 By the afternoon of Friday 8 November, the newspapers'early editions carried photographs of the Lucans across their front pages, accompanied by headlines like "body in sack ... countess runs out screaming", and "belgravia murder – earl sought". A meeting that day at the Clermont, between John Aspinall, Daniel Meinertzhagen, Charles Benson, Stephen Raphael, Bill Shand-Kydd and Dominic Elwes, became the cause of much press speculation. Meinertzhagen and Raphael later insisted that the gathering was just a rational discussion between concerned friends, keen to share anything they knew about what had happened, but the relationship between the police and Lucan's social circle was strained; some officers complained that an "Eton mafia" worked against them. Susan Maxwell-Scott refused to add to her statement, and when Aspinall's mother, Lady Osborne, was asked if she could help locate Lucan's body, she replied "The last I heard of him, he was being fed to the tigers at my son's zoo", prompting the police to search the house and the animal cages there. They searched fourteen country houses and estates, including Holkham Hall and Warwick Castle, to no avail. Amidst concerns expressed by the Labour MP Marcus Lipton that some people were "being a bit snooty" with the police, Benson wrote a letter to The Times asking him to either identify those people or "kindly withdraw his remarks". To their cost, Private Eye accused James Goldsmith of being at the Clermont meeting, when he was actually in Ireland. Dominic Elwes went to see Lady Lucan in hospital and was reportedly deeply shocked both by her appearance and her statement "Who's the mad one now?" Elwes was apparently unhappy at some of the negative press coverage of the countess, and was later ostracised by his friends for his part in an article critical of Lucan, which appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine. He committed suicide in September 1975.
