White Mischief (33 page)

Broughton spent his days taking his favourite walk around the lake at Doddington, talking to anyone on the estate whom he met by chance. He saw Mrs. Woodhouse every day. At his insistence they would read over the transcript together again and again while he flattered himself on his courtroom performance.

Mrs. Woodhouse had moved to Hastings in the mid-1960s and we met her there, in the Queen’s Hotel, on a windy day in late July. We each took notes on her appearance.

Connolly: Aunt was a well known Cheshire horse woman. One son, now a doctor in Hammersmith. Dark, late middle aged, cosy, sense of humour, nice brown eyes, rubbery smell. Keen on good old days. Tory party. Double whiskies. Suspicious at first (photo in papers) but unbent gradually. Loved crime stories. Hates Labour. Her sharpness!

Fox: Obviously strapping hunting gal in early days. Gin set. Typical of odd half of Broughton’s entourage. Glasses. Tailored tweeds with sapphire horsey brooch. To a double whisky at tea time, craftily suggested by C. C. she replied, “A damn good idea.”

Mrs. Woodhouse didn’t come to the point immediately. She described the early days at Doddington, her dislike of Diana; how when he returned Broughton called Diana “a real bitch.” Vera’s wanting to marry Lord Moyne, she said, had been the cause of all his troubles. It was a further shock when his daughter Rosamund, whom he adored—and vice versa—got married. It was then up to Broughton to get a young and beautiful woman. Vera herself had been very beautiful, with green eyes and a wonderful figure. Rosamund would have come out to Kenya for the trial, but he told her she shouldn’t.

She didn’t think that Rosamund avoided him when he returned. He simply hadn’t let his children know, and she didn’t think that he had even seen Vera.

Broughton, she said, was very much in love with Diana. He was a most honourable and splendid man, and he couldn’t stand this kind of dishonesty. It had crossed her mind that he might have been impotent, however. She noticed the great interest he took in monkey glands after a neighbour had used them with good results, but she thought that it may simply have been vanity, his declining looks, that concerned him. He was a very bad rider, but he was fit, and it was nonsense about his inability to walk over distances, even at speed.

He had taken to drink in Kenya with bad results. Until
then he had been wary of it because of his brother Brian, who was “a drunken sot.” He used to come up to the house and Broughton would say, “That’s why I never touch a drop.”

“They were married on April Fool’s Day,” said Mrs. Woodhouse (in fact it was Guy Fawkes’ Day). “And he wrote to me, ‘I hope I’m not the April Fool.’ But of course he was, poor dear.

“I saw him almost every day after he came back,” she said. “He would come to collect me, driven by his chauffeur. Then we would go back to Doddington for tea or a walk. We had an affinity. Put it like that. We were both lonely.

“He was terribly worried about the tenant farmers’ and the locals’ opinion of him after the trial. They had placed bets in the pub on the verdict. He was living at the time at Badgers’ Bank … He wanted quiet dinners. He couldn’t stand the pace. I remember, he thought June Carberry a good and loyal friend, but thought Wilks as bad as her mistress, and completely on
her
side.”

She and Broughton were discussing the transcript again, two days before he was due to go to Liverpool to have his plaster changed. “We talked a lot and went for walks together,” said Mrs. Woodhouse. “He said to me, ‘You know I did it, Marie.’ I was dumbfounded. I said, ‘You didn’t, Jock.’ He said, ‘I’ve never run so fast in my life.’”

“You know, we laughed about it. He said he thought he was doing everyone a service, but you know, I think that was boasting a bit. He was trying to boost his morale.”

Broughton told Mrs. Woodhouse that he had left the house after seeing Mrs. Carberry (official time: 2:10 a.m.) and had walked to the point of the ambush, and had then run back. He told her that the stealing of the pistols was genuine, and the murder was done with a third gun which he had later given to a friend to hide. “He didn’t say any more, and I couldn’t ask him about it in detail,” said Mrs. Woodhouse.

She had the impression that Broughton was obsessed with the affair of Diana and Joss. He had written to her soon after it began. “He told me that Joss Erroll had already been horsewhipped in Nairobi. I asked him why he hadn’t done that, and he said he wasn’t strong enough, and he wanted it to be final.

