White Mischief (23 page)

As you see, I’m beginning to be obsessed as well and am so much looking forward to seeing you and the solicitor and James Fox on Wednesday—Connaught Restaurant at one—for an unbridled discussion. Funnily enough, at lunch today I met a girl called Tessa Reay and suddenly realised that she must be Sir Jock’s grand-daughter. I find it hard to believe these people were (and are) real—they seem
more
than real, like characters in fiction …

Kaplan arrived at the Connaught at the appointed hour—a neat, small, worried-looking man—and he picked his way through our many questions, exonerating Broughton, his former client, at every turn. Connolly’s notes, edited here for clarity, record the conversation:

Kaplan was convinced that Broughton never left the house; that the theft of the revolvers was genuine, that the blood on the golf stocking was animal blood. In his six months in prison, he said, Broughton would without doubt have given something away to the warders or the South African soldiers he was constantly drinking with, if he had been guilty. He didn’t think Broughton’s
motive sufficient. He described Broughton as an unjealous, equable person, although after the trial he had become more and more deranged by alcohol and “nerves.” “You gentlemen approach it from a psychological angle,” he said, “as a lawyer I studied the facts. The prosecution case was based on bullets, ours on his never leaving the house. You will never get anywhere if you think Broughton did it—that was already rejected by the jury.” June Carberry’s veracity was never impugned, and nobody questioned her story. But Gwladys, Lady Delamere’s evidence was very biased, and Diana, urging Morris to cross-examine her had said, “That woman is lying. You must go for her.” Kaplan recalled standing under a full length portrait of Erroll in his coronation robes at Oserian some years after the trial and asking Diana, “Do you still think about him?” She replied, “How dare you ask such a question.” Asked what he thought Diana’s reaction would be to our writing about the case, Kaplan answered “boredom.”

We discovered little of great interest from Kaplan, and his memoirs turned out to be dull and uninformative, but he was a useful ally, and the transcript was of immense value to us.

Soon after he returned to Nairobi Kaplan, having originally asked for his help to be acknowledged in print, suddenly withdrew his support, sending letters to Connolly that suggested great anxiety, and communicating to us through intermediaries that he wanted all traces of his cooperation to be removed from the record and finally demanding—his last communications arriving through a firm of London solicitors—the return of the transcript. Connolly hurriedly copied almost half of its 600 pages into his notebooks in longhand. Something or someone had given Kaplan a bad fright. He died less than a year later.

By July that year Connolly had tracked down Poppy, using that classic instrument of investigative journalism, often the last resort—the local telephone directory.
He was thrilled by the discovery and congratulated himself in his notebook. It was not entirely a coincidence. The towns of the south coast of England—Brighton, Hastings, St. Leonards, Eastbourne—were a catchment area for retired civil servants from the British Empire in the late 1950s and 1960s: fortresses of middle-class gentility where displaced Englishmen, returning from abroad after many years, used to the status and the relative comforts of a ruling class, would eke out their marginal reward from the old country. We got to know many of the hotels and tea rooms along that coast in our meetings with returned colonials.

There was one restaurant which never failed to lift us out of the depression brought on by these establishments: the Starlit, an old haunt of Connolly’s, on the roof of the Metropole Hotel in Brighton. It was one of the finest buildings along the front, with its magnificent high-level view, from the restaurant’s vast windows, of the unspoilt Regency terraces along the strand below, and the two Victorian piers reaching out to sea. The food in the Starlit was exceptionally good and we made it our place of rendezvous with our contacts whenever we could manage it. Unsuccessful cooking could torture Connolly to the point of suppressing all other interest except his own pain. At the Starlit, especially in fine weather, our lunches were usually a success.

