‘The idea that Goldsmith would have risked his freedom in that way…’ says a contemptuous Daniel Meinertzhagen. ‘Ridiculous. He guaranteed one loan. That was it.’
‘Neither Jimmy nor I at any time believed he was still alive,’ his wife Lady Annabel would later write.30
In fact the two men were not even particularly close. Goldsmith spoke loyally about Lucan at the Private Eye court case in 1976, saying that they used to see each other relatively seldom, but adding: ‘I do not want to look as though I am in any way reneging on Lord Lucan. I was a friend and I am sorry…’ They were friends, and spent time together when Goldsmith was keeping ‘open house’ (as in the Mexico holiday, photographs from which later appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine). But they belonged to fundamentally different worlds: one was defined by ambition, the other by inanition. Goldsmith was not attracted by losers, which Lucan, superior being or not, had clearly become. He lived close to the edge, both in business and in private, but his daring was directional: he did it to make money, to pull a beautiful woman. He didn’t need to get his thrills from aiding and abetting. And, as Meinertzhagen says, he would never have taken this particular risk. He had far too much to lose. The truth, very simply, is that he was a highly convenient figure to the myth. He was a hated figure among much of the press. His almost mystical wealth made him credible casting for the police in the role of Lucan’s devilish fairy godfather. It was nonsense; just as it is nonsense to suggest that a popular, well-known man like Graham Hill would have risked his career to fly Lucan out of the country; or that children who were wards of court would have been mysteriously transported to Africa so that their father could watch them at a distance.
In fact, almost everything that has been written about the circle is nonsense. ‘There was no such thing as the Lucan circle,’ Goldsmith told the court during his libel action. He was probably pretty much right.
Yet the idea touched upon prejudice in a way that still resonates. It is prejudice, really, that has sustained belief in Lucan’s great escape. That is what people like him do, and what people like his friends help him do. And there is a folkloric power, a literary allure, in the myth of the earl who moves like an ageing lion among the empty spaces of Botswana, drinking vodka martinis in bars shuttered against the sunlight, dreaming of the white island of Belgravia, his life vanished but his demeanour still tremulously in place. Could it really, by some magical means as yet unknown, have happened that way?
The girlfriend of one of the set says:
One read the rumours that he was spirited away. This thing that the friends were holding something back… I can’t believe we wouldn’t know by now. Someone would have talked. Particularly someone like Dominick Elwes. Charles Benson blurted everything out. I don’t think there’s any way that the secret would have been kept all these years. Someone would have spilled the beans by now. They were such big mouths!
There was another question: that of time. Remembering that this was not what was meant to happen, that if Lucan had indeed intended to kill he had also intended to make a success of it, nobody was expecting to have to construct a masterly off-the-cuff stratagem to deal with his failure. It was just before 10pm on the night of 7 November when Lucan left his house, and 10.05pm when the police arrived. From that time onwards, he was on the run. To get away was one thing, but to do so as instantly and definitively as Lucan did, if he did, was another thing altogether.
This is where Susan Maxwell-Scott, decidedly not a big mouth, re-enters the picture. An obvious implication of her silence through 8 November, her steadfast wait to be contacted by the police, is that she was allowing Lucan time to formulate his plans. She was giving him a day’s grace.
In 1995 newspapers carried the story of a former babysitter for the Maxwell-Scotts, Mandy Parks, who claimed to have seen Lucan drinking with her employers in the early evening of the 8th. Suitcases were in the hall at Grants Hill House. Lucan was wearing a blue suit that presumably belonged to Ian. It is unclear why Mrs Parks did not come forward at the time. ‘It’s not my place to question people like them,’ she said, twenty-one years later, ‘but it’s not right that the truth should not come out.’31 David Gerring’s reaction was to restate his belief that Susan had kept something back. ‘The car went to Newhaven,’ he said, ‘but Lucan didn’t. It was a decoy to put us off the scent.’32
The Maxwell-Scotts’ former nanny, who by the time of Lucan’s disappearance had left the job, raises a practical objection to Mrs Parks’s story. In 1974, four of Susan’s six children were at boarding school. ‘I doubt she would have needed a babysitter just for the others,’ says the nanny.33
The Maxwell-Scotts’ driver says:
Why would they have a babysitter? I can’t tell you that there wasn’t someone, but it rings no bells. If she was female I’d have known her. Well, it wasn’t a very big town. She wasn’t stupid, Susan – she wouldn’t let him stay there and let the babysitter see him. She was a very intelligent lady. How the police managed to get as much as they did out of her, I don’t know. I know she didn’t tell them the truth in the first place.
