White Mischief (24 page)

We sought in vain for an explanation of Gwladys’s attitude. At last we found one. From another witness in the trial we learned that an unkind remark that Gwladys
had made about Broughton had been repeated to him and he had given her a dressing down in public. After that she was always getting at Broughton, in front of Diana or anyone else. (“A real bitch,” said the witness. “She had it in for him.”) It began to emerge that Gwladys was in a state of some emotional confusion. In 1928, the year she rolled the Prince of Wales on the floor of the Muthaiga Club, and even during the 1930s, she was generally seen as a kind, loyal friend, much admired for her “attractiveness,” for her lovely pale skin and black hair. Now she had become bossy, touchy and “unbalanced”—the word that always occurred to the friends who remembered her at the time of the trial. (“
Very
unbalanced,” insisted Paula Long.)

It was these reports that suggested Gwladys to Connolly as the authoress of the anonymous notes left for Broughton in his rack at the Muthaiga Club. He wrote, “I suspected the change of life and what used to be called ‘getting a thing’ about someone.” (But Gwladys was only forty-three, rather young for the change of life.) Connolly had also suspected a woman as the author “from the use of such expressions as ‘there’s no fool like an old fool’ and ‘the eternal triangle.’” Certainly the staccato style, brusque and emotional, is common to both Gwladys’s evidence and to the anonymous notes. In the end Connolly used the transcript to prove his point. He wrote,

I’m quite sure she wrote the anonymous letters. Listen [to her testimony]:

Then, at the very end of her evidence came the question from a member of the jury which we have already heard, but which is perhaps worth repeating in this context. It seems to illustrate the jury’s reaction to Gwladys.

The first anonymous note read, “You seemed like a cat on hot bricks at the club last night. What about the eternal triangle? What are you going to do about it?” The third, “There’s no fool like an old fool. What are you going to do about it?” The second note, “Do you know that your wife and Lord E. have been staying alone at the Carberrys’ house at Nyeri together?”, was written by someone in close touch with one of those three people. “My strong reaction to the letters was that they were written by a jealous woman,” Broughton said in court.

In his defence at the Press Council hearing, Connolly wrote: “The expression, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ seems typical of a woman accustomed to getting her way, as was the Mayor of Nairobi. It is, of course, a common expression, but not when used so aggressively.” “Hot bricks” suggests Gwladys, too. Indeed she overdid them in her description in the preliminary enquiry of her lunch with Broughton at the Club after the funeral when she said, “He talked about the events of the day. He mentioned his wife with unhappiness, with rage, with every possible reaction within a quarter of an hour.” Most significant, perhaps, were the disparaging references to Broughton’s age (“He’s an old man and has had his life …”, “There’s no fool like an old fool”). Gwladys herself had been married to a much older man, Hugh, Lord Delamere, who died three years after their wedding. She had been a widow for ten years by 1941. Did she long for a younger man—and see all her disappointments and failures mirrored in the ageing Broughton?

The English critic and crime writer Julian Symons wrote that one of the worst mistakes made by Poppy was not to have traced the typewriter on which the notes were written. Mrs. Rose Hodson, Gwladys’s daughter, in her complaint to the Press Council, wrote that it was absurd to suggest that Gwladys, who was unable to type, would laboriously tap out such notes with one finger. And yet if she had really developed such a feeling of spite against
Broughton, it was the perfect way to get at him. And if she was so keen on Erroll it was also a method to make Broughton “sit up” and put a stop to the affair.

Harwich said that it was generally believed that Gwladys lied in court because she was desperate to prevent her affair with Erroll from being mentioned. He also said that there had been a row between Erroll and Diana on the night of the murder initiated by Gwladys, who had ordered Erroll to give Diana up; a case of jealousy masquerading as sound advice.

Morris knew of Gwladys’s feelings towards Erroll and said to her in court, “I am going to put it to you that you were vastly interested in Lord Erroll’s happiness or what you conceived to be his happiness?”

“Not vastly,” replied Gwladys.

And yet she was keen enough on Erroll to be one of the first arrivals at the mortuary and to ask Bewes for the indentity disc around his neck. The Mayor of Nairobi—no doubt to her embarrassment—was told that she was not allowed to remove his effects without permission from a higher authority than Bewes.

We had a further hint, after the appearance of our article, suggesting Gwladys as the authoress of the notes. Valerie Ward, later Barwick, but then married to a settler, Roddy Ward, had been a close friend of Gwladys’s two daughters and of Gwladys herself. She told Connolly that late in 1940 she had been a member of the Aga Khan Club for influential Indians, and often used to dress in a sari. She began to receive, in her Muthaiga pigeonhole, type-written letters with messages that said, in effect, “How can a nice, well brought up English girl go about mimicking the Indians?” She did not find them really offensive, but they hurt, she said, because they were unsigned. She consulted a “great friend,” Walter Shapley, a Nairobi solicitor, who discussed the matter with Lord Francis Scott. Shapley sent for Mrs. Ward and told her he was sure that the letters came from Gwladys Delamere.

