Lord Lucan's Nanny is Dead in The Cellar

Sandra was lying dead in the cellar; Veronica was screaming blue murder; and I was leaving London for the last time. I have never set foot in that city since.

All I knew was that within hours, the entire British police force would be searching for me. Worse, I didn’t have a plan.

The one thing that I had catered for was to efficiently and permanently dispose of my wife’s body. And now that she was still very much alive - alive and cursing me from the roof-tops - I had not the vaguest notion of what to do next.

I remember how my brain galloped through all the possibilities. From one thing to the next, from giving myself up to doing myself in; and then what would happen if I did give myself up? Would I try to deny it all, or would I be the man and make a clean breast of it? You can see, perhaps, that I still had a number of options available to me, and the only thing they had in common was that they all seemed particularly unpleasant.

The friends that I had called up that night all said the same thing. Give myself up, they said. Turn myself in. Let the police sort it all out.

But of course they were going to say that - because they all believed me when I’d told them that I’d had nothing to do with Sandra’s murder. And if I were innocent, then obviously I had nothing to hide, and the best course of action by far was to go to the police.

A perfectly reasonable course of action - if, that is, I’d been innocent.

The truth, though, was that I was in it up to the eyeballs. Giving myself up did not really seem like an option. Can you imagine it? The first hereditary peer in I don’t know how many centuries to be convicted of murder? It might even have come to trial by my peers. Then jailed for life and the ignominy of being shunned by my children and my friends.

Too awful to contemplate.

With hindsight I would have given myself up the very next day. Anything at all, even a full life-term in the Scrubs, would have been preferable to the exquisite agony of my life over the last 20 years. Though given the unusual circumstances of the case, I think I might well have been out in ten. Who knows - I might even be on speaking terms with my children. They might have found it in their hearts to forgive me. All these scenarios are things that I have come to contemplate during my infinite hours of soul-searching.

But - as obviously you know - I did not take my chances with the British judicial system. It was not in my nature, and that nature was part formed by my schooling. Of the many things I’d learned at Eton, one of the key lessons of survival had been that simple adage 'Deny, Deny, Deny'. Never own up. Never admit guilt. Lie through your teeth. Just hold your nerve and there’s a chance that something better might turn up.

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