Murder by Mistake Read Free Page B

called him “the Relic” and “Old Fossil,” and he seemed to belong to a time of “upstairs, downstairs,” where the master did as he liked and the servants took off their caps to show respect. The John Lucan now wanted by the police to “assist them in their enquiries” was caught in a time warp of his own making.
    He joined the army as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, his father’s old regiment, in 1953 and was posted to Krefeld in West Germany as part of the Army of the Rhine that would stay in Germany for years after the war. All young men in Britain had to go through national service at the time, and by 1955, he was back in London with a career to launch. His father had been the 6th Earl for a while by this time, and so John was now officially Lord Bingham. The title cut through a lot of red tape and opened doors. Young John, now 21, became a merchant banker with the City of London firm William Brandt.
    Bingham took to the job like a duck to water, although finance and money had never loomed large in his math curriculum at school. He rented a flat near London’s Regent’s Park and joined the party set of champagne, beautiful girls, fast cars… and gambling.
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Chapter 4: Lucky
    Gambling was definitely not on the curriculum at Eton, but young John learned it anyway and enjoyed it. He became a compulsive gambler and won the nickname “Lucky” because of the rare times he won. The name may even have been ironic. He was at school, in the army and in the City of London, a small area within Greater London that is a major business and financial center, with rich men to whom placing a bet, on cards, dice or horses was a way of life. He was a frequent visitor at England’s race courses, many of which were a stone’s throw from London and became adept at poker and backgammon. In fact, by the late 1960s, he was probably one of the world’s top 10 backgammon players, and he enjoyed the prestige that the ranking gave him. Casinos were still illegal in London in the 1950s, but they were all the rage in Germany where Bingham had been with his regiment, so he turned easily to the games of chance—baccarat, roulette, blackjack and
chemin de fer
.

    Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan
passport photo
    Once established in the City, of course, John had to be more discreet. He played bridge for low stakes because that was the acceptable side of card-playing. As soon as possible, he adopted a millionaire lifestyle, taking holidays in the Bahamas with a rich stockbroker friend, Stephen Raphael. He played poker with the Aga Khan, one of the richest men in the world and, as his more staid family became more and more alarmed, he became a professional gambler and gave up the day job.
    New gaming laws in 1960 allowed private casinos to spring up, and one that became Bingham’s second home was the Clermont Club, set up by millionaire zoo owner John Aspinall, at 44 Berkeley Square, one of the most fashionable addresses in London and close to Lucan’s home. Older gentlemen’s clubs, some of which had been operating for 200 years, turned up their noses with the finely-tuned snobbery for which those establishments are famous, but Aspinall made the Clermont
the
place to be. It had expensive interior décor and, interestingly, no clocks. Here was a magic place where time did not exist, and that suited Lucan very well. As Aspinall cynically put it, “I wanted to create a place where English gentlemen could ruin themselves as stylishly and suicidally as their ancestors had done.”

    Clermont Club, 44 Berkeley Square
    Night after night, Lucky would sit at the tables, smoking and drinking heavily, winning or losing (but usually losing), acting as a magnet for the gullible who would enjoy playing with a lord. When he inherited the Lucan title in 1964, he was generally known as John Lucan, and the £240,000 ($562,000—well over $2.5 million today, allowing for inflation) that came with it, the lure and the