The driver has more to say on the subject of Lucan: an entirely new story, in fact, as to what happened in the early hours of 8 November. At this time his family ran the taxi firm that ‘did the whole of Uckfield. Mother ran the taxi business from her shop. My father drove Aspinall – London mafia, I’d say he was. Dad used to carry the royal family, Vivien Leigh, loads of celebrities. 1968 I started, until 1976. I drove the royal family at seventeen, and I remember Princess Margaret because she gave me a cigarette. We all had security clearance. So we didn’t talk about things.’
Part of what they did not talk about, until now, is information that the driver says was told to him by his father in 1987. ‘He’s dead so it can’t hurt him now. They’re all dead, so it can’t do any harm. And I know it’s true, because he told me some other things that I was shocked by. He was a bad man, my father. It’s because we were sitting there doing nothing, and he told me lots. Why would he lie to me?’
According to the driver, his father said that in the early hours of 8 November he received a call to go to the Maxwell-Scott house. He then picked up Lord Lucan and drove him to Kent.
There’s a little airfield near Headcorn. He didn’t actually say he went to an airfield – just near to Headcorn. In one of our cars. He never said what time this was. Some nights he didn’t come home anyway, so my mother would never have questioned anything.
I think Dad said Lucan went to France – which to me is logical, because I don’t think you’d do it in one go. France, Spain, Africa. He had no passport. You’ve got to remember there was smuggling all the time, though that was usually Essex. But Kent’s not far across at all.
Lucan got cleaned up, changed his clothes – had some of Ian’s, though they were slightly large for him. That’s what my Dad told me. And the gardener told me he got rid of Lucan’s clothes.
The suggestion, of course, is that the clothes were bloody; which reopens all the old questions about the problematical forensic evidence.
The driver then claims that he himself received a call to go to Newhaven. ‘“A person” took that Ford Corsair to Newhaven, and I picked them up. I brought them to Uckfield. The next day, in the morning, in daylight.’ Did this not seem an odd request? ‘Why would I think it was odd – why would it be unusual somebody being in Newhaven? Why is anyone anywhere? That was what I did, I was a taxi.’ The police, he says, never questioned him or his father.
How could you, if you were running the investigation, not ask the local taxis who were doing the work for the Maxwell-Scotts? The newspapers did. They came down, every weekend for about two months – I was quite happy to take their money off them and run them round. I was told to tell them any rubbish.
Now if the police had done a proper job, they would have been able to find out who Lucan rang – it was manual in those days, it’s possible it went through an operator. Local you could dial – but if you wante
d London… Uckfield was quite late with a phone system.
Anyway, Dad wouldn’t have said anything to the police. You’ve got to remember a taxi cab was almost a sanctuary, a confessional. If we talked about what we did or what we didn’t do, nobody would use us. They’d say to Dad, George, do us a favour… You can doubt me if you want to, but what I’m trying to tell you is that we all knew each other, and some things were acceptable and some things weren’t. Why would we say anything? People weren’t like that in those days. It was just part and parcel.
It is very difficult to know what to make of this story. The former driver has never tried to make money out of it, nor offered it to a newspaper. He has no obvious reason to invent what he says. Undoubtedly he did know the Maxwell-Scotts and some of their friends; details of their lives are identical to those given by the nanny. There are problems, however. The first is the thirteen-year time gap between his own alleged drive to Newhaven and the conversation with his father. He himself would have known, as soon as he read the papers, precisely why he was asked to pick up the ‘person’ from Newhaven. Even if he chose to say nothing to the police, why not discuss it with his mother, who passed on the order, or with his father?
