by John Preston
As the Lady Ghislaine sailed towards Madeira, back in London Maxwell’s son Kevin had some unscheduled visitors. A group of lawyers acting for the Swiss Bank Corporation told him they had passed on to the City of London police details of MCC’s refusal – or inability – to repay Swiss Bank’s £57,000,000. The lawyers made it clear they were offering MCC one last chance. If the money wasn’t repaid by Tuesday, 5 November – the same day as the scheduled meeting between Maxwell and the audit committee – then they would go public with the story.
Soon after 8.30 on the morning of 2 November the Lady Ghislaine sailed into Funchal harbour in Madeira. Two hours later Maxwell went ashore. After buying some British newspapers, he tried, unsuccessfully, to find a history of the island to read. According to Rankin, his mood hadn’t changed. This, however, would be contradicted later by a Funchal shipping agent who said he saw Maxwell sitting on his own in a café looking morose and preoccupied.
In the afternoon he decided he wanted to go swimming, so Rankin sailed to a group of uninhabited islands nearby called Las Desertas. With some difficulty, Maxwell climbed down the hydraulically operated ‘swim-stair’ at the back of the yacht and lowered himself into the water. While he wasn’t a strong swimmer, he was fond of floating about in a giant rubber ring the size of a tractor tyre which was tethered to the side of the boat. Not that he had any need of buoyancy aids. According to the first mate, Nigel Hodson, ‘He couldn’t sink anyway. He floated so well that he didn’t need to make a stroke.’
Returning to Funchal, Maxwell dined by himself in his stateroom before going to a local bar with the second mate, Mark Atkins. While they were having a drink together, he noticed a building nearby bathed in blue and pink light – the Ta-Madeira casino. Maxwell told Atkins to go back to the yacht and return with his passport and $3000 in cash from the safe. He spent the next twenty-five minutes in the casino playing roulette before calling on his walkie-talkie and asking to be picked up.
That night, he informed Rankin that he intended leaving the following morning and flying back to London. But by breakfast Maxwell had changed his mind. Was there was an airport anywhere between Madeira and the Caribbean, where his private jet could land? When Rankin told him there was nothing but open ocean for the next 3500 miles, Maxwell seemed surprised. He then changed his mind again. Now he instructed Rankin to sail in the opposite direction, to the Canary Islands, 250 miles away. The Gulfstream could follow and pick him up from Tenerife.
The next night – Sunday, 3 November – Ian Maxwell called the yacht to remind his father he was supposed to be speaking at the annual Anglo-Israeli Association dinner in London the next day. Before he had left London, Maxwell had told Ian how keen he was to attend. But now he said he wasn’t feeling at all well and didn’t know if he would be up to it. They agreed to talk again in the morning and see how he was.
By this point the Lady Ghislaine had left Madeira and was on its way to the Canary Islands. After another sleepless night, Maxwell said he was still feeling poorly and that Ian should go to the dinner in his place. That evening, Maxwell had what was later described as ‘a shouting match’ with his son Kevin on the phone.
On the Tuesday – 5 November – Maxwell and Kevin were due to go for a meeting with the Governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, where they were bound to face awkward questions about their solvency. November the 5th was set to be a day of reckoning on almost every front. Swiss Bank were about to go public if their £57,000,000 was not repaid, Goldman Sachs were going to announce they had been selling MCC shares after repeated delays to the repayment of their loans, while Maxwell was scheduled to meet MGN’s audit committee to explain the £38,000,000 hole in the pension funds.
Kevin Maxwell was also going to be interviewed by the Financial Times about the state of his father’s businesses. But when he told his father that he would like him to come back to London as soon as possible, Maxwell refused. ‘We needed to prepare for that meeting [at the Bank of England] and I was a bit hacked off that he was going to leave it until the last minute,’ Kevin recalled.
The next morning, 4 November, Maxwell struck Rankin as being more irritable – more like his usual self – than he had done before. But as the day went on his mood improved. He was particularly taken with Rankin’s suggestion that the Gulfstream should stage a fly-past on its way to Tenerife, passing directly above the boat at low altitude. As the plane went by, Maxwell threw his head back and waved at the pilot.
