Looking for Lucan
John Knight
Last Tuesday, 7 November, was the fourth anniversary of that night when Lord Lucan murdered his children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, and then tried to murder his wife, Veronica, at their family home in Lower Belgrave Street. Since then, the Lucan affair' has become a bandwagon for cranks and sensation-mongers: four years of sightings by the score, of police 'swoops' in glamorous locations, and still no sign ol Lucan himself.
South America was a much favoured area for 'Lucky' Lucan during the early period. A man in an Italian jail had claimed that Lucan was being maintained there by a rich Englishman but, like that othei ghostly fugitive Martin Bormann, the Earl never emerged. In fact it has become a popular ploy for convicts to pretend to be helping the police by giving information about Lucan, in the hope of some form of 'deal'. No one is fooled any more, however; to say that you know where Lucan is, or was, has become a joke.
The French episode was one of the funniest. The proprietress of the Grand Hotel in Cherbourg, a modest establishment despite its name, told the French police that Lucan had slept there (she should put a plaque to that effect over the coffin-like bed in Room 22). She was a most theatrical lady, hands on hips, head thrown back. Lucan had no baggage and smelt dirty, she said. His face was brick-red but he was sober. Her receptionist, however, claimed that he was drunk all the time. The sighting at the Grand Hotel started an epidemic, and very soon a party of English journalistic sleuths were having dinner at the restaurant next to the Grand. They showed the proprietess a picture of Lucan: 'Eet ees 'im!' She was positive as so many people are.
'Lady X' was equally sure that she had seen him in a Cape Town restaurant. 'I was there to meet a friend for lunch at the Café Royal. I walked into the restaurant and Lord Lucan was there. His hair was blonde and he had shaved off his moustache. I don't know why I did, but I backed away. I did not want to embarrass him.' Indeed she did not: although she told her story to a newspaper, she refused to be named to the police. It turned out that the restaurant where she had seen Lucan was also a favourite rendezvous for journalists, and one was left to speculate why Lucan would be so incautious as to eat there, and why he did not react to 'Lady X' when he saw her especially as she had been, she claimed, in his circle for ten years.
Extravagant claims of friendship and involvement, however, have often been made. Not least by a British doctor who says that he met Lucan in an East African port. Lucan was with an attractive blonde girl, and they were driving in a Land-Rover. The doctor, who was returning to England, became involved with them in a bar. As they drank Lucan, who had not identified himself, became maudlin and is said to have cried, Dammit, if only I could get back to the old country'. Then, in tears of salt and alcohol, he confessed who he was and was last seen driving to Kenya with the fairhaired lady at his side.
The Lucan hunt can be extremely &hat" ing for those men who look even remotelY like Lucan. A poor Dutchman on holiday la Rhodes was taken to the local police station because a British tourist had spotted him. and denounced him as Lucan. The police in Melbourne also thought they had him at last, but it turned out to be John Stone house en route from his faked drowning disaster. But, nevertheless, Scotland Yard looks at everything connected with Lucan how. ever paranoid or idiotic. Roy Ranson, the Scotland Yard detective, is still at the centre of the investigation with, theoretically, 8 murder warrant for Lucan in his pocket. He works on other cases, of course, since he 15 Number Two in the Complaints Investigation Bureau but Ranson gives 'top 1,ri°.1' ity' to Lucan, and will drop everything le order to continue the search. Despite all the sightings and rumours' however, nothing has emerged which gives the flimsiest grounds for assuming tha,,t Lucan is alive -or, for that matter, dead./ number of people close to the case fee' instinctively that Lucan is in fact still alive and it is possible that, with more than a lilt!! help from his friends, he is able to 'lie doggo' as he put it in one of his faroveu letters. His nickname, 'Lucky', still has a certain credibility and Lucan clearly has --°r had qualities which inspire loyalty even from his wife, Veronica, who believes he murdered the nanny in mistake for herself. Only latterly has she told the story of how' after the murder, she staggered into a nearby pub and, with blood all over her' pretended to faint. She did not want 03 reveal who she was, since in that everl_t, Lucan might have been apprehend' immediately. Only later at St George s Hospital did she reveal her name and, bY that time, Lucan was well on the way_t W) whatever destination he had in mind. .1D';' loyalty, .a. kind of closing of ranks, is pecur iarly British and it is this aspect of the ease. which has generated a great deal of interes` in the foreign press.
One German magazine sent over a teal° of ten reporters and photographers. They told their London correspondent that theY wished to go to the Clermont and all the 'English gentlemen's gaming clubs'. tunately the correspondent was not ; member of any of them, nor did he anyone who was. In desperation, he too them to the tourist havens and the tattY. casinos, pretending that these were indeee the haunts of the lords and ladies of tilde realm. The German journalists belie!? him. They wrote an enthusiastic artic'ee' knocking Britain, entitled 'The Death of th English Gentleman'.
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