To another question, why Susan herself did not drive Lucan to Kent and keep the plot in the family, as it were, he replies: ‘I can’t ever remember seeing Susan drive. I’ve been racking my brains – I never remember actually seeing her at the wheel of a car.’
There is also the problem of how, if Lucan did fly out from Headcorn, a plane was commandeered. ‘Aspinall was the brains. You wouldn’t know what he had.’ True enough. He certainly had a country house in Kent. Nevertheless a private plane, which he did not have, not least because he was broke at the time, presented a huge logistical issue; particularly if one exonerates Goldsmith and Graham Hill from collusion, as common sense suggests that one should. And a further question arises. If Susan Maxwell-Scott had really been privy to some escape plan, why were the letters to Bill Shand Kydd allowed to carry the Uckfield postmark? Without that, nobody need ever have known that Lucan had visited Susan at all.
Lastly there remains the stubborn, and essentially unanswerable, question of money: how, once out of the country, Lucan was to live.
Although the driver’s story hangs together in several ways, and he is a bright and amiable man, some of his theories on the case are harder to accept. He suggests, for instance, that the ‘establishment’ looked the other way with regard to Lucan, and did not actually want him brought to trial.
When was the last peer of the realm convicted of murder? The establishment expected him to do the proper thing [in other words, kill himself]. That is what they wanted. The faceless ones, the ones who run this country. Ranson wouldn’t have been in charge, there’d have been someone above him pulling the strings. Sussex police didn’t want it. They didn’t have the resources. If they wanted to find him they would have found him. He’s probably in Africa.
Africa, the resting place of the myth. If Lucan did indeed make it to this particular place of safety, as the driver appears to suggest, then he and his friends had pulled off one last great winning coup; against the odds, and against the forces of justice.
Yet the driver then goes on to describe how, in the aftermath of Sandra Rivett’s murder, the Maxwell-Scotts’ life at Grants Hill House came quickly to an end. So too, by extension, did the life of the Clermont: of that world in its entirety.
‘Everything stopped. People stopped coming. They went to Wales. Everything went downhill – the cars went, the house went, the friendships seemed to come to an end. I think it tore all their friendships apart. Everything went wrong after Lucan died.’ Except, of course, that according to this story he did not die.
The probability remains that Lucan did die, on or soon after Friday 8 November.
In 1974 Roy Ranson said: ‘I think he would rather die than let his children see him humiliated in court on a murder charge... I think the strain of murder on top of everything else has probably been too much for him. I think he may have parked the car and then got on board a ferry and thrown himself off halfway across the Channel.’
Twenty years later Ranson wrote an account of his search for Lucan in Africa, in which he proclaimed his absolute conviction that his quarry was alive. So had he really changed his mind about Lucan’s fate? Perhaps, perhaps not. It must have been great fun for ex-policemen and journalists to go hunting in Gaborone, or Windhoek, or Maputo, or better yet in the Seychelles: a Lucan sighting meant a bit of a jolly, a story to sell. As a former pressman wrote: ‘I spent three glorious weeks not finding him in Cape Town, magical days and nights not finding him in the Black Mountains of Wales and wonderful and successful short breaks not finding him in Macau, either, or in Hong Kong or even in Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas where you can find anyone.’ He also said, with a wise flippancy: ‘The game would be spoilt if he ever turned up.’34 Lucan would now be nearly eighty. But the family is long-lived, on the whole. He could still, theoretically, be ‘found’; only when a few more years have passed will that faint possibility die.
Would he have wanted to live, or to die? That is the question. Those who believe that he escaped cite his gambler mentality. He would not have thrown in his hand, they say. He would have tried his luck.