‘He seemed in very good spirits watching the aircraft fly over the boat.’
At four in the afternoon, the Lady Ghislaine reached the port of Santa Cruz in northern Tenerife. At 8.15 that evening, Maxwell went ashore, wearing check trousers, an open-necked shirt, a light summer jacket and one of his trademark baseball caps. A taxi driver called Arturo Hernandez Trujillo drove him to the Hotel Mencey, the only five-star hotel in town. Maxwell got into the front of the Toyota Camry and pushed his seat back as far as it would go, but his knees were still wedged against the dashboard, Trujillo noticed.
When they arrived at the hotel, Maxwell was shown to the best table in the dining room – Table One – overlooking the gardens. Although the Hotel Mencey can’t have seen many 22-stone men wearing baseball caps having dinner on their own, Maxwell doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention – at least from the other diners. He made more impression on the staff, several of whom claimed later that he had appeared out of breath when he arrived and had spent some time jabbing impatiently at the buttons of his walkie-talkie.
After glancing at the menu, Maxwell asked the head waiter, Sergio Rodriguez, for his recommendations. Taking Rodriguez’s advice, he started with a spinach and asparagus mousse, before moving on to hake with clams in a mushroom and parsley sauce. To drink, he ordered a beer. As he was so large, Rodriguez decided that one beer would never be enough, and brought him two.
Maxwell did not object, later ordering a third.
For dessert, he had a single pear. Before leaving, Maxwell complimented Rodriguez on the food – everything had been ‘very good’ – and paid the 3000 peseta bill (around $25) in cash, leaving a 20 per cent tip. On the way out his mind must have been elsewhere because he forgot his jacket, which he had hung over the back of his chair. Rodriguez had to run after him and give it back. Outside the hotel, Maxwell caught a taxi, returning to the Lady Ghislaine shortly after 10 p.m.
Immediately, he told Rankin to set sail: ‘Mr Maxwell wanted to cruise all night out at sea.’
Maxwell went straight to his stateroom, where he made a number of calls on the yacht’s satellite phone. Shortly afterwards he complained that he could smell exhaust fumes. To try to clear the air, two stewardesses turned on a portable fan. At around 10.45 one of the stewardesses, Liza Kordalski, checked to see if there was anything else that he wanted. Maxwell told her he was fine. As Kordalski was on her way out, he asked her to lock the sliding door to his stateroom from the inside, then leave through the bathroom – this in turn led through Maxwell’s study into the dining room.
At 11.15 p.m., Ian called the yacht on the satellite phone to let his father know how his speech to the Anglo-Israeli Association had gone. ‘He was in a good mood. I told him that the speech had been very well received. He wanted to know how a particular joke we had discussed had gone down.’ During their conversation, Ian referred to the fact that the next day was going to be a ‘big day’ with ‘important meetings’.
The call ended with him saying, ‘See you tomorrow then.’
‘You bet,’ said Maxwell.
Afterwards he told the bridge that he didn’t want to take any more calls. But five minutes later the phone in his suite rang again. This time it was Rabbi Feivish Vogel from the Jewish Orthodox Lubavitch movement. Vogel was calling from Moscow and insisted on being put through. He wanted to discuss a campaign that he and Maxwell were involved in to secure the release of an archive of Jewish manuscripts from the Lenin Library.
‘He sounded completely fine,’ Vogel rememb
ers. ‘He was as robust and as helpful and positive in his last call as in all our other calls. I had no inkling that anything was wrong.’
After receiving another couple of phone calls, Maxwell retired to bed. But he can’t have slept for that long because when one of the crew, Graham Leonard, came on watch at 4.10 a.m, he saw him standing by the stern rail. He was wearing a white dressing gown over his nightshirt and looking at the lights of Gran Canaria on the horizon. By now the wind had got up and there was a light easterly breeze. This time Maxwell complained that his bedroom was too hot. Leonard turned on the air conditioning. Having done so, he went back to the bridge, leaving Maxwell standing on deck gazing out over the stern rail.
It was now 4.15.
Half an hour later, at 4.45, Maxwell called and said that his bedroom was now too cold. The air conditioning was turned off. The Lady Ghislaine continued to sail on though the night.
