The seventh Lord Lucan, by all reports, was a very boring man. That was the point I kept in my mind when I wrote Aiding and Abetting, a fictionalised account of Lucan's post-murderous wanderings. (To depict a boring person as such, without being boring, was, incidentally, quite difficult.)

I inquired of numerous people who had met him, at school, in the army, in later life: this boring factor was the most constant. He was also, even for those days, a musical snob. Approaching 40, he was simply not imaginative enough to take up a guitar-playing hippy identity.

For these, and many other deeply psychological reasons, I think it extremely unlikely that Lucan would have had it in him to take up the life of a jungle hippy in Goa, as a new book, Dead Lucky, alleges. If he had, he would never have been able to resist expressing some uninhibited sentiments about his past. In that environment, he would have talked about his children to whom, in fact, Lucan had been very much attached.

I have not seen the book, and look forward to reading it. But, though physical resemblances are part of the argument, they are not enough. While I was doing research for my novel I received quite a few letters from people who were convinced that they had seen and talked to Lucan, but none of their descriptions fitted the psychological picture of the stupid gambler, occupation: aristocrat, deeply in debt, who dressed to kill, and did kill.

Even if he had not murdered the nanny by mistake and had achieved his aim of killing his wife, he would have been the first suspect. He was much too stupid to be able to take on a totally new identity. I feel that he simply got away and stayed abroad incognito.

A police officer involved in the case wrote to me a few years ago that he and many of his fellow officers believed Lucan to be still alive. In a subsequent TV programme his widow asserted that he had died of drink. Although in my novel I brought him to a stickier end, I think Lady Lucan is probably right.