“He said that she was in such a peculiar state that it was best to ignore them.” She never spoke to Gwladys again, and “did not regret her death.”

Supporting Connolly at the Press Council in 1970, she wrote in her affadavit:

I know that Lady Delamere was greatly attracted to Lord Erroll and enjoyed the attention which he paid to her, but when Lady Broughton arrived in Kenya. Lord Erroll diverted his attention to her.

It is not unnatural for an older woman to feel jealous of a younger and very attractive woman stealing the attention of her admirer. Lord Erroll. I gather that Sir Delves Broughton received some typewritten letters informing and then reproaching him over the affairs between his wife and Lord Erroll. In my view it is more than likely that the author of those anonymous letters could have been Gwladys, Lady Delamere.

Gwladys was apparently at home at Soysambu on the night of the murder. She died, of a stroke, in 1943—the result of high blood pressure.

13

BULLETS IN THE GARDEN

At our lunch at the Brighton Metropole, Poppy told us that Jack Soames had been suffering from acute anxiety during the trial—he was “in a terrible state” as he waited for a full ten days to be called as a prosecution witness. His nervousness might have arisen simply from the fear of letting slip evidence that could incriminate his old schoolfriend. So much depended on Soames’s memory of whether Broughton was shooting with a Colt at Nanyuki that day.

If Broughton did commit the murder, Soames’s evidence provides a peculiarly neat back-up for Broughton’s own story, suggesting a complicity, a conspiracy or even mutual blackmail between the two men. It was to Soames, his one trusted Eton friend, that Broughton went for sympathy about Diana’s affair with Erroll; and it was to Soames, too, that he wrote his “bread and butter” letter with its oddly detailed description of the revolver thefts and its announcement that he would “cut his losses” and go to Ceylon. (It was written the day after the theft occurred, and apparently delivered to Nanyuki two days later.) Then there was their urgent drink together at the Avenue Hotel on January 28th, when Soames already knew that the police intended to search for bullets on his farm in five days’ time. This was just after Broughton and Carberry, who
had come to stay in the house at Karen, had been discussing ballistics and comparison microscopes.

Finally it was Soames’s evidence that had clinched the ballistics argument for Morris. Kaplan described Morris’s hand pressing on Broughton’s shoulder as he asked Soames, “And if Sir Delves tells His Lordship and the Jury that this gun was not a gun that broke [non-Colt] but one in which the cylinder fell out [Colt] you would not dispute that?” and releasing his grip as Soames replied, “I would believe him.”

If Soames had committed the murder himself or lent Broughton the gun and the ammunition, the ballistics evidence would in no way be contradicted. Of the three live rounds found in the grass by the police, one contained black powder, one contained ordinary powder and the third was left unopened for the court to decide what to do with it. There was, of course, no provable link between these live rounds and either the murder bullets or the spent “Nanyuki” bullets found in the grass. Of the eleven empty .32 cartridge cases found lying about, four had Smith & Wesson markings and four Remington markings—and all eleven bore the mark of an identical firing pin and were thus fired by the same weapon. Therefore either Broughton was lying when he said that he took an unbroken box of fifty rounds to Nanyuki for the target practice, or Soames provided some extra .32 ammunition, possibly the black powder bullets. (The idea, raised in the trial, of previous target practice on the same site can be discounted. Although it did occur on the Soames estate, this particular range was chosen at random, had never been used before, and was only twenty-five feet in length.) Thus the black powder evidence, at least, was equally damaging to both men. Possibly it was Soames’s .32 that they used for the target practice—and for the murder. It was only Broughton and Soames who swore that Broughton had brought his own revolvers to Nanyuki for target practice—a perfectly normal suggestion, apparently, to make to a guest on his way for the weekend. There was, of course, a war on.

Was it during Broughton’s second visit to Nanyuki to see Soames, a week before the murder, that they hatched the murder plan together and concocted the story of the stolen revolvers? This would assume firstly a knowledge of ballistics and secondly that Broughton intended to use his own gun, the idea of the theft being to draw attention to the misleading firearms certificate. Why, after all, should Broughton write so quickly and in such detail about the theft? Did he write the letter at all? Soames said, “I eventually burned it.” But did he bum it before the murder or afterwards? Had he kept it, it would have been valuable evidence for Broughton. Was it after the meeting at the Avenue Hotel that Soames and Broughton agreed to the story that he had brought his own Colt to the shooting practice on that first weekend?

HARRAGIN:
Did you notice what kind of gun it was to look at?

SOAMES:
I understood it was a Colt, but I could not say.

At some stage Connolly wrote in his notebook:

How they did it

Soames