White Mischief (22 page)

You could speculate at length on these photographs. A possible scenario, which also agrees with much of the
prosecution’s version, is that the killer rode with Erroll to the junction, where he asked to be dropped off so that he could walk home. He shot Erroll either as he was getting out of the car, or just afterwards, through the window or the open door. Erroll’s feet were on the brake and clutch, the car was in gear and the engine running. As the bullet hit him his feet slowly eased off the pedals and the car began lumbering, its front wheels already turned to the right to negotiate the corner, towards the murram pit, carried forward by its thirty-horsepower engine. Erroll fell sideways on to the passenger seat with the movement, the wounded ear staining the seat cover, and the car came to rest in the murram pit. If he had had the strength. Broughton might have pushed the body into the footwell in an attempt to free the pedals.

At first sight it seems certain, both from the photographs and from the police experiments, that the body could not have fallen naturally; that the steering wheel would have blocked it, that it could only have been pushed there by force. If the murderer got out of the car before it began rolling towards the murram pit, he must certainly have followed it there. The car was found in gear and the ignition must therefore have been switched off
after
it came to rest. The lights, as we have seen, could only be switched off with pliers. Did the murderer panic at not being able to switch off the lights, and, wanting to drive the car farther off the road, make an abortive attempt to push Erroll’s body away from the controls? The easiest way to do this would be to sit on the front seat and push the body forwards and downwards with one’s feet. The rumpled carpet on the floor in the back of the car and the marks of shoe whitening on the back seat could have been made by the murderer climbing into that position. For support he would have grabbed the armstraps, which came away, and which were found lying on the floor in the back. Bewes was convinced they had been wrenched out although Butcher, the mechanic who examined the car, testified that the armstraps
had been
unscrewed
since the previous day; Mrs. Carberry, who always used the straps, remembered them in position on the evening of the murder. One has to conclude that Butcher was wrong, that the wrench marks were simply not visible, the fittings loose. Why, after all, would anyone unscrew a pair of armstraps and throw them on to the floor?

And yet it
is
possible, as one of the police witnesses admitted under questioning from Morris, that the body fell into position naturally. In the simple experiment of sitting on the edge of a bed, falling sideways and then rolling limply on to the floor, you end up in the identical position in which Erroll’s body was found. The jolts of the car as it rolled over the rough ground, and its sharp impact against the murram pit, could quite easily have caused the body to slip under the steering wheel, since the bulk of Erroll’s body and hips were already slightly to the left of the wheel after he had fallen sideways. If the body did fall naturally into the footwell, the only obstacle to the theory that a woman had committed the crime was removed.

This left us with two main groups of suspects to consider. First, those who fired revolvers at Nanyuki, using black powder bullets, and secondly those who knew Erroll would be returning to Karen a few minutes or so either side of three o’clock and could wave him to a stop and open the door. Group one included Broughton, Soames, Diana, or anyone they might have provided with a gun. Group two included almost everyone who knew Erroll and frequented the Club and his house. Lezard, Portman, Llewellin (and their girlfriends), Mrs. Barkas, Alice de Trafford, the Carberrys, Lady Delamere—all knew of Broughton’s 3 o’clock deadline for his wife’s return.

How efficiently were their alibis checked? And was it possible to go back along the road so many years later? In his certainty that Broughton had committed the murder,
mesmerised perhaps by his own cleverness at discovering the bullets, and his eagerness to get a conviction, had Poppy looked elsewhere, in any depth, for a suspect? He had certainly produced a ragged prosecution case against his chosen man. The problem of the Colt, with its left-handed rifling, on which his case had foundered, had been completely overlooked. Yet Ernest Harwich who, in the trial, had given this crucial piece of evidence (and proved that a Colt could not have been the murder weapon), wrote to the Editor of the
Sunday Times
soon after our article, upset by the impression he thought we had given, that he had withheld this piece of information until he was asked about it in court. On the contrary, he wrote,

Up to the time of the preliminary examination before the magistrate I did not know, nor was I told, that there was any question of a Colt revolver being used. Had I been so told, I would have scotched the Colt concept once and for all … the signature on both sets was so obvious and so identical that there was never the slightest doubt about them. As it was, the C.I.D. were not left under any illusion by me that either the murder bullets or those found at Nanyuki could ever have been fired from a Colt. It seems to me now as it did at the time that it would have been far better for the prosecution’s case to have conceded this point rather than try to force a link between Broughton’s Colt, the Nanyuki gun and the murder weapon.