Convincing though this ought to be, somehow it is not. Why? Because Lucan was not that kind of gambler. His gambling, although bold, was essentially an act of weakness, of evasion. It was an alternative to reality. It was also, of course, part of the earl’s façade. In 1836 the Honourable Berkley Craven, who had lost £8,000 on the Epsom Derby, shot himself like a gentleman rather than default on his debt. That was the aristocratic exit route: the pistol, the glass of whisky raised to one’s forebears, the locked drawing room. For Lucan, appallingly conscious of the tainted legacy that he was bequeathing his children, facing a future that held only bankruptcy and a murder charge, brought up hard at last against stony reality, this was surely the natural way out. His life had gone wrong. He had, as would be written of Edith Thompson, convicted of murder in 1922, ‘come to the place where dreams fail’.35
‘Lucan was not an honourable man,’ wrote Roy Ranson. But he was Earl of Lucan still. It was all that he was; pretty much all that he had ever been. He may not have thought this consciously, but it was there in him, that mysterious sense of caste that had directed and misdirected his life. Psychologically, therefore, suicide is infinitely more likely to have been the chosen fate.
‘I am sure he is dead,’ Veronica said. ‘My husband was a nobleman and he would behave in a noble way. That is why I call myself dowager, because I am a widow.’
Kait Lucan said, very simply: ‘Everyone meets their Waterloo.’
The idea that Lucan was alive, said James Goldsmith, was ‘absurd’.
‘He is dead, you know,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen.
Victor Lownes, the man who took over the Clermont, says: ‘He embarked on a cross-Channel ferry and jumped off. Oh yes, I’m sure. Lots of bodies don’t get washed up. He was very recognizable. It would be very difficult to hide, looking as he did’: a very valid point. It would have been like trying to hide the thoroughbred Shergar in a field of horses. Really, it could not be done.
Lucan’s sister Jane says:
At this point one just brushes off all the stories, and says oh, it’s one more crazy – like the drunk Englishman in Goa [when Lucan was mistaken for the folk singer Barry Halpin]. As far as what happened to him, I don’t know. In a way I can’t imagine that he would commit suicide. Because his curiosity… I think he would have wanted to stay on so he could hear what was happening to his children. But he probably never did. There was the drink, of course – he was a heavy drinker. And a much heavier drinker at the end, when he was distressed.
‘I’ve absolutely no idea if he died that night,’ says Bill Shand Kydd, ‘but I would have thought it likely. If a fisherman catches a body in their nets, they spike it – otherwise the whole catch is condemn
ed. They just put a boathook through it.’
‘He had some drink with him, didn’t he?’ says Christina. ‘And he got in the ferry and took a whole lot of pills and drank a bottle of whisky and dropped off the side – that’s what we think. The police don’t. All this rubbish about seeing him abroad…’
‘There was certainly a lot of despair,’ says Bill. ‘And drink.’36
‘Three of us swore an affidavit,’ says Lucan’s schoolfriend. ‘I suppose it was eight or nine years after. Bill, me and another, saying that we believed, or we were convinced, that he was dead. Because he was so inquisitive, he loved to know what was going on. He couldn’t have resisted getting in touch with someone. So I’m convinced, yes, that he went overboard.’
A problem remains: no body. Explanations for this are possible. If he had gone in the sea, he could have been spiked by a fisherman, eaten by crabs or, as Michael Stoop suggested, caught in the propellers of the ferry. As Victor Lownes says, not all corpses are washed up. ‘When they dug the Channel Tunnel,’ says Graham Forsyth, who does not espouse a belief in Lucan’s mythical escape, ‘they found lots of bodies down there, even from the war.’ If he had gone into the undergrowth of the South Downs, the theory of Charles Benson, the body could have been natural prey to wild animals. Bones of other long-missing persons, including a judge, were found incidentally during the search for Lucan around Newhaven.
There is also a suggestion that Lucan drowned, went down with his boat, in the place where he had planned to dispose of his wife; possibly the Solent, or the River Hamble close by (which Forsyth believes to have been the intended site). Lucan had definitely sailed in those areas off Southampton, and knew the waters very well. The Solent has complicated tidal patterns; the Hamble, which is part-tidal, is extremely deep in parts. If he had indeed had the idea of sinking Veronica’s body in a particular place, for which there is incidentally no proof at all, this meant two things. Firstly, Lucan knew of an area where a body could disappear. Secondly, he had access to a boat. There is no evidence whatsoever that he did, but this plot assuredly required it. If he then took over the plan and used it for himself, it means something else as well: that he did kill himself, but not on the morning of 8 November, at Newhaven.
A Different Class of Murder Page 32