Читать книгу The Great Cat Massacre - A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes - Gareth Rubin - Страница 18

Richard Bingham, the ironically nicknamed Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan, wanted to kill his estranged wife, Veronica. He planned to do so on a Thursday – 7 November 1974, to be precise – when his children’s nanny had the night off and always went out with her boyfriend, leaving his wife alone in the house.

So that night he hid in the kitchen of his wife’s home in Belgravia, west London, took the bulb out of the light and waited until nine o’clock when his wife always came down to make herself a cup of tea. When she did so, he sprang out and beat her to death in the dark with a length of lead piping, as in the popular board game Cluedo. He was therefore a little surprised to then hear her voice from upstairs calling for Sandra Rivett, the nanny. With understanding dawning like an unwelcome guest at Christmas, he realised that he had killed the wrong woman. Not one to be put off a task, however, when his wife really did come down this time, he attempted to kill her too, but bizarrely relented halfway through and went upstairs with her to watch television. Lucan, it seemed, couldn’t bring himself to kill his hated wife, but he was perfectly capable of beating an innocent third party to death. This unusual decision allowed Veronica to escape and raise the alarm by running to a nearby pub.

After Lady Lucan burst into the Plumbers Arms, screaming that her husband was trying to kill her, the police rushed to the house and forced open the door to find a bloodstained towel in one bedroom and a large pool of blood with a man’s footprints on the floor of the basement. In the basement they found the body of the nanny stuffed in a canvas mailbag, as in a cheap detective novel.

The perpetrator of this grisly act, however, had disappeared and soon became Britain’s most famous fugitive, passing into near-mythical status. Since then, he has been spotted everywhere and was even inadvertently responsible for one of Britain’s oddest political scandals, the Stonehouse affair…