Later we lunched with Harwich, at the Mitre Hotel, Oxford. He was the image of the upright, detached ex-officer and policeman. He told us that he had been summoned from Uganda, where he had been Assistant Director of Security, to help with the case, and that when he arrived in Nairobi he was denied access to the Government laboratory by Maurice Fox, the testy chemist who squabbled in court with Morris, out of jealousy at Harwich’s intrusion. Harwich also expressed the officials’ conventional dislike for the Muthaiga crowd. He found them “totally selfish, self-centred exhibitionists” for whom the trial had
been little more than a platform for their histrionics. He recalled that for most of them the problem of establishing alibis was that they had been too drunk to remember where they had been or with whom they had been sleeping on the night of the murder.

We also received a letter with a Hampshire postmark from Anstis Bewes, the businessman seconded to the Kenya police, who had been the only officer to take detailed notes at the scene of the crime and in the mortuary. Apart from the intrinsic fascination of being able, for example, to read his first-hand account of the overpowering smell of scent inside the Buick, Bewes’s notes confirmed our growing suspicions about the inadequacy of the C.l.D. investigation.

One of his duties at the time of the murder had been to attend sessions of the Legislative Council to report to his superiors any debates relevant to the police and their work. Bewes wrote:

About the time of the murder, Mr. Wright, an unofficial Member (Aberdares I think) raised the question of the Police Force, emphasising the lack of
esprit de corps
and gross inefficiency at the top—reports of considerable moment were made, he alleged, and no action was taken. Discontent was rife throughout the Nairobi Force, and it was the unhappiest in the Country. Isherdass (later murdered) stated that complaints were not made by NCOs through the commissioner for fear of victimisation (he stated this to me after the debate and not in the Council). I have merely added this note in order to indicate that this particular murder investigation
may
not have been carried out with 100% efficiency in view of the lack of keenness on the part of many of the regular officers.

Bewes had made another interesting entry in his notebook at the time:

Mrs. Napier [a neighbour) knew Miss Wilks, and on the day after the murder. Miss Wilks came to say she couldn’t stay in
the house any longer with “Lady B. drilling it into her again and again what she must tell the police.” If Miss Wilks said such and such a thing took place, Lady B. said “No, you have got it wrong.
This
is what happened,” and so on. Miss Wilks said she was nearly demented with it all. She told Lady B. that if she went into the witness box she would tell the
truth
. Miss Wilks added that, on hearing of Lord Erroll’s death, Mrs. Carberry did not wait to dress, but put on her dressing gown and drove post haste to Erroll’s house, returning with a jewel box which she. Miss Wilks, helped Mrs. Carberry carry into the house. It was very heavy. Police went round and took a statement from Miss Wilks. Mrs. Napier was asked to make a statement but said she did not wish to. All this was reported by me to Chief Inspector Elliott.

Bewes’s notes hint at a major problem that faced Poppy and his fellow officers. They were dealing with a homogeneous crowd who were accustomed to patronising officials and policemen, and who treated the law with a kind of amused contempt.

Any testimony they produced could always be corroborated by their servants, who could be bribed at a higher price than anything Poppy could find out of C.I.D. expenses. Lying to Poppy was nothing compared with the sexual deceptions, which also involved purchasing the servants’ silence. The Somali servants, in particular, famous for their secrecy and indirectness, would be more than equal to an ambitious policeman in his early thirties, new out of Scotland Yard.

For evidence of the rapid reflexes of the Muthaiga group, threatened with the imminent arrival of detectives in their midst, one need look no further than the separate statements of Broughton and June Carberry, taken only fifteen minutes after Gerry Portman’s call at 9 a.m. telling them of Erroll’s death, when the police were already on their way to Karen. Despite Broughton’s later claims that he was so drunk that he could hardly remember anything, he and June were both definite in their statements that the
exact time of their return to the house the previous night was 2 a.m.

