14

What became of Lucky

IN THE ABSENCE of a body or an authentic sighting of Lord Lucan, it seemed that nobody was ever going to know what had become of him, particularly once the Coroner’s findings effectively wrapped up the murder investigation.

There were several potential leads arising out of the circumstances of the murder. Why had Lucan felt obliged to make not just one but two trial runs to Newhaven in Michael Stoop’s Corsair before the murder? Why Newhaven? And why, as one member of the Clermont told me, did he feel it necessary on his second trip to take one of his old Clermont friends with him and return with a mailbag in the back of the car? If he was simply anxious to reach the port by a certain time, why all this trouble?

When most people fuss about their time of arrival at a ferry port it is because they want to catch the ferry. But this made little sense for someone planning what was meant to be a perfect murder. Had the great Lucan gamble worked, and had everything happened as intended, the last thing on earth he would have wanted would have been to get to France, which could only have aroused suspicion. Even if he had been making preparations for the sort of unforeseen disaster that occurred, no fleeing murderer in his senses would have taken the overnight ferry to Dieppe. At that time of year he would have been dangerously conspicuous among the few passengers aboard; and since in those days the voyage could take up to five hours, the police would have had all the time they needed to contact their French counterparts and ensure that a posse of gendarmes was on the quayside at Dieppe to welcome the homicidal Earl to France.

But if there had been no connection between those trial runs and catching the ferry, what then? Why had Lucan twice visited one of the least charming seaside towns in southern England? Why did he have to reach it by a certain time? Why the mailbag? And if he didn’t catch the ferry after murdering Sandra Rivett by mistake, why did he still park his car in Norman Road in the small hours of the morning after killing her?

In the midst of all the far-fetched theories that were soon appearing, questions such as these were such small beer that they were rapidly overlooked. And that would have been that, but for the appearance on television in 2000 of a celebrated South London criminal called Frederick Foreman. In the sixties Foreman was a man of considerable standing in the London underworld, who combined running a pub in Southwark, The Prince of Wales, with organising one of the most successful gangs in London. During the affluent sixties he had grown rich. Then, in 1968 he made one big mistake: as a favour to an East London gang, headed by the notorious Kray Twins, he helped dispose of a fellow criminal called Frank Mitchell, better known as ‘the Mad Axe Man’.

Originally Mitchell had been something of a hero to the Krays, but after arranging his escape from Dartmoor, and then concealing him from the police, they soon realised that the mentally retarded Axe Man was a dangerous liability. Foreman and an accomplice finally relieved the Krays of this embarrassment with alarming efficiency, and in 1969 when the Twins and their gang were put on trial at the Old Bailey for gangland killings, Foreman was tried along with them for Mitchell’s murder. Frank Mitchell, however, had been made to disappear so skilfully that no trace of him was ever found, and the murder charge against Foreman was dismissed for lack of evidence.

This left Mitchell’s ultimate fate as much a mystery as ever – until 1996, when Foreman published his autobiography. Believing himself protected by the long established rule of British Justice that no one can be tried for the same crime twice, he described how he and an accomplice had in fact shot Mitchell, but he wrote nothing of perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the case – the disposal of the body.

During his TV programme, still immune from prosecution, he finally explained how this was done. This involved what he casually referred to as ‘a little facility’. This ‘facility’ consisted of the skipper of a deep sea fishing boat who knew exactly where and how to dispose of a human body at sea, so that it sank for ever and the currents never brought it up again. Foreman actually demonstrated how the skipper wrapped the body in canvas, weighted it with heavy stones and encased it in chicken wire.

Foreman’s story reminded me of something I discovered back in 1969 when working on The Profession of Violence, my biography of the Kray Twins. Although the Twins talked to me quite freely, both before and after their arrest, there were certain things that they would not discuss, including what happened to the bodies of their murder victims. At the time there were several rumours on the subject. The commonest was that they ended up inside the concrete pillars of the Hammersmith flyover. My favourite was the story that the Krays had a hold over an East London undertaker, who as favour to them, used to place an extra body in a coffin just before a funeral.

I was never terribly convinced by either theory, and it was only some years later that a former close associate of the Krays told me what had really happened. This matched virtually word for word Foreman’s account of how his ‘little facility’ had taken care of the body of Frank Mitchell. Like Foreman, he also said that the facility was in Newhaven, so while researching this book I went there to see it for myself. Once I started looking round, I began to understand the real reason for Lucan’s visits and why he left his car there.

