Aiding and Abetting (9 page)

“Tell me about the murder.”

“Oh, I suppose it was a murder like any other murder.” Perhaps these were the words of a hit man. Perhaps and maybe. But, Hildegard noted, they were hardly a killer’s words. And yet, their coldness might fit in with the Lucan known to the public, his mad-cold calculative mind.

But behind it all, at this stage, was blackmail. Blackmail between Lucan and Walker, with Walker the probable blackmailer, and now blackmail of herself: they needed money. What else did they need? Probably a psychiatrist’s counseling and comfort?-Yes, probably that, too. And perhaps a sympathetic psychiatrist to testify in the event of a court case.

The last witness to see Lucan after the murder gave evidence at the inquest on the death of Sandra Rivett that Lucan had told her how an unknown intruder had attacked his wife and presumably killed the nanny, he himself having passed the house by chance and intervened. According to the witness, she had the impression that he “felt rather squeamish about the blood and did not want to look too closely at the sack.”

All right, Lucky was squeamish. Hildegard’s story, also dripping in blood, had evidently given him further reason for his squeams. “You covered your hands, side and feet with your menstrual blood, Dr. Wolf.” He had found the courage to come out with that statement, squeamish or not. He had said it in an almost confidential way: we’re both in this blood-business together, he seemed to say. Walker, however, had merely referred to “Your past, Hildegard Wolf, or should I say Beate Pappenheim?” When Lucky had first walked into her office, Hildegard was immediately taken with his resemblance to her prior Lucan patient, Walker. They were not indistinguishable, but they might have been brothers. And certainly, both were white-haired, aging photos of the thirty-nine-year-old Lucan which looked out of the pages of the quantity of books and press articles written about him from year to year since his disappearance in 1974. Was the real Lucan dead, as numerous people claimed? If he wasn’t, how did he materially survive? Walker himself had never claimed that he presented himself to Lucan’s friends. It was usually Lucky who periodically collected sums of money, deposited at certain places, with certain people, by rich friends. Friends-how could they be deceived if they had once known Lucan? “Easy,” Walker had explained. “They expect Lucan to have undergone surgical modifications to his features. They are right. Your other Lucan patient is a fraud, Dr.

Wolf. He also goes collecting, as you can imagine.”

“But you work together.”

“Of course. If one of us were caught, it would always be the other, the absent Lucan who would be the real one.”

“And your voices? Don’t your friends suspect from the voice?”

“Lucan is known to be musical. We have coordinated our voices. Besides, people might assume that voices change.”

Years ago, there had been an arrest. Lucan is found in Australia! Indeed the suspect turned out to be a very much wanted missing man; but he wasn’t Lucan. And as far as Hildegard was concerned, neither, as yet, were quite proved to be either Walker or Lucky. She had a naturally objective set of wits. The men were each, to her, “a mere anatomy, a mountebank . . . a living-dead man,” as Shakespeare had put it long ago.

In manners, in speech, Hildegard had written, both Lucky and Walker could have based themselves on the Lucan of the historical case. Their methods of copying would have been fairly easy for the reason that Lucan himself had been a perfect bore, a cut-to-measure gentleman with a pack of memories very, very like that of many another man of his class and education. He does not appear to have had one original idea, ever, beyond that of attempting and planning to murder his wife. He was extremely average of mind. He could have been anybody.

With a smattering of information about the past life and schooling of a man like Lucan, given the height and shape, it would not have been difficult to assume a personality that would convince his acquaintances of his identity. Oh, Lucan, Lucan, you hot potato. The rain had stopped. Hildegard put away her notes. She felt a great longing for Jean-Pierre and regretted not being connected even by e-mail. Surely he would be looking for her, might even find her. But she didn’t trust his tact in evading the Lucans. Jean-Pierre lacked duplicity whereas they were altogether a double proposition. Sooner or later she would phone him.

Walker had a very fixed idea of what a gentleman should be. He had studied Lucky Lucan diligently for ten of the years since Lucan had been a wanted man on the loose. He had got most of his ideas about a hundred years out of date, as were the convictions and attitudes of Lucan himself, for Lucan’s conceptions of a gentleman were greatly distorted. This had been noted by his fellow guardsmen in the Coldstream regiment, where Lucan played the Earl from start to finish, outdoing the other earls in the practice of earldom.

