Col. Mustard Update

  We had barely sat down before a tall thin man appeared. He was elegantly dressed. He had a moustache, and his black hair was perfectly combed.
  “Good evening,” he said with an elegant accent. “My name is Richard. I shall be looking after you this evening.”
  To my relief, he did not look down his nose at me. In fact, he made us feel quite comfortable.
  “I love your accent,” said Linda. “Where are you from?”
  “England, ma’am. London actually. May I interest you in an aperitif ?”

There is more to report about the Lord Lucan case.

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m on about, then you must not have read the post I made here two years ago. That is where I acknowledged that I had made the real-life Lord Lucan a character in my work of fiction, Lautaro’s Spear, set in 1980, six years after the man’s disappearance. Partly to help define one of my characters and partly just to amuse myself—and maybe also as a bit of foreshadowing that my protagonist would one day mysteriously go missing—I included a brief walk-on for a minor character, a waiter, who would be strangely recognizable to those familiar with a particular criminal case from the 1970s in Britain.

The reason for my previous post on the long missing aristocrat was an article in The Times of London providing some previously unknown (to me anyway) information.

To recap, Lord Lucan vanished without a trace a half-century ago this month, immediately after his children’s nanny and his wife were both attacked with a lead pipe in the family home in fashionable Belgravia, London. Lady Lucan survived, but the nanny, Sandra Rivett, died. The borrowed car Lucan had been driving was found abandoned in the port town of Newhaven, East Sussex, prompting speculation he had drowned himself in the harbor. He left letters protesting his innocence, saying that he had actually intervened in an attack on his estranged wife by another man, who then fled. A coroner’s inquest subsequently found Lord Lucan guilty of Rivett’s murder, making him the first member of the House of Lords to be named a murderer since 1760. He has never been found and an official death certificate for him was issued in 2016.

The new information I got two years ago was that, when the Ford Corsair he had been driving was found in Newhaven, it contained three cards from a game of Cluedo owned by the lord. Specifically, they were Colonel Mustard, the lead pipe, and the hall. Additionally, there was an alleged sighting of the fugitive at a party in Portugal. Most interesting, though, was the report that a facial recognition expert, using AI photo analysis, had claimed to have made a 100-percent match between photographs of Lord Lucan and an 87-year-old pensioner in Australia.

The latest wrinkle in the story comes courtesy of a recent three-part documentary on BBC television. While it acknowledged that most people think Lord Lucan is dead, an passionate exception to that consensus comes from a builder from Hampshire. Adopted in infancy, he never had any interest in tracking down his biological parents, but upon his adoptive mother’s death, he learned that his mother was the tragic Sandra Rivett. That led to an obsessive quest, lasting 17 years so far, to find the missing Lord Lucan who, he is certain, was still alive. With the aid of a former investigative journalist, he has followed leads to such far-flung places as Mozambique, South Africa, and yes, Australia. The saga continues, seemingly with no end in sight.

No one else’s fascination with the case is as personal as the murder victim’s son, but plenty of others have been intrigued with the case. It was an Irish Times article seven years ago that caught my attention and led to my including a fictionalized version of the lord in my novel.

“Some reports suggest that he was fed to Aspinall’s tigers after he shot himself,” it said. “Others are convinced that he escaped; reported sightings of the missing peer are legion. Lucan has been spotted waitering in San Francisco, managing a clothes shop in South Africa, living in a neo-Nazi colony in Paraguay, and living as a hippy musician called Jungly Barry in Goa.”

Waitering in San Francisco, you say?

It was a bit of whimsy on my part, but now I too have found myself forever linked in a minor, odd way to that gruesome, tragic event.