241 Pizza

The key figure in her story — an international financial fixer — still cannot be named, but she explained what had previously been inexplicable. And her key point was that Lucan is dead: he was rescued but then murdered by his own minders.

WHEN Lucan first entered Aspinall’s orbit in the 1950s, he was one of the brightest members of what became the Clermont set. He could have been a sort of template for the club — hereditary aristocrat, Eton and the Guards, risk-taking member of the British Army bobsleigh team, fearless gambler and man of honour. His distant kinsman Andrew Duke of Devonshire told me that he had the most perfect manners of any gambler he’d ever met.

He was a particularly close friend of Ian Maxwell-Scott, gambling gourmet and secretary of the Clermont club. Lucan and Veronica often took their children down to Gants Hill, the Maxwell-Scotts’ big house in Uckfield, Sussex, for weekends.

Lucan had sufficient money to live very comfortably indeed, but the Lucans had never got remotely near the financial league of families such as the Derbys or the Devonshires. As addiction to chemin de fer began to bite, the money dwindled and then ran out entirely.

He was effectively bankrupt, and his wife seemed under severe stress as she tried to cope with her desperate husband and their three young children.

In 1973 they separated and a judge awarded Lady Lucan care of the children. This was greeted with indignation at the Clermont, where Aspinall’s philosophy prevailed. If the female of the species resists the authority of the silverback gorilla who has fathered her children, she must expect the sort of treatment that a rebellious female primate would encounter in the wild.

Many ex-husbands have fantasies of murdering their former wives, but Lucky’s fantasies became an open secret among the Clermont set. Veronica had to disappear without trace so that no suspicion would fall on him and he could instantly pick up a new, untroubled life with his children.

Lucan seems to have had no qualms about turning to a number of his Clermont friends for unknowing help. He asked Michael Stoop, a banker, to lend him his spare car, a Ford Corsair.

For reasons that have not been properly understood until now, but are the key to the underworld connection I have discovered, the Sussex ferry port of Newhaven figured prominently in Lucky’s plans. I have been told that he drove Stoop’s car on at least two trial runs from Belgravia to Newhaven. On one of these he returned with a US mailbag in the back, another clue that has not been properly understood before. A friend from the Clermont had accompanied him on the trip.

Lucky apparently needed a considerable sum of ready cash. He asked Jimmy Goldsmith, the richest of the Clermonteers, for a £10,000 loan. Saying he never lent money to his friends, Goldsmith offered the one thing he knew that, as a gentleman, Lucan could not accept — a gift of £10,000.

Goldsmith then lay low in Paris, keeping clear of whatever Lucky was up to. Other friends rallied round to put together the money.

Lucan spent a lot of time working out the perfect murder. The children had told him that Rivett always took Thursday evenings off and that their mother would go down to the kitchen in the basement to make tea. He decided this was his opportunity. He would kill her, put her body in the mailbag and get away without leaving a trace.

The flaw in the plan was that Sandra Rivett did not take her customary night off on Thursday November 7. When she came down to make the tea shortly before 9pm, Lucan mistook her for his wife and struck her so hard that the skull virtually exploded.

When he heard Veronica coming down to find out what was going on, he started hitting her as well. Somehow she managed to grab his balls. Suddenly he seemed to come to his senses.