White Mischief (42 page)

The writer Julian Fellowes, creator of
Downton Abbey
, had no doubt in his television feature,
A Most Mysterious Murder—The Case of the Earl of Erroll
, that Broughton was the culprit. For me, the study of the slightly deranged Broughton has always been the key to the mystery. It is Broughton’s motive, his state of mind, a study of his actions and what he said at the time, including the confessions he made, that bring the murder into focus. His very palpable dual personality, the calm and controlled exterior and the insane rage underneath, comes so vividly to light in the last letter he wrote to Diana, which appeared after my book was published and is included below. It shows that Broughton had lied consistently in court about his feelings—a convincing, masterly performance of which, as Diana told me, he was proud. She said that Broughton had boasted to prosecutor Walter Harragin after the verdict, “I’m a very good actor.” Broughton minded that Erroll had taken his wife away, he said in court, but he had to stand by the pact he had made with her in Durban when they were married, that if she fell in love with someone younger, he would stand aside and give her £5,000 a year.

The prosecutor asked him, “Can you explain to us why you took so placidly this robbery that was taking place under your very nose?”

His response was, “What is the use of having a pact if you do not honour it?”

Broughton, above all a vain man, was being publicly humiliated in a place from which he couldn’t escape. His only hope of protecting his vanity and his pride was to pretend he had accepted defeat and “cut his losses.” Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to lunch with the gang at Muthaiga every day—he would be alone. Diana told me she regretted that she hadn’t seen through Broughton—she might have been more careful. Because in fact, Broughton’s rising anger, his refusal to be pushed aside, can be seen in his ill-tempered confrontations with Diana and with Erroll before the murder. With Diana he started arguments late at night about jewels. The significance of those incidents becomes clear in a letter Broughton wrote in October 1942, fifteen months after his acquittal, in which he reveals his real feelings about the pact and an about Diana.

The letter came to light in 1993. It is, among others things, an attempt at blackmail. It was shown to filmmakers Livio Negri and Warwick Hembry for their documentary about the case,
Alcohol, Altitude and Adultery
, by Peggy Pitt, who was secretary to the prosecutor at the trial, Walter Harragin. Pitt held onto the letter until 1993, hoping to write her own account. I had heard of this letter from Diana. In my interview with her at the end of the book, she said of Broughton, “He was the most evil man. He sent me a letter trying to get me to return to England with him. It was appalling. I took it straight to the attorney general.”

Understanding the letter’s contents requires context. Broughton wrote it in Mombasa as he waited to return to England as a deck passenger on a troopship, feeling almost insane with depression. Between the trial and October 1942, when he wrote the letter, Broughton had subjected Diana to a miserable partnership during their travel to Sri Lanka, and then living in Erroll’s house on Lake Naivasha, which Broughton had purchased. And yet, in his usual disturbing, remote style, Brought on had written to his friend Lady d’ Avigdor-Goldsmid, “I decided the only thing to do was resume our life, as if nothing had happened.”

In the letter, he tries to make out that Diana was “perfectly happy” with him on these trips. He was asking Diana to continue her marriage with a man she was sure had killed her lover, Erroll. She was trapped in Kenya, her reputation ruined, not knowing how to get rid of Broughton. She had latched onto Gilbert Colvile, their neighbor at the Djinn Palace, as described in
White Mischief
, and moved him in as her lover—a clever move worthy of a skilled courtesan. Broughton accepted only partial defeat and moved to Nairobi.

The last time Diana ever saw Broughton was in front of a lawyer in Nairobi where Diana, in a formal move to make a legal break with her husband, said to his face that she thought he had murdered Erroll. Broughton said nothing and left the office. He never denied the murder, nor showed any curiosity about the identity of a killer close at hand.

The letter begins:

Diana, I am determined to punish you for ruining my life in the way you have done. Up to the time we left England, universally popular, respected, millions of friends and welcome everywhere, I worshipped the ground you stood on and got divorced in order to marry you. On board the boat you became a stranger to me and a completely different human being. You started a fuck with Tony Mordant under my eyes and I discovered the copy of a letter you wrote to your Italian; the most violent love letter written when living with me on “Doddington” writing paper. This was the first time I knew you had double crossed me.