There are in fact two Newhavens. The town itself is split by the River Ouse, which enters the English Channel at this point. The east bank of the estuary is the Newhaven from which the Channel ferries come and go. It is clean, brightly lit at night, and consists of the ferry terminal, the railway station, various warehouses and a neat row of terraced cottages occupied by people working on the ferries. Back in 1974 there were also extensive customs sheds which were brightly lit and regularly patrolled at night.

The west side of the harbour could be in another world. The waterfront here is formed by ancient wooden piles driven deep into the mud of the estuary, and at low tide it looks like a Thames-side scene from Dickens. This is where the fishing boats still land their catch, and vessels of all sorts are moored here, from trawlers and fishing smacks to lobster boats, and derelict fishing boats ready for the breakers’ yard. In the seventies, late at night, it would have been a badly lit, distinctly creepy place where a boat could come and go and anything could happen. Even today it is hard to imagine a better spot for the captain of a fishing boat to take on board a body in the dead of night, and then dispose of it at sea.

For anyone trying to devise a perfect murder, in which the victim’s body disappeared without a trace, this would have been the answer, and is the only possible explanation as to why Lucan took so much trouble coming to such an unlikely place on those two occasions just before the murder. It would also explain why he bothered with the mailbag, and got as far as shoving Sandra Rivett’s freshly murdered body inside it, before realising his disastrous mistake.

There was also one crucial fact about that mailbag that nobody appeared to notice at the time. The all-important point was that this was an American mailbag. British GPO mailbags are much smaller than those used by the US Postal Service, and would not have been large enough to take the body of a grown woman. But although the American post office from time to time does sell off its unwanted mailbags through wholesale outlets in the States, and they occasionally find their way to surplus shops in Britain, they are far from being readily available in London. When they are sold here they tend to be sold in bulk to companies in need of a strong and simple form of packaging – or to someone requiring an easy way of wrapping up a body in strong canvas.

It is most unlikely that anyone in Lucan’s walk of life would have dreamt of using a surplus US mailbag to dispose of a body. The mailbag into which he shoved Sandra Rivett’s body would almost certainly have been the one he brought back in the back of the Corsair after that second trial run to Newhaven with his friend from the Clermont. One can only think that someone connected with the facility gave him the mailbag when they were finalising their arrangements.

Lucky’s anxiety over timing his arrival can have had no connection with the departure of the ferry. What really mattered to him was that he arrived in time, with Lady Lucan’s body safely in the mailbag, for the skipper to wrap it in chicken wire, weigh it down with heavy stones, then catch the early morning tide. Since such services did not come cheap, and a cheque would not have been acceptable, this also explains why Lucky had to rustle up that ready cash.

In the midst of his careful planning for his perfect crime, the idea of using the facility at Newhaven to dispose of his wife’s body suggests the involvement of someone with the sort of criminal expertise that Lucky obviously lacked. Disposing of bodies is not something you can look up in the Yellow Pages, and certainly neither he, nor any of his fellow gamblers from the Clermont, would have known anything about it. This can only mean that someone from outside their immediate circle must have been advising him. At some point this person must have also vouched for Lucky to the owner of the boat as someone he could trust.

Whoever may have been Lucky’s adviser, it is almost certain that, at this stage of events, this would have been the full extent of his participation in the plans for Lady Lucan’s murder. Apart from making arrangements with the skipper of the boat, he wasn’t needed, if only because Lucky seems to have believed that he had covered every possible eventuality himself. But once disaster struck, and Lucky’s careful planning came to nought, it would have been a different matter.

As Susie Maxwell-Scott made clear, by the time Lucky reached her house that night he was in no fit state to think coherently, let alone to organise his escape and disappearance so effectively. After the shock of discovering his mistake he seems to have been in denial over what had happened. Not having planned for what occurred, he had clearly lost his nerve and at this crucial moment a new, decisive intelligence was required to save him. Either before or after arriving at the Maxwell-Scotts’ house, somebody he trusted must have made a number of snap decisions for him.

