The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll (18 page)

After their mother’s death and the end of World War II, Nolwen and Paola left Chicago and returned to France. Nolwen had taken a course in Mary land with the Women’s Army Corps during the war and she joined the Free French forces in 1944 as a diplomatic liaison officer. On September 23, 1948, she married Lionel Armand-Delille and together they had two children, Frédéric and Angélique. In the 1950s, Nolwen embarked on a career in fashion, becoming the president of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, which would no doubt have delighted her stylish mother. After divorcing Armand-Delille, Nolwen married twice more—first to Edward Rice and then to the art historian Kenneth Clark. She died at the family château, Parfondeval, in 1989. Paola married twice, first to Walter Haydon and then to John Ciechanowski. She had two sons, Guillaume and Alexander. She died in 2007. Both of Alice’s daughters remained loyal to their mother’s memory throughout their lives. Their apparent lack of resentment must be some indication of their good feeling toward her, despite their long separations from her, and of Aunt Tattie’s excellent care of them in Alice’s absence. Sadly, Nolwen and Paola never did visit Alice’s beloved Wanjohi Valley. The only de Janzé member of the family to have seen Alice’s farm to this day is Nolwen’s daughter, Angélique Fiedler. On a visit there in 2004, Angélique was so taken by the breathtaking beauty of the place that she set about negotiating with the authorities to have the school renamed the De Janzé Primary School. Angélique is now seeking to endow the school to enhance its prosperity and future, in memory of her grandmother.

Dickie Pembroke received word of Alice’s death while posted in Egypt. He was devastated by the news. Undoubtedly, he had had it in mind that if he survived the war, he would return to Kenya and marry Alice, but this was not to be. Throughout the rest of the war, he carried Alice’s letters in the left-hand breast pocket of his battle uniform, along with his AB64 (the document denoting his number and rank). In March 1943, Dickie’s battalion entered Medenine, in Tunisia, where the British won a decisive victory against Field Marshal Rommel, one of the finest German generals of World War II. Toward the end of armed conflict, Dickie returned to England, later going on to the War Office, where he was granted the status of full colonel in 1951. His medals and awards included the 39/45 Star, the Africa Star, the Defence Medal, and an OBE. After marrying Mrs. Dermot Pakenham in 1950, he left the army and embarked on a career in the bill-broking business. He died in Upham, Hampshire, in 1967, at the age of sixty-three. Brigadier H. R. Norman, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, wrote an obituary for Dickie Pembroke, in which he described him as “the most modest of men,” someone who had the gift of creating friendships with all sorts and conditions of people, old and young.

Lizzie Lezard also outlived Alice. On arriving in Cairo in late 1941, he began boarding with several other bachelor officers, one of whom was the future diplomat and translator of Turgenev, Charles Johnston. Later, Johnston would immortalize Lizzie and their time in Cairo in his book,
Mo and Other Originals
(1971), where Lizzie appears as Monty Malan, a bon vivant who spends all day lounging in bed, being brought trays of chicken sandwiches and whiskey and soda by his servant, Mo. In 1943, Lezard, who had recently completed his parachute training, was dropped near Monte Carlo, where he fell heavily and broke his back, henceforth becoming known as “The man who broke his back at Monte Carlo.” Lizzie was rescued and hidden by the local Free French until the arrival of the Americans, at which point he returned to London on a steamer and was welcomed home a hero. He was next heard of living in a butler’s room at the top of the Ritz Hotel, leading an extremely active social life, before taking a flat in Eaton Square. In 1958, he went into the hospital for a minor operation, where he died very suddenly from shock on August 21, at the age of fifty-six. Charles Johnston wrote in Lizzie’s obituary, “It was as if a vital source of light and warmth in our lives had been violently put out.”

