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like us know how to deal . . .” Did Lucan have that conviction in mind when he “dealt” with the woman he thought was his wife, when he “dealt” with the knowledge of his blunder that he had killed only the children’s nurse? People like us . . . people like them . . . It was almost melodramatic, but then, as Hildegard told Jean-Pierre that night, the very situation of Lord Lucan and his disappearance had a melodramatic touch. It was this very naive approach to his personal drama that had probably confused the police in the days after the murder. They were looking for upper class sophistication, but they got nothing but cheap showbiz from Lucan’s friends. Lucan had been drinking heavily, Lucan was hopelessly in debt. But no, Lucan is a friend of ours, he is one of us and you don’t understand that people like us . . . Lucan had sent letters to a friend while he was still so covered in blood that the stains appeared on the envelope. Lucan had turned up in a panic at a friend’s house that night of the murder, with a bloodstain on his trousers.
    Blood. “What I’m afraid of,” Hildegard said when she discussed it with her lover, “is that Walker will murder Lucky. It would be in character.”

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    “But you say that you believe Lucky to be the real Lucan?”
    “There is always a doubt. I could be wrong. But Walker sticks in my mind as an unscrupulous fake.” Jean-Pierre had been making notes. It was an hour before they would sit down to dinner. Jean-Pierre gave Hildegard her preferred drink, a small quantity of whisky dowsed in water, took one for himself, a dry martini, and got out his notebook. He read:
    After twenty-five years of playing the part of the missing Lord Lucan he surely is the part. The operative word is “missing.” If indeed he has been Lord Lucan in an earlier life he had never gone missing before. After the murder he went without money apparently, without decent clothing, without a passport. He just disappeared.
    If he was the real Lord Lucan the clandestine life must have meant a loss of innocence-that he had not known he possessed. The spontaneous pleasure, for instance, of just being in Paris, as so many English people experience. The boulevards, the banks of the Seine, the traffic, the bistros, the graffiti on the walls-all lost in the new life of careful watchfulness. The odds would be against him, as he must have known if he was Lucan the professional gambler. The police were active in those early months of his clandestine flight.
    And as the years piled up with nothing achieved but his furtive travels in South America, in Africa, in Asia, between intervals of quick, dangerous trips to Scotland and Paris to pick up his old friends’ money, what had he become? Someone untraceable with blood on his hands, in his head, in his memory. Blood . . .
    My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.
    When he disappeared in 1974 he was thirty nine. The detective assigned to his case, Roy Ransom, died in recent years. Sightings of the seventh Earl are still frequent. Lucan is here, he is there, he is everywhere. In a final message to Lucan, Roy Ransom wrote, “Keep a watchful eye over your shoulder. There will always be someone looking for Lucan.”
    He must have gone through several false passports, several false names.
    “Well, Hildegard,” said Jean-Pierre, “which of your Lucans fits my profile best?”
    “Neither,” she said, “and both.”
    “Why,” said Jean-Pierre, “are the Lucans getting psychiatric therapy?”
    “They are sick,” said Hildegard. “Especially Lucky.
    Sick, and he knows it.”
    “I mean to find out,” said Jean-Pierre, “why they actually want psychiatric treatment.”
    “Perhaps they need money. They want it from me,” said Hildegard. “It could be that Lucan’s source of income is drying up.”
    “It could be. I’d like to know,” said Jean-Pierre. “I read a recent article in which Lucan’s friends claim that he is