Aiding and Abetting (8 page)

He liked this woman’s tone.

“She often spoke to me of places she stayed in different parts, you know in Madrid she stayed at a lovely little hotel, the Paradiso, and at Zurich there was a gem of a place she loved, Seelach Gasthof, just a boarding-house really. She loved to stay in places like that, but perhaps she’s with friends.”

“Where else did she mention, Madame? London?

Brussels?”

“There was a place in London at Queen’s Gate, and Brussels I don’t know the name, it was a rundown part. She ate at a restaurant called La Moule Parquée, whatever that means. Oh, I do hope you can find her. I very much miss Hildegard. Why ever did she go off just like that?”

“Look,” said Jean-Pierre, “I’ll keep in touch. If she gets hold of you at all will you let me know?” He left his number.

He rang Dick and Paul. Dick answered. “We were devastated when we got her message. Just a few lines enclosing a check and, although we’re fully paid up, it kind of hurts. Do you know when she’s coming back, Jean-Pierre? Did she leave any message with Olivia?” Olivia, the maid whom Jean-Pierre and Hildegard had shared, was still working in the flat. She had already expressed herself as bewildered as everyone else by Hildegard’s disappearance.

Jean-Pierre looked at the piece of paper where he had jotted down Mrs. William Hane-Busby’s information.

She had been the only one to furnish any sort of clue as to where Hildegard might be. She had obviously been a confidante as much as a patient. Jean-Pierre put a cross against the Hotel Paradiso, Madrid, and a query against Hotel-Queen’s Gate, London. Maybe Brussels, though. He tried Dr. Oscar Hertz’s number again. This time he was more successful. A woman answered in guttural English, “Dr. Hertz?-I think he’s just come in. Hold on.” A rendering of “Greensleeves” filled in the gap. It was cut off, not before time, by a click and a man’s voice. “Here is Dr. Hertz.”

“I’m Jean-Pierre Roget, Hildegard Wolf ’s companion.

I suppose you know she has disappeared.”

“I myself am very anxious about that.”

“If you’re so anxious why didn’t you telephone to me?

You know we lived together. You know that.” “The secretary, Dominique, informed me. There is nothing we can do?”

“Dr. Hertz, she had a special friendship with you.

She-“

“Oh, yes, I was not a patient.”

“No?”

“No. I was a colleague.”

“You’re a psychiatrist?”

“A psychologist, rather. Hildegard was not herself a theorist, she was essentially a practitioner.” “You speak of her in the past tense.”

“Yes, I speak in the past tense.”

“Oh, God, what do you think has happened to her?”

“Nothing. She wasn’t a person to whom things happen.

She did all the happenings.”

“You think she’s committed suicide on us?”

“I daresay.”

“Well, I daresay you’re wrong. I know her better than you do.”

“She was being blackmailed.”

“That I know. And her disappearance is no doubt the result. But she has gone somewhere. Have you any idea where?”

“From a psychological point of view, if she remains alive she would be expected to have gone back to the place of her origin, to the countryside of Nuremberg. There, the most successful psychiatrist would be safe from detection.” “Thank you, Dr. Hertz.”

Jean-Pierre poured himself another drink. “Cold bastard,” he reflected. He thought of Hertz’s words: From a psychological point of view . . . she would be expected . . . As if Hildegard herself would not know what she might be expected to do, and avoid just that course of action. Jean- Pierre studied the few scribbles he had made on the telephone pad during his conversations. Certainly the cross he had made against Mrs. William Hane-Busby’s remarks was the most sensible, although he reserved suspicions about Dr. Hertz. The houseboys, Dick and Paul, were probably reticent. Dr. Jacobs, whoever he was, perhaps knew more than he would say if he were available. In the meantime Jean-Pierre busied himself in finding out the phone number of Hotel Paradiso, Madrid, the names of hotels, large and small, in Brussels, and in the Queen’s Gate area of London.

