This second length of piping was an apparently conclusive find. It was not exactly necessary to the police case, although, as was later said, ‘without the twin bludgeon, none of the evidence would have been enough in itself to contradict [Lucan’s] story’.20 The police had their man, and now they had an incontrovertible piece of proof. Nevertheless there is something strange about it. Why would Lucan have cut two weapons with his hacksaw, and why then use the smaller of the two, given that the heavier pipe would have done the job far more efficiently?
A subsidiary question is where he prepared these weapons. Not Belgravia, one imagines. Graham Forsyth was sent to find the possible source of the piping, a task that included a profitless search of the vicarage at Guilsborough, home to Lucan’s sister Sally. The Lucan children had gone to stay at the house on 9 November, and Frances and George had been quickly enrolled at the village school.
‘It was Sally’, says Lucan’s other sister Jane, ‘who called me to tell me what had happened. She was adamant that John hadn’t done it. I couldn’t imagine he had done it either. Such a bloody thing. We obviously talked for many, many hours, days, months, about it.’
On 13 November, another High Court hearing took place about the children, who remained wards of court. Custody for Veronica was opposed, this time by the representatives of Lord Lucan. As she put it: ‘Some of the family plotted to get custody of my children while I was in hospital.’21 The Shand Kydds, to whom Lucan had expressed in his letter the desire that they should have care of the children, attended court. Veronica, who had left hospital to go to the High Court, arrived in a police car as the hearing ended; her escort was heard to shout ‘Don’t get out’ (the implication being that she would want to avoid her sister). Again the case was considered by Mr Justice Rees, and one wonders what he thought about his decision to hand the Lucan children to their mother sixteen months earlier; perhaps he felt still more justified.
No conclusion was reached on 13 November. The Official Solicitor, Norman Turner, stated: ‘I cannot say one word.’ The Reverend Gibbs, later a vociferous defender of Lucan – ‘This is not British justice,’ he said after the inquest – told the press that he did not know when, or if, the children would be leaving his care. ‘I found him a most uncharitable man,’ says Graham Forsyth, whose loyalties were very much in the opposite camp.
Later that day Veronica was interviewed by Ranson at Lower Belgrave Street, where her telephone was monitored and an armed policeman installed.22 It can hardly have been easy to return to that house. The day before the inquest in June 1975, by which time Veronica had already publicly expressed the belief that her husband was dead, she told a newspaper: ‘I still get frightened, especially at night when I am at home, that my attacker will come back and try again to kill me.’23
On 15 November, Mr Justice Rees awarded custody of the children to Veronica. Four days later she was reunited with George and Frances. Camilla, who was ill, remained with her aunt. The 20 November headline in the Daily Express read: ‘Fast Line to Joy’, above a photograph of Veronica in a railway carriage, opposite a very relaxed-looking DS Forsyth, who had a foot up on the seat. Veronica was described as bearing ‘slight facial scars’, and was pictured with her hair uncovered, freed from the specially tailored hat that had previously covered her wounds. The pair were travelling to a safe house in Devon, where the two children would join them; Frances was interviewed there by a female officer. Although the booking had been made in the name of ‘Mrs Jones’, the press crowded on to the train. ‘You couldn’t cry about it,’ says Forsyth. ‘We gave them a photo, then jumped off and ended up at the local Chief Constable’s office. She was very game. She said, he stays with me.’ It was later said that Forsyth was ‘almost [Veronica’s] only companion for several months, until it was felt that the danger had passed’.24 Great emphasis was always placed on Veronica’s isolation. When she returned home from the three-week stay in Devon, however, Christabel Martin was again employed as her nanny, and also in attendance was a stridently eccentric girl named Mary-Geraldine O’Donnell, a semi-professional ‘minder’ to upper-class women. Miss O’Donnell claimed to have been supporting Veronica for more than a year before the murder, although Veronica herself later asserted that ‘Sandra was my only friend’.25 After the event, Miss O’Donnell acted as a (possibly self-appointed) spokeswoman and appeared on television dealing with the press. On 21 November she gave an interview to the Daily Mirror, stating that Veronica had been ‘hoping to patch up her marriage’.26
One wonders sometimes why this did not happen. Why Lucan did not simply bite the bullet and move back into 46 Lower Belgrave Street; not to ‘patch up’ the marriage, but to save money, and above all to ease his mind about the children. It was a big house: six storeys. He could have led a separate life from his wife. Could he not have borne to do it?
