A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  What Greville Howard said, however, was taken very seriously indeed; certainly by the police. During the week of the inquest Howard was laid up, receiving back treatment at the Nuffield Clinic. Counsel for the police requested that his statement be read in court. Michael Eastham, for the Lucan family, objected strongly that this would be ‘devastating and prejudicial’, and his argument was upheld by the coroner. Subsequently it was alleged by Private Eye that Howard, who then worked for James Goldsmith, had been coerced into staying away from the inquest.

  Howard never spoke again about the case. Some of Lucan’s friends did later talk to the press, and, contrary to myth, they did so in a manner not entirely loyal to him. Aspinall made frequent proclamations over the years. Charles Benson, himself a journalist, told the Sunday Times that Lucan was ‘very Right-wing and he never compromised in front of people. He would talk about hanging and flogging and foreigners and n*****s equally to shock and get a reaction.’ Dominick Elwes, who shifted uneasily between camps, said that Lucan’s obsession with his wife and children ‘was the dark side of the moon. It wasn’t the Lucky I knew. It was perhaps a classic case of paranoia’ (a damning choice of word, given Lucan’s use of it in his letter to Bill Shand Kydd). Benson and Elwes were men who thrived on popularity; it was their raison d’être. It was natural that they should have felt uncomfortable as hate figures, and have shifted position closer to that of public opinion. They had their own skins to save, although Elwes proved unable to do so.

  Yet there were people who did not tell things; whose loyalty to Lucan, or unwillingness to get involved, compromised the inquiry. Probably this is usual in any murder investigation. Michael Stoop did not reveal a letter and two envelopes. Others withheld details of Lucan’s private life, leaving Veronica’s version to become the only one that was accepted. But what was unusual, and deeply so, was that Susan Maxwell-Scott did not contact the police to say that Lucan had been at her house.

  Gerring gave her a very hard time when he visited Uckfield (en route to searching the house of another friend, Algy Cluff, who was rumoured to be sheltering Lucan in his wine cellar). He accused Susan of lying about the state of Lucan’s clothes. He questioned her about Lucan’s mysterious overcoat, and suggested that she had burned it. He expressed disbelief when she claimed that she had not known, on 8 November, that Lucan was being sought by the police. He asked why she had not contacted Bill Shand Kydd about the letters that Lucan had written to him, but had left it to Bill to perceive their significance.

  Susan remained unmoved. If Gerring had thought that he could frighten her, he was wrong. ‘I don’t care what you believe,’ she said. ‘I’m telling you the truth.’

  Gerring then asked Ian Maxwell-Scott to attend at Gerald Road, and questioned him with equal ferocity. He got little that was new. Ian, who undeniably displayed all the arrogance with which the image of the circle was tainted, told Gerring what the rest of them would have dearly loved to say: ‘I don’t like your attitude.’

  Later Susan would write a letter to the Daily Star, which reads slightly drunkenly, in reply to one of Ranson’s periodic attacks upon Lucan’s friends. She said:

  I fully and truthfully answered all questions. I also gave permission to search the house and the grounds. Later still, I allowed police forensic science experts to examine my chairs for blood stains – they did not find any! I cannot imagine in what way I could have helped Ranson more! Friends have loyalty to each other – else they are mere acquaintances NOT friends. Loyalty among friends is, in my opinion, the highest morality in life. Without it friendship could not exist – only acquaintanceship.

  The police concluded, among other things, that Susan was half in love with Lucan. ‘She was a very loyal friend,’ says Christina.

  On 12 November, the day that a warrant was issued for Lucan’s arrest, Bill Shand Kydd made a public appeal on ITV’s News at Ten. Here, at least, was somebody facing the situation with appropriate realism. Of course the Shand Kydds were closely concerned with those half-forgotten victims, the children. Lucan’s schoolfriend says:

  The evening before, on the Monday, Bill, Christina, Caroline Hill and I had dinner, and we discussed tactics. I knew Sandy Gall [then an ITN newsreader] very well, and Bill knew him slightly, and so we got hold of him. He said he would certainly make sure it was in News at Ten next time. And we had a bit with Bill on the news. He was saying, John, whatever the rights and wrongs, come forward.

