White Mischief

by James Fox

  Broughton almost admitted as much in court, but he turned it round: Diana’s integrity, he said, would have prevented her from claiming the money, and thus the financial part of the pact was effectively waived. Erroll told Diana at the last moment that without finance, the marriage plans were off and Broughton had therefore forced Erroll into officially taking over Diana, knowing that it would be impossible for him to do so. As a result Erroll had lost his nerve and backed away. Broughton was almost broke by this time. In any event he would certainly have been unwilling to finance Diana’s affair with Erroll for three years, or until they could get a divorce. Diana herself was about to lose everything: miles away from home; a baronet, an earl; not one, but two sets of pearls, and above all, her romantic happiness.

  Reading some of Broughton’s testimony in this light gives it a new flavour. Here he is explaining his “dispassionate business discussion” with Erroll, within earshot of June and Diana and in view of Erroll’s houseboy and garden boy, who described Broughton beating the table with his fist:

  I think on that occasion I enquired about his financial position and Lord Erroll was rather evasive. I could not get out of him what his resources were. [It was surely common knowledge in Nairobi that Erroll was penniless.] I think he said he had not got very much. I wanted to get out of him [my italics] exactly what he was worth and I gathered it was not very much. I think he said on that occasion he was afraid Diana would not have all the things she had been used to, or a lot of the things she had been used to.

  In 1979 a close friend of Diana’s told me that she had once said to her, quite courageously, “I always thought you shot Joss.” “And she took it quite seriously,” said the friend, “and very well, and said, insisted, that she hadn’t. And I gave her my reasons, which were: he had made it clear to her that in no way could he marry her because, for one thing, she couldn’t be divorced for three years and he had absolutely no money—the reverse: he was very badly in debt. And he more or less said the best thing you can do is go back to Broughton and call it a day. And in her rage she shot him. I said I thought this was quite a feasible thing. And she swore she didn’t.”

  Broughton seemed always to be hinting after the murder that something had gone wrong between Joss and Diana. One could perhaps read too much into the following courtroom exchange, taken from Broughton’s testimony, but it might also be read in the light of a letter Broughton wrote after his acquittal to a friend in England, in which he said, “Diana has been completely disillusioned about Erroll by revelations which have come out since all this trouble started.”

  In court he was asked by Morris:

  You had some hope of everything coming all right in about three months’ time when you returned from Ceylon?

  A:

  Girls do change their minds.

  Q:

  And had you ever heard of Erroll changing his mind?

  A:

  Unless I am very much pressed I would rather not answer.

  Q:

  I merely suggest to you that you had a double chance of everything being all right in three months?

  A:

  Yes.

  Q:

  You also knew Lord Erroll’s reputation with regard to that sort of thing, that he was fickle in such matters?

  A:

  If I am pressed to answer, yes.

  If there had been an argument between Joss and Diana, why should it have occurred suddenly after the dinner, at which everything seemed to be so amicably settled?

  There was no explanation for this and no hard evidence to support the “row” theory, until Connolly stumbled on a witness whose story provided not only a plausible reason for the argument, but also seemed to explain the “missing hour” in the timetable of the movements of Broughton and June Carberry that night.

  Lady Barwick, formerly Valerie Ward, who supported Connolly at the Press Council on the question of Gwladys Delamere and the anonymous letters, told Connolly that on the night of the murder June Carberry had invited her to dinner at the Muthaiga Club to celebrate Broughton’s surrender. She and her South African friend, Laurie Wilmot, were dining elsewhere, so June asked them to come on to the Claremont Road House afterwards and join the party. Lady Barwick and her escort had drinks at the Club, at around 7:45. Connolly’s note of his conversation with Lady Barwick tells the rest of the story:

  She saw, and spoke to the following: Derek Fisher from Nanyuki, somebody Gaskell. who had an ulcer and drank milk, and Denzil Myers. June and Alice de Trafford were there; Long John Llewellin and his wife, Gypsy someone, Jacko Heath, still alive (1969) and married to Sally Billiard Leake!

