Fall

by John Preston

  ‘You’ve completely finished?’

  ‘Yes,’ the policeman told her.

  ‘What, you’ve seen all you wish to see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  What puzzled her even more was that the main cabin hadn’t been sealed by the police. Nothing had been taken away for analysis. Nor did anything appear to have been given more than the most cursory examination. As she looked around, Betty had a sense which she couldn’t define, but which would never leave her: a nagging suspicion that something wasn’t right.

  ‘I had not met Captain Rankin before. He was tall and rather stout, in uniform, but casually so, not giving the spruce naval appearance of previous captains, as one would expect on a luxury yacht like the Lady Ghislaine. Some of the crew gave me the same impression. The boat did not seem quite shipshape to me.’

  Her sense of disquiet deepened when she spoke to Rankin. She didn’t care for the familiar way in which he talked about Maxwell, almost as if the two of them had been best friends. It didn’t ring true, she felt, ‘familiar as I was with Bob’s loathing for intimate conversation’.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ she asked him.

  Caught offguard, Rankin said that his immediate assumption was that Maxwell had committed suicide.

  Going into the main cabin, Betty saw that it was exactly as Maxwell had left it. His swimming trucks – still damp – were lying on the bathroom floor. On a table by the telephone, labelled ‘Strictly Confidential’, was a copy of ‘The Maxwell House Contact System’, a bound alphabetical directory of important phone numbers. In the bedroom, sweatshirts were strewn over the sofa, there were pieces of orange peel on the carpet and an empty glass on the bedside table.

  Intending to sleep there that night, Betty asked the stewardesses to change the bedding, clear up the mess and ‘follow normal procedure, just as if Mr Maxwell were still alive’. By now Maxwell’s youngest daughter, Ghislaine, about to turn thirty, had flown in. ‘She was really, really upset,’ Lennox recalls. ‘You could tell this was Daddy’s girl. Even as an adult, she would refer to him as “My Daddy” all the time. She was inconsolable; she could hardly speak. When she saw her mother, her knees just buckled.’

  To try to stop the yacht from being besieged by paparazzi, Betty told Rankin to set sail once more – to a small fishing village north of Santa Cruz. At around ten o’clock that night the five of them – Betty, Philip and Ghislaine, John Jackson and Ken Lennox – sat down to a makeshift supper in the yacht’s dining room. Throughout the meal, there was a stream of calls on the satellite phone. One was from Maxwell’s lawyer in France, a man called Sam Pisar. Had Betty noticed anything about her husband’s body, Pisar wondered. Or the behaviour of the crew?

  Then he asked a question that was currently being asked in newsrooms all over the world: was it possible Maxwell had been murdered?

  The question was so unexpected it left Betty feeling as if she’d been winded: ‘My whole world was shaken to its core.’ Two hours later Pisar’s words were still going round and round in her head. Lying in the same bed where Maxwell had been lying less than twenty-four hours earlier, she tried to put her thoughts into some sort of order:

  ‘The more I thought about the mystery of his death, the less I could comprehend it. How could it have happened? I must admit that the idea that he might have committed suicide did cross my mind, but I could not take it seriously. It was just not in character.’

  However much Betty tried to dismiss the idea, the more it preoccupied her. If Maxwell had committed suicide, surely he would have left her a note? Unable to sleep, she got up and decided to search the cabin. ‘I knew Bob’s habits very well. All his life he had had special places where he would keep his money or an important letter.’

  She began by looking through all the pockets of his clothes. Then she searched the drawers, the shelves, inside the pillowcases and even under the mattress.

  She found nothing.

  Next, she went through the five black-leather pilot cases in which Maxwell kept important papers. Just as Rankin had searched the yacht three times over for Maxwell earlier that day, so Betty also searched everything three times, ‘bent only on discovering a note in Bob’s hand that might give me a clue’.

  Again there was nothing.

  At five o’clock, exhausted and more puzzled than ever, she finally fell asleep. Five hours later, she woke up: ‘My first full day as Bob Maxwell’s widow had begun.’

