Nor was it entirely true to say that Sandra was ‘lonely’. Rootless, perhaps; but she was a very good-looking woman, and she had plenty of male friends, with whom she drank in the local pubs on her nights off. She was, wrote David Gerring, ‘receptive to their advances’. One of these, a married man, was intensely embarrassed to be questioned after her death. At the inquest, Veronica was asked: ‘Did you know whether she had many boyfriends?’, to which she replied: ‘I know of two, she talked to two.’ Veronica also knew that Sandra had had a son adopted by her parents, although she was unaware of the second child.
The question was then put: ‘Had any men friends come to your house?’
‘No.’
‘Had she asked if a man could come?’
‘No.’
One of Sandra’s boyfriends may have been a mysterious ‘Norwegian seaman’, now mentioned by the former officer Graham Forsyth (the Norwegian embassy was in Belgrave Square). Another was said to be named ‘Ray’.6 Recently a statement, made to the police in November 1974 by Sally Gibbs, was uncovered by a BBC journalist.7 Sally recounted a conversation in which her niece Camilla had referred to a man who was living at Lower Belgrave Street, or who stayed ‘on the odd occasion’. Frances, when told of Sandra’s death, also instantly mentioned her ‘boyfriend’.
‘There was always this thing about Sandra’s boyfriend,’ says Christina. ‘The children said that Sandra had a boyfriend who used to come in a big Mercedes. No idea who it was at all. She had had a row with him, and the affair had ended.’ The police did indeed say, without making much of it, that Sandra had broken up with an unnamed man just a few days before the murder.
It seems unusual for a child as young as Camilla to have been aware of boyfriends; but she was highly intelligent and doubtless very alert. And there is evidence that she had mentioned them on another occasion. Frances’s police statement also drew attention to Sandra’s love life: ‘During the last weekend we spent with Daddy on 2nd and 3rd Nov 1974, Camilla told Daddy that Sandra had boyfriends and went out with them.’
There were, in fact, more than two boyfriends. But only one became a known quantity: John Hankins, a twenty-six-year-old Australian barman, who came forward to the police of his own volition. He was introduced to Sandra at the Plumbers Arms some six weeks before her death. She would visit the various pubs in which he worked and sometimes spend the night with him. Hankins told the Daily Express: ‘Sandra and I had talked about her returning to Australia with me in a few years’ time. We might have got married.’ Sandra had phoned Roger Rivett to discuss the possibility of a quick divorce, it is assumed on account of Hankins. Rivett replied that he would do what she asked if she provided evidence of adultery, to which she never responded.
The relationship with Hankins was occasionally fiery. The pair had rows, one in particular on Sunday 3 November. They made it up, however, and went out together on the 6th. Hankins rang Sandra on the evening of the 7th. In another interview with the Express, he said: ‘We spoke for about fifteen minutes. We talked of going out next week. I was probably the last one, apart from her killer, to speak to her on the telephone last Thursday.’ According to Roy Ranson this call took place at 8.00, although he claimed that the conversation lasted just five minutes. He may have been aware of a possible discrepancy here. In her statement, Frances told the police that she had entered her mother’s bedroom at about 8.05pm after watching Top of the Pops in the nursery. ‘We all’, she said, meaning that Sandra was there also, ‘watched the TV in Mummy’s room.’
Another minor point arose as to why Sandra was at Lower Belgrave Street on the night of 7 November. Thursday was her usual day off. At the inquest, Veronica said that she had changed it on account of Hankins: ‘Her current boyfriend had his day off on Wednesday, and she asked if she could change hers to Wednesday as well so that she could go out with him.’ Ranson gave another explanation, that Sandra had felt unwell and thought she might have glandular fever. His account has Sandra actually saying this to her mother on the night she died. The Daily Mirror, however, reported a different conversation. Mrs Hensby told the paper that Sandra rang her ‘shortly before the murder. She told us she was fine.’ The time of this call is unclear. Frances says that Sandra was already in her mother’s bedroom at 7.20pm, when she herself went to watch Top of the Pops. If one accepts the phrase ‘shortly before the murder’, Sandra probably rang her mother just before the call from Hankins.
