Taken all in all, the hitman hypothesis has a great deal in its favour. Certainly it permits an explanation for the blood anomalies. For example: Veronica could have surprised the killer in the basement, as was suggested in The Times; he could have begun his attack upon her there, then continued it on the ground floor; he could have tried to exit through the garden, either before or after the second assault. The theory also explains the minimal blood on Lucan, the fact that he was wearing a coat (having just come in from the street), the blood in the car, the mailsack.
It can explain pretty much everything, in fact; which makes it all the more vexing that it has one gigantic flaw. It is the same problem that sits at the heart of the other theories, but in this case it is near-impossible to overcome. Why in the name of heaven, if he had employed a hitman, did Lucan go to Lower Belgrave Street that night?
The obvious, the sane thing to do would have been to stay as well clear of the house as possible. Not merely to be seen driving past the Clermont at 8.45pm, but to be sitting blamelessly at the tables, gambling away, while the proxy did his murderous work. One could say that Lucan did not actually need an alibi, given that the plot was to suggest that Veronica had disappeared, not that she had been murdered. Nevertheless, once the police were notified, the estranged husband would have been an object of some suspicion. It would have been sensible, to say the least, to be visibly elsewhere throughout the evening of the 7th.
It is possible, just, that Lucan was not sensible enough to do this. That he lurked outside the house, perhaps out of concern for his children; looked through the window, saw Veronica in the basement; and realized that the plan had gone amiss. That he then entered the house, as Susan Maxwell-Scott told the inquest. ‘She [Veronica] cried out to him that someone had killed the nanny. And then, almost in the same breath, she accused Lucan of having hired the man to kill her, not Sandra.’ These words are echoed in one of the letters to Bill Shand Kydd. ‘When I interrupted the fight at LB St. and the man left Veronica accused me of having hired him...’ This could have been an elided version of the truth.
There are other possibilities. Did Lucan go to the house because he had been left the job of putting the body in the car? Did he himself launch the attack on Veronica as the hitman fled, like Macbeth in the guise of Third Murderer? Were there, in fact, two assailants: the hapless psycho who bludgeoned Sandra, and the incompetent raging aristocrat who could not kill a wife half his size?
What nonsense it all sounds. One does not, as they say, buy a dog and bark oneself. If Lucan had taken the fantastic step of finding a hitman, the last thing he would logically have done was turn up and pitch in himself.
So the theory, which in so many ways resembles a solution, becomes a flawed hypothesis.11 Perhaps the least explicable thing about it is why Veronica was left alive at the end of it all. But then the same conundrum applies to the fourth hypothesis, the one that is generally believed to be not a hypothesis at all but straightforward fact: that Lord Lucan, solus, is guilty.
‘A murderer is always a gambler’
AGATHA CHRISTIE, The ABC Murders, 1936
It is quite extraordinary, given the weakness of the case against Lucan, how strong is the general assumption of its truth; how a story that is circumstantial and partial is viewed as resoundingly complete. One can pick the thing apart, arguing to and fro about blood here and alibis there, loosening the bonds that appear to tie it all up. It makes no real difference. Everybody still believes that he did it. Is that simply the myth, exerting its power? Is it prejudice? At the trial of Edith Thompson, scarcely a jot of real evidence suggested that she had colluded with her lover to plot the death of her husband; yet she was convicted, because the judge didn’t like her, and public opinion distrusted her adulteress’s allure. Yet the lover of Dr Crippen, Ethel Le Neve, was acquitted of a similar count of conspiracy, because people thought she looked fragile and innocent and incapable of dissimulation. Ninety years after Edith Thompson’s execution, the bias that condemned her is terrifyingly apparent. One would say that it could never happen now. But of course it could, if the accused triggered a different, contemporary prejudice.
In Muriel Spark’s Aiding and Abetting, the psychiatrist treating a patient who claims to be Lucan says:
‘You would be tried for murder if you are indeed Lord Lucan.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I am. And you would be found guilty on the evidence.’
