Aiding and Abetting (5 page)

On her return to London to finalize her divorce, Maria heard the story of Lucan’s visit from her husband. He felt the young daughter was bound to provide a version of Lucan’s visit followed by that of the exciting policemen. At the time Maria accepted Alfred’s actions as normal.

And now, decades later, Maria Twickenham reads in the paper of yet another sighting of the missing seventh Earl. According to this report he was observed reclining in a hammock, in a British fruit merchant’s luxurious garden somewhere small and, to Maria, forgettable, in East Africa. He appeared to have been plastically altered but was still, with the help of a computer’s identikit system, recognizable. The reporter of this news had returned next day with a photographer but the hounded one, having sensed danger, had gone. At the house nobody could help. “A white man of about sixty lying in a hammock? You must be mad. People have been turning up here all morning. I’m going to rename my house Pilgrim’s Rest. Anyway, there’s no one here this time of year . . .” Maria thought back over the years which had done so much to change her life, her personality, her looks, her principles, her everything in a way, little by little. She thought back.

To Maria the memory was like that pill-box veiled hat she had found among her old things, dating from the early seventies, last worn at the Derby. She could not wear the hat anymore, nor could she again accept the concealment of Lucan. Certainly, she knew that if it were to happen to her now, if it were to happen that a Lucan should turn up bloodstained and frantic with a perfectly ridiculous story about passing a basement window and seeing his wife being attacked by a man, Maria, herself, would not clean him up, feed him and pass him on to the next set of good friends. Friendship? Yes, but there can be too severe a strain on friendship. In friendship there is a point of collapse-a murderer revealed, or a traitor-they are people-within-people hitherto unknown.

But what was the difference, Maria wondered, between then and now? More than a quarter of a century was the difference. Alfred had married again, had died. There was something in the air one breathed. Habits change. States of mind change. Collective moods change. The likeable, working-class, murdered young nanny was now the main factor. At the time the center of the affair was Lucan.

Maria’s daughter Lacey, now over thirty, had started in her late teens to influence her mother in a quite natural and unpremeditated way. Having read the most sensible and well-informed of the books on the subject of Lucan, Maria’s daughter said, “How could you ever know such a type? What possessed Daddy to help him to escape? But how could he have been a friend in any case, such a ghastly snob? Anyway, if he could kill once he could kill again, no matter he wasn’t tried for murder, the risk of his being a killer is overwhelming. Hadn’t anyone any feelings for the poor lovely nurse-girl? Did everyone really believe he could be excused for attempting to kill his wife simply because he didn’t like her and didn’t want her to have custody of the children? Was Lucan mad?” In some cases, Lacey reflected, there comes a moment when the best of friends, the most admiring, most affectionate, when faced with a certain person’s repeated irrational behavior, have to admit that the person is more or less mad. “Mad” covers a whole minefield of mental conditions.

Maria’s daughter, now beginning to be free, her children already in their teens, wanted to write a book. People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education. Lacey’s main experience was based on her mother’s, which was the fact that she had known the missing, probably the late, Lord Lucan. Lacey took her mother’s bundle of press cuttings, she read all the articles and books about Lucky Lucan that she could lay hands on. Then she started on a series of interviews with some of the living remnants of his life. Not many would consent to see her, and those few who did were mostly convinced that Lucan had committed suicide, either to avoid justice or to avoid injustice, as the case might be. One charming widower, a former acquaintance of the missing Earl as an undergraduate, was more forthcoming. He had retired to a stone house in Perthshire.

“If I had my time again,” he told Lacey, “I would have looked into the affair with meticulous thoroughness. I would have solved the mystery.”

“Don’t you feel that enough was done at the time?”

Lacey said.