One of these decisions involved him driving the car on from Uckfield to Newhaven as originally planned, and leaving it in Norman Road. Norman Road, where Lucan left the car is close to the West Quay, and while it is the last place in Newhaven where one would choose to park a car before catching the ferry, it is only a few minutes’ walk from the waterfront. He unquestionably drove the car there himself. No one else could have done so at such short notice, in the middle of the night, and a passer-by spotted it there at around six o’clock that morning. Michael Stoop also received a letter in the post two days later in what he recognised at once as Lucan’s hand-writing, telling him exactly where he had left his car.

Whoever was hurriedly making these arrangements for Lucan in the middle of the night, was smart enough to realise how sensible it would be for him to stick to his plans and leave the car in Norman Road which he clearly knew already. Whether someone from the facility helped him when he got there is something else that we will never know. But long before the Sussex police had been alerted and had begun combing the Sussex Downs for his body, Lucan had definitely been met by somebody in Norman Road, then driven off on the next stage of his journey.

Through his sheer ineptitude it was likely that Lucan had placed not just himself but several friends and fellow gamblers from the Clermont at risk. If he was caught and made a full confession, as was more than likely in the state that he was in, certain members of the Clermont Set could have well ended up sharing his disgrace as accessories to his lethal gamble. With so much suddenly at stake, damage limitation had become the first priority.

John Aspinall once called Lucky ‘my sixth or seventh best friend’. Aspinall had always been one of Lucan’s firm admirers, and was a staunch supporter throughout his marital troubles. He shared Lucan’s animosity to his wife, and like several other Clermont friends, was certainly aware of his intention to kill her. During a subsequent interview, Lynn Barber asked him outright, ‘Do you think it’s right for someone to murder his wife?’

Aspinall’s reply was most revealing: ‘Certainly, if she’s behaving in a bad way. There are times when a woman can provoke a man and give him little alternative.’

Apart from this, everything we know of Aspinall’s mentality, makes it clear that, to him, the bonds of friendship would have been more binding than the obligations of the law, and he would have done everything he could to help a friend before leaving him to the police. In Lucky’s desperate hour of need, his old friend Aspinall was the one person he could have relied on for the advice and practical assistance which someone unquestionably gave him.

In that same interview, Lynn Barber asked Aspinall whether, had he known Lucan was a murderer, would he still have helped him? He replied, ‘Well, I always think that if someone who has been a great friend, is then in a terrible position, you feel more warmly towards him because that’s when you’re needed. A friend is needed when things are going badly.’

But however warmly Aspinall felt towards his ‘great friend’, Lucan, it would have been difficult for him, when suddenly rung up in the middle of the night to have organised Lucan’s faultless flight unaided. And since Lucan almost certainly ended up abroad, the brains behind his disappearance must have belonged to someone else with powerful connections in the European underworld. I had absolutely no idea of who this could be until one early April afternoon, when I visited Susan Maxwell-Scott in her terraced house in Battersea.

*

By then I had interviewed her several times. I got on well with her, and enjoyed her company. Every time I saw her she seemed frailer than before. She was tiny, and in old age had become strangely beautiful, with enormous dark brown eyes shown off by the pallor of her face. She was crippled and had difficulty walking, but seemed to treat her suffering as something of a joke inflicted on her by the Almighty. As a devout Catholic who knew she hadn’t long to live, she was convinced that she would soon be reunited with her husband Ian. She smoked incessantly, as if anxious to hasten the process.

She enjoyed talking about the early days of the Clermont. She was the only person I met who still called Aspinall Jonas, the name he gave himself at Oxford, and although she made it clear that she hadn’t liked him, she still seemed fascinated by him. I had heard that in spite of his lifelong friendship with Ian, he had once banned Susie from the club when she was drunk and had burned a hole with a cigarette in one of his green baize tables.

Although she had previously told me in detail of Lucky’s arrival at her house on that November night, she had made it plain that, like most survivors from the Clermont, she did not wish to discuss what then became of him. So that day I was surprised when she suddenly asked me outright, ‘Now that your research is almost finished, have you discovered what happened to Lord Lucan?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m still not sure,’ I said. ‘Either someone helped him to escape and he started life afresh with a new identity, or he must have killed himself.’

Instead of answering at once, she paused as if uncertain whether to continue. Then she lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply as she always did, and said. ‘You’re wrong on both counts. I knew him well enough to know he didn’t have the guts to kill himself. And if he had begun another life abroad, I know that I’d have heard from him by now in some way or another.’