But that is not really so. A good defence counsel could have pulled the evidence to pieces, picked remorselessly at the loose threads in Veronica’s story. Almost certainly Lucan would still have been found guilty, and what would have convicted him is prejudice. In the battle of his word against his wife’s, he would have lost. He would have stood there like a waxwork, spluttering in his cut-glass accent, enraging everybody with his talk of debts, of loans, of bets, of trust funds, all computed in sums that exceeded the average annual wage; none of which in itself made him a murderer. After the custody case, he knew what was ranged against him. The phrase in the letter to Michael Stoop, ‘judging by my last effort in court no one, let alone a 67 year old judge, would believe...’, is incoherent but clear in import. In the eyes of many, the strongest evidence of Lucan’s guilt is that he ran away. Yet those who knew the story of the custody hearing understood why he did.
Veronica did persuade: the High Court judge and the police and the coroner. Everybody says how convincing she could be when she chose. ‘She could win over anybody,’ says Zoe Peto. ‘Yes, she could twist everyone round her little finger,’ says Pierrette. ‘She was very, very, very persuasive,’ says Christina Shand Kydd. None of these women, incidentally, believes in Lucan’s guilt. Nor did his counsel at the custody hearing, the highly esteemed James Comyn, who had seen the prejudice against his client in action.
It is a dangerous game to question Veronica’s version of the events of 7 November 1974, except as pure hypothesis. She has been believed for forty years, but she remains alert to any hint of criticism. In 1999 she threatened to sue her own son for alleged theft of private papers, and gave an interview condemning him for suggesting that his father was semi-innocent. The following year she issued a public warning to Muriel Spark, saying that the concept of Aiding and Abetting was ‘absurd and insensitive’ and that Spark should have spoken to her before writing the book. ‘I am not only thinking about me but also my son.’ Yet Aiding and Abetting was essentially on her side: it was a brilliant spin on the story, but it still took the official line. Spark wrote that the police believed Veronica. ‘They had every reason, with so much corroborative evidence, to believe her.’ When Veronica said, in 1998, ‘I am the one who has been vilified’, one has to wonder what on earth she meant. Nothing she has ever said about her husband has been doubted, except by the people who knew him; for which crime they are the ones who have been dismissed and excoriated.
Some who knew Lucan believed in his guilt, while accepting a theoretical defence of provocation. ‘He did do it,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen. ‘He talked about doing it. I saw him getting obsessive.’ This echoes remarks made by Charles Benson, Dominick Elwes, Greville Howard and John Aspinall. The girlfriend of one of the set also says: ‘Obviously he became completely obsessive, and it pushed him over the edge. I definitely saw that in evidence. I suspect he tried to get custody back and failed, and in the end he was so obsessive he took that step – which is quite a step to take. No one thought it would go to that extreme, no one. People were amazed, shocked.’
Stuart Wheeler says:
I could sort of see, if he thought, this needed to be done. My wife’s mad – I’m not saying she is, of course, I’m saying that’s what he thought – and I want to get the children… There’s only one way to do it, so that’s what I’m going to do. No, I wouldn’t have thought that especially surprising. I don’t mean to say I expected it. I was astonished.
Unnamed friends were also quoted, after the event. ‘Very occasionally one did see a flash of tem
per, and then it was quite unpleasant. He would get very tensed up and shake – the classic bellicose effect. He would get angry with golf caddies who wouldn’t listen, and so on.’ This is in contrast to the character portrayed by Lucan’s old schoolfriend, but one has the sense that Lucan was at his best with this relaxed, kindly, level-headed man. What was also made much of were Lucan’s right-wing politics. ‘We used to have long heart-to-hearts about the dreadful political situation,’ said Michael Stoop. ‘His remedies were fairly drastic. Liberal solutions were no good any more.’12 Today, of course, this is almost worse than murder. Yet one must place it in the context of the early 1970s, when Britain was in a state of fairly frightening disarray and, like Lucan himself, essentially bankrupt. ‘He felt we were on the edge of an abyss,’ said Stoop. He was not alone. Stoop himself had joined the private army organized to keep Britain going in the event of anarchic breakdown.