  What Bill also said, very decidedly, was that Lucan should contact him and that they would go with a solicitor to the police. This constitutes further evidence that the Lyall Street lunch, at which Bill had been present, had not in fact concocted a plan to enable Lucan to flee justice. So too does Dominick Elwes’s desperate plea, made through the Daily Express: ‘If Lucky is still alive, as I believe he is, would he please contact me?... I would tell him to go to the police and sort this whole bloody mess out.’ Elwes was not in a condition to be disingenuous; he really did not know what had happened to Lucan.

  ‘We were just thinking, where could he be?’ says Lucan’s old schoolfriend. ‘We thought, maybe Robin Hill had him hidden away in a tunnel...’ Hill, the future 8th Marquess of Downshire, lived at Clifton Castle in North Yorkshire. He and his sister Caroline were good friends of Lucan; Robin Hill was a rich man, and he could have helped a flight from justice; except that he didn’t. ‘But at first, yes, we thought John was alive. He said he was going to lie doggo for a bit...’

  Again, this suggests ignorance of Lucan’s whereabouts. It also, of course, suggests that very willingness to help him of which the circle was accused.

  ‘I think they would have done it,’ says Christina. ‘I’m sure that people would have helped him. But Bill was right – Bill is always right. He should have gone to the police. If he hadn’t run…’

  It was John Aspinall, beyond doubt, who inspired the myth that Lucan had been spirited away by a daredevil gang of plotters, led by himself. Take Aspinall out of the picture, and what is left is a sense of disparate people, most of them co-operating with the police, some not, some of them believing that Lucan was innocent, most not, stunned by the situation in which they found themselves, united only by Bill Shand Kydd’s iron insistence that Lucan should return to confront the matter. Put Aspinall back into the picture, and immediately the circle regroups in all its outlandish aspect: the people who believed that the life of a young woman was a bagatelle weighed against the freedom of their noble friend.

  When the police turned up to search Howletts, Aspinall pranced about mockingly, suggesting that they might like to lift the floorboards. Asked if he was proud to call Lucan a friend, he pounced. ‘I said, if she’d been my wife, I’d have bashed her to death five years before and so would you. I said, don’t come that line with me…’ As Bill Shand Kydd puts it: who needs a friend like Aspinall?

  To the Sunday Times Magazine Aspinall boomed on, saying:

  Lucan was really a leader of men. In fact he wasn’t – but in more rigorous times he would have found a better role in life. In other words, in a time of war Lucan would have been a valuable acquisition to a country. He wouldn’t have had any difficulty in getting loyalty from his men. He was a warrior, a Roman. He was quite capable of falling on his sword, as it were.

  Beneath the bombast was a kernel of acuity, as well as contradictory hints as to Lucan’s fate. He could have commanded enough loyalty to help him flee, but equally he might have committed suicide. You decide.

  Aspinall’s most famous comment was made when Ludovic Kennedy, a distinguished analyst of murder cases who believed in Lucan’s innocence, asked what he would do if Lucan were to reappear. ‘I would embrace him.’ The remark would later appear on the wall of Aspinall’s casino, inscribed under a relief of Lord Lucan (the date of whose death was left tantalizingly open).

  ‘Quite right, too’ was a later reaction in the Guardian. ‘If you’re going to forgive your dumb, four-legged friends for their violent actions, you might as well forg
ive your dumb, two-legged ones as well.’23

  Reading Aspinall’s words about the Lucan case, the overriding impression is of a man conducting a gigantic tease. He was completely unafraid of the police, indifferent to public opinion in a way that is very rare, amusing himself by making people think that he was harbouring all sorts of priceless knowledge. ‘I formed a view he was secretly laughing at us,’ David Gerring later said.

  When asked directly about Lucan, Aspinall could suddenly revert to caution: ‘He was very skilled at motor-boat racing,’ he told the interviewer Lynn Barber in 1990, ‘and I think he had a boat there at Newhaven, where his car was found, and I think he jumped into one of his little motor boats, went out to sea, put a big weight round his body and jumped overboard. And scuttled the boat. That’s what happened.’

  Later in the conversation, however, he said:

  I’m more of a friend of his after that than I was – though I haven’t seen him – because if he wanted me to do something, I’d do it for him. Because he needs one and, like everyone else in life, I like to be needed. What’s the use of a friend who, because you make one mistake, suddenly… I don’t believe in that.