  She soon discovered just how many hurdles would have to be cleared before her husband could be buried. Three years earlier, Maxwell had bought himself a burial plot on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. According to Jewish lore, this was where the Messiah will arrive on the Day of Judgement, thus putting anyone interred there first in the queue for resurrection.

  But Jewish lore also dictated that he would have to be buried within five days – by the following Sunday, 10 November. No funeral could take place on the Sabbath – Saturday. Similarly, no body could be admitted into Israel after sunset on Friday. That meant that Maxwell’s body would have to be on a plane by Thursday evening at the latest, just thirty-six hours away.

  Before then, an autopsy would have to be carried out by the Spanish authorities, and the necessary paperwork completed to transport a body to another country. That could take up to a week, Betty was told. She begged her Spanish lawyer, Julio Claverie, to hurry things along.

  ‘Mrs Maxwell, this is just impossible,’ Claverie told her, ‘but I shall try.’

  To complicate matters further, Maxwell’s insurance brokers wanted to do their own autopsy in case there was any dispute about the cause of death. Meanwhile the phone continued to ring. To allow Betty some time to herself, John Jackson volunteered to field calls. Remarkably, given how badly their lunch had gone eight months earlier, one of the first callers was President George Bush. Margaret Thatcher also rang, as did Lord Goodman, former solicitor and adviser to Harold Wilson. Goodman wondered how such a distinguished figure as Maxwell should be commemorated, and suggested that a memorial service in Westminster Abbey might be appropriate.

  After a meeting with a judge to try to arrange a death certificate, Betty returned to the Lady Ghislaine. That afternoon, she had another meeting with Captain Rankin. There were a number of questions she wanted answering. She asked him about Maxwell’s mood during his time on the yacht, what he had said, where they had sailed to, who first discovered he was missing and why it had taken so long to raise the alarm.

  None of Rankin’s answers struck Betty as being peculiar, or suspicious. And yet after their conversation was over she had the same feeling she had had when she stepped on board the yacht the day before. A nagging sense of unease. Of ‘malaise that is difficult to describe or explain’.

  35.

  The First Autopsy

  The day after Maxwell’s body had been found, John Jackson spent the morning writing a speech for Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine to give to the world’s press. Throughout the night, a stream of journalists, photographers and TV crews had descended on Las Palmas. Now they were ranged along the quayside, long lenses pointing at the yacht. Once Jackson had written the speech, Ken Lennox coached Ghislaine on how to deliver it. He made her repeat it over and again until she could reach the end without bursting into tears.

  Meanwhile, Jackson looked after Maxwell’s oldest son, Philip. If anything, Philip was even more distraught than his sister. ‘He was a very nice, very quiet man, and at one point he asked if he could have a word. I could see how upset he was and I knew I had to keep him away from the cameras, so we went behind the funnel of the Lady Ghislaine.’

  Of the seven surviving Maxwell children, Philip was by far the most scarred by his upbringing, and by the loss of his brother Michael in particular. Michael’s death had meant that the burden of being Maxwell’s male heir passed to him – a burden Philip had neither the desire nor the temperament to shoulder. After working for Pergamon as Managing Director of Encyclopedias, he had resigned because of ill-health.
‘The moment we went behind the funnel, Philip became very upset. The saddest thing was that he said that his father had always hated him and that he didn’t particularly like his father, but now he no longer had a chance to make up with him.’

  Like Betty, Philip had a nagging sense of unease about Maxwell’s death. But while she had only talked to the Lady Ghislaine’s captain, Gus Rankin, Philip decided to question each member of the crew individually. None of them appeared at all evasive or shifty, and yet nothing he heard put his mind at rest.

  Whenever she left the yacht to attend the coroner’s office, Betty tried to make herself look as impassive as possible. ‘Cameras whirred into action, flashes exploded and the journalists closed in on me . . . I just walked past them, erect, my eyes fixed slightly above the horizon, a wan smile on my face, just as I had been taught to do so long ago, when my mother made me take a course in deportment in Paris. I never said a word.’