Walker’s notion of a gentleman was further distorted by the reality of Lucan’s character. Lucan was, in fact, bent, a natural felon, a failed person. He was self-centered as a man, self-occupied as a nobleman; the mask of the upstart, strangely, was Lord Lucan’s favorite mode of self-expression. “Virtue and honor”: his family specifically claimed that these were guiding features of their fugitive kinsman. However, they were obviously not remotely attributes of his; they were the facade which Walker in his role of freelance gentleman had assiduously copied and assumed. Yes, he was now ideally Lucan’s doppelganger, his other self.

Walker’s physical resemblance to Lucan had grown over those years since they had met in Mexico. Its initial advantage was the two men’s precisely identical height of six-foot-plus and the curious melon like shape of their heads. Lucan’s head was described by an acquaintance as “bony,” and so was Walker’s. Their dark coloring had been more or less the same. Only their separate features had differed. This had been attended to gradually in the more recent years by plastic surgery, so that it was now difficult to tell the two men apart.

Lucan, however, had a certain charm, not a great deal of it, but enough to be all the more charming. Walker had none and was always at a loss how to achieve it; was transparent, which at times was in itself quite appealing. Where they resembled each other most in character was in their aptitude for cold indifference; on that level they never failed to be in harmony.

Walker had come to Lucan’s notice on a ranch in Mexico, one of Lucan’s many places of refuge in the years following his disappearance. His host had been a small spare man, nut-brown, a horse-racing old-time friend; the hostess had been a film star, now retired into a life of retaining her wonderful looks day by day, and keeping her clothes, which she changed frequently, fresh and ironed all the time.

“It’s remarkable,” she said, “how much Walker resembles you. I thought he was you last night when he walked across the lawn to the house.”

“So strange,” said the host, “I thought so too.” After two months it was nearly time for Lucan to move on to his next aiders and abetters.

“I will give you Walker,” said the kindly Mexican.

“You may take Walker with you. He’ll come in useful.” Walker was a butler-keeper and head groom (for the establishment was constituted on hierarchical lines). “I don’t know,” said his wife, “if I can manage without Walker.”

“I give him to Lucan,” said the man, very casually, as if he was presenting the Earl with a silver dish. “What should I do with him?” said Lucan the comparative blockhead.

“You can use him a thousand ways,” said the all-knowing, all-experienced host. “He could be arrested in your place, if necessary. You must train him up a bit, make him more your double, teach him your voice.” “He is very intelligent,” said the wife.

“If he was very intelligent,” said the sage brown fellow, “he wouldn’t be working for us. However he will do as I say. Besides,” he said wearily, “I will of course make it worth his while. I give him to Lucan. Get his chin modified, Lucan, and his nose straightened a bit. He’s the very image.”

That had been ten years ago. Walker had not needed to make frequent trips to Mexico to collect his former employer’s bounty. Unlike Lucan, he was safe with bank transfers. As Walker, no one was looking for him, although as Lucan he had several times fallen under suspicion. As Lucan he had been “sighted” on the beaches of the world, in cafés. He had been a temporary secretary of a sports club in Sydney, and sighted there. He had been a riding instructor at a school at Lausanne, from where he had to flee from a “sighting.” Interpol never caught up with him, and if they had, he was, after all, Walker, with Walker’s passport, Walker’s birth certificate, Walker’s own blood group. Lucan, meanwhile, was always elsewhere, in and out of jobs, or lounging in hotel gardens. He painfully avoided the casinos, where he knew he would be looked for.

The Mexican was not his only patron, but he was the richest. When he died in 1998, Lucan was left with only two firm friends of the past, the actress-wife having cut off Walker’s allowance and Lucan’s handout without explanation. Walker and Lucan went to Paris.

Lucan was always anxious about Walker’s voice.

Walker had adopted the slightly plummy full-fruited accents of Lucan’s speech, but still it was not quite right. Lucan knew that although Walker’s looks could pass for a twenty-year-later Lucan with his old friends, the voice, perhaps, could not. So far, he preferred to go “collecting” by himself.

