So what was the story that John Lucan told his mother and Susan Maxwell-Scott, which he had hinted at in his first letter to Bill Shand Kydd?
Not content to let his private detectives do the snooping for him, Lucan was in the habit of watching the house in Belgrave St. himself, either from his Mercedes or on foot. On the night of November 7, he had been passing the house when he witnessed a fight going on in the basement. When the Dowager Lady Lucan first relayed this to the police in her official statement, she used the word “driving,” and Ranson’s team quickly demolished that possibility. Even if no cars were parked outside Number 46, a passing vehicle, even traveling very slowly, would not have had a view into the basement. Lucan would have had to have been standing on the pavement in order to see what he claimed.
Lord Lucan
Portrait
According to John Lucan, he dashed into the house. He still had a front-door key and did not comment on the fact that a safety chain was usually stretched across the inside, but was not in place that night. Once in the hall, Lucan would have turned a sharp left down the basement stairs. The first anomaly in his story occurs at once. The police had found the light bulb out of its socket, so Lucan must have hurtled down there in the total darkness at break-neck speed. It explains why his footprint should have been found in the blood on the floor and why he could only describe Veronica’s attacker as a “large” man. It doesn’t explain, however, how he could have seen anything in the basement from pavement level just by the aid of a street lamp.
Lucan and the intruder presumably struggled, but he skipped over that and merely said that the man got away. Because the basement door led to a garden from which there was no apparent escape, he must have gone back up the stairs he had just come down and out of the front door. At this point, Lucan claimed that Veronica, covered in blood and hysterical, was so disoriented that she assumed he was her attacker, and the two of them fought.
After the struggle, as they both calmed down, she accused him of hiring a hit man to kill her. This accusation made a certain amount of sense; after all, Veronica knew about the private detectives. If they could spy on her and help kidnap her children, what else might they be persuaded to do?
Lucan could not handle this situation. Having helped Veronica onto the bed and having gone to get towels to tend her wounds, as a distraught but loving husband would, she had panicked and rushed out of the house. She would raise hell, get sympathy on her side. No one would believe him. He would end up charged with attempted murder. No one, in Lucan’s version of events, mentioned the dead nanny, Sandra Rivett. Already, it was as though she didn’t exist.
The two versions of events at Number 46 stand in stark contrast to each other. In a way, they are a gruesome extension of the custody war that the Lucans had fought in court back in July, except that now it was for real. And it was about murder.
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