‘I doubt it very much,’ says his sister. ‘Because I think there was a hatred there, and an anger.’
As Veronica was reunited with her children, so Ranson and Gerring were in Newhaven, in grim pursuit of their quarry. On 10 November, the day that the car was discovered, they visited guesthouses and hotels. Forty officers, who had been engaged upon house-to-house inquiries in London, were diverted to the port and joined by local police. On the 11th David Gerring went to the ferry terminal, trying to discover if Lucan had obtained a forty-eight hour passport: at the time, an easy thing to do. Around one thousand boats and fishing trawlers, moored on the unlovely mudflats beside the pier, were searched. So too was every ferry to Cherbourg and Saint-Malo (where Lucan would later be ‘sighted’), and those to the nearest destination of Dieppe. It was confirmed that security checks were lax; that Lucan could already have crossed the Channel, or flung himself into it.
Might he have taken a boat from the marina? None was reported missing. Did he know Newhaven? He had almost certainly sailed from there in the past. Did he have a boat of his own? Some people said that he did, some that he did not. But it was also said that shipping movements were recorded at Newhaven, that the pier was manned constantly. Forty frogmen searched the area near the mouth of the Ouse, explored a deep depression known as The Hole. But no body was discovered.
‘It was damn cold on the night he vanished,’ Ranson said to the press. ‘How can a man get far in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain and the wind, without an overcoat? [sic]’ It is usually stated that the weather was terrible on the night of 7–8 November, although in fact the weather report in The Times described the south-east as ‘mostly dull, occasional rain or drizzle’, and the English Channel as relatively calm: ‘sea slight’, then ‘moderate’. Assuming reasonable accuracy, the weather therefore offered no clue to where Lucan might be.
Might he have jumped from nearby Beachy Head, the terrifying white cliffs favoured by suicides? Again, no body was washed up. Might he have crawled with a spare bottle of vodka into the vast undergrowth of the South Downs, found a pothole, died from exposure, shot himself? His guns were kept at Lower Belgrave Street, but did he have another? Might he have holed up in a nearby Napoleonic fort? The search became imponderable, overwhelming: an attempt was made to investigate the Downs in a five-mile radius from Newhaven, but this was estimated to require 1,000 policemen working for an entire month. Photographs from the time show uniformed officers scything their way through shoulder-high tangles of gorse. The army offered one hundred men for three days. Later, Wing-Commander Kenneth Wallis took an autogyro over the area, a machine like a flying bicycle fitted with a camera that took X-ray photographs. In its excitable futility the search was reminiscent of the one for that other disappeared person, Agatha Christie, whose car was found abandoned on the similarly impenetrable North Downs in 1926. Oddly, her whereabouts had also been conveyed in a letter sent before she vanished; whose envelope, again, was thrown away.27 She, it quite soon transpired, was not on the Downs at all. After a few days it began to be said that the same must be true of Lord Lucan. ‘The earl’s car “a false lead”,’ wrote the Dai
ly Express on 16 November. ‘Detectives hunting Lord Lucan are now considering a theory that the car he drove on the night of the murder was abandoned as a deliberate false trail.’
Four days earlier, a warrant for Lord Lucan’s arrest had been granted by Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. Bets were laid at Gerald Road as to when he would ring the station, or stride in with a crack solicitor at his side; but by the 12th it had become apparent that this was not going to happen. Now the police had the authority to search the homes of his friends. The investigation would turn to that entity so dominant within the myth of this case: the Lucan circle.
The Circle
‘It was up to him to show the old boy that he for one was not given over to any unworthy prejudice; after all, nobody could help being an aristocrat, could they?’
KINGSLEY AMIS, Take a Girl like You, 1960
‘But he gained a queer sort of momentary self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to be nothing… was the last saving grace of a gentleman; his last freedom, almost.’