Mrs Hensby made no mention of suspected glandular fever. Possibly Ranson, conscious of any prejudice against Sandra’s active love life, was seeking to stress the innocence of her reason for staying at home. In the first days after the murder, and despite the emphasis upon Lucan, newspapers were inevitably casting about for details about the victim. The Express, which had particularly good police access, reported a visit by detectives to the flat in Kenley, where they found a ‘huge colour magazine picture of a nude man’ above the bed. Hankins was also described in a way designed to arouse interest, although there was no mention of any other boyfriend.
‘One thing I want to make clear’, Hankins stated firmly, ‘is that Sandra was a very nice girl.’ Similarly, Veronica would later say: ‘As a young and attractive woman she did have boyfriends, but not a large number. She did not give me the impression of being promiscuous.’8 Nevertheless rumours about Sandra had begun to circulate among Lucan’s friends, around the world of the Clermont. As Stuart Wheeler says: ‘One of the people that definitely was in the Lucan circle said of the nanny, oh well, there were God knows how many men in her book, the implication being that she was involved in prostitution – which perhaps illustrates a willingness to put a gloss on things.’
In other words, it was being suggested by those who sought to exonerate Lucan that there were alternative suspects within Sandra’s life: that she, in fact, had been the intended victim. The idea that she was killed in error, which the official version of the case has never questioned, was, in the end, only an idea. In the world of the fictional detective, where the question of what really happened is the only one that signifies, the answer would be: Sandra died.
Yet her love affairs would soon be of scant interest to the press. There was only Lucan, Lucan, Lucan. An inevitable rumour arose that he had been having a fling with the nanny; by no means unknown, but also not his style, and as a lead it led nowhere. The police interviewed the men in Sandra’s life (although the Norwegian, if he existed, remained elusive), but only as a matter of form. Roger Rivett, who has always maintained a gentlemanly silence about his wife, had an impregnable alibi. John Hankins, who on the night of 7 November was working at the Kings Arms pub in Buckingham Palace Road (at the bottom of Lower Belgrave Street), was also eliminated. He talked freely to the police about Sandra’s situation, saying that she had appeared to be friendly with Veronica, but wanted little to do with Lucan. Veronica herself later made the strong assertion that Sandra was wary of Lucan. Against this, however, is testimony from Sandra herself. As recalled by her son Stephen Hensby, she had written to her parents saying that ‘she had this good job in a lovely house and that both Lord and Lady Lucan were very nice to her’.9
Lucan was certainly pleased with Sandra, whom he met when he collected the children, and at birthday parties held for them at Elizabeth Street. And Veronica liked her very much. ‘They used to go out together a bit,’ says Christina Shand Kydd. ‘For a drink.’ Sandra, whose warm good nature brought ten weeks of relative happiness into the house at Lower Belgrave Street, had possessed a gift for life, something that the couple for whom she worked had lost along the way.
Can it possibly be true that, when interviewed by the police, one of Lucan’s friends said of Sandra’s murder ‘What a pity! Good nannies are so hard to find’?
It has become the defining epigraph of the myth, yet according to David Gerring, who would doubtless have loved to claim it for a member of the Lucan circle, it was actually said by a complete outsider. The remark was made during house-to-house inquiries by an elderl
y resident of Belgravia. By degrees rumour did its work and attributed it much closer to home. There it sat very comfortably. Even if it hadn’t actually been said by somebody that Lucan knew, it might as well have been. That was the kind of people they were.
It was further claimed that the Lucan camp completely ignored Sandra’s family, at the inquest and at all other times. This, too, is not entirely accurate. Both Lucan’s sisters, Sally and Jane, wrote to Eunice Hensby. Veronica did not do so. She did speak to Mrs Hensby on the phone, and Sandra’s parents publicly wished her luck with her claim from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board (their own failed, but Veronica’s succeeded). Nevertheless Sandra’s sister Charmaine told the press that ‘some of the family were hurt that Lady Lucan had not sent a letter of sympathy’; she also said that when her aunt had gone to Lower Belgrave Street to collect Sandra’s clothes, ‘they were bundled in a paper bag and Lady Lucan handed them over’.10 This may, of course, have been straightforward discomfiture on Veronica’s part. It was also perhaps understandable that she sent a wreath, rather than attend Sandra’s funeral at the Croydon Crematorium on 18 December 1974: Lord Lucan’s fortieth birthday.
