7

All along the shelves under the three windows of Hildegard’s consulting room was placed her collection of miniature cactus plants. It was of such an extreme rarity that Hildegard was quite annoyed when one of her patients innocently presented her with another cactus. It was never of an equal rare status as her own ones, and yet she was obliged to have the new little plant on show at least for a while.

Walker had brought her such a plant; it was good but not quite good enough. She placed it with pleased carefulness on the shelf, quite as if it was of the last rarity.

Hildegard waved Walker to his chair.

“There are two of you,” Hildegard said.

Walker looked put out. “Oh, there has to be two of us,” said Walker. “One who committed the crime and one who didn’t.”

“And which of the two is the real Lucan?”

“I am,” he said. His eyes shifted from the window to the door as if entrapped.

“Well, you’re a liar,” she said.

“I often wonder about that,” said Walker. “After years of being me, it’s difficult, now, to conceive being him. How did you know there was a pretender?”

“A man called Lucky Lucan is one of my clients. He claims to be the seventh Earl.”

“What a sneak, what a rotter!” Walker was really upset. “The seventh Earl is myself.”

“Sneaks and rotters hack children’s nurses to death, you mean?”

“It was a mistake. Nanny Rivett was killed in error.”

“And the hack-and-bash job on Lady Lucan?”

“That was different. She should have died. I was in debt.”

“God, I’d like to turn you over to Interpol,” said Hildegard.

“You won’t do that, Beate Pappenheim. Don’t forget that I’m a professional gambler. I know when the odds are loaded against me. That’s why I’m on the run, that’s why I’m here, in fact. All I am asking for, Beate Pappenheim, is free psychiatric treatment. Nothing more. Just that. Your secret, your blood secret will be safe with me if mine remains safe with you.”

“And Lucky Lucan—my other client?”

“He shouldn’t have come to you at all. He’s a swine.”

“He looks awfully like the original.” Hildegard opened the file she had already placed on her desk in preparation for the interview. “See here,” she said, “Lucan aged thirty-eight on the beach, Lucan in his ermine robes, Lucan in his tennis clothes, Lucan at a dance, and playing cards at the Clermont Club with his notorious friends. And,” she said, “I have also a photo kit of what he should look like now, based on computer-devised photos of his parents at your age, and here’s another police identikit which allows for plastic adaptations to the jawbone and the nose. Look at it. Look.”

“But look at me.”

“You look the same height. Your eyes are spaced convincingly. Your English voice is very probable. Yes, but you don’t convince me. How did you get together with Lucky Lucan?”

“I hired him. There were so many occasions when I was nearly caught, especially when collecting the funds that my friends have put at my disposal, that I thought I would take on a double. He effectively fools my friends when he goes to collect. Strangely enough Lucky, so-called, resembles me when I was in my forties more than he does now. And of course, they hardly want him to linger.”

“And suppose it’s the other way round? My other client is Lucan and you are the hired substitute?”

“No,” said Walker.

“Well, I can’t take you both on as patients.”

“You won’t need to. I’ll deal with Lucky, so-called. People like us know how to deal with people like him.”

These last words of that afternoon’s conversation hovered over Hildegard’s imagination. “People like us know how to deal . . .” Of course Walker had meant to disturb her. She was aware of that. Once before he had said, when she had asked him why he had not taken the simpler course of giving himself up and standing trial for murder, “People like us don’t go to prison.” He was overfull of his aristocratic qualities, as he supposed them to be, and this was what had led Hildegard to assume he was a fake. “People like us know how to deal with people like him.” Perhaps, after all, he was the real Lord Lucan. “People like us know how to deal . . .” Did Lucan have that conviction in mind when he “dealt” with the woman he thought was his wife, when he “dealt” with the knowledge of his blunder that he had killed only the children’s nurse? People like us . . . people like them . . . It was almost melodramatic, but then, as Hildegard told Jean-Pierre that night, the very situation of Lord Lucan and his disappearance had a melodramatic touch. It was this very naive approach to his personal drama that had probably confused the police in the days after the murder. They were looking for upper-class sophistication, but they got nothing but cheap showbiz from Lucan’s friends. Lucan had been drinking heavily, Lucan was hopelessly in debt. But no, Lucan is a friend of ours, he is one of us and you don’t understand that people like us . . . Lucan had sent letters to a friend while he was still so covered in blood that the stains appeared on the envelope. Lucan had turned up in a panic at a friend’s house that night of the murder, with a bloodstain on his trousers.

