’
‘Look, the words “I interrupted a fight” were his words, and I imagine that, when I made the statement, the impression that there was a third person present was an obvious deduction from the statement that he had interrupted a fight.’
‘Yes, but why didn’t you tell the police that he had interrupted a fight so that it could go in your statement – no deductions, just plain statement?’
‘It is a plain statement, and this is a plain statement. The upshot of the two is the same.’
‘That is a matter for the jury to decide. The point is that you didn’t use in your statement the words which you now tell the jury your son used.’ Watling concluded: ‘I need go no further. The jury have seen this woman for themselves.’ Eastham objected to this astonishing rudeness; staggeringly at odds with the deferential treatment shown to Veronica. In its small, biting way the remark showed, not just the prejudice that now flourished against Lucan and his supporters, but the nose-thumbing liberation with which it was flaunted.
Kait came over badly. Her clipped, steely self-control was inimical to the court. But she was simply not the kind of person to show distress and disorder; she was the kind who, like the queen in the days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, maintains a mask at all costs: showing one’s feelings was not what one did. It was an attitude that the times no longer admired. The fact that Kait would have been dying inside was not intuited. She would not have wanted it to be; but her determined resilience did her a disservice, and her son an even greater one. Nor did Susan Maxwell-Scott convey at all the impression that she sought to do, with her nerveless, smiling delivery, her faintly disdainful repetition of the word ‘hysterical’ to describe Veronica’s behaviour. These, it seemed, were cold people.
By implication, they were also liars, so blind to everybody outside their own class that they were prepared to take the side of a demonic aristocrat against two grotesquely assaulted women. The story related by Kait and Susan, that Lucan had ‘interrupted’ a fight in the basement, was damaged by the police testimony. Equally powerfully, however, it was discredited by antagonism in the court.
It was not, anyway, a very good story. Graham Forsyth told the inquest what was indeed the truth, that from a car it was utterly impossible to see into the basement of 46 Lower Belgrave Street. Roy Ranson later confirmed this. However David Gerring, the final inquest witness, stated that even if a person was walking past the house, it would not be possible to see the site of the attack. He had done experiments with another officer. All that could be glimpsed, if one crouched down outside the window, was a pair of feet. With no light in the basement, one could not even see that. Actually the picture conjured of a coal-hole under the stairs was not entirely accurate. ‘It was never that dark in the basement,’ says the former nanny Pierrette Goletto. ‘There was a street lamp right outside’: as indeed there is, directly opposite number 46. The newspaper account of Sergeant Baker’s evidence, in which he was reported to have ‘found a light switch’ in the basement, was probably mistaken; but it does raise the very faint possibility that there was another working light source.
It is not easy to see into the basement at Lower Belgrave Street, because it is not set back very far from the pavement. It is almost flush with the street. Nevertheless one can see a little more than was implied: the sink at the window, some of the room behind, the bottom of the staircase. Veronica herself later said: ‘The police said this was not possible, but actually if the blinds weren’t drawn properly you could see in.’14 That is why the small quantity of group A blood found in the basement was significant. It rendered just conceivable the notion that an attack had been launched there upon Veronica, and had continued as she ran up to the ground floor. Hence the absolute insistence by the police that Veronica had never been in the basement that night. This was necessary, to discredit Lucan. ‘There was no sign of a fight in the basement,’ David Gerring told the inquest: he meant that Lucan’s story was a lie, although he himself was eliding the facts. There was a great deal of evidence of a fight in the basement, albeit very little to say that this fight had been with Veronica.
If Lucan had indeed ‘interrupted’ a fight, then, as Kait said, the obvious deduction was that a third party had been present. Gerring was questioned about this by Brian Watling. There was, he said, no sign of forced entry at Lower Belgrave Street, and no evidence that anybody had a key except the Lucans.
‘And have you been able to trace any third person who might have been in the house that night?’
‘None whatsoever, sir.’
‘Have you made very extensive efforts to do so?’
‘Very extensive, including inquiries in the area and forensic work across the whole of Belgravia.’
Watling concluded with an insidious lawyerly thrust. ‘How long’, he asked, ‘have you been a police officer, Mr Gerring?’
‘Over twenty years, sir.’
And who could argue with that, except the lunatical upper classes? Later Roy Ranson would return to the story proffered by Lord Lucan. There was, Ranson said, no forensic evidence to suggest the presence of another person at 46 Lower Belgrave Street. Nobody in Belgravia had seen ‘this large and blood-stained man’ (they didn’t see Lucan either, but that was by the by). There was nothing to say how the man had entered or left the house; he could not have exited by the front door (in fact there is no reason why he could not have done just that), nor through the garden (it was true that the wall is high; nevertheless there was the evidence of the blood found on leaves, and the inexplicably unlocked back door). But the clincher was that Veronica ‘saw no other person in the house except her husband’. That was what she had said, and therefore, for Ranson, the matter was at an end.
Lucan could not deny havin
g been at the house, because his daughter had seen him. But if he had given another, innocent reason for entering the property, there was a chance that he would have been believed. It would simply have been his word against Veronica’s. As it was, his word was wholly compromised. His defenders, including Michael Eastham, were stuck with a story of the grossest implausibility. Once again, Lord Lucan had brought his fate upon himself.
At about 12.15am Lucan asked Susan Maxwell-Scott if he might ring his mother. She offered to leave the drawing-room, but he said there was no need. During this second call he sounded less bouleversé; ‘more on all fours’, as Kait told the inquest in the alien, upper-class idiom of all Lucan’s supporters. (‘If they sometimes sounded like characters from a play by Coward,’ it was said, ‘that was because the playwright had modelled his dialogue on theirs.’15) Later Kait would speak of her lasting regret that she did not force him to speak to the policeman in her flat. It is a mystery, incidentally, why no attempt was made to trace the call.
Susan’s recollection of the conversation was essentially the same as Kait’s, although she remembered Lucan saying: ‘Has Veronica turned up?’ He then tried to ring Bill Shand Kydd, as Kait had done earlier without success (‘I was told that he was not available,’ she said to the inquest. ‘This was a mistake’). Again Bill did not hear the telephone.16 It is possible that Lucan made other calls, but this is unknown. ‘After that’, said Susan, ‘he asked if he could borrow some notepaper.’
Lucan wrote at least two letters, probably seated at the beautiful Georgian table in the Maxwell-Scott drawing-room, with its inkwells and letter rack; the sort of table he had used all his life. Both letters were to Bill Shand Kydd. They were received on Saturday 9 November, postmarked Uckfield.
The first letter was written on two pages in Lucan’s slanting, public-schoolboy hand. It reiterated the story told to both Susan and his mother.
A Different Class of Murder Page 26