  After their own dinner she and LW go to Claremont in his camouflaged army car. They were first and were sat down at a long table. Had two dances. Then Diana and Erroll arrived, looking rather unhappy and sat at the end of the table—and later June Carberry and Broughton appeared! Their appearance caused consternation to Joss and D and they were obviously not meant to come. DB looked very white, started protesting immediately. They ignored everyone else. Immediately a terrific row started with DB shouting at Erroll and June booming away, trying to soothe them. It go so bad that she and LW got up and left and went to another club. Blue Room or 400 (up steps). She rather thinks there was someone else at their table. The row was fundamentally a scene of jealousy. Broughton and June then went back to Muthaiga—or where?

  Next morning she was rung up because her Buick was the only one in Kenya besides Gibbs and the No. was almost the same (T 7341). [The Registration number of Erroll’s Buick was T 7331.]

  Poppy, who usually resisted the suggestion of gaps in his investigations, believed that Valerie Ward’s story may have been correct; was impressed by the missing hour in the timetable, and he confirmed that the police did enquire about other Buicks, in case of confusion over the sightings of Erroll’s car before the murder.

  Broughton certainly planned to go to the Claremont Road House that night. He told Mrs. Barkas, Lizzie Lezard and Llewellin how much he was looking forward to it. Lezard understood that Jock would be taking June there as a dancing partner. June never specifically denied going to the Claremont. She simply said, in her evidence, “Joss and Diana went off to the Claremont. Jock asked me if I would like to dance and I said I did not want to, as I was not feeling particularly well.” She supported that by the requests for quinine later on.

  Diana and Erroll dancing together at the Claremont Road House had set off Broughton’s rage on another evening, if the prosecution’s information is correct, when he was heard to say to Diana before she left, “Shall I throw the champagne in your face, or break the bottle over his head, or would you rather I threw the bottle at your head?” On this final evening, had their departure again triggered off his anger, so carefully suppressed at dinner under the studied passivity and almost perverse generosity of the toast and the good wishes?

  Why did no one else witness Broughton’s scene at the Claremont Road House? Nobody was asked about it, and according to Poppy, Wilks was the only one among the witnesses who volunteered information. Lady Barwick’s version of the last dealings between Broughton and Erroll before the murder, as reported here by Connolly, is close to the popular version:

  Valerie Barwick. Part of her theory (obviously based on real knowledge): When it came to the crunch, DB said that he was not going to give her up without a test—he would say that he was not going to give her any money, after all, that if E’s sentiments were genuine, he would say, “never mind, we’ll manage somehow.” If he didn’t then they would fix him between themselves or some such expression. All this was tried on the last evening and E said something to the effect that he had only made love to her for her money and that without the money there could be no marriage—this could have happened at the club, the night club, the house afterwards, or on the way back to Karen (Wilks’s description of Diana’s anger). Perhaps the scene at the Claremont was the showdown and the moment when DB made up his mind to kill Erroll (though she thinks he h
ad planned the murder for ages).

  Reconstructing the scene from this new evidence, Connolly wrote:

  The dinner was rather short—8:30 to 10:30 and ended in a vin triste. perhaps a quarrel after the Toast … D and E perhaps slipped away suddenly. E is surprised to see DB and JC at Claremont and there is consternation—Diana too. The row flares up and DB threatens Erroll. (VW and partner leave.) DB and JC return to Club and he starts off again “It’s all very well June” etc. It is this threat he is so frightened of coming out, that he rushes up to Nyeri after the verdict of murder and asks her what she has told the police. She reassures him—only that he was in bad mood at Club. If he made this threat, D would know of murder as soon as death of E is established. Hence, can’t abide DB.

  The fact that no one gave away the visit of J and DB to the Claremont or the row there suggests that they all decided not to mention it. Purpose of DB’s actions: to draw the enemy fire. He asks about prison conditions, fate of man who kills his wife’s lover in flag, delicto—draws attention to bonfire.

  If DB had hired a killer he would need an alibi and would therefore ensure Wilks being in and out of his room too—he might also make his presence known to D and E—but he behaved quite differently.