“I certainly don’t. There was a kind of psychological paralysis, almost an unconscious conspiracy to let him get away. It was not only that he was a member of the aristocracy, a prominent upper class fellow, it was that he had pitched his life and all his living arrangements to that proposition. His proposition was: I am a seventh Earl, I am an aristocrat, therefore I can do what I like, I am untouchable. For a few days after the murder, this attitude overawed the investigators and his friends alike. Besides, it was not an ordinary murder, not a shooting affair, it was a horrible bloody slaughter; his wife was in hospital with gaping head wounds which she said were inflicted by him. He was seen by friends with blood on his trousers but they couldn’t, or in other words didn’t, want to believe he had perpetrated all that violence. In those first days, and even first weeks, he managed to get away. He did so on the sheer strength of his own hypnotic act. A similar case, before your time, was the escape of the traitors Maclean and Burgess. Maclean was particularly upper-class-conscious (although he was nothing, really) but it took everyone in, rooted them to the spot when the facts broke in the Foreign Office. They got away purely on the hypnosis of their lifestylish act.” Lacey listened intently. Before Dr. Joseph Murray, as his name was, had finished his meditative discourse, she had started, with hope in her heart, to form a plan. “You say if you had your time again . . .” said Lacey. “Yes, I would have plunged right in. I think I could have nabbed him. The police were slow. The friends who aided and abetted Lucan ran rings around the police.

Those police were used to lowlife criminals from the streets and from the rooming houses of Mayfair and Soho. Clever sharpsters, they were unnerved by the stonewalling toffs; they were not exactly abject, not at all. But they were hesitant, out of their depth. When one of the friends of Lucan exclaimed when approached, ‘Oh dear, and good nannies are so scarce!’ the police took this for heartless reality instead of a quip in poor taste. That sort of thing. I would have known how to deal with the situation the very night of the murder. I wouldn’t, believe me, Lacey, have been overwhelmed.”

“It’s not too late,” said Lacey.

“What?”

“Hopefully, you could still find him,” said Lacey with the utmost enthusiasm. “I want to interview him, only. I wouldn’t want necessarily to hand him over. I think he must be alive.”

“Perhaps. Personally, I believe in justice, but . . .” “How could there be justice in such a case?” said Lacey.

Joseph Murray smiled at her. “You’re quite right, of course. Human justice could never equal the crime. All the books and articles-such piles of them-that have been written on the subject, appear to agree that Lucan, if guilty, was very guilty. Indeed I incline to agree with the theory-you’ll find it in Marnham’s book-that there was an accomplice, a hit man. If so, that hit man is somewhere on the loose. I must say that the theory is highly tenable. If sound, it would explain a number of loose factors, small as that number is.”

“Will you help me to launch a new search?”

“Oh, no. Not now.”

“Oh, yes. Now, Dr. Murray,” said pretty Lacey. “Now,” she repeated.

“Call me Joe,” he said.

“Joe,” she said, “now,” she said.

Joe was the youngest son of a prosperous family. He was now in his sixties, not too tall, fairly slim. He had never married again after his young wife had died while he was teaching at Cambridge. He was a virtual and ardent zoologist and in fact took up a zoologist’s interest in many human affairs outside of his personal life. About Lucan he appeared to feel as he spoke, almost zoologically. What species was Lucan? Joe was all the more curious on this score, in that he had been a friend of Lucan’s. How he regretted not having had long conversations with Lucan outside of topics such as baccarat, craps, poker, vingt-et-un, and the possible winner of the three thirty.

Now that he came to think of it, he had never thought of Lucan, so that when the scandal broke and Lucan did not step forward to clear himself it did seem to Joe as if Lucan could possibly be, in a way hitherto partly concealed from his acquaintances, bad-tempered to a degree that was outside of human, and was something else. Well, he reflected, that’s perhaps another way of saying that poor Lucan was mad. Lucan besides was a silk purse, and it was useless to expect such an object to turn into something so good, so true, as a sow’s ear. “You know,” Joe said then to Lacey, “I think there must have been an accomplice, a hit man.” “Why do you think so?”

“I knew Lucan. Not closely, but enough. When we were undergraduates. He had no imagination, or at least very little. Now, think of what he claimed in his letters and statements to his friends and on the phone to his mother the night of the murder. He said he was passing the house in Lower Belgrave Street where his wife and children were staying, when he saw from the pavement a man in the basement attacking his wife, and went to the rescue, and got all bloodied. It is the question of his seeing a man. To someone of limited imagination it would be a natural excuse-a man. The man was most probably, in fact, the man prominent in his mind and memory, the hit man, the accomplice.”