Hildegard lay on top of her hotel bed aware of the pouring rain of London, which was somehow much worse than the equivalent rain of Paris. Her mind, with the passing of the years, had become ever more studious. It was not only because she feared the Lucan pair, but because she was fascinated by them, that she had brought, in her bulging zipper-bags, the Lucan files comprising her notes and three published books on the subject of Lucan the killer, his habits of life, his milieu, his friends. The documents were spread on the bed beside her, that double bed in which Hildegard had felt, every night she had spent in the Manderville Hotel, decidedly alone. Her lover had been replaced by her clinical notes. She kept in touch with her au pair helpers in Paris, Dick and Paul. Yes, Jean-Pierre rang every day to find out if either one of them had heard from her. “No, don’t worry, we haven’t said a word.” “Once, that Mr. Walker had called. No one by name of Lucan.” “Jean-Pierre is really frantic, though, Hildegard, why don’t you call him?”

“I will,” Hildegard said, “oh, yes, I will.” Eventually . . . she said to herself.

“Walker-Lucan,” as she thought of him, had said to her, “You know I am officially dead in England, although that leaves a big doubt as to the reality of my death. The House of Lords cannot recognize my death. Sometimes I’m tempted to go back, though, and challenge the courts. I would plead that, as a dead man, I couldn’t be tried.”

“It wouldn’t work,” said Hildegard. “You would be tried for murder if you are indeed Lord Lucan.” “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am. And you would be found guilty on the evidence.” “And you, Dr. Wolf? On the evidence against you, could you still be tried for fraud?”

“Yes,” said Hildegard.

“All those years ago?”

“In both cases,” Hildegard said, “all those years ago.” Conversations like these led Hildegard to wonder if, after all, Walker was the real Lucan. He seemed to have been there at the kill.

But so, in a sense, through immersing herself in the subject, did she. And what interested her even more was the whole world of feelings that preceded Lucan’s decision-apparently a good month before the event-to kill his wife. Hildegard opened one of her notebooks and read:

He detested his wife. She had defeated his lawsuit for the custody of his children, leaving him with a large legal debt and the mortification of being exposed by her as a sexual sadist, a wife-caner. In his eyes, his wife, Veronica, was expendable.

It was, according to the testimony, early in October 1974 that he actually told a friend of his decision to murder his wife, and of his carefully planned precautions. “I would never be caught,” he told his friend (according to Chief Superintendent Ranson who conducted the investigation into the crime).

Twenty years later Ranson wrote, “I believe that,

rather than the much-quoted love of his children, it is his lack of money, all of it lost through uncontrollable gambling, that provides the key to this case.”

“I believe,” Hildegard had noted, “that this is very much to the point, if not altogether true. Another motive is spite.”

“Walker,” Hildegard has also put in her notes, “could be a hit man hired by Lucan, and Lucky is Lucan himself. Or it could be the other way round. But the evidence is all against this theory.”

Lucky, by Walker’s account, genuinely needed treatment by a psychiatrist. Not long after Walker started consulting Hildegard he had said, “I hear voices.” By this he probably meant that Lucky “heard” voices, and equally he was covering the personage of Lord Lucan for a possible confrontation with the law. Establish the “voices” and Lucan could be found not fit to plead.

But was he fit to plead? Lucky, more so than Walker, Hildegard felt. But there was no doubt that in the weeks before the murder a certain madness had set in. “Uncontrollable gambling,” as the worthy policeman had cited as the main cause of his action, was in itself only a symptom. His hatred of his wife had been an obsession aggravated by the continual dunning letters from the banks to which he owed money.

Hildegard turned the pages of the Detective Superintendent’s account. A year before the murder, letters from the bank managers were moving in on Lucan daily. These letters sounded like the phrases of a popular music-hall song:

23rd October, 1973

Dear Lord Lucan,

I am extremely disappointed that I cannot trace a reply from you to my letter of the 10th October regarding the borrowing on your account . . .

And in December 1973, as his thirty-ninth birthday approached:

Dear Lord Lucan,

You will know from my recent letters how disappointed I am that you have not been in touch before this to let me know what arrangements are being made to adjust your overdraft here . . .

Lucan put the family silver up for auction at Christie’s. He took recourse to money lenders. Where, demanded Hildegard, did he say good-bye to reality? That he did just that is the only certainty in the case. For even if his plan had come off, even if he had succeeded in killing his wife and not the nanny, he could not have escaped detection. Was it the approach of his fortieth birthday combined with the shock of being a failure in life, irretrievably on the point of bankruptcy, that had removed him from reality? In the second half of the twentieth century, in any case, an inherited earldom was not very real. While it was a social fact, it did not relate to any other social fact of significance, especially in his case where there was little family property, no house with its land, no money. In reality, he belonged to a middle-class environment with upper-class claims in his conscious mind.