Raymund de Trafford was released from Parkhurst prison in 1941, having survived the air raids over the Isle of Wight during the Battle of Britain. He soon reported to his former regiment of the Coldstream Guards, hoping to rejoin, but he was turned down, and his application for a commission with the Rifle Brigade was also refused. Eventually, in 1942, after having missed three years of service during the war, he was permitted to join the Pioneer Corps as a lieutenant. Raymund was posted to Morocco, where he worked conscientiously as the commander of a platoon of engineer workers, digging drains and building bridges. He remained in North Africa until 1945, when he was honorably discharged, having attained the rank of captain. After the war, Raymund was awarded two medals. He also resumed his previous lifestyle, hunting, gambling, womanizing, and visiting friends, including the writers Evelyn Waugh, Maurice Baring, and Robert Graves. (When Baring died at the end of 1945, Raymund was named as Baring’s literary executor.) In 1950, he met Eve Drummond, whom he married the following year. The day after the couple’s wedding announcement appeared in
The Times
of London on May 21, 1951, congratulatory telegrams arrived, along with demands from six separate bookmakers. Raymund and Eve went to live in Ireland, but the marriage did not last long. Raymund used his asthma and worsening emphysema as an excuse to visit Robert Graves in Majorca, leaving Eve behind. Robert, who was very fond of Raymund, took him in almost permanently at his house in Dejà on the Spanish island. In May 1971, Raymund was visiting London where he suffered a fatal stroke. He was seventy-one years old. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery in Monks Kirby, Warwickshire. On his headstone is written “
Liber scriptus proferetur, in quo totum continetur,
” a verse from the Catholic Requiem Mass, which translates as “The written book will be brought forth in which all is contained.” Dermot de Trafford, the sixth baronet and Raymund’s nephew, has said of his uncle, “He behaved badly, but he knew how to behave well.” Raymund left an estate worth £212.02.

Jock Delves Broughton sailed to Ceylon and India after the end of his trial for Joss’s murder, staying until later that year. Diana was at his side. On their return to Kenya in 1942, they rented Joss’s former home, Oserian, for a time. Diana said that it brought her solace to be surrounded by a place Joss had loved. The Delves Broughton marriage lasted until the end of the year, at which point Jock returned to England. Despite his acquittal, he had continued to be dogged by speculation and ignominy. Soon after his return, he took a fatal overdose of morphine at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, dying on December 5, 1942, a little more than a year after Alice’s suicide.

Diana Delves Broughton stayed on in Nairobi, where she was more or less completely ostracized by the settlers, many of whom had come to blame her for Joss’s death. Undeterred, she proceeded to marry one of the wealthiest men in Kenya, Gilbert Colville, in 1943 (a month after Jock’s suicide). Gilbert bought Oserian for Diana, and the couple went on living there until their divorce in 1955. At this point, Diana had already met and fallen in love with Thomas Pitt Hamilton Cholmondely, the fourth Baron Delamere, the son of the famed highland settler and third Baron Delamere, Alice’s old friend D. Tom and Diana married in 1955. Despite Gilbert’s divorce from Diana, he still left her his entire estate on his death, making her a very wealthy woman. When Tom died of heart failure in 1979, Diana was sixty-six years old, at which point she took an apartment behind the Ritz Hotel in London, staying there for a few months each year. The rest of her time was spent in Kenya, attending Nairobi races or fishing at Kilifi, where she acquired a home called Villa Buzza. Diana died of a stroke on September 7, 1987, at the age of seventy-four. Her body was flown back to Nairobi, where she was buried at Ndabibi between the graves of Gilbert and Tom. The inscription on her grave reads “Surrounded by all I love.”

Alice’s great friend Paula Long, née Gellibrand, also maintained her ties to Kenya. She and her husband, Boy, lived on their ranch, Nderit, at Elmenteita, where they farmed cattle, close to the lake whose shores are fringed with pink flamingos. It was an appropriately dramatic setting for this flamboyant couple: In the hills above the house is a place called Eburu, where hot steam emerges from splits in the rock surface. After Boy’s death in 1955, Paula left Elmenteita and returned home to England, where she lived at Henley-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire. Late in her life, she began to suffer with dementia, and she died at the Priory, a private psychiatric hospital in London, in 1986, at the age of eighty-eight. She is buried in the small Oxfordshire village of Nettlebed.