  15

  LETTERS FROM THE WANJOHI

  Loneliness fixed Alice. Everyone was frightened of her.

  BERYL MARKHAM

  Alice de Trafford’s marriage to Raymond had ended long before their divorce in 1938, and she was often alone in her house at Wanjohi, with her Ridgeback dogs and her pet eland. She had fallen in love, after Erroll’s death, with Dickie Pembroke, her alibi for the murder night. Pembroke could never return Alice’s affection with the same intensity, and she began to cling to him with suicidal devotion.

  As she took up with Pembroke, so her affair with Lezard came raggedly to an end. It was a period of confusion for Alice. Patricia Bowles remembers that shortly before Diana’s arrival in Kenya, while Erroll was conducting his affair with Mrs. Wirewater, Alice had talked about the possibility of getting Erroll back as her lover.

  On the morning after the murder, Alice had begged Lezard urgently to take her to the mortuary to bid farewell to Erroll’s body. They took along Gwladys, and Bewes recorded their arrival in his notebook. What he didn’t record, but what Lezard saw, was that before Alice put the branch of a small tree on Erroll’s body, she kissed him on the lips, pulled the sheet back, smeared it with her vaginal juices and said, “Now you’re mine for ever.” After that Lezard suspected Alice—the murder fitted in with her morbid preoccupations. And there is a suggestion that she may have confessed to him. In later years Lezard was untypically evasive on the subject. Yet the writer Alastair Forbes, Lezard’s flatmate in London after the war, is convinced that Lezard would have told him if this was the case, “Or if he had either done it himself,” wrote Forbes, “or taken money to do it, or had it done without doing it, his most likely course in the circumstances.”

  Alice brought supplies, especially books, to Broughton in jail each day. She became fascinated by the trial, and filled with anxiety that Broughton might be convicted, a feeling she communicated almost daily to Patricia Bowles.

  Pembroke had been expected to keep out of the public eye since his banishment but the trial, where he was a witness, and his subsequent relationship with the notorious Alice had exposed him once again. Pembroke applied for a transfer and in July 1941 he was posted to Cairo. This finally broke Alice’s spirit.

  The letters that Alice began writing to him, even before they parted that month, describe her own pathetic decline, and represent as well the last rites for Happy Valley. Pembroke’s feeling towards her can be measured to some extent by the care with which he kept her letters until his death in England in the late 1960s.

  The first letter was written in Wanjohi on July 23rd, 1941.

  My darling Dickie,

  It does seem absurd—even grotesque—to be sitting opposite you and writing you a letter. However with the length of time it seems to take. I’d rather send you—or give you—some silly nonsense to read from me on your arrival, than to envisage weeks more of lack of contact when you reach Egypt.

  We’ve just had our “toasties” with much talk about the virtues of real or pseudo caviar.

  For a moment I’m going to say sad things—& when the G & T with dash has worked a little—cheer up again. I can’t imagine the immediate future at all. Joss gone, then Dina.* now you—who mean the most of all. Even Paula [Long] is gone in a way. Our way of life lies apart and her big. bold paramour has changed her nature a little.

  Lizzie is going. † Even you reproached me lately for being a little hard on him. I’ve never meant it really, for I count on him a great deal and am really fond of him. Anyway all of you are gone or going and my self-pity wells up when I realise that I can follow no one. You will surely smile with me when I say. “Thank God one can still recognise self-pity as such and not give it any greater dignity than just that.” And now—what I said flippantly to Lizzie in my note. I mean with all my heart. Thank God I seemed unreasonable and was firm. We’ve had—for me at least—a lovely week. I hope I can bear the end, which is tomorrow, decently. I don’t think I could have borne only the two days without being difficult and making your departure hard.

  The next letter is undated, written from the Norfolk Hotel, soon after Pembroke left.

  My Beloved Dickie.

  … There are not a great many things to say, but there are a few. Firstly—that you have made me inconceivably happy for exactly five months and four days. There is not one single thought or word to break the continuity of that happiness in my memory.