On the boat you were regretting the whole time that you had not stayed in England and married Rory More O’Ferrall. We got to South Africa where at Cape Town you were bloody to me most of the time. When being thoroughly fed up I said I should like to return to England in front of the Bailes family, you said, “I shall stay in South Africa, why don’t you return to England?” Charming for me. You made such a farce of our marriage that the Registrar almost refused to marry you. If I had not adored you I should not have been fool enough to marry you but I worshipped you. We came up to Kenya where for about six weeks I was happy. You then started double crossing me with Erroll. Do you think any woman has ever treated any man as badly as you did me? Letting him be divorced from a wife he has lived with not unhappily for 25 years and then telling him she was leaving him 2 months after she had married him because she let herself fall in love. Millions of people fall in love, but they have feelings of decency and do not behave like you did. If you had returned to England you would, of course, have got over it. Erroll was murdered. You say yourself it never even occurred to you to connect it with me, till the Police put it into your head. You then in your evidence did all in your power to get me hung. Later you say yourself you were convinced I had nothing to do with it.

Like much else in the letter, the accusation that Diana wanted Broughton convicted was a manipulative and unfair taunt. Diana never gave evidence in court. It was she who went to South Africa to hire Harry Morris QC, who got Broughton off. Juanita Carberry, to whom Broughton confessed hours after the murder, also overheard Diana the following day screaming accusations at Broughton that he had killed her lover, and later, Broughton contradicts himself: “Can you realise what it is to live with someone who is always telling you how much they were in love with someone else and that you often thought I murdered him.”

The letter goes on:

After the verdict you were charming to me and were perfectly happy in Ceylon and India. We came back and were quite happy till we went on safari with Gilbert Colvile. Since that moment everything has gone wrong. You knew he was the richest settler in Kenya, could be useful to you, was easy money and laid yourself out to ensnare him, quite regardless of how you knew how unhappy and miserable it made me. You never said you did not want me to go on safari and I went. During the safari you made it clear you hated me and never took the slightest notice of me and to rub it in, made the most frightful fuss of Gilbert Colvile all the time. I began to hate you for this but took it all lying down without reproaching you.

We have never been anything else but unhappy since we went there on March 1st. I never objected to you having people to stay but when we had rows you always dinned into me how you were still in love with Erroll. This and your very fervent friendship with Colvile and your obvious dislike of being ever alone with me made me depressed, unhappy and hating the place, people, country—everything connected with it.

I thought things were going better when you had Hugh Strickland to stay, liked him and enjoyed having him … Like the poor fool I was I had no idea of what was happening or why you put him in a room with no lock on the door opening straight out into your rooms till Chappy Bailes told me that he was seen kissing you in your bedroom at the Stanley by a highly amused crowd from Torr’s hotel. Even then, thinking you had always told me the truth about your “cold temperament” I didn’t suspect what was going on till you were so anxious to get me off to bed one night with a sleeping draught. I watched through the window of your bathroom and saw you actually go and fetch him and return to your bedroom with him, and then listened to him fucking you through the gauze in you bedroom window not more than three yards away. By the way the whole bed rocked you evidently enjoyed it, like you used to with me.

For the next two nights, the voyeur Broughton waited and watched, “but you both had chills and I saw nothing. The next night I asked for a sleeping draught and went to bed early and watched and saw him walk into your bedroom and get into bed, and you followed and got into bed with him. I then took action.”

Diana’s reaction was to “have the cheek to suggest” that Strickland stay another four days. “Like the fool I was, still loving you, I forgave it, but since that moment you have been more vile to me than anyone would think possible. It was of course because you were furious at being caught out red-handed.” What “maddened” Broughton, he said, “was you telling me [sex] was bad for you and hurt you when I wanted to have you and going to bed night after night with a vigorous man who certainly made your inside so bad that you had to have another operation.”