After Alice’s death, Idina went on living and farming at Clouds. Until the end of the war, Phyllis Filmer lived there, too, and Idina was evidently glad of the company—her husband at the time was the fighter pilot Vincent Soltau, and so he was almost permanently away. What’s more, during the course of the war, she suffered the losses of her first and third husbands (Euan and Joss) and her two sons from her first marriage, David and Gee. By 1945, she had a nervous breakdown, brought on by grief. Her doctors advised her to seek relief from living continuously at so many thousands of feet above sea level, and she left Clouds for a time for her bungalow at Mtapwa Creek. Mtapwa is about ten miles north of Mombasa, on the banks of a long sea inlet. Here she planted a lushly beautiful tropical garden. After divorcing her fighter-pilot husband, Idina reverted to her maiden name, Sackville, promising never to marry again. In 1950, she met James Bird, known as Jimmy Bird or James the Sixth, in honor of his position as the sixth “husband” in Idina’s life, although the pair were never officially married. He became her constant companion, despite the fact that he was something of a drunk and known to prefer men to women. “I’ve worn out five husbands and the sixth is on his last legs,” Idina was often heard to say. In 1952, she had a hysterectomy, having been diagnosed with uterine cancer. Despite the operation, her cancer returned. After refusing to go back to the hospital, Idina fell into a coma, dying at Mtapwa in 1955, at the age of sixty-two. Idina had once told her neighbor there, the essayist Edward Rodwell, that she knew the identity of Joss’s killer and that she would tell Rodwell the name before she died. She never did.

And so one by one, the protagonists in the Erroll saga passed away, taking what they knew of the mystery of his murder to their graves.

I
N
1998, I
HAD BEGUN TO CAST AROUND FOR INFORMATION
on Alice de Janzé, in the hope that I might write her biography. I was keen to track down Alice’s former housekeeper, Noel Case, who had helped run Wanjohi Farm after Alice’s return to Kenya in 1933. I felt she must have great insight into Alice’s life there, and that she could well prove essential to my research. By now, I had begun to suspect that Alice was responsible for the Erroll murder, but I needed to know more about her psychology and movements in order to be sure. I was already in contact with the writer Errol Trzebinski, who was at that time hard at work on her biography of Joss Erroll,
The Life and Death of Lord Erroll.
It was Trzebinski who put me in contact with a woman named Alice Boyle. Alice Boyle was the daughter of Dr. William Boyle, the physician who had raced to Alice de Janzé’s bedside after her suicide. Trzebinski told me that Alice Boyle was in close contact with Noel Case and could perhaps put us in touch. Even so, Trzebinski warned me, I should not hold out too much hope of an interview. Apparently, Noel was refusing to talk to anyone (even her own nephew) about her days with Alice de Janzé at Wanjohi Farm.

I obtained a telephone number for Alice Boyle (now Mrs. Fleet) and invited her to lunch at my house in London. I was met by an attractive woman in her fifties with dark hair and a lively and capable air. As we began to speak—first about Noel Case and then about Dr. Boyle—I realized that this Alice was shy and even a little defensive, especially when it came to talking about her father. Over lunch, she revealed to me that she was still in possession of the blue oil painting that Alice de Janzé had left to Dr. Boyle at the time of her death. Later I learned that Alice Boyle was certain her father must have had some kind of an affair with Alice—who was his favorite patient—possibly before his marriage in 1936. It was only after our fifth or sixth meeting that Alice Boyle revealed information to me that cast the story I was researching in a startling new light.

“You know, my mother told me all about Alice’s confession letter,” said Alice Boyle obliquely one day over lunch in London. She seemed to assume that I already knew about the existence of such a letter. I began to question her further, trying to suppress the true degree of my curiosity, in case it should disturb the telling of her story.