Poppy was our greatest Metropole catch. Connolly recorded our first meeting: “July 5. Saturday. Excellent lunch over the sea where I used to lunch with Ian [Fleming] and Osbert [Sitwell].” I remember Poppy as an imposing, friendly man, who ordered sherry, shrimp cocktail and rump steak, a menu that never varied in our subsequent meetings, while Connolly poked into every corner and crevice of the menu looking for fresh delights. The eating never affected Connolly’s attention, neither could it affect mine: he forbade the use of tape recorders or even notebooks at every one of our interviews, relying on total recall
and the writing up of our notes together as soon after the event as we could manage it. Apart from his usefulness in filling in the basic narrative, Poppy had some points of crucial interest to make.

On the question of alibis he was adamant. There was no question, he said, that each one had been checked beyond a doubt. Dickinson was in hospital on the coast recovering from a foot so badly poisoned that it had almost had to be amputated; both Nancy Wirewater and her husband were in South Africa; John Carberry was at home at Seremai, Nyeri; Alice de Trafford was in Nairobi at the Muthaiga Club, in bed with Dickie Pembroke. (Poppy confirmed that Alice was the principal woman suspect.) “Lizzie” Lezard was in bed in a spare room at Erroll’s house at Muthaiga, and had heard Diana and Erroll come back from the Claremont and leave again for Karen.

Portman was staying, of course, at the Club. It had been widely suspected in Nairobi, after the murder, that someone was trying to silence Portman. On the eve of the preliminary hearing in the magistrate’s court, he was found naked, beaten unconscious, lying at the foot of a staircase in his own house. The truth of that, said Poppy, was that Portman had in fact been clubbed on the head by the irate husband of his African maid, whom he had tried to seduce. Gwladys—who Poppy agreed had a motive of jealousy—Llewellin and all the rest were accounted for, but Poppy had left his notebooks with the police department in Nairobi, and couldn’t remember all the details.

He did not think that Broughton could have planned the murder with anyone else, and it would have been impossible, he said, to trust an African. He found the African servants “good chaps” in general and usually truthful, and the mutual dislike between Kikuyu and Somali would have ensured that anyone who disappeared or came into money would be informed on. Broughton’s driver had not disappeared, said Poppy, he simply was not needed to give evidence.

Poppy believed that the love note which Broughton had thrown into the grave, apparently on Diana’s behalf, was really a taunt of his own; he was saying, in effect, “See what you can do with it now.” And one other detail stood out in his mind: he found it incredible that the jury could swallow Broughton’s assertion that after a hectic morning driving about—to the police station, on to the mortuary, into Nairobi to rebook his ticket for Ceylon, all the while apparently shaking with nerves—he should come straight home and light a bonfire with a large quantity of petrol “because he loved it.”

Poppy, of course, had his professional pride to defend in these conversations, and however open he was to suggestion, his certainty of Broughton’s guilt and the various alibis seemed overconfident so many years later. Ignoring the obvious flaws in the prosecution case, based on the evidence he himself had marshalled against Broughton, and the requirement under English law to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Poppy insisted, for example, that a jury in England would have brought a conviction against Broughton—a highly dubious contention. He said it was very difficult in Nairobi to get an “impartial” jury; that one of the jurymen, called Head, was Broughton’s barber, and gave him the “thumbs up” sign when the jury returned to court with the verdict.

I asked Poppy whether he had heard the story of Broughton going up to Harragin after the case and saying, “Bad luck old boy, I did it …” He had never heard of it.

“But Harragin was a strange fellow,” said Poppy. “Very fond of curry. When he came to lunch with you he’d take off his coat to show he was expecting to sweat from the curry you were going to give him.”

He thought it was possible that Harragin would have become Chief Justice of Kenya if he had managed to convict Broughton, and he must have taken the acquittal hard. He, Poppy, hadn’t minded too much. In a case like that,
he said, you get so tired of answering questions that you long for it to be over, and you don’t really care who wins.

Poppy, a young and already successful police officer, had done a diligent job of organising the investigation—often hampered by the inexperience of his colleagues who carted away the body and the car, for example, before a proper examination had been made for fingerprints. His discovery of the Nanyuki bullets was an inspired piece of sleuthing. And the decision to prosecute on the evidence at hand rested, finally, not with Poppy but with the Attorney-General, Harragin.