JOHN FOWLES, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1967
According to the Lucan myth, Sandra Rivett has become a double victim in the forty years since her death. She was murdered, and now she is forgotten; while her murderer is remembered. Yet the irony is that Sandra is also overlooked within the myth itself, portrayed only as a symbol of aristocratic contempt for the innocent lower orders. After the inquest, the press raged on Sandra’s behalf. ‘Note the name again: SANDRA ELEANOR RIVETT. Hardly surprising if it does not ring an immediate bell,’ wrote the Sunday Mirror. ‘But everyone knows the name of Lord Lucan.’ Indeed they do; and not least because of the press.
At the inquest, which opened on Monday 16 June 1975, the tiny oak-panelled coroner’s court in Horseferry Road divided clearly into factions, and what most mesmerized the reporters was the wall of ice, invisible yet palpable, between Lucan’s supporters and his wife. It was an extraordinary piece of theatre. Veronica arrived every day in a police car with DS Forsyth, lunched with him at the police canteen, and sat separately. She wore the same outfit every day, a black coat and white turban. With her pallor, her eyes from which all expression seemed to have been exhausted, she looked like a carefully dressed-up Little Match Girl. She was, wrote the Daily Mail, ‘barely acknowledged by her mother-in-law, by friends who had once holidayed with her, even by her own sister’. One is reminded of Diana, Princess of Wales, seated sorrowfully in front of the Taj Mahal. Directly in front sat Christina Shand Kydd, a sun-tanned and glamorous figure in deep-blue velvet. Veronica was described as having the spectacular ruby clasp of her sister’s pearls jammed right in her eyeline, as if in mockery of her own relative penury (although five months earlier, when the Daily Express had interviewed Veronica, she herself was described as wearing a ‘necklace with a huge diamond and blue sapphire pendant’).1 Christina variously sat with her husband Bill, with Kait Lucan, with Sally Gibbs and with Sally’s vicar husband William. Susan Maxwell-Scott, in a large pink hat, sat with her husband Ian, who carried a straw trilby. They all lunched together at the Barley Mow pub over the road, which on the second day of the inquest ran clean out of beer. Out on Horseferry Road a woman shook a tin for a society supporting battered wives. Her placard read: ‘It affects us all, rich and poor.’
Meanwhile inside, at the back of the court, sat two players in a very different drama: the quietly respectable figures of Sandra’s father and his sister Vera.
‘My daughter’s name has hardly been mentioned,’ said Mr Hensby. ‘Yet she is the reason why we are all here.’2
This was unanswerable. The storming battlefield of the Lucan marriage, in whose crossfire Sandra had apparently been caught, had overwhelmed the death of this one young woman, and the grief of her father Albert and mother Eunice. ‘What those parents must have gone through,’ says Lucan’s old schoolfriend. Sandra’s son, Stephen, who like Lady Frances Bingham was ten years old at the time of the murder, would later recall the night in 1974 when two police officers arrived at the Hensbys’ caravan in Basingstoke. Stephen, born out of wedlock, had been formally adopted by his grandparents at fourteen months; he believed that Sandra was his sister. This kind of benevolent lie was usual fifty years ago. Social attitudes in the 1960s were liberal only within a very small but vociferous group of people. Now Stephen was told that his sister had died. Two years later he learned from a book that Sandra had in fact been his mother, and that she had been murdered.
Sandra had two sons. She was eighteen when she gave birth to Stephen, naming ‘John Andrews’, a builder, as his father. Three years later, after an affair with a local estate agent, she had her second baby, Gary, who was adopted by a couple in Hampshire. A letter to them read:
I’m pleased to tell you that we have a baby son for you. He was born on February 4th and weighs 7lb 8oz. His mother is a single girl aged 21. She was educated at secondary modern school and has recently been employed at a wholesale chemist. She already has one little boy who at the moment is being cared for by her parents, and she feels that she can’t possibly bring the baby up properly herself.
The baby’s father is a man she has known for quite a long time but he is married to someone else. Unfortunately, while his wife had a period in hospital, she [Sandra] visited his home on a number of occasions to help in the house. Intercourse occurred and she became pregnant... She did not want to break his marriage so came away from the area.