When Alice Boyle was eleven, she informed me, her mother, Ethnie, had told her that Alice de Janzé had left a confession letter addressed to the police before her death, along with her suicide notes. Dr. Boyle had shown his wife these letters before submitting them to the coroner’s office. Ethnie Boyle had seen the confession letter with her own eyes and had told her daughter all about it. Alice Boyle continues to stand by the clear memory of her mother’s words: “Alice de Janzé confessed to shooting Lord Erroll in a letter.” When I went back to my copy of James Fox’s
White Mischief,
I even found a reference to this vital piece of evidence: “She [Alice] left several notes. One was to the Police—its contents were never released,” wrote Fox.

So, if a confession did indeed exist, whatever happened to this missing letter? It is true that its contents were never released, and the Kenya police deny that there is any record of the note existing in their archives. Although Dr. Boyle definitely submitted the note at the original coroner’s inquest, the letter has since disappeared. Certainly its contents were not disclosed at the inquest. What happened to the missing note? It is possible that the confession letter never reached the police in the first place. It is my guess that the coroner was so shocked at the implications of Alice’s confession that he directed the note to the personal attention of the attorney general, Sir Walter Harrigan. Harrigan was the attorney general from 1933 to 1944, and prosecutor for the Crown at the trial of Jock Delves Broughton. Harrigan would doubtless have been extremely alarmed by the letter’s contents. He would have weighed the implications carefully, bearing in mind that the Crown’s case against Jock had failed and that numerous suggestions had been made both during and after the trial (some in writing) that the murder had been carried out by a discarded mistress. Rather than open up a can of worms, Harrigan could easily have decided to suppress the confession, justifying his decision on the grounds that he was stabilizing speculation about a controversial murder. To protect himself, he could have sent the confession out of the country in the diplomatic bag to London for safekeeping, with a memorandum explaining his actions.

I soon discovered that I was not the only one to have learned of Alice’s confession letter. Alice Boyle had recently revealed her story to Gordon Fergusson. At the time, Fergusson was in the process of writing a history of the Tarporley Hunt Club, entitled
The Green Collars.
Tarporley, founded in 1762, is the oldest hunt club in England and once counted Jock Delves Broughton among its members (in fact, he was the only member of the club ever to have been tried for murder). As a result, Fergusson was familiar with the Erroll case. When he met Alice Boyle socially in 1993, she told him the story about her mother and the confession letter. Fergusson felt he had information that would finally and definitively clear Jock’s name, and so he published his findings in
The Green Collars
in 1993. When Fergusson’s book came cut, the Peter-borough column in the
Daily Telegraph
picked up the story, publishing it under the headline
TARPORLEY MAN PUTS THE FINGER ON ALICE.
This led to a little flurry of correspondence in the paper. “No!” replied J. N. P. Watson, a cousin of Dickie Pembroke. “Alice was deeply in love with Pembroke and was in bed with him at the time of the murder.” Watson went on to argue that, apart from her alibi, it would have been “quite out of character for Alice to have hidden in the back of Erroll’s car in order to shoot him, or to have killed him up on the road.” But there is no doubt that Alice had the “motive, means, and mentality for murder,” wrote Fergusson, adding that her alibi was “one that any woman could have arranged.”

During my investigations, I came across other clues further implicating Alice. In
White Mischief,
James Fox wrote that after the trip to the morgue on the morning of Joss’s death, Lizzie Lezard always suspected Alice, as “the murder fitted in with her morbid preoccupations.” Fox even went so far as to suggest that Alice might have confessed the murder to Lizzie. “In later years Lezard was untypically evasive on the subject,” Fox writes. Then there was Betty Leslie-Melville’s memoir about her time in Kenya,
The Giraffe Lady,
published in 1997. Betty’s mother-in-law, Mary Leslie-Melville, was once Alice’s neighbor in the Wanjohi Valley. In
The Giraffe Lady,
Betty recounts the time she asked her mother-in-law who she thought had shot Lord Erroll. Mary replied without hesitation, “My Dear, I do not
think
who may have killed him, I
know.
”

It was Mary’s firm belief that Alice had shot Lord Erroll. Betty wrote, “Alice knew that Erroll was due to have dinner at Muthaiga Club on the fateful night. Mary also knew that Alice was aware of the road Lord Erroll would take to drive back from Karen afterwards. So Mary’s theory was that Alice had waited at the cross road where the murder took place. The sight of her on the road would have stopped him. She would then have walked up to the car and shot him in the head. Afterwards she drove home.”