  At midday on Wednesday, 6 November, in a small, poorly ventilated room next to the undertaker’s where Maxwell’s body had been stored, three inexperienced Spanish pathologists began what was known as ‘the opening of the cavities’. They found a small amount of water in the respiratory tracts leading to Maxwell’s lungs, along with traces of vomit and a seasickness medicine. Samples were taken from his brain, his one lung, his kidneys, pancreas and stomach, and sent to Madrid for further tests.

  Amid mounting speculation that he might have been murdered, the National Institute of Toxicology in Madrid was told to check specifically for substances that might have attacked Maxwell’s central nervous system. This theory was lent further weight by Julio Claverie, who issued a statement saying that ‘Mr Maxwell was a man who had many enemies, powerful enemies. There has to be a possibility that he was murdered.’

  On the Thursday morning, Betty woke up in a panic. ‘Two days had already slipped by and I realized it was going to be touch and go to get Bob’s body out of Spain in time to fly it to Israel to comply with all the strictures of Jewish Orthodoxy.’ There was still a mass of things to attend to. A death certificate had to be issued, along with an exit permit allowing the body to leave the Canaries. Hotel rooms had to be booked in Jerusalem, vehicles hired, a funeral service organized, security arranged . . .

  The undertakers asked what sort of coffin she wanted. Betty said it should be as simple and plain as possible. Then it turned out that Maxwell’s private jet was almost certainly too small to transport any sort of coffin. Could the undertakers lend the family an empty casket so they could make sure? Alas, this was impossible, she was told. Another larger plane, specially converted into a flying hearse, was located in Switzerland.

  By now the pathologists had reached their preliminary findings. Maxwell, they concluded, had died of a ‘cardiovascular attack’. The absence of water in his lungs was taken as evidence that he couldn’t have drowned. Either he had suffered a heart attack on deck and fallen into the water, or else he had fallen, then had a heart attack in the water.

  Far from banishing Betty’s disquiet, this only increased it. Something, she still felt, wasn’t right – ‘but who was I, at this stage, to contradict the experts?’ Maxwell’s insurers – Lloyds – were also unhappy about the autopsy, principally about the way it had been conducted. Not only did the Spanish pathologists lack experience; it seemed they also lacked the right instruments. With disarming frankness, the pathologist in charge of the autopsy, Dr Carlos Lemela, later conceded that it might have been less thorough than it should. ‘We are not the world’s best,’ he said. ‘I think we carried out the initial autopsy correctly and professionally, but we are open to criticism. I must admit one can be mistaken.’

  Lloyds insisted there should be a second autopsy, this time conducted by Dr Iain West, a man frequently referred to, not least by himself, as ‘Britain’s leading forensic pathologist’. But if Maxwell was going to be buried on Sunday, there was no time to conduct a second autopsy in Tenerife. Instead, it would have to be done in Israel on Saturday night, just a few hours before the funeral started.

  That afternoon Betty heard that a death certificate had at last been issued, along with an exit visa for the body. It had already been decided that she and Ken Lennox would accompany the body, while the others would come later on another plane. If they left that night, they ought to be able to make it to Israel by sundown on Friday.

  But the undertakers were still refusing to release the body. Because of the heat and the risk of decomposition, it was having to be embalmed. Unfortunately, the embalmer still hadn’t finished his work.

  And there was a further problem. Clearly embarrassed, the undertakers told Betty that Maxwell wouldn’t fit into a normal-sized coffin and they were having problems finding a larger one.

  On Thursday evening, Betty had what would be her last meal on the Lady Ghislaine. Although she couldn’t explain why, she had a suspicion that she would never set foot on the yacht again, and she wanted to fix as many details as possible in her memory. ‘I stood at the place where Bob’s life was thought to have ended, gazing at the open sea, questioning, wondering, perturbed.’

  In the observation lounge, Betty touched the fabric of the upholstered sofas where Maxwell had liked to entertain his guests. ‘From there I went down to the great formal dining room, with its shimmering memories of stately dinners, then up an internal staircase to the study and finally back to Bob’s cabin, where his last hours had been spent, and I tried to fathom the mystery of his death.’