“He should have had a trade, a profession,” Hildegard said to herself. “The calling of a gambler is madness. Being an earl, full stop, is madness. Yes, he needed the help of a psychiatrist. He still needs one. He needs me.”

Hildegard’s notebooks were based on the published facts in the first place, and what Lucky had told her in the second.

Lucan had been married eleven years when the murder of the nanny and the savage attack on his wife took place that night at Lower Belgrave Street. He was separated from his wife. He had lost custody of his children. One way and another he had lost his mind. The jury at the dead girl’s inquest pronounced her cause of death as “Murder by Lord Lucan.” This was not itself a trial verdict, but it is impossible to conceive any other jury, on the known evidence, failing to convict him of murder. It is difficult to believe that his friends and family objectively believed his innocence, on the basis of the facts. To protest his innocence in public was the easiest thing he could have done. He had only to step forward and present his case. Surely there would have been some factors in his favor unknown to the investigators if he had not committed the crimes. His wife, covered with blood, had escaped to the nearest pub, from where she was taken to the hospital with head injuries. They were inflicted, she said, by Lord Lucan, and the police believed her. They had every reason, with so much corroborative evidence, to believe her.

If Hildegard had only read about Lucan, and never met the probable man himself, she would have assumed that he was, like many obsessive gamblers, block-stupid.

The Lucky Lucan she knew, the Walker-Lucan she knew, were not stupid. Lucan’s mind must anyway have been sharpened by constant evasion. Hildegard was conscious that Lucky Lucan, however, had a mental problem. Walker, to her, was probably a plain criminal. She remembered Lucan’s loud laugh when he had made one of his jocular remarks. It was a laugh that filled the whole room. At her little jokes he merely gave a smile as if he were anxious about a waste of his time. Although he wore a smile, Walker seldom laughed, and if he did, it was a short, sharp, cynical “huh.”

Walker had said he “heard” voices.

What did they say?

“That Lucky is plotting to kill me.”

“But you didn’t believe the voices, or you would not have come to consult me.”

“In fact there was only one voice.”

“Male or female?”

“A female voice. I think it was the murdered girl, Sandra Rivett, who spoke.”

In the margin of the page where she had transcribed her recording of this interview, Hildegard had noted: “It is possible there is no ‘voice.’ It is poss. that Walker intends to kill Lucky and is establishing a cover up of insanity in case he is caught. It is possible-but anything is poss.” Hildegard added: “Who is supporting these men? Who aided Lucan in the first place? Who aids and abets him now? He has friends somewhere.”

In the matter of the seventh Lord Lucan’s disappearance the public was more mystified than outraged. The more he was described, and his way of life outlined, by his friends, the less he was understood. The case of the seventh Earl is only secondarily one of an evasion of justice, it is primarily that of a mystery. And it is not only the questions of how did he get away, where did he go, how has he been living, is he in fact alive? The mystery is even more in the question of what was he like, how did he feel, what went on in his mind that led him to believe he could get away with his plan? What detective stories had he been reading? What dreamlike, immature culture was he influenced by? For, surely, he had thought his plan to kill his wife was watertight. Whereas, even if the nanny had taken her night off, even if he had murdered the countess, the plot leaked at every seam as truly as did the blood-oozing mailbag into which the body of Sandra Rivett was packed.

As Hildegard knew from her own experience as a stigmatic fraud, blood, once let loose, gets all over the place. It sticks, it flows, it garishly advertises itself or accumulates in dark thick puddles. Once it gets going, there is no stopping blood.

It was a description by Lucky, finally, of the blood all over his trousers, of the blood oozing from the mailbag, that had inclined Hildegard to believe that he was indeed the Lucan who was wanted for homicide. Walker, on the other hand, was reluctant to describe the murder. He had now told Hildegard that, yes, he had “performed the deed,” and he had even gone into some of the already well-publicized details. Walker sometimes sounded like a printed column out of a tabloid Sunday edition. “I thought it convenient at that stage to rid myself of a wife that I had come to loathe. She had custody of my children. A ridiculous member of your profession, Dr. Wolf, gave evidence in her favor in a court of law. I lost my children. I was allowed to see them twice a month-imagine! I could have sold the house at Lower Belgrave Street to pay off some of my debts. She was evil, she was mad, but the court would not recognize it.”