And Mary claimed to have actual proof. A few years after Erroll’s killing, Mary’s headman was fishing rocks out of the little river that separated Mary’s property from Alice’s Wanjohi Farm in order to repair the road. Here he found a gun buried under one of the rocks. He took the gun to Mary. According to Mary, this gun was the exact make and caliber of the missing revolver used to shoot Joss. Mary concluded that Alice must have thrown it there after returning from shooting Joss on the night of his murder.

“What did you do then?” Betty asked, astonished.

“Nothing.” Mary replied. “Erroll was dead. Alice was dead. What good would it have done to tell anyone?”

Mary led Betty to the hall cupboard in her Nairobi house, unlocked the door, and showed the revolver in question, which was just hanging there. By the time I read these words, Mary Leslie-Melville had long since died and the whereabouts of this supposed murder weapon was unknown. But its existence, as described by Betty, added further fuel to my theories.

With the clues provided by Alice Boyle and by Mary’s story, I became convinced that it was Alice who had murdered Joss. Still, several questions remained in my mind: Why would Alice have killed the man she loved? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to kill her rival, Diana?

In 1998, I finally succeeded in calling on Alice’s former housekeeper, Noel Case (then Mrs. Eaton-Evans). Noel was white-haired by this time, in her eighties, and living with her husband, Tom, at Diss, in Norfolk. I had already sent various questions to her through Alice Boyle, and, contrary to all my expectations, I was received hospitably by both Noel and her husband. We talked at length that day, exchanged letters, and when I called on her again a year later, she offered me photographs of her time at Wanjohi Farm, along with various letters pertaining to Alice’s life there.

During my first interview with Noel, I asked her if she thought it was Alice who had murdered Lord Erroll.

“It could have been Alice who shot Erroll,” Noel replied thoughtfully. “Why she would want to do this is a mystery, because she was madly in love with Erroll and surely it would have been more motivating to kill Diana and not Erroll. But, on the other hand, with her belief in the occult and her firm belief about the other side, it is possible that she thought that if she could send Erroll to heaven, where he might just have qualified for entry, she could join him there.”

In the French courts, when Alice was being tried for attempted murder, she had told the judge that she had shot Raymund because she wanted to join him in the “Great Beyond.” If she did kill Joss, then this desperate act must be seen in the same context. Alice had always believed in an afterlife. She had been brought up in the Presbyterian faith. She took as gospel that when you die, your soul goes to be with God, where it enjoys God’s glory and awaits the final judgment. The Presbyterian Scots Confession states, “The chosen departed are in peace, and rest from their labours…they are delivered from all fear and torment….” Alice took for granted that after her death she would be reunited with her loved ones, and that all her pain would be washed away. “Now you are mine forever,” she told Joss in the mortuary.

By killing herself, Alice completed what had begun on the night of Joss’s murder. Hence her strange words to Patsy Bowles just days before her death: “If you have an obsession or a very deep wish, or even two wishes which you dream about and want—they often happen. The first of my wishes has happened. I wonder if the second one will occur?”

Her first wish was to kill Joss. Her second wish was to kill herself so that she could be reunited with him in the Great Beyond. Her own suicide had always been part of the plan, and yet she held off, unable to finish the job. Perhaps it was Dickie’s devotion that kept Alice alive for the subsequent eight months after the murder. It was only after Dickie left for Cairo that she could no longer put off the inevitable.

As Alice’s fatal dose of Nembutal took hold just a few months later, what were her final thoughts? Had she forgiven Joss for forsaking her? Had she forgiven herself for his murder? Did she think only of Joss as she approached her own death, or also of her long lost mother and estranged father, both waiting for her, she believed, on the other side? She had even ensured that her beloved dog Minnie would be there, too. The revolver lay on her heavily bandaged bosom, its muzzle pointed at her heart. One squeeze of the trigger and she would finally be free. This time, she did not falter.