‘But if he didn’t kill himself, and didn’t manage to escape, what happened to him?’ I asked.

‘Have you considered that there could be a third possibility?’

‘Like what?’

She paused again, then looked me straight in the eye before replying. ‘That he was murdered. Ian certainly thought he was, and Ian knew more about him and his goings on than anyone.

‘So why didn’t Ian go to the police?’

‘In the first place Ian had no real proof. More important, it would have stirred up so much trouble for some of our friends.’

‘So who murdered him?’ I asked.

At first I thought she hadn’t heard my question. Finally she nodded, then murmured a name I failed to catch. I repeated my question.

Again she looked straight at me, then in a clear voice told me who it was. Since I have subsequently discovered that the person she was referring to is still alive, I must call him Mr X. I asked her to tell me about him.

‘Mr X knew Jonas well. He was one of those international money men who seemed to flourish in the sixties. He had connections everywhere. In the days of exchange controls, some people used him to get money in and out of Europe.’ She smiled at the idea, and went on smiling at the thought of happier days when Ian was alive. ‘I remember once when we were holidaying abroad and found ourselves cleaned out after an evening gambling at the casino. Next morning Ian telephoned Mr X, who told him to go to the casino cashier in a couple of hours, and just mention his name. We did so, and the cashier seemed to know all about us and gave us several hundred pounds of high denomination chips. This was one occasion when Ian and I did not gamble. Instead we took ourselves off to the bar and had a drink. Then half an hour later we returned and cashed in all the chips we’d been given. The money paid for the rest of our lovely holiday, and when we got back to London, all we had to do was to settle up with Jonas.’

‘But what has that to do with Mr X’s involvement in Lucan’s death?’

‘According to Ian, it was Mr X who helped get him out of the country fast and arranged with certain people that he knew, to have him looked after. Ian seemed to think that later there was no alternative for Mr X but to arrange to have him killed.’

‘Why was that necessary, when he’d taken so much trouble to rescue him in the first place?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I suppose poor John just got too hot to handle.’

‘Did Ian ever mention where he might be buried?’

‘It was a long time ago, but I do remember Ian saying something about him being buried somewhere in Switzerland.’

*

At first her story struck me as unlikely, and although I tried talking about it to her later, we never got much further. What other facts she told me about the shadowy Mr X had little bearing on the Lucan business, but I finally discovered more about him on my own account. Shadowy he may have been, but for several years dating back to the early sixties, he seems to have provided an invaluable service to Aspinall and others. During the days of exchange control, when a succession of cash-strapped governments kept an eagle eye on the movement of money in and out of the country, Mr X was the man many rich people turned to when they needed to transfer money in and out of Britain. I even heard that he had helped Lucan bring some of his celebrated £20,000 Le Touquet winnings back to London.

Evidently Mr X’s usefulness did not end there. His true skill came from his knowledge and his range of contacts among bankers, rich Europeans and that whole grey world of the international underworld. During the sixties this enabled him to trace a number of high-rolling continental gamblers who owed Aspinall large amounts of money – and presumably put the squeeze on them. The myth that Aspinall never pursued a debt was not entirely true, provided that the debt was large enough. In the memorial volume put together by Robin Birley after Aspinall’s death, Angelo Baglioni, his favourite Italian croupier in the days of the floating chemmy parties, and later gambling manager at the Clermont, describes how he once accompanied Aspinall to France in pursuit of a notorious gambler who had disappeared after gambling at the Clermont, leaving large unpaid debts behind him. Mr X arranged for the gambler to meet them both in a Paris restaurant. After a short discussion the gambler agreed to pay up.

We also know that fairly early on, Mr X did Aspinall various important favours. Apart from growing rich operating between England, foreign casinos and banks, Mr X also enjoyed a considerable reputation as an international fence, specialising in stolen jewellery. The story goes that after her divorce, Jane Aspinall took several pieces of jewellery to the well-known pawnbrokers Sutton’s of Victoria. This caused Aspinall considerable embarrassment when the pawnbroker, as required by law, reported the jewellery to the police, who discovered it was stolen. When they questioned Aspinall about it, he knew better than to implicate his friend, the invaluable Mr X. Instead, he replied that the jewellery had been a gift to his ex-wife from one of her admirers. As the police discovered later, the ‘admirer’ had been drowned in a boating accident in Italy three months earlier.