At first Broughton told the police that he had never left his room after going to bed. After June had told them of two visits to her room, he told the police, “I might have gone out into the corridor at 4 a.m. or so, to switch the lights off; I can’t remember.”

Was Poppy still alive, and could he vouch for these alibis he had collected? The cast of characters was severely depleted by 1969. The one great survivor was Diana, Lady Delamere. Of the rest, Gwladys Delamere, Lezard, Soames, ldina, Alice, were all dead. So was John Carberry. June was still alive in Johannesburg, although old and sick and dying of drink and drugs.

One of the finest reporters in South Africa, Benjamin Pogrund, who was famous for his courageous exposés of the evils of apartheid in the
Rand Daily Mail
and who was also the
Sunday Times
stringer in Johannesburg, was defeated by Mrs. Carberry. He rang her many times and made several appointments to see her, but she was never there when he arrived. He wrote, “She’s a mighty difficult person. My discussions with her on the phone range from long meanderings about nothing to curt refusals to discuss the matter as being too far in the past. I gather she’s an alcoholic.”

Some of the minor characters were still around, like “Long John” Llewellin, who had been in the Muthaiga Club on the evening of the murder and who had seized joyfully on some inaccuracies in our article, informing us, for example, that Alice de Trafford’s favourite pet, “Minnie,” was not a cat, as Connolly had reported, but a dachshund dog. The last picture we had of Llewellin, who died sometime in the mid-1970s, was in a letter to Connolly from a friend who was visiting Kenya in 1973.

Dear Cyril,

I thought of you yesterday. I went shopping in Nanyuki and called on Long John Llewellin—aged 85, sitting on his verandah. Black patch over one eye—lots of patches on the tweed jacket—very dusty verandah with dried cacti in pots. Two dirty but attentive houseboys—a well stocked drink tray and two dachshunds who were given meticulously prepared dinners. The dogs’ coats were the only things which shone. A very faded copy of
THE
number of the S. Times Magazine lay on a table, with Diana’s face so faded that it had almost disappeared like the Cheshire cat’s. “Had I seen anything of that writer fellow lately? Can’t remember names.” I said I hadn’t seen you for ages …

Dickie Pembroke, who had retired to Kent, had been right under Connolly’s nose for years. The writer Antonia Fraser remembers the sadness and frustration of Connolly, in their last conversation before he died, when they both realised that a frequent guest at a country house they often visited in Kent, a “gentle, sweet, terribly nice, very boring” man whom they had always tried to avoid, had been Dickie Pembroke himself.

Kaplan was alive, of course, and so was Dr. Gregory. But what of Hugh Dickinson, Diana’s close companion whom she had called “Dicksy Ducksy,” who had been a guest at Doddington before the war; who had come out to Kenya to be near her; who had been on that extraordinary hunting safari with Broughton and Diana after Erroll’s death? He told the court that at the time of the murder he was in hospital in Mombasa, his foot poisoned by coral. He would surely be interesting to talk to, if only we could track him down.

In the middle of May 1969 Kaplan signalled that he was coming to London, and offered us his help. Connolly arranged a lunch for him at the Connaught Hotel on May 14th, and invited Francis Wyndham and myself. Kaplan had written to say that he had a copy of the typescript of the trial, which we badly needed, and a manuscript of his
own, which he hoped Connolly would help him to get published. Wyndham wrote to Connolly on May 11th,

Dear Cyril,

I can’t tell you how excited I am about the article on the Erroll murder. It’s a wonderful subject and in your hands will be really superb …

The more I think of it the more I agree with your solicitor friend’s remark that the key to the whole thing lies with June Carberry. She said Sir Jock visited her room twice that night to ask about her “touch of malaria,” and that she had a long talk with Diana—thus giving them both badly needed alibis, but also giving herself one as well. Of the five people who knew what happened at Karen that night: i) Lord Erroll was dead, ii) Diana didn’t give evidence, iii) neither did Wilks, iv) Sir Jock said he was drunk and could remember nothing, not even his “alibi” with Mrs. Carberry. So Mrs. C is the
only
source, and may have been telling lies or the truth or a mixture of both.