  Understandably, this left Barber with the sense that Aspinall ‘more than anyone held the key to the Lucan mystery’. His own friends admit that he would have helped Lucan escape, that temperamentally this would have appealed to him. Indeed one is reminded of a novel, Agatha Christie’s The Hollow, in which members of a dangerously charming upper-class family, aware of who has committed murder and seeking to shield the person, embark upon a half-amused, half-serious campaign of misdirection. ‘I recognized fairly soon’, says Hercule Poirot to the leader of this campaign, ‘that it was your ingenuity that I was fighting against, and that you were being aided and abetted by your relations as soon as they understood what you wanted done!’ This sounds very much like the popular solution to the question of what happened to Lord Lucan after the murder. John Aspinall, says the myth, designed a web of mystification, of stiff-upper-lipped silence obfuscated by outbursts of rhetoric, and behind it lay the truth in which he took such secret, laughing delight. He had outwitted the flat-footed police and the news-hungry press. He had saved the nobleman from the lower-class fate of Wormwood Scrubs and the dismal one of becoming crab-fodder in the English Channel. Like the daredevil he was, he had gambled for Lucky, and the pair of them had won. A last repayment, as it were, for the earl’s inheritance that was squandered at the Clermont.

  The belief in this scenario is enduring: extraordinarily so. ‘Confirmatory’ stories have occasionally emerged, such as the one offered by Aspinall’s former secretary, Shirley Robey, in which she told of obtaining passports for the Lucan children so that their father could observe them in Africa. Rumours still persist that Lucan was flown out of England in a plane, possibly belonging to the racing driver Graham Hill (Ranson strongly suggests this in his book); that he was given plastic surgery; that he has been sighted here, there and in almost every country on earth. The circle had effected Lucan’s escape and, such was their class loyalty, they had also bankrolled it. Perforce: how else was Lucan to live?

  Muriel Spark wrote in Aiding and Abetting:

  His source of cash was here in Britain. Nowadays, he came twice a year to collect it from his old friend, the rich Benny Rolfe [an invented character], who always, since Lucky’s operation to change his features, had a fat package of money ready for him on his visits… Most of the cash came out of Benny’s own pocket, but there was always a certain amount contributed by Lucan’s other old friends and collected by Benny Rolfe.

  ‘Aren’t you disgusted, ever, by what I did?’ Lucan had asked Benny on one of these occasions. ‘Aren’t any of you horrified? Because, when I look back on it, I’m horrified myself.’

  ‘No, dear fellow, it was a bungle like any other bungle. You should never let a bungle weigh on your conscience.’

  ‘But if I’d killed my wife?’

  ‘That would not have been a bungle. You would not have been the unlucky one.’

  ‘I think of Nanny Rivett. She had an awful lot of blood…’

  Aiding and Abetting is a gorgeous novel, but it has little to do with what really happened. It is a fable; a meditation on evil, identity and, of course, class. Anybody who sees it in terms of reality will encounter, immediately, a problem with the notion of ‘Benny Rolfe’ collecting money from the Lucan circle. It is the same problem that undercuts the whole alluring myth: which is money.