The Sunday Mirror, grinding its political axe on the wheel of the Lucan case, wrote that it was
Lucan’s aristocratic family and gambling friends who dominated the London inquest. What an ugly real-life performance of Upstairs, Downstairs. Sandra Rivett, the Little Miss Nobody, was firmly kept in her lowly place by his chums: downstairs (where, indeed, she was slaughtered). If words of sorrow or compassion for her were spoken by the Upstairs Crowd, they were very few and far between.
The ‘Upstairs Crowd’, in this context, did not include the then Countess of Lucan.
And there was truth in what the Mirror said, but it was not the whole truth. In the same way, there is truth in the belief that Lucan’s friends obstructed the police inquiry; but only some truth. That they behaved in this way is so central to the myth that it is difficult to deconstruct the image of the circle, the ring of people who sought to protect one of their own kind. Yet as with the Clermont gamblers, the notion of a single entity is a false one. These were individuals, and they differed from each other. Even the police later admitted as much; although more often it suited their purposes to lament the powerfully united wall of silence that confronted them. ‘[The police] were under pressure from above to find John,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen. ‘So they blamed us.’
Forty years on, the same tune is still being played. The police remained extremely sore over their failure to bring Lucan to justice. David Gerring wrote defensively of the criticism hurled at the ‘nob squad’. The very human desire to excuse themselves was displayed as recently as 2012, when a former detective said:
I don’t think a great deal of pressure was placed on Lucan’s friends. Britain was more class-conscious than it is nowadays and they did have a pull. I wouldn’t say that hindered us a lot but I don’t think Roy Ranson got the assistance and honesty he should have got from witnesses.
If the Lord Lucan case had happened today, I think he’d still have been helped, except that it would have been a little more difficult for his friends.11
There are two separate accusations made against the Lucan circle. The first is that they were deliberately unaccommodating to the police when questioned; the second is that they aided a murderer in his flight from justice. Although obviously connected, one accusation is infinitely more serious than the other, and the two have been far too casually conflated.
Lucan had three very full address books, and the police contacted everybody in them. Within that large number of people were those who had known him very well, and others – a majority - who were acquaintances, often of the merely fleeting kind. Some of this second group were unhappy about being interviewed in connection with a murder inquiry. They did, undoubtedly, show it, in that testy, cool-eyed, God-what-a-bore way that the upper classes tend to adopt as a default mode. Lady Amabel Lindsay, whose husband sold the Lucan family silver, batted away police questions by saying (and how one can hear it): ‘Now, what do you think happened?’ ‘We’re not paid to think, madam’ was the stolid reply. People would suggest a chat when they returned from a skiing holiday, or treat the police as funny little servants. ‘If they behaved as arrogantly as they may have done,’ says Stuart Wheeler, ‘the police probably had good reason to hate them. I mean one man I knew from the Clermont – when the police came to interview him, one of them said to him, Lucan was a very good backgammon player, wasn’t he? And apparently this chap replied: “No. He wasn’t. Well, all right, he might have been the eleventh best in England.” So there was all that sort of stuff…’
Soon the press, who were drinking cosily with the police in the Duke of Wellington or (the favoured ones) in Ranson’s office, were playing to the gallery. Just a week after the murder, the Daily Express wrote of the ‘masonic-style bond which links that certain breed of men whose “stud book” lines mostly lead back to the same stables – privileged prep schools, Eton, Oxford, the Household Brigade’. The article concluded: ‘The honour code binds their silence’ and warned that this ‘may mean the police’s work will now be just that more difficult’.