Lucan’s sister Jane, who is staunchly on the left, is naturally repelled by this; but nevertheless does not take her brother’s politics wholly seriously. She views his hysterical outbursts as an expression of the angry misery that possessed him at the time, an exaggerated by-product of his fascination with money, a stubborn stiffening of the Conservative tradition that the family, before Pat broke free of it, had followed for centuries. ‘A lot of it was talk. Like friends we all have, who try and get your goat.’ Fear, which was in Lucan’s nature, extended to fear about what was happening to the country. Nevertheless he did have recordings of the Nuremberg rallies in his flat at Elizabeth Street, later falsely described as a ‘shrine to Hitler’.13 ‘I don’t think necessarily you have to be a great fan of Hitler to be interested in the Nuremberg speeches,’ says Stuart Wheeler. ‘On the other hand, it’s possible that he was.’
There is no doubt that Lucan had areas of extreme oddity. The very tautness of his demeanour implies twists of tumult within, as first evidenced in childhood. At the same time he could be kind, generous, wryly amusing; a devoted father; a sensitive soul, with a private love of playing Bach and Scott Joplin. The portrayal of a cold, dull, vicious throwback is simplistic in the extreme. It bears no relation to the man as described by those who knew him. It may have been the mask that he wore when he felt inadequate, which was surprisingly often. Without wishing to deny all evidence of his dark underbelly, one has the sense that much of it came from hangers-on, people looking to chuck in their ha’porth of gossip.
But Lucan’s marriage, an odd thing in itself, sent him the wrong way: as marriages can. His qualities began to drain into nothingness. His gambling, at first a hopeful, would-be shrewd dream of ‘making my pile’, became a reality that only delusion could hide. Lucan was weak, au fond, and he masked a lack of inner substance behind the impeccable marvel of his appearance. He was the perfect thoroughbred that did not know how to race. He was ‘alien and unhappy; he felt that the enormous apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive armour that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian species’.14 He certainly had not a clue how to live in a world that had once belonged to his ancestors, who had been free in a way that he could only pretend to be, thus tightening the trap ever more closely. He was trapped. If there were ways out, then he could not see them. All he could see were the red bills, the chemmy table, the cards, the chips, the impregnable white house at Lower Belgrave Street, containing all that should be his; the constricted little maze within the sacred postcodes, without an exit.
Did all this mean that he was also a killer? Was that where the trap naturally led him, to the escape of violence? Did he, who had lost the battle of his marriage, seek to win the war with a show of strength?
Was he that kind of man? It is not true to say, as detective fiction has it, that everybody is capable of murder. What this means is that everybody is capable of the emotions, the motives, that lead to murder. Lucan certainly had motives enough. Resentment; anger; hatred; self-hatred; wretched agony over the children; ineradicable creeping shame at the accusations thrown at him in the custody case; urgent need to stop paying for two establishments; the knowledge that Veronica had won, and would go on winning: in sum, the classic domestic murder motive, which sees the removal of the disruptive element as the only way to restore life to its equilibrium. ‘He had a motive – he had twenty motives!’ says the former nanny Pierrette Goletto, who nevertheless believes him to be innocent. ‘He was a guy who could shout, and this and that, but he was not strong. He was shouting, but not violent. He was too weak. I know he went through hell.
‘But he wasn’t the type to kill.’
It is interesting that a worldly Frenchwoman perceived Lucan in this way, and that the bright Maxwell-Scott nanny, whose sharp eyes missed not a trick, also saw straight through the façade. The weekends that he spent at Grants Hill, with the time in the nursery playing with his children, left an impression of softness, vulnerability, rather than aggression. ‘I think because I didn’t have a dad, I was drawn to that side of him. No, I didn’t believe it when I heard what had happened.’