“The police network failed,” said Lacey, “to produce any man on the run that night. They found no accomplice. There was no light in the basement, and nothing could be seen, from the street, anyway.”

“The police didn’t find Lucan, either. They were slow throughout. If you’d like to leave your notes with me, and any cuttings that are contemporaneous with the crime, I’ll give a bit of thought to the subject. Now, my dear, you’ll stay for a bite, won’t you? My helper puts it ready in the microwave, and there’s always more than enough for two.”

Lacey accepted the invitation and made herself at home at the kitchen table. She told Joe how she was separated from her husband, awaiting a divorce; there was no real fault on either side but that was how it was. Joe told her she was good-looking, perhaps even prettier than her mother had been at her age. He remembered Maria Twickenham quite well, she had been around and knew Lucan, “though not intimately.” But who had known Lucan intimately?

“Lucan-who knew him really?” Joe said.

“His wife? His parents?”

“Only partially-none of them could have known him, fully.”

“He talked previous to the murder about murdering his wife.”

“Yes, well, talk . . . People often talk that way. It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily; in fact, quite the opposite. It could be argued that if he intended the murder he wouldn’t have talked about it.”

“I want you to come with me and see that priest I mentioned in my letter. Is he still at the same parish?” “Father Ambrose? I got a Christmas card. Yes.”

“You’ll come with me?”

“I don’t know about that. And there’s Benny Rolfe.”

“Who’s he?”

Benny Rolfe, Joe explained, was a prosperous businessman who was once a friend of Lucan’s. It was rumored that he financed Lucan’s sojourn abroad. “You must remember that if Lucan’s alive, he may have changed more radically in appearance than the mere passage of years can explain. He would have undergone perhaps extensive plastic surgery.”

“Then how would his friends recognize him?” “That’s the point. They would expect to not quite recognize him immediately; they would expect him to have undergone facial surgery. Which leaves the way wide open for a crook, posing as Lucan, making an understandably rapid visit to a friend, to pass a few general remarks, collect his money and run. Lucan could be dead while the conspiracies to elude the law continue. All I want to say, really, my dear, is that your search for the real Lucan might be fruitless.”

“Could he get away with it?”

“Enough,” said Joe, “has been written about Lucan to prompt even an amateur actor of feeble intelligence. He would be in a position to know practically every detail of the past. A fake Lucan might be entirely convincing.” “Obviously,” said Lacey, “you think Lucan’s dead.”

“I think nothing. I think nothing at all on the subject. His friends are divided fifty-fifty on the possibility that he killed himself soon after the murder. I should say fiftyfifty.”

“Would you know if you met him-“

“If he was real or fake? Yes, I think I should.

Perhaps . . .”

“Then let’s find him,” said Lacey, with so much of the enthusiasm of the novice that Joe was lost for words; he simply smiled. “Am I talking a lot of nonsense?” she said. “Yes and no. I must say that without trying, nobody gets anything, anywhere. And then, of course, the whole Lucan story is thoroughly surrealistic. The only real things about it are a girl’s battered body in a mail sack, his wife’s head wounds, her testimony that she had been attacked by him, and blood all over the place. Apart from those vital factors-and they are vital, to say the least, aren’t they?-the disappearance of Lucan partakes of the realistic-surrealistic. He was ready to disappear to avoid bankruptcy; on the other hand his friends were numerous. They seem to have been faithful in the class conscious sense. I find very little evidence that any of the friends, the aiders and abetters as they might be, cared a damn for Lucan the man.”

“Mummy found him quite amusing,” said Lacey. “But do you know, she told me that if she had that time over again-that moment when Lucan came to see her in a panic, talking about bloodshed in the basement of his home-she would simply ring the police. She wouldn’t try to cover up for him as she did. Something has happened to her conscience between then and now. Has this happened to other people who were involved at the time?”