Lucan’s friends, who appeared to close ranks in the wake of Rivett’s death, now appear keen to address his legacy too.
“He wasn’t talkative. Quite silent and reserved – but he wasn’t haughty, quite endearing in fact,” says Anne Somerset, a historian and sister of the current Duke of Beaufort, who frequently saw Lucan at the Earl of Suffolk’s house at the weekend in the months leading up to his disappearance. Others remember him as “rather dim but certainly not in the least sinister”.
One person who demurs from this line, however, is Algy Cluff, a former oil executive who knew Lucan through private London clubs at which they were both members, and remembers him as an abuser of dogs. “I wasn’t really a friend of his so I was astonished when the police came and searched my house in Dover after he went missing,” says Cluff. “Because I had known him from a bit of power boating on the Solent I suppose. I once had to intervene as I caught him giving massive electric shocks to his dog. The poor thing was in very great distress and leaping about a foot in the air.”
But what do his former affiliates think happened to Lucan? Inside his family and former social set, as outside of it, the theories vary wildly.
Lady Somerset is of the opinion that Lucan, who would be 90 next month, pitched himself off a ferry that left from Newhaven, having abandoned his car beforehand. “As a man who ate a lunch of lamb cutlets at the same table in the same place in the winter and jellied lamb cutlets in the summer, to be eating bush meat in a jungle is implausible,” she says.
The current Lord Lucan is equally sceptical that his father ever made it overseas, to carve out a life in hiding in some far-flung corner of the world. Bingham is resentful, he says, of “any absurd narrative set in the backstreets of Bangkok or Adelaide or Rio” spun out “with carefree abandon”.
But others offer up lurid suggestions. A one time friend of Lucan’s, Philippe Marcq, claims he made it to a zoo in Kent where he shot himself before being fed to the tigers having fled from London on the night of Rivett’s killing.
Perhaps the most convincing theory is that of Lucan expert James Fox, who covered the case for The Sunday Times. Fox believes Lucan had borrowed a boat and “scuttled” it off the south coast, sending himself under the water.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Lucan had an accomplice of some sort,” he says.
But the mystery of whether Lucan successfully fled British shores, and if he had help or not, be it from the then-Earl of Suffolk or otherwise, endures. And with even those who knew him divided on the saga, it seems likely to do so for at least another 50 years yet.
“I think he might have got to France then turned around and got a ferry home, but was pushed overboard by one of his fed-up friends,” says Emma Soames, a granddaughter of Winston Churchill’s and a former Tatler editor who knew Lucan and his wife.
“Though thinking about it, there’s a chance I might have seen that in a film.”