  Secondly the fact of you going away in these uncertain times, even for only a short time, as we hope, is pure and absolute pain … P.S. Funny how small and irrelevant thoughts intrude. One is that I forgot to tell you that if you have occasion to use that morphia, squeeze one good drop out of the needle before injecting in order to expel any air which hurts and blisters. Also do not take U93 for more than four consecutive days (3 a day after meals)—3 days is better. It will probably make you feel a bit mouldy, but should you feel really ill stop it at once. Some people don’t tolerate it at all. Take it for a heavy cold and also if you have any sort of infection which won’t readily clear up such as veldt sore.

  At the end of August, Alice was discovered to have cancer of the womb and was waiting to go into hospital for a hysterectomy. She had also suffered another, bitter loss.

  I really had to laugh—gloomy as I felt on arrival. The greetings I got from the Matron and the Nurses (almost all of which I’ve known for years) was for all the world as if they were welcoming me to a party. The night sister startled me a good deal by saying “There’s plenty of your maté tea here if you want it. You left a whole packet here last time and it’s hardly been touched.” I had intended sending out for some this morning!

  Flo came down [to Nairobi] with me. We had a hideous trip—two punctures and of course no spare the second time. We arrived here at 7 but I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want the dinner, whereupon the Matron said “I know what you like—you used to drink gallons of chicken broth last time,” and everybody laughed heartily and I had a cup of chicken broth!

  As to the operation itself—that is cheerfully referred to as “the op” and with much thumping of pillows and shaking of towels one is told how well one is going to feel. This part is all parallel with people telling you—“you must see this film or that play—you’ll love it.”

  And now I have one thing to tell you which I cannot bear to write about beyond the bare facts. “Minnie” [Alice’s dog] is dead—I killed her entirely painlessly, she knew nothing—because that car hysteria was no longer limited to cars. Her distress was so great that I put her out. I feel as if I’d committed a murder. She trusted me so, all the time I was breaking my heart feeding her Nembutal in some of your pâté … I look forward to all these moves with an indifference amounting to distaste. I can’t imagi
ne what Wanjohi will be like without “Minnie” for company and the train journey to Diani. You once said to me impatiently “Life must go on.” Well, it need not. Look at Joss, look at Minnie. Life need not go on. In Joss’s case someone decided that, in Minnie’s case I did, and the length of our own lives lies entirely within our own hands (unless someone else gets at us first!)

  September 17. I am OK surgically speaking and since yesterday quite healed up, but I feel simply frightful, weak and ill. I suppose this will get right but it seems very long. The Matron who is charming gave me a talking to before I left and said that I must expect to get periods of depression for some time and not to let them get me down. You know the books “What every young girl (wife) (mother) should know”? I felt this lecture could be incorporated in the series under the title, “What every old hag in the forties should know.” What these periods of depression will be like, plus the ones I get anyway, I can’t imagine … What I can see of the garden from my bed looks well and full of colour. The Eland was standing in the pyrethrum by the road as we came in yesterday and has become quite enormous. Quite terrifyingly big.

  It is desolate beyond words without Minnie. She is the last person and I mean “person” except for Paula, left … I went out to Joss’s grave, day before yesterday and I was glad to see that someone has put new pots of growing flowers there. Since the middle of May there have been only odd bunches of dead flowers there, and nothing kept up …

  September 20. Bill Allen* is coming to lunch today. I’ve had long talks with him. He first said that he thought Jock incapable of “things” because he said he was one of the greatest cowards (in ordinary life) he’d ever met. He’d known him for years. He liked him. however. When I stressed the fact that the murder was about as cowardly as one could imagine he agreed entirely and thought it consistent. She [Diana] is a great friend of his ex-wife’s (an awful woman. I know her) so I asked his opinion of her. He said he’d met her several times and took her to lunch etc. He said “I see nothing whatever in her,” and that he’d been “abysmally bored” at lunch. Now that surprises me. for though I don’t pick her as you know, I’m surprised at anyone—even Bill, finding her lacking in all interest. However he sticks to this.