  When they had finished supper, Betty, John Jackson, Ken Lennox, Ghislaine and Philip sat around waiting. It was now after eleven o’clock. The pilot’s deadline for making it to Israel had long since passed and Betty was getting desperate. All at once Julio Claverie appeared with the news that the coffin had finally been released and would be taken to the plane at Las Palmas at two o’clock in the morning. If Betty and Ken Lennox left immediately, they should be able to make it in time.

  With a procession of press cars in hot pursuit, a police escort accompanied them to the local airport. After Ghislaine had said goodbye to her mother, John Jackson heard her tell the crew that there was one last thing she wanted done – and done immediately:

  ‘Shred everything on this boat!’

  36.

  A Hero of Our Time

  In the days following Maxwell’s death, tributes poured in from all around the world. Mrs Thatcher sent Betty a handwritten three-page letter. ‘No one will ever replace the energy, vision and resolve personified in Mr Maxwell,’ she wrote. ‘He was and will remain unique. Above all, Mr Maxwell showed the whole world that one person can move and influence events by using his own God-given talents and abilities.’

  According to Neil Kinnock, Maxwell had been a ‘true day star of his age’. No one was quite sure what a day star was, but it was clearly intended as a compliment. ‘Many like me valued Bob’s friendship and loyalty and admired his remarkable tenacity, intelligence and insights,’ Kinnock went on. ‘We will all miss the infectious vitality of one of the few people I have known who deserved to be called irreplaceable.’

  The Prime Minister, John Major, was believed to have delayed his weekly audience with the Queen so that he could write his tribute: ‘No one should doubt his interest in peace and his loyalty to friends,’ Major wrote. ‘During the attempted Soviet coup this August, he was able to give me valuable insights into the situation in the Soviet Union because of his many contacts . . . His was an extraordinary life, lived to the full.’

  Chancellor Helmut Kohl was ‘very sad’, President Gorbachev was ‘deeply grieved’, while President Bush extolled Maxwell’s ‘humanitarian endeavours and his unwavering fight against bigotry and oppression’. According to the former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, ‘Mr Maxwell was not a man, but an empire in his power, thought and deeds.’

  Amid all this effusiveness, one tribute was brief to the point of terseness. ‘Mr Maxwell was a remarkable man,’ said Rupert Murdoch. ‘My wife and I send our personal condolences t
o Mrs Maxwell and her family.’

  At the same as extolling Maxwell’s achievements, the Sun’s headline managed to get in a dig about his origins. According to the paper, he had been ‘THE RICHEST PEASANT IN THE WORLD’. For its part, the Mirror marked his passing with the newsprint version of a twenty-one-gun salute. ‘The body of Robert Maxwell, publishing giant and world statesman, was found in the Atlantic today . . .’ the paper’s front page announced. Readers who wanted to know more about this ‘Great Big Extraordinary Man’ were invited to turn to pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 18, 19, 34, 35 and 36.

  Joe Haines wrote that ‘His death removed a colossus from the scene . . . Love him or hate him, his like will never be seen again.’ Facing the television cameras outside the Mirror building, Charlie Wilson, the Editor of the Sporting Life, declared in a voice appropriately thickened with solemnity that Maxwell had been nothing less than a hero of our time. Wilson had just been appointed official spokesman for the Maxwell family – not because he knew them particularly well, but just because they needed someone at short notice.

  Other newspapers took a less adulatory yet generally respectful tone. While acknowledging that Maxwell could be a terrible bully, the Guardian conceded that he had been an ‘effective bully’. He will be ‘much missed as a public figure’, the obituary concluded. The New York Times noted admiringly that he had ‘borrowed money on a heroic scale’. Lord Goodman told Betty Maxwell that he’d given a lot of thought to his earlier suggestion that there should be a memorial service at Westminster Abbey and had come up with what he felt was a more appropriate venue: St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Meanwhile, speculation about the cause of Maxwell’s death continued to run amok. To begin with there appeared to be three possible explanations: accident, suicide or murder. Supporters of the last theory eagerly lit on reports that the Lady Ghislaine had apparently been shadowed by another ship as it sailed down the coast of Tenerife. Could a crack team of assassins have been aboard? Had they managed to board the Lady Ghislaine in the middle of the night, murder Maxwell, then slip away unnoticed?