"I believe Goldsmith would have used his commercial knowledge to provide advice on financial matters I can't say whether Goldsmith financed Lucan. "She said much of the conversation was about the difficulties of getting money into and out of Africa and using bank accounts in places such as Jersey and Guernsey," he said. He also believes that Goldsmith was instrumental in the escape."I don't believe he would have been involved in the nitty-gritty: he was too clever to have put Lucan on to a boat across the Channel himself," said Mr Gerring. "But I do believe he was involved in the planning from a safe distance."Think about it; Lucan has just committed murder, so who does he go to? His friends.

They see he is in no fit state to organise his own escape, so they do it for him. He had many influential friends and Goldsmith was among the most influential and wealthy."Mr Gerring interviewed a woman who claims she met Lucan at a lunch in South Africa in the late 1970s He had undergone plastic surgery Mr Gerring is satisfied that it was the aristocrat. The retired detective chief inspector believes Lucan, who would be aged 62, is still alive, has undergone plastic surgery, has adopted a fake identity and has a comfortable lifestyle in South Africa. Detectives probed the old Etonian network and Lucan's associates who frequented the Clermont Club, a high-class gambling club in Berkeley Square.Following the death of Goldsmith two weeks ago, David Gerring, second- in-command of the manhunt, has spoken for the first time of his inquiries into the network and, in particular, the flamboyant businessman's role in Lucan's flight.

Now that Goldsmith is dead, Lucan's cover may one day be blown. The biggest international manhunt in police history failed to locate the gambling peer, who fled the country after Miss Rivett was killed and his estranged wife, Veronica, attacked in the basement of 46 Lower Belgravia Street, in November 1974.For years there were rumours of a network of wealthy old Etonians who had helped spirit "Lucky" Lucan away and set him up in a new life. One of the detectives who hunted Lucan throughout the 1970s after the brutal murder of the Lucans' nanny, Sandra Rivett, believes Goldsmith's death may create a crack in the wall of silence surrounding the aristocrat's disappearance. "These people are quite poor and their savings and resources are being used up. For a charity, the response rating in an area of very low unemployment can be 12-14 times more than in an area with a high number of people out of work."The Data Protection Registrar said data obtained fairly from public records and fairly processed was acceptable. However, certain information, although derived from freely available public material, might not be. A list of rich widows living alone at home, for example, had been condemned by the Data Protection Registrar..

The death of the billionaire businessman Sir James Goldsmith could help police solve one of the greatest crime mysteries of the century - the disappearance of Lord Lucan. For a company wanting to sell age-specific holidays, such as those for the over-65s, this can be invaluable."Targeting the unemployed can be particularly detrimental to a direct mail response," said Mr Griffiths. Just the data available on an electoral roll is useful to business. It indicates that a person is at least 18 years old; it provides information on a household's composition; first names can help indicate what age a person might be. What businesses find particularly helpful is when this data is broken down into postcode areas, enabling them to make specific attempts to target potential customers. It could be used to help companies reach the poor and then charge them very high rates of interest.

It is distasteful and should be prevented if at all possible."Many market research companies today are able to produce highly sophisticated data overlaying all kinds of information from different sources, such as the census, electoral rolls, and general household surveys. "Areas with high rates of long-term unemployment tend to be less affluent," said David Griffiths, managing director of Trac "It would be very helpful to a charity for instance. There is no point asking someone who is out of work for a donation when that person cannot afford Christmas presents for his own children But other organisations could want to target the unemployed. A loans company, for instance, might want to find people who needed money."Last week Paul Convery, director of the Unemployment Unit, a research and lobbying organisation, said such a project would be doing the unemployed a great disservice."They are aiming at people who are economically vulnerable, and are trading on that very vulnerability. Its map (see left) shows that the highest levels of unemployment in Britain are concentrated in northern Ireland, London, northern cities and the far north of Scotland. But it can also provide exact locations of populations of around 2,000 that have the worst levels of unemployment. It was designed to enable advertisers to screen out pockets of unemployment and likely poverty where residents would be unlikely to afford major purchases.