These are outsiders. Their testimony is valuable. Yet so too is that of the people who really knew Lucan: Bill and Christina Shand Kydd, the old friend from Eton, the sister. It has been so easy, so convenient, to dismiss Lucan’s defenders simply because they are upper-class, and therefore to say that they stick to their own kind (but Veronica, too, was of that kind: nobody placed more importance upon breeding than she). Some of them were not, strictly speaking, likeable. Ian Maxwell-Scott comes across as a drearily self-destructive snob; his wife as something of a Lady Jekyll and Mrs Hyde, an intellectually frustrated woman who became volatile in drink: they were the Lucans of myth, far more than the Lucans themselves. John Aspinall, for all his outlandish charm and his miraculous rapport with animals, was a complicated personality with a moral code all his own: or so he liked people to believe. His style has infected this story, and turned Lucan’s world into an image of archetypal arrogance. But it is not that simple. Only a fool would be so reductive as to say that all members of the working class are the same; logically, therefore, this should not be said about the upper classes; yet it is said, and without compunction.
It is necessary, therefore, to emphasize that the people still alive who knew Lucan best, and who forty years on still seek to offer a different view of him, are nice people. They are remarkably open and straightforward. They command respect. They have no reason now to say the things that they do of Lucan: to portray him, also, as a victim of his marriage. Saying this does not help their own cause: they would do better to toe the familiar line, and say that he was a swine. Forty years on he is not going to be brought to trial, given a hearing. Yet a hearing is what they want him to have, because they believe that he has been portrayed unjustly, and they liked him enough to mind about it. There is, too, the fact that his children have been obliged to grow up with the Lucan myth, which these people mind about even more.
That is not to say that they think him blameless in this story. It is not that simple, either. What they think is that too much has come from one side only, and that the truth is therefore incomplete. They think that Lucan did have motives, but that these sprang from something real, not from some crazed construct of feudal entitlement. They think that what happened is an appalling sadness for the Lucan family, and a tragedy for Sandra Rivett and her family. To them, it is not a myth.
Yet such is the strength of the myth that it is almost shocking to hear it spoken about as something real. Even to hear the name ‘John’ is a jolt. To be told about the Clermont, or the marriage, or the lunch at Aspinall’s house, or the letters written at Susan Maxwell-Scott’s house, induces a sense of dislocation: as if actuality has made a sudden sidling entry into a hazy filmic image, dark with the accretions of years of story-telling.
For the people who really did know Lucan, there is a different kind of disbelief. ‘No, I can’t believe it all happened,’ says Jane. She is still, touchingly, distressed by the fact that it did. Yet h
er view is clear-eyed. ‘He could be very kind to people – but I think he might have been capable of being deliberately unkind. Which is a bad side to him. But he could, yes, be wonderful.’
Christina Shand Kydd says:
This is the thing that’s always upset all of us most, the way the press have portrayed him as the cold-hearted gambling aristocrat. He was a gambling aristocrat, but he was far from cold-hearted. I liked him very, very much. When our son was ill, with leukaemia, he was just so touchingly concerned and sweet. I remember Caspar lying on the sofa at home and he’d gone to sleep, and John just said that he would carry him up to bed. And I always remember, he picked him up and he had tears in his eyes, he was so upset and worried.
I don’t know – I just find it absolutely incomprehensible that John did it.
‘No question,’ says her husband.
His schoolfriend says:
We were very, very close. My parents particularly liked John. They were pretty effective people, and they really liked him. And he had some very high-quality friends – when I say high-quality, I mean proper people. You know, they rated him.
I would have done anything for him, you know. What went wrong, I just don’t know. I think about it quite a lot, and I just think, well, hell of a waste. And the tragedy of the nanny. Terrible. That, I can’t… I mean, there’s no way he could have mistaken her for his wife, and there’s no way he would have done that. Physically, I mean.
Zoe Peto, who also came to know Lucan well and was fond of him despite her complicated friendship with Veronica, says cautiously: ‘My first thought was not that John had done it.’ She also takes a sensible, sceptical view of Lucan’s conversation with Greville Howard, in which he confessed the desire to kill:
A Different Class of Murder Page 37