Gary, whose name was changed by his adoptive parents to Neil, was born while Sandra was staying with her sister Teresa in Portsmouth. ‘Sandra was lovely with kids,’ said Teresa, ‘but I just don’t think she was cut out to have them herself. There was nothing we could say. It was her business.’3 Four months later, in June 1967, Sandra married Roger Rivett, at twenty-two a year her senior.
There was a great gulf between the lives of the Rivetts and the Lucans. The wording of their marriage certificates says this very simply. The description of the couple who married at the church of Holy Trinity, Brompton, read:
Richard John Bingham, gentleman, 49 Egerton Gardens, father peer of the realm
Veronica, company director, 34 Wilton Crescent, father army officer4
The description of the Rivetts, who married in the registry office at Croydon, was:
Roger Rivett, able seaman, 6 Stoats Nest Village, Coulsdon, father a gardener
Sandra, domestic aged persons’ home, 49 Nunehams Rd, Caterham, father a porter.
Fifty years ago, the two worlds presented in those few lines would have been as remote from each other as the earth and moon. Less so today; for all that the prejudice against privilege is more powerful than ever, the gap has narrowed immeasurably: not just because of the forces of meritocracy, egalitarianism, demystification, but for subtler reasons connected to the growth of a new class, just emerging at the time of the Lucan marriage in late 1963: the class of the rich and famous. Today, the sort of person who might live in Egerton Gardens is more likely to be a Premier League footballer than a young aristocrat; and the world is now acutely familiar with the doings of a footballer, his evenings spent at restaurants in Knightsbridge or Mayfair, his shopping trips down Bond Street, his patronizing of Asprey’s or Burberry, his wife’s longed-for custom at Dior or Ferragamo, his racehorses, his majestic holidays; the accoutrements of lives that once belonged only to the unknowable upper classes. Few people today can afford these things, but they know all about them through the new kind of person who can. The class of the rich and famous has brought privilege illusorily closer. PR has done its work. The world of the Lucans, with its yachting trips, its interior decorators, its designer clothes and tailoring, its jewellery, is no longer remote as it would once have been; we know too much about Roman Abramovich, the Beckhams, the Oscar red carpet, to be bedazzled by it. Only the title, the earldom remains; meaningless, yet somehow impregnable; and hated on that account.
To Sandra Rivett, 46 Lower Belgrave Street must have seemed a fabulous refuge. Her life, up to that point, had been
restless. Born in September 1945, she attended school at Caterham, Surrey, close to her family home, then took a variety of jobs. She became an apprentice hairdresser; a secretary in Croydon; a nanny for a doctor. In 1963, in an odd echo of Veronica’s own medical history, she entered a mental hospital as a voluntary patient. Again like Veronica, she had suffered badly over an unhappy love affair. It was at the hospital that she met the father of her first son. He did not want to marry her. She prepared to give up the baby, but her kindly parents took him into their home. Sandra continued to earn her living, although this was disrupted by her second pregnancy.
Soon after her marriage, Roger Rivett was sent abroad for eleven months with the navy. After about six months Sandra’s letters grew infrequent, and the couple effectively became estranged; but in 1969 Roger bought himself out of the service and began working close to home. Sandra took a job as a cleaner at the Reedham Orphanage in Purley. In 1971 the Rivetts took a furnished flat in Kenley, near Croydon, at a cost of £9.25 a week. Nevertheless the marriage was clearly not made to last. In 1973 Roger again went abroad, working for Esso on a tanker. When he returned in April 1974, he moved almost immediately into his parents’ home in Coulsdon.
By now Sandra, who had kept on the Kenley flat, was on the books of a domestic agency in Belgravia and working for an elderly couple. A friend from the Reedham job, Rosemary Jordan, saw a lot of her at this time; they went dancing together, and Sandra confided in Rosemary about her love life. She told her about the new job as nanny to the Lucan children. The police said that the Belgravia agency found her the post, which she took up on 28 August 1974 for a wage of £25 a week, although at the inquest Veronica seemed to suggest that Sandra had come through Knightsbridge Nannies. ‘Sandra was a lonely girl,’ she would later say. ‘Her husband had left her and she seemed to have little to do with her parents who lived outside London.’5 In fact the Rivetts’ separation was mutual, and the Hensbys had taken on the care of Sandra’s son.
A Different Class of Murder Page 28