At around six o’clock the next morning Kevin Maxwell phoned his father. There was no reply. At 9.45 Gus Rankin docked in Los Cristianos in southern Tenerife. At 10.30, a banker from Rothschild’s in New York called and asked to be put through to Maxwell’s stateroom.
Again there was no reply.
‘Mr Maxwell is still asleep,’ he was told. Could he try again later?
Half an hour later John Bender, senior Vice Chairman of Maxwell Macmillan in America, telephoned. Bender had urgent business to discuss, he said. After Rankin had tried putting the call through to Maxwell’s stateroom, he tried other internal phones around the boat.
Still there was no answer.
Puzzled but not especially concerned, the crew went looking for him. ‘I was surprised,’ Rankin recalled later. ‘Where was he? We went and looked in all the usual places.’ There was no sign of Maxwell in the dining room, or the kitchen, or on any of the decks. Next, Rankin and the chef, Robert Keating, tried the main door to the stateroom. It was locked. Trying the other door that led from Maxwell’s stateroom on to the rear deck, they found that this too had been locked.
Repeated knocking failed to get any response. Going back to the bridge, Rankin fetched his pass key. Although Liza Kordalski was sure she had left the key in the other side of the lock the night before, Rankin found he was able to insert his pass-key and slide the door open.
‘Mr Maxwell?’ he called out.
Again there was no reply.
‘Mr Maxwell? Are you all right?’
When Rankin walked into the stateroom, the first thing he saw was Maxwell’s dressing gown, lying crumpled on the floor. Next, he looked in the bedroom. By now, Rankin was half anticipating what he might find: Maxwell lying in bed having suffered a seizure of some kind. But the bed was empty. So was Maxwell’s dressing room, as well as both bathrooms.
At this point the whole crew, led by Rankin, searched the yacht from top to bottom. They conducted the search three times, looking in the staff quarters below decks, as well as in the inflatable dinghy that was suspended alongside. As soon as they had finished one search, they started all over again. ‘We were even opening drawers, we were so confused.’
They found nothing.
Even then, the truth was so hard to comprehend, so appalling in its implications, that they couldn’t quite believe it. ‘At some point it sunk in that he was not on the boat,’ Rankin recalled.
Running back to the bridge, he telephoned the local SOS station, Gomera Radio. It turned out that no one there spoke English. He then told a local shipping agent, John Hamilton, to alert the authorities in Los Cristianos. At 12.02 p.m., Rankin called Brian Hull, the Gulfstream operations manager at Farnborough airport.
‘How are things?’ Hull asked.
‘We’re not doing very well,’ Rankin admitted. ‘We’ve lost Mr Maxwell.’
34.
Found
Shortly before six o’clock that afternoon, Captain Jesús Fernández Vaca of the Spanish National Rescue Service was about to abandon his search for the day. The sun was already slipping beneath the horizon and the light starting to fade. Within a few minutes it would disappear completely. Just as Vaca was about to turn his helicopter around and fly back to Gran Canaria, he spotted a dark shape in the sea below.
Unsure just what he had seen, Vaca descended for a closer look. Directly beneath the helicopter was the naked body of a man. It was lying on its back with its legs spread-eagled and its arms stretched out on either side. A rescue diver, José Francisco Perdoma, was lowered into the water. First of all, he checked for a pulse: nothing. He then tried to roll the body into a special basket that had been lowered with him. But it was too big to fit in, and so a large nylon harness normally used to rescue cattle and horses from flood zones was lowered instead. Even this proved difficult.
In the gloom it eventually took five men to attach the harness and winch the body up into the helicopter. By the time it landed at Gando airfield in Las Palmas twenty miles away, Betty Maxwell was already on a plane out to the Canaries. Immediately after Gus Rankin had alerted the Gulfstream operations manager at Farnborough airport, Kevin Maxwell had called the Lady Ghislaine. Rankin explained that his father had gone missing during the night. Kevin then went to see his brother Ian.