The press knew perfectly well what its readership thought of Lucan and his merry band. ‘What can one say’, wrote the Daily Mail, ‘but that a man is judged by his friends?’ It knew that, in an age of austerity and privation, their way of life would both titillate and enrage. The idea that these people were also attempting to thwart the plods was too good to resist. But the truth is that, as with the Lucan marriage, the war was on both sides, and this time it was a class war. The police fell into cliché as well; even by calling themselves the ‘nob squad’. Alert to accusations that they would be too deferential in their questioning, that they would bow and scrape, they often went too far the other way. Gerring was a self-consciously hardened policeman straight out of Life on Mars, known as ‘Buster’ because he had busted gangs, including the seriously villainous Richardsons. Although Graham Forsyth, a kindly man in his own right, now describes Gerring as ‘very nice, lovely’, he was surely not the right person to handle this inquiry, which required anything rather than his style of lairy bombast. He talked about the Lucan case being a ‘nice little earner’ (meaning overtime). He deployed a provocative idiom, hoping to offend the upper-class eardrum by saying ‘was John a crumpet man?’, when it would have been just as easy to ask if he had had girlfriends. In his book he stated airily that he ‘liked the aristocracy’,12 but there was not much sign of that in his dealings with them.
There was also quite a lot of aggression, not physical, but designed to intimidate. ‘I spent six hours at Gerald Road [police station],’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen. ‘It didn’t bother me. But they were threatening. They wouldn’t believe that I didn’t know anything! All that nonsense about the circle…’ Greville Howard’s former wife Zoe says he was given a particularly rough ride.
I think Greville had quite a hard time with the police, because of course they were all meant to be having dinner together that night [at the Clermont on 7 November]. We were split up by then, but I remember him ringing me up, it must have been early in the morning, and he said, I’ve just come out of the cells, or whatever… I think he had a horrid time.
Today, infinitely greater cynicism about the police allows the belief that they, too, were motivated by prejudice; anybody who has ever had an officer take against them will know what it feels like to be trapped within a force-field of legalized bullying. With people of the Lucan kind, however, there is probably a counter-belief that they deserved whatever they got. Nevertheless a man like James Goldsmith, a bully in his own right, was treated with a very light touch; with him they wouldn’t have dared.
They resented the fact that these people did not play the police’s game: the police like power, just as much as the aristocracy ever did, and they like it when even the innocent are just a little bit frightened of them. What they also liked, very much ind
eed, was moving and shaking within the Belgravia world. They used the Elizabeth Street flat; they obtained warrants to search a large number of houses, including Warwick Castle and Charlton Park; they visited the Clermont, and had it bugged. The ex-bunny girl receptionist, who had been present on the day of the murder, recalls how the staff were called into the middle of Berkeley Square and interviewed there (on the principle that walls have ears). She also remembers one officer getting hopelessly drunk at Annabel’s: ‘I had to call a police car to take him away.’ And the police positively relished their closeness to Veronica Lucan, a bona fide countess who was nonetheless on their side, a ‘good old girl’, as Forsyth says. Her sister Christina visited her at St George’s Hospital, where DS Forsyth was in attendance.
He was her absolute shadow throughout the entire thing. I remember, I went to see her the next day – and she was extremely aggressive – well, she’d had a nasty crack on her head. But she was spoiling for a fight, cold as ice, absolutely… And I said to her, how are you? He was very much sitting there, and I was very much treated by him as an evil person, you know, that I was not nice. That came across very clearly. The sort of condescending rich sister, I think he looked upon me as – that’s how he made me feel – he didn’t even know me! Veronica was extremely difficult, and I said is there anything Bill and I can do to help you? What can we do, just tell us? And she said something like, what do you ever do?
I mentioned money. And she said, I can assure you I’ve got plenty. Those were her exact words. So I said, oh I see. And then she just didn’t speak anymore, I sort of tried to make some sort of conversation but it was made perfectly obvious that I was not required there. So I left.
Graham Forsyth also remembers that incident at the hospital. ‘She walked in, the sister, and said, what have you done now? I had a lot of sympathy with Veronica. She seemed so isolated.’
A Different Class of Murder Page 29