Blood. “What I’m afraid of,” Hildegard said when she discussed it with her lover, “is that Walker will murder Lucky. It would be in character.”

“But you say that you believe Lucky to be the real Lucan?”

“There is always a doubt. I could be wrong. But Walker sticks in my mind as an unscrupulous fake.”

Jean-Pierre had been making notes. It was an hour before they would sit down to dinner. Jean-Pierre gave Hildegard her preferred drink, a small quantity of whisky dowsed in water, took one for himself, a dry martini, and got out his notebook. He read:

After twenty-five years of playing the part of the missing Lord Lucan he surely is the part. The operative word is “missing.” If indeed he has been Lord Lucan in an earlier life he had never gone missing before. After the murder he went without money apparently, without decent clothing, without a passport. He just disappeared.

If he was the real Lord Lucan the clandestine life must have meant a loss of innocence—that he had not known he possessed. The spontaneous pleasure, for instance, of just being in Paris, as so many English people experience. The boulevards, the banks of the Seine, the traffic, the bistros, the graffiti on the walls—all lost in the new life of careful watchfulness. The odds would be against him, as he must have known if he was Lucan the professional gambler. The police were active in those early months of his clandestine flight.

And as the years piled up with nothing achieved but his furtive travels in South America, in Africa, in Asia, between intervals of quick, dangerous trips to Scotland and Paris to pick up his old friends’ money, what had he become? Someone untraceable with blood on his hands, in his head, in his memory. Blood . . .

. . . My nature is subdued

to what it works in,

like the dyer’s hand.

When he disappeared in 1974 he was thirty-nine. The detective assigned to his case, Roy Ransom, died in recent years. Sightings of the seventh Earl are still frequent. Lucan is here, he is there, he is everywhere. In a final message to Lucan, Roy Ransom wrote, “Keep a watchful eye over your shoulder. There will always be someone looking for Lucan.”

He must have gone through several false passports, several false names.

“Well, Hildegard,” said Jean-Pierre, “which of your Lucans fits my profile best?”

“Neither,” she said, “and both.”

“Why,” said Jean-Pierre, “are the Lucans getting psychiatric therapy?”

“They are sick,” said Hildegard. “Especially Lucky. Sick, and he knows it.”

“I mean to find out,” said Jean-Pierre, “why they actually want psychiatric treatment.”

“Perhaps they need money. They want it from me,” said Hildegard. “It could be that Lucan’s source of income is drying up.”

“It could be. I’d like to know,” said Jean-Pierre. “I read a recent article in which Lucan’s friends claim that he is dead beyond the shadow of a doubt. ‘Shadow of a doubt’ were the words. If they never found his body or other evidence there is a shadow, there is a doubt. There is a possibility that he is alive and another possibility that he is dead. There is no ‘beyond the shadow of a doubt.’ None whatsoever. That is journalistic talk. There are shadows; there are doubts.”

“That’s what I thought when I read it. Not that I care one way or another. Only I have these Lucan patients and I’m under pressure of, well, call it exposure.”

“Yes, I call it exposure, Hildegard. Let’s be clear. One gets nowhere by being muddy.”

“Nowhere,” she said, smiling gratefully at him.

Their dinner was prepared and served by the two au pair young men, who were close friends with each other. It was a convenient arrangement. Dick and Paul were former students at a psychiatric institution where Hildegard lectured. She had found them to be engrossed with each other, anxious to shed their families, and not at all keen to study. They were delighted to show their prowess at cooking (which was not very great) and general housekeeping. They got on well with Hildegard and in a chummy way with the maid Olivia, who came every morning to clean up. Dick and Paul went shopping for the household, and advised Olivia how to shop economically for her sexy clothes. It was a tranquil background for the love affair between Hildegard and Jean-Pierre. Only the facts of blood which hovered over Hildegard’s professional life and her memories of the past disturbed her.

