“Do you know him?” he asked. “Can you message him for me?”
Probably… Nerissa had met him once through an art contact.
A man allegedly resembling the missing Lord Lucan was taken to Brisbane after he was arrested by police in the outback Goondiwindi in October 1979 for stealing parts from a burned-out car. It turned out that the suspect was who he claimed to be: Kenneth Charles Knight, a boilermaker from England who had emigrated to Australia 18 months earlier.Credit:AP
The man politely asked if he could join us. We introduced ourselves. He said his name was Lucan. I asked if that was Something Lucan or Lucan Something. “Only Lucan,” he said and winked. “Or you can call me Lucky.” And he winked again.
His message to Keating was that Lucky said hello and wanted him to know that the mean bastard who threw us out of the pub that night in Galway, well, he died in Wormwood Scrubs. He demanded that this be written “for security reasons” on a postcard without an envelope.
He then went on to talk, seductively addressing the government, the military in Germany, the courts, the royal family, his aristocratic illegitimate descendants. He spoke with an air of humble authority. He didn’t like it The Rupert Murdoch F-ing Times, or the police. He seemed bitter. Betrayed but not broken. A little nuts but ironing inside. sober.
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“The English police have blown my life up. Burned it.”
Suddenly something clicked. Lucan. Call me Lucky. Oh. Was this the 7th Earl of Lucan? (Richard) John Bingham – the Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had been the subject of countless unsubstantiated sightings since he disappeared in 1974 at the age of 39, wanted for the murder of his children’s nanny and the mistreatment of his estranged wife? He was a high stakes gambler and was also known as: Happy.
The army. The charm. The police. Oh. It felt like a UFO had just landed in my head, but it was time to go. A few more driving days back to Dublin to fly out. We told him we would send that card to Paul. As we left, he asked, “Do you know what schwarz means?”
“Black,” I replied and he winked.
Two nights later I would put the strange encounter behind me. In a cheerful, packed pub in a west coast town, we were joined by a tall, striking, older man dressed in black. He said there was a beautiful cricket oval in a town on the way back to Dublin. The best in Ireland, he said. We have to stop tomorrow. I asked him which city.
“Lucan,” he replied and winked.
The next morning at breakfast the maternal B&B owner advised not to drive to Dublin that evening – the congestion! – but stay in a beautiful city this side of the capital. Which city, Nerissa asked. “Lucan,” she replied and nodded with a wink.
We walked around Lucan. It looked like a hectic, busy, unattractive satellite city. If we had driven to the cricket ground, a character might have approached us with an envelope or a cassette tape. Here it is: the truth, proving that we did indeed meet the Lord Lucan. The same missing Lord Lucan who had been pronounced dead in 1999, less than two years earlier, although the death certificate was not issued until 2016. Maybe we were invited to this truth by the Irish Bush Telegraph. Was that our sliding door?
Back in Sydney, I kept the story to myself. I’m not a floater, though I did nervously send a postcard to the ex-Prime Minister’s office. Not heard back.
And of course it all came back this week with news reports that a British computer scientist claimed to have used AI technology to confirm that an 87-year-old retiree living in a Brisbane suburb — who had been tracked down by the murdered nanny’s son — was the one and only Lord Lucan. This claim, like so many observations, is disputed.
And yet … on the internet one day, about ten years later, I found two things that shocked me. One was a letter Lucan wrote to a friend on the night of the murder; the tone of tense/genuine anger, the language so similar to the man we met. The other was a bunch of crazy conspiracy posts linking the Lucan murder to Arnold Schwarzenegger! Look them up. black. Lucky’s last question to me. The wink. Scary.
Your husband at the pub? Was it him? Lord Lucan? The man hadn’t tried to convince us of anything. We just talked. Frankly, I still can’t decide.
2016: George Charles Bingham finally gets his infamous father’s title. Lucky’s son is finally the 8th Earl of Lucan. TV vision shows the son emerging from a courthouse on a drizzly afternoon. He looks relieved. Tired. Fifty. Long gray and dark hair fell behind his ears. Keith Miller hairline. Dull brown jacket. A slightly crumpled weathered subtle beauty. Absolute death sound.
Reg Lynch is a cartoonist, illustrator and writer. His cartoon appears with Jacqueline Maley’s column in The Sun Herald.
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