12

THE MAYOR OF NAIROBI

Of all the members of the Muthaiga group exposed by the trial, Gwladys Delamere seems to have been the most disliked by the colonial official class for her high-handed manner. They were particularly incensed by the fact that she had clearly lied in court and had produced blatantly biased evidence against Broughton which, given her unpopularity, had had the effect of swaying the jury in his favour. Harwich described her to us as “a formidable old dragon who bossed them all about.” Others, including, it seems, the whole English community in Zanzibar, even believed Gwladys to be the murderess. The debate must have livened up the atmosphere of that sweltering claustrophobic island. It is evocatively recalled by a reader of our article, Margot Irving, who wrote from Ankara in 1970:

I was particularly interested in your article because in 1941 I was living in Zanzibar. My husband. Francis Irving. O.B.E., was Comptroller of Customs and Economic Controller then. Our small European community in Zanzibar had either met the principals concerned or knew a lot about them from hearsay. We read avidly the almost verbatim reportage in the
East African Standard
.

It was the general opinion among us that Gwladys Delamere had engineered the murder. She knew Joss would be bringing
Diana back to Karen House around about 3 a.m. We opined that she hired an African, who crept into the back of Joss’ car while he was inside the house, and who shot Joss at the junction. We never thought D.B. had done it—he was too infirm.

The motive? Sheer possessive jealousy. Gwladys adored Joss. She was his “intermittent mistress.” But when Diana arrived on the scene Gwladys knew she’d met her Waterloo. Rather than let Diana have him, she arranged his murder. “Hell hath no fury …” Of all that hard set of Happy Valley, Gwladys was the hardest of the lot. But none of us thought she had had a secondary motive in causing D.B. to stand trial.

All this was, and is, mere conjecture. However, I thought you might be interested.

Gwladys was certainly keen on Erroll, there, is no shortage of evidence for that; Kaplan, Paula Long and Lady Barwick, who will appear later in this chapter, all mentioned her strong affection for him at the time of the murder. But what of her new dislike for Broughton? She had been the first to entertain him when he arrived and yet, when her old friend was up on a murder charge, she was even prepared to use the witness box to vent her spite on him.

The first discrepancies in her evidence concern the advice she gave to Diana and Erroll on the night of January 12th at the Broughtons’ house at Karen. At first, Gwladys said, she advised Erroll to leave Diana alone, but realised that this was useless. Did she then advise them to elope and “leave a note on the pin cushion”? She denied this, but June said in evidence that she was with Erroll when he telephoned Gwladys and that Erroll had said, “Gwlady, we have taken your advice, except for the note on the pin cushion.” She also denied saying to Broughton that evening as they sat on the sofa watching the dancers, “Do you know Joss is wildly in love with Diana?” She
had
tried to talk to Broughton, she said, but he wouldn’t listen—he was watching Joss and Diana dancing with an expression that registered “anger, misery, rage, brooding, intense agitation and restlessness.” (Was this burst of eloquence
more of a reflection of Gwladys’s own feelings as she watched the youngsters locked together on the dance floor?) Broughton said that when Gwladys broke the news to him, he was deeply upset “and I rather neglected my duties as a host.” Several times in court Gwladys contradicted herself, always backing out of admitting her twenty-year-old friendship with Broughton and finally whittling him down to an “acquaintance.”

Morris opened his cross-examination of Gwladys:

When asked in court about her evidence, Broughton said

Parts are correct and parts are very incorrect indeed. On our arrival in the country. Lady Delamere not only had lunch with my wife and myself but dined with us and treated me as a very old friend and told me I had never looked so happy. Now apparently she has taken a dislike to me. This I fail to understand as I knew her during her first marriage in England. I knew her quite well and saw quite a lot of her. When she was married to Lord Delamere I stayed up at Government House, Entebbe for a week and we played golf together and were most happy and amicable and the best of friends. Lord Delamere was almost my greatest friend out here and a near neighbour of mine in England. Nobody was more surprised than I was at her evidence … It was entirely fabricated.