‘My initial reaction was utter disbelief,’ Ian remembers. ‘It just seemed too far-fetched to be true. I remember standing up and having a thirty-second cry and it was accompanied by the most bizarre feeling, a combination of exhilaration and being scared. In a sense, exhilarated to be free of this extraordinary alpha male presence in my life and at the same time incredibly scared as to what the future would look like without him.’
While Kevin and Ian remained in London, Betty Maxwell flew out to Gran Canaria with her oldest son, Philip. Travelling with them in a private jet were the Mirror photographer Ken Lennox and John Jackson, a Mirror reporter. ‘Betty was dressed in black, even though at this stage Maxwell was still missing,’ Jackson remembers. During the flight, the co-pilot asked Lennox if he could have a word in the cockpit. ‘He told me that they’d just heard that a body had been found, but they didn’t know if it was Maxwell or not. They wanted someone who knew him well to make sure it was him before they showed the body to Betty.
‘I then went and told her. There were no tears or anything; she was quite composed.’ Almost immediately afterwards, Betty Maxwell said to Jackson, ‘“I’ll tell you one thing. He would never kill himself. It’s not suicide.” She was very clear about that.’
When they arrived at La Palmas, a reception party was waiting to greet them, including the British vice-consul. While the vice-consul stayed with Betty Maxwell and John Jackson, Ken Lennox accompanied one of the officials to the pilots’ mess. ‘I went in and there was Robert lying naked on a table. I was asked how I could recognize him and I said that he had two black moles behind his left ear. I then walked around the body and had a good look. There was one mark on his body, on his upper arm. It looked like a scrape mark, greenish-blue in colour. Otherwise, there was nothing unusual.’
After Lennox had signed a statement formally identifying Maxwell, a photograph was taken of him holding up the statement with the body in the background. ‘Once that was done, I went outside and said, “Betty, it’s Robert.”’
In the meantime Betty and John Jackson had been talking to Captain Vaca. He gave her as much information as he could about recovering the body: about where it had been found and its exact condition. In Vaca’s opinion, the body had been in the water for about twelve hours. He also told Jackson that when the body was winched up into the helicopter no water came out of its lungs. ‘He said, “I have taken many, many bodies out of the sea and I can tell you for certain that he didn’t drown.”’
A few minutes later, Betty Maxwell and John Jackson were taken into the room where the body was now lying beneath an orange rubber sheet. ‘Two doctors, a man and a woman wearing white coats, were in attendance,’ Betty recalled. There was also an audience of sorts. ‘The vice-consul, a police officer and other officials were seated on chairs lined up alo
ng one side of the room. I braced myself, fearing from all I had heard about drowning that the body would look bloated or mauled by sharks. I walked slowly towards the head of the stretcher. The lady doctor lifted the sheet, uncovering Bob’s face and torso.’
Betty’s fears that the body might be disfigured proved groundless. ‘Even in death he looked a most impressive figure. He seemed taller, his body was completely straight and his whole bearing was one of extreme dignity, even defiance . . . There he was lying dead and yet his imposing attitude moved everyone in the room into silence. We were all stunned, and I felt intimidated: the combined emotions of grief, shock, fear, sadness, awe and perplexity that overshadowed us were almost too much to bear.’
She asked the doctor to remove the sheet completely so she could see Maxwell naked. ‘Although I felt embarrassed, I needed to be sure that his body was whole and intact. I noticed nothing abnormal, except for slight bleeding from the nose, which I was told was usual in such circumstances in death.’ When she touched Maxwell’s hand and his forehead, she was surprised to find that his skin was soft. ‘It seemed strange that rigor mortis had not set in.’
Jackson noted that Maxwell’s skin hadn’t discoloured or wrinkled at all, despite being immersed in the sea for twelve hours. Nor had his hair dye run. But it wasn’t this that made the most impression on him. ‘Maxwell was lying with arms up either side of his head. Both his hands were clenched together as if he was trying to hold on to something. I remember looking down at him and thinking that he looked just like a baby who had fallen asleep.’
From Las Palmas, Betty Maxwell was driven to the Lady Ghislaine in Los Cristianos harbour, along with John Jackson and Ken Lennox. A Spanish police officer was also there to offer his condolences. When Betty asked how long the police would need to conduct their investigations, she was astonished to learn that they had already done so.