The dinner consisted of a mysterious brown fish soup, a mousse of spinach and cream cheese with tiny new potatoes, and a peach ice cream with cherry sauce. Jean-Pierre and Hildegard ate it appreciatively, half-consciously, happier with the fact of being cooked for and served at all than with the actual dinner. The young men, slip, tall and wiry, cleared the table and brought them coffee in the sitting room. It had been arranged at first that their status entitled them to join Hildegard and Jean-Pierre at the table for meals, but really they preferred to eat alone together in the kitchen, with occasional friends who had belonged to their student days, than with their employers. And this suited Jean-Pierre and Hildegard, too. They could talk more openly, for one thing.

While they dined they discussed that other supper in the bistro with Lucky. He had certainly absorbed his smoked salmon followed by lamb chops “like blotting paper,” as Hildegard put it.

“Well, it was very good smoked salmon; the lamb chops were very well prepared.”

“What did you make of him?”

“From the way he was talking I would say Lucky is Lucan, and his mind is giving up. His conscience is taking over. In his mind, God might tell him to kill again.”

Walker appeared in Jean-Pierre’s workshop. There were no customers at that hour, 10:30 A.M. Jean-Pierre was working on a plastic eye which was intended for a statue.

“My name is Walker.”

“I know who you are.”

“I want to speak to you,” Walker told Jean-Pierre.

“I have no money for you,” said Jean-Pierre.

Walker left the premises.

Hildegard was in her office talking to the patient known as Lucky.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” Lucky told her.

“I know. How long have you known Walker?”

“About ten years.”

“What is your real name?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“What was your profession?”

“A theological instructor.”

“A priest?”

“I am a défroqué.”

“How very interesting. Why were you defrocked?”

“I got married,” he said.

“And now? Where is your wife?”

“That would be telling,” he said.

“I think you are Lucan,” Hildegard said.

“No you don’t.”

“Have it your own way. There is every sign that you are the wanted man.”

“My job is just to collect from the aiders and abetters. Lucan is a name in the newspapers. He could be dead.”

“Why does Walker send you to collect?”

“Oh, he sometimes collects himself. But I look more like Lucan.”

She studied his face. “Yes, in a way you do. In a way you don’t. It could be you were once a priest, though. You have a touch of that theological look that can never be thrown off. Only a touch. Now look, Lucky, you are going to deal with one question that I think only you can answer: Did you ever know Heinrich Esk, a theological student at a Protestant college in Munich, let us say about ten, eleven years ago?”

“Twelve years ago,” he said.

“I worked miracles,” said Hildegard. “And that is the truth.”

“Undoubtedly. But you were a fraud. A fake stigmatic. Heinrich told me. He died of leukemia, you know.”

“What do you want from me?” Hildegard said.

“Advice. I sold my soul to the Devil, as I’ve already told you.”

“And you want it back?”

“I want it back.”

“You must break with Walker for a start,” she said.

“That would be difficult.”

“I know. Well, I can’t take you both on as patients.”

“I think you have no choice.” Suddenly, Lucky produced a small package. “I brought you this from Scotland,” he said, passing the little box to Hildegard.

“You thought of me in Scotland,” she said, opening the little parcel with many exclamations of quite genuine appreciation of the crystal pendant.

“I thought of you all the time,” he said.

“That is a normal reaction towards an analyst. And what were you doing in Scotland, exactly?”

“I’m afraid that’s a secret. Your other Lucan is furious because I came to you. In fact, I’ve been round the world in the past twenty-five years. I’ve been short of money at times and had to be a salesman of textbooks on Presbyterianism and physiotherapy; I’ve been a gentleman’s gentleman—I did well. I’ve been a genealogist helping the Mormons to trace their ancestry—that was too dangerous, though—I had to make trips to London. What a pity: it was lucrative.”

“And how did you become a priest?”

“Well, I hid in a monastery for a time.”

“That didn’t make you a priest.”

“Well, not quite. I just went around with a dog collar.”

“Most of the money wasted on psychoanalysis,” Hildegard said, “goes on time spent unraveling the lies of the patient. Your time is up.”

“Am I Lucan?” he said. “I want you to know that I believe in myself.”