  Soon after Lucan’s disappearance it was reported that he was carrying £100,000 in cash, a figure that two days later had dwindled to £20,000, and subsequently to zero.24 As for his friends: although they have been excitably portrayed as ‘rich and powerful forces’, which frankly sounds like something from a sub-Bond film script, the truth, as would later be said, is that they ‘had no real links with power’.25 It is also true that most of them were flat broke. Few people had much money in 1974, but these men had been cleaned out by Aspinall, who himself lost pretty much everything he had taken from them in the 1973 stock market crash. Altogether they could probably have spared enough to maintain Lucan on the run for about a fortnight. To take the most extreme example: Ian Maxwell-Scott, who left the Clermont in 1974, would soon have his house sold by mortgagees and be living off state benefits. For Aspinall to say, as he did, ‘I had many people calling me and saying, if Lucan wants money, he can have it’, was yet another tease. It flattered Lucan by implying that he could command faithful friendship; but it was also insidiously damning, designed to press the buttons that set off class prejudice. Who were these people, anyway, who had money to spare? Bill Shand Kydd was rich, but he wanted nothing to do with any lawless flights from justice. Nor did any of the other sensible, highly respectable figures in Lucan’s life: his uncle John Bevan, his best man John Wilbraham, his old schoolfriend and the like. Later these people bought back some of Lucan’s auctioned silver and contributed generously to his daughters’ education. That was the way in which they showed their loyalty: to the children. The idea that they would have subsidized a criminal act is beyond belief, nor has it ever been suggested. Lucan did know some indestructibly rich people, like Selim Zilkha, Gordon White26 and the Brady Tuckers. Again, however, one would have to be positively insane to suggest that anybody of that kind would have endowed a fugitive fund. Lucan also had a brother, Hugh, who moved to Johannesburg six months after the murder and who, not unlike Aspinall, has occasionally tantalized the press with contradictory remarks. ‘There are lots of rumours and lots of outcomes,’ he said in 2012, when asked about Lucan’s fate. ‘There are all sorts of possibilities and lots of things puzzle me but I am not sure I want to share them with anyone.’ Yet Lucan’s older sister Jane, who is in regular contact with Hugh, is still patently and movingly distressed by her ignorance of what happened to Lucan. The same was true of his younger sister, Sally Gibbs, who remained bewildered by these events until her death in 2002. The idea that Lucan lived in Africa, that Hugh suspected as much and said nothing to his sisters, is utterly ridiculous.

  Therefore the focus is back on that wretched circle: the infamous lunchers.

  How, then, was this new life of Lucan’s to be financed? Not by a bunch of hedonistic paupers, that was for sure. Which means that one possibility remains: James Goldsmith. ‘Men like Goldsmith and Aspinall saw themselves as outlaws,’ it was said, ‘and the murder of Sandra Rivett gave them a rare chance to live out that fantasy.’27

  In 1997, when Goldsmith was safely dead, David Gerring let loose with a near-obsessive belief that ‘the Golden Man’, as he called him, had been the money behind Lucan’s alleged escape.

  I don’t believe he would have been involved in the nitty-gritty: he was too clever to have put Lucan on to a boat across the Channel himself. But I do believe he was involved in the planning from a safe distance. Think about it; Lucan has just committed murder, so who does he go to? His friends. They see he is in no fit state to organise his own escape, so they do
it for him. He had many influential friends and Goldsmith was among the most influential and wealthy.28

  A few years later, Gerring would go further. By this time he was landlord of a pub in Kent, and he sounds downright intoxicated in conversation with the author and former playboy Jeremy Scott, who was writing a book about what happened to Lucan after the murder. ‘That wouldn’t be clever,’ Gerring warned. ‘You can’t upset the Golden Man.’ He then made a vague allegation that Lucan, having been helped in his escape, had become so much of a nuisance that he himself was murdered. ‘If one of their mates gets into trouble they help him. The once! But if he then gets to be an embarrassment they have him taken care of, know what I mean?’29 The belief that Lucan was shot dead, even possibly in the driveway of the Maxwell-

  Scott home, is still given some credence, supremely idiotic though it is.

  Having formerly praised Goldsmith for his ‘helpfulness’, Gerring later said that he had avoided an interview for some weeks, and that when he finally spoke it was only to reveal ‘name, rank and number’.

  It is perfectly true that Aspinall expressed the desire to put Lucan beyond the reach of justice, and that Goldsmith had the means to effect this. The only question, and one that never seems to have been asked by those who believe in Goldsmith’s involvement, is why he would have done such a thing. Does not a man with a business empire, plus a deeply engrossing love life, have more pressing matters to deal with than paying hush money to Lord Lucan’s plastic surgeon?

  ‘They had’, Gerring patiently explained, ‘this weird idea about being superior beings. The law did not apply to them. Like most of Lucan’s friends, they gave the impression that we were making a lot of fuss about nothing. Sandra Rivett was only a nanny, after all. But Lucan, with his aristocratic background, was one of them. They would not have deserted him.’

  To which one yearns to say: change the record, Dave. His argument, in sum, was that James Goldsmith, a wildly successful tycoon with ambitions to become a newspaper proprietor and acquire a knighthood, engaged upon a fraught and expensive enterprise that could have landed him in jail because he believed that Lucan was a superior being.