It seems that Mr X was one of those high-grade contact men and fixers without whom the shadowy world of international crime would find it hard to function. In the straight world he’d have called himself a business consultant. His knowledge was exceptional, and he was certainly the only person Lucan would have known who could possibly have told him about the ‘little facility’ at Newhaven. What was also obvious was that Mr X would never have done anything like this involving a member of the Clermont without first discussing it with Aspinall.

It is unlikely that at this stage Mr X made any further contribution to Lucan’s preparations for his great impending gamble. Lucky had everything so carefully worked out he thought there was no need to involve him further. How wrong he was.

*

Lucky’s behaviour after discovering his mistake bears all the marks of someone in a state of shock. This was all too understandable. He had suddenly lost everything. His unconvincing story of having interrupted an intruder was patently absurd.

In the state that he was in he could not possibly have organised one of the most successful criminal escapes in history on his own. Among his friends one man who could not possibly allow him to fall into the hands of the police was John Aspinall. He knew that once Lucan was under close interrogation, everything would be revealed, including the nature of the gamble, and the extent of encouragement and actual help he had received from friends around him. The world that Aspinall had spent so much of his life creating would have been destroyed. It was not only for Lucan’s sake that he had to be got away – and fast.

Mr X, too had an interest of his own in keeping him out of the clutches of the police, having been involved with Lucan over the ‘little facility’. Certainly for a professional fence and top international currency runner like him, it would not have been too difficult making the necessary arrangements to ship him instantly and secretly out of Britain. As much of Mr X’s business was done through Swiss bank accounts, so Ian Maxwell-Scott’s theory about Lucky ending up in Switzerland may well have been closer to the truth than I imagined. Once across the Channel, he and his minders could have driven to Switzerland within hours.

But once Lucky’s new associates had him safely out of England and holed up in a safe house on the Continent, their problems would have only just begun. Within a few hours of killing Sandra Rivett, during his brief visit to the Maxwell-Scotts, Lucky tried to convince Susie of his innocence. Now that he had time to brood upon his situation, it would not have been long before he convinced himself as well. Once he had done so, nothing would have stopped him trying to return to England to see his children and attempt to clear his name.

Those who were hiding him would soon have had to cope with the dangerous situation faced by anyone who helps a wanted criminal escape. When dealing with an eerily similar situation, the Krays ended up deciding that they had no alternative but to have their former friend, Frank Mitchell, murdered. If Ian Maxwell-Scott was right, whoever now had charge of Lucan made a similar decision.

Whatever happened and however it was done, the ultimate responsibility for Lucky Lucan’s death was essentially his own. By murdering Sandra Rivett and then escaping he had already signed his own death warrant. The longer he remained at large, the more he would have implicated others in his crime. In the end the reckoning would have come, as he would have been unable to resist making some sort of contact with his precious children.

Les jeux sont faits. Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, had made his final gamble and had lost.

*

By disappearing without trace, Lucky had saved his friends from the disgrace his trial would have brought them. He also saved his children from the shameful presence of a father serving a long prison sentence for murder. And in a strange way, because of the element of doubt that always hung around his disappearance, he also managed to preserve something of the family name. One could always argue, as indeed close members of his family often have, that the 7th Earl of Lucan was innocent in spite of everything.

Anyone who gambles with his life must be prepared to forfeit it if he loses. Lucky would have known the score as, of course, John Aspinall did when he wrote out the inscription that he intended placing underneath the bust of Lucan. Aspinall was right. As a gambler, Lucky Lucan really must be counted, together with Charles James Fox and General Gordon, as a seriously dedicated gambler who was also one of history’s greatest losers.

Today when you enter Aspinall’s Club in Curzon Street, the bust is no longer in the dining room as Aspinall originally intended, but in a more discreet position in a corridor. He must have had second thoughts about his original inscription. Perhaps he realised it gave too much away. He replaced it with the words he spoke that night to Ludovic Kennedy on television: ‘If Lucky entered the room now I would embrace him.’

But it was the original inscription that really said it all.

‘John, 7th Earl of Lucan, who gambled his life to repossess his children.’