So what really happened on the night of 7 November 1974? The inquest concluded that Lucan had broken into the house and murdered Sandra Rivett, thinking she was his wife. Realising his mistake, he then set upon his wife.

Lucan, however, saw things differently. In the hours immediately after the murder, he proclaimed his innocence in frantic letters to his brother-in-law, Bill Shand Kydd, and in phone calls to his mother. He was passing the house, he said, when he was alerted to a burglary gone wrong. Whatever the truth, he knew the evidence was against him. Fearing the shame of being branded a murderer and having the family name dragged through the courts, he decided to do the decent thing and disappear.

The fact that Lucan's body has never been recovered has fuelled perennial speculation over his fate. Many of his close friends insist that he probably drowned in the English Channel, either by jumping off a ferry or by scuttling a speedboat.

But Roy Ranson, the Scotland Yard detective who headed the initial hunt for Lucan, always doubted this theory. Why, for example, was Lucan's body never washed up on the beach? Given the prevailing tides, he insisted, a body should have been recovered. Ranson argued that the Ford Corsair was a decoy used to distract the police while Lucan was smuggled out of Britain in a plane piloted by his friend, the formula one racing driver Graham Hill, who was killed in a plane crash in 1975. According to Ranson, Lucan went first to Portugal, and then to South Africa. In the 30 years since the murder there have been multiple alleged sightings of Lucan in several southern African countries.

Just recently, the Daily Mail ran a story in which former Tory MP and old Etonian Piers Dixon claimed that Lucan possibly fled to Mexico or Africa, under the protection of business financier James Goldsmith.

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