Then Diana moved Gilbert Colvile into Oserian. “I notice you changed his room to the one with a clear run to your bedroom and do you really expect me to believe he was never in it? What still astonishes me is that you would go to bed with a man you didn’t particularly care for. You are certainly as you say devoted to Colvile and would go to bed with him whenever he wanted.”

Broughton knew that Diana had a last ace up her sleeve, a letter she had found from Broughton to Vera, his ex-wife, asking her to take him back and saying that he hated Diana. Broughton was trumped. “There was only one possible course left to me and I left,” he wrote. Victim, cuckold, self-pitying wreck that he was, he added, “You never even said ‘Goodbye’ to me.”

He accused her of ruining him financially—“the trial cost me over £5,000”—and added pathetically, “You have been consistently selfish in every way, and I have given in to you because you made yourself so absolutely bloody when I did not. You have frequently made me lose my temper with you, but I have always said I was sorry.”

He then moved to the blackmail and here he showed his true wickedness. He tried to frame Diana for a crime she didn’t commit. The mechanics of the blackmail can be summarized. In 1939 Broughton, feeling hard up, persuaded her admirer Hugh Dickinson to “steal” Diana’s pearls. Diana received an insurance check for £12,000—double their value. Dickinson put the “stolen” pearls in a deposit box in his own name or in Diana’s—but almost certainly without Diana knowing—and eventually returned them to Broughton’s solicitors. Dickinson was still in Kenya, in uniform, at this moment, and Broughton tried to blackmail him along with Diana. Dickinson refused. And Diana was not blackmailable.

You can imagine how I am nearly dead with depression by now, and all my thoughts have been centered on how I can really punish you for what you have done to me. You have double crossed me so many times that I am going to double cross you properly if I find my suspicions justified … I have always been suspicious as to what you had inside the deed box you gave me to give George Green (his solicitor) to keep for you.

Diana could already see from this sentence—a wicked distortion of the real events—how he intended to frame her. If she didn’t start for England in ten days, he wrote, he would have the box sent to Scotland Yard.

You will then be sent home for trial. If you were only an accessory it would be exactly the same thing and make no difference. The penalty for this “offence” is 14 years hard labour. You are now nearly 29 and by the time you were taken home for trial and sentenced it might take 9 months and this would keep you from double crossing me and popping into bed with any strange man until you are 44, and prison is very ageing and I don’t think you would find men so easy then. I am wondering how your “Tigie darling” [her name for Colvile] would react to your confession. At any rate he will have died of old age before you get out of jail. I could moreover divorce you for having committed a criminal offence. However many accomplices you may have had would be equally involved (if my suspicions are justified).

You have changed me into a fiend thirsting for vengeance. I think of nothing else day and night. I never sleep for thinking of it. I am determined to see you in the dock where I was last year because of your love affair with Joss Erroll. I get bloodier minded every day.

In another paragraph he added, “I have not slept for nights, and my nerves have gone to pot from misery and depression and I am only just sane and I am only buoyed up by the thought of revenge at any cost.”

As I say hate and love are very akin, and I still love you. I hate you sometimes like you do me, but I miss you every hour of the day and night, and want you back and am determined that swine Gilbert Colvile who is the cause of all this shall not have you. When you told me that you and he were going to share Oserian which of course means that he would have to keep you, I thought how I could punish you both and this is how I am going to do it.

Broughton’s conditions for lifting the blackmail were that Diana should come back and live a “normal” life with him—offering her, in effect, a miserable form of human bondage.

I would take a house, I think, just outside London and we should both have to do jobs of work like everyone else in England. We shall both have lots of friends and I would never have anyone in the house you didn’t like, and you would do the same, but I won’t have you getting out of bed with other men. Once again in England among your friends you would soon forget and be happy. But if you do show signs of hatred or annoy me when you return I shall act at once … I am not double crossing you nearly as badly as you have me. It is moreover quite useless coming back to me as a stranger or knowing that you hate me, but as my wife.