PART I

The Lucan Myth

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'I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh – Very smooth he looked, yet grim ...'

Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, 1819

The famous murders all become myths, and that myth is not necessarily a distillation of truth. It is, more precisely, a distillation of our perceptions. It has a different kind of truth, symbolic rather than factual.

The myth of the Lucan case is a parable about class: a tale of aristocratic hubris. Every element in the story has been seen through that prism. The myth contains some truth, of course, but it is not the whole truth. Indeed it is not above telling lies. This book will go on to tell a different story, because the myth can't be allowed to have things all its own way. Nevertheless there is nothing to be done with it. You can't kill a myth. It is the way that a story settles, and however much you shake it up it will always fall back into position. It is the favoured version, the one that people have decided upon.

Moreover, this particular myth has a tremendous power. Lucan symbolized the old and terrible ways, so casting him into hell was, and continues to be, a peculiarly satisfying act of national catharsis.

Forty years of newspaper articles prove as much. One can pick out the phrases at random, from any point between then and now: Lord Lucan was a 'murderous hooray Henry', the 'unacceptable face of privilege' who 'after a jolly night's gambling, bludgeoned his kids' nanny to death'. His 'eyes are arrogant and exude a dull-witted authority'. His victim, 'the Little Miss Nobody, was firmly kept in her lowly place'. His friends were 'an ugly bunch of right-wing boobies'. 'If that's how members of the "higher human strain" behave, thank God for the humble vermin.'

Two weeks after the murder, this letter was published in a newspaper:

The ordinary people of this country are accustomed to being told how lazy and greedy they have become and how they must make greater sacrifices. If I were a miner, factory worker or railwayman and I had read of Lord Lucan's lifestyle (rise at noon, lunch at the Clermont, gambling losses of £5,000 in one afternoon) I would have said a few well chosen words when my alarm went off this morning.

Them and Us, that great British theme, had found in the Lucan case a perfect conduit for its own expression. From the first, therefore, it has been almost impossible to question the Lucan myth without questioning the political orthodoxy that lay behind it. To suggest that the case might be a more nuanced business than it was perceived to be, that an earl is not evil merely because he is an earl, is a dangerous business. It is to become an implied apologist for the aristocracy, for the privilege of birth not merit, for the world before Attlee: all the wrong things. Meanwhile those who uphold the myth are on the right side, and can get away with prejudice because the prejudices are acceptable. It is entirely understandable, when one considers the centuries of dominance by men like the Earl of Pembroke, or indeed the 3rd Earl of Lucan. How to resist using the story of Lord Lucan as a means to balance those absurdly weighted social scales?

And Lucan was so earl-like: an aristocrat straight from central casting. He was screen-tested for the role of an archetypal English gentleman by the Italian director Vittorio De Sica, who had been struck by his remarkable presence and beauty in a Deauville casino. He failed the test, being too much the part to be able to act it.

At six feet two inches he 'stood like a guardsman, very stiff and upright'. His face, a handsome shallow sculpture, wore its arrogance like a shield. His demeanour was impeccable. He was amazed, or thought that he should be, by the sight of a man in Annabel's wearing a pink shirt. On the London streets men not much younger than he were dressing as rock stars, with hair down to collars like the wingspans of model aeroplanes. But Lucan was contained within the structures of gentlemanliness, buttoned and tailored like a man who employed somebody to dress him, although he did not.

He presented an impenetrable façade; and, because murder is most fascinating when it wears a mask, this image of Lucan's became central to the myth. As with 46 Lower Belgrave Street, it seemed to magnify murder by its supreme incongruity. Unlike the classic domestic killers – Crippen and his prim detachable collar, Madeleine Smith and her rustling balloon of a crinoline – Lucan did not present an air of respectability. He went way beyond that, into the realm of the thoroughbred. Earls, after all, did not have to bother about being respectable, even though some of them were. They simply acted as they chose, and looked the way that they looked. In 1970s Britain, with its hippy-hangover fashions, its prime minister Harold Wilson doing his man-of-the-people act in a crumpled Gannex mac, this was a perpetual shock to the eye, a reminder of why Lucan must be hated.

So the myth begins and ends with class, as did the life of Lord Lucan himself. Both, in their way, were rendered incomplete by that strange and powerful nonsense.

Here, then, is the forty-year-old Lucan myth. It tells a simple story, as myths do: that of a man whose charmed life went wrong. The damage was self-inflicted, but the story is not a tragedy, because the man never had the capacity for greatness that a tragic hero requires. He was simply born lucky. He had every advantage, and he squandered them all.

Richard John Bingham was born on 18 December 1934, the second of four children. His father, although not excessively rich, was more than comfortable. The 6th Earl owned land in Ireland and on the Surrey–Middlesex border, and later set up family trusts that would ensure his son a substantial unearned income. Both he and his wife were Labour Party supporters, with the earl becoming Labour chief whip in the House of Lords. They were in tune with the times. Their son, flagrantly, was not.

As a child growing up in Eaton Square, Lord Bingham had, it was later said, a personal maid, as well as a nanny. During the Second World War he was sent, with his brother and two sisters, to the safety of America. There he lived with the Brady Tucker family, awash with nineteenth-century banking money and owners of the last private house on New York's Park Avenue. Summers were spent on the family estate at Westchester, where the Lucan children had a house of their own. The future earl ate liberally from the fruits of near-infinite riches: the child's unquestioning familiarity with luxury would become, in adulthood, an insatiable yearning for...