But money was getting short for both of them.Walker made it plain to Lucan that they were not, ever, to separate. By the time they hit on Hildegard and her past, they needed her more for genuine psychiatric help than for what she could yield through blackmail. Lucan, in Scotland for his latest collecting venture, received a phone call from Walker.

“Don’t think,” said Walker, “don’t so much as let it cross your mind to fail to return to Paris. I need you here.”

Lucan said, “I’m coming to Paris.” In fact he had nowhere else to go. He hated Walker, but there was no escape from him. And now he had begun to find out more about Walker, who knew so much, so very much, about him, if only through those books and articles that had probed every aspect of his past life.

Walker and Lucan, Lucan and Walker, they were bound together.

Walker, for his part, could hardly bear to look at Lucan’s melon-shaped head, exactly like his own.

There was one enormous difference between them, however, and both knew it. Lucan was a killer and Walker was not.

Lucky Lucan believed in destiny. By virtue of destiny he was an earl. His wife had been destined to die, according to his mad calculation. It was the madness of a gambler. During the last two months before the attempt on his wife, Lucan had behaved with comparative civility towards her; even, it was reported, with tenderness. He understood she was destined to die and did not for one moment reflect that this destiny arose merely from his own calculations and plans. His “needs” dictated fate itself. He had “needed” the money that would have derived from the sale of the house she occupied, he “needed” his wife dead, and it was destiny.

It was also now his destiny to share his life with Walker. But an overriding “need” had arisen. Old friends were dying or dropping off. Lucan needed to rid himself of Walker, and soon; before Walker decided that Lucan must die, it was Walker’s destiny to die.

On the plane to Paris, Lucan began to work out the mechanics of Walker’s death. Walker was a card to be played in this gambling den of life; not an ace card, merely a card. It was a situation in which Lucan felt confident, with the sort of confidence with which he had felt he could kill his wife with impunity. His feelings were those of a gambler. His confidence was a card player’s. His sense of destiny obliterated the constant, well-known fact that the gambler loses and the bookie, the croupier or whoever, always wins in the end.Walker was a card to be played, and there was no intention in Lucan’s mind to generously share his latest “collected” windfall with his look-alike. This latest bundle of luck might well be the last, these days being these days.

Walker must go. The stewardess brought him a glass, a half bottle of flat Vichy water and a miniature Johnnie Walker which Lucan twirled in his fingers with some scorn, before opening and pouring. Presently she returned, offering him a plastic meal which he refused. Walker must go, die, disintegrate. By habit Lucan wore tinted glasses; they had no special lens: his contact lenses, a messy brown color, disguising his blue eyes, were made for his natural vision. He was in business class and sat in the aisle seat, which he always preferred. It gave him the feeling of a quick getaway, even on a plane. Twenty-five years had not settled his jitters. No years would do that. If he had remained at home and faced his trial and certain conviction, under the two charges against him, he would by now have been a free man for at least ten years, a fact which he appreciated but did not ponder. There had been no question of his standing trial.

He was the seventh Earl of Lucan. He had never got used to, or understood, the casual treatment, often contempt, that had been slung his way in the press by his peers. Not one of the other earls, even those of his schooldays or his regimental years, had spoken up for him. Besides most of his immediate family, which was understandable, only his gambling friends and his less nobly born friends had expressed horror at his plight; they had done their best.

By habit Lucan scrutinized, with more than usual passenger curiosity, the other travelers. Beside him was a girl with long streaky hair, reading Newsweek while picking into her tray of food. She, yes, could be a detective. Had they stopped looking for him? He could never be sure. This trip to England would have to be his last. With modern technology, collecting was becoming too dangerous and the collection itself too meager. He took out his book, a detective paperback. For twenty-five years he had been taking out paperbacks on planes and buses, remembering always to turn the pages regularly, even when his glances were elsewhere. His jitters at all times: he felt he did not deserve such a fate. He hadn’t killed his wife, after all. Only the girl with all that blood. He turned a page and sighed. His neighbor read and picked on.