“We laughed about him stoking up the bonfire,” she said. “It was completely out of character.”

At the end of our meeting, as we stood on the pavement in the breeze, Mrs. Woodhouse said, “Weil, Cheerio, gentlemen.” Connolly and I turned and struggled along the strand—he in a felt hat blowing about the brim—to a bar where we could write up our notes. Later Mrs. Wood-house wrote to say how much she had enjoyed our article.

Two days after his last conversation with Marie Wood-house, on December 2nd, 1942, Broughton went to the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool:

He went to the Adelphi without me [Mrs. Woodhouse had told us]:’ We had booked two rooms and were going to a show to cheer him up. Jock was waiting to go into hospital to have his plaster changed to a lighter, more comfortable one. At the last moment I couldn’t go with him because my son, Nick, was very ill and I couldn’t leave him.

I rang Jock and told him, but he seemed to expect me to go anyway. He was a bit disappointed. He rang me back later and said. “Are you all right. Marie—financially I mean?” I should have known then. I said, “Of course, Jock.” I was always broke. He said he would see me next day. I said, yes, if my son was better. I tried to ring him the next morning, but the manager said Sir Delves Broughton was under treatment and wasn’t to be disturbed. What a fool I was not to have realised what he was doing to himself. I knew he already had a tube of morphia in jail, in case the verdict went against him.

The
Cheshire Chronicle
reported what happened in the following three days:

… Miss Bridget Hayes, head housekeeper at the Adelphi Hotel, said that about 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 2nd. she received a telephone message as to the arrival of Sir Delves.

THE CORONER:
Did he seem a little fastidious?

MISS HAYES:
Just a little. He asked to be kept perfectly quiet. He didn’t want to be disturbed by anybody.

Forty-eight hours later, Miss Hayes found Broughton, much too late, bleeding from the nose and ears, and in a coma. She noticed a detail that would belong, more realistically, to a soap opera: a bottle label marked “Medinal” floating in the lavatory.

Dr. Ray Maudsley, Resident Medical Officer at the Northern Hospital, admitted Broughton at 6:30 p.m. on Friday December 4th. There was a puncture mark on the inside of the left elbow and several other puncture marks, but not into the vein. Broughton had taken fourteen injections of Medinal. He died at 2:25 a.m. on December 5th.

Mrs. Woodhouse was visited by the Cheshire police, and received an urgent message from Vera asking for a meeting. The question of suicide threatened the life insurance payments, and Mrs. Woodhouse understood that the family wanted to be sure. The coroner’s verdict left no question, however, about the cause of death.

Broughton’s casket was put in the family vault at Broughton parish church. He had sent Mrs. Woodhouse packets of coffee and tea from Kenya—something of a wartime luxury. After his death, they continued to arrive. She found this “rather morbid.”

He had left two notes, both addressed to his solicitors. The most significant message was to do with the “strain” of the trial, and the fact that he could not face further charges. He ended the note with characteristic pomposity:
Moriturus te Saluto
. The second note said that, as a result of his back injury, he had blacked out many times on the journey home and since his arrival; that he had lost all sensation on his right side, and was becoming paralysed. He had therefore decided to take his life.

20

BLACKMAIL

Gentlemen; have you ever heard anything so fantastic? Here is a man whose whole life is being ruined; having his wife stolen from him right under his nose; being made a complete fool of before the whole public of Kenya; and when his wife comes home he discusses who shall pay for a bit of jewellery. Do you believe a word of it?

For ourselves, Broughton’s obsession with this one particular piece of jewellery was certainly not to be dismissed so easily, if only because Broughton always brought up the subject with Diana at the moments of greatest crisis between them. A whiff of insurance frauds had always surrounded Broughton in our minds ever since Connolly had heard the rumour in Nairobi, back in 1967, that Broughton had paid a hard-up officer to steal his pictures.

Pearls, in some form or other, had an insistent way of coming back into the story again and again, and we felt instinctively that the pearl trail would be a hot one to follow, with its suggestions of accompanying blackmail. Looking for clues, we found an original newsroom memorandum in the cuttings library of the
Daily Express
in Broughton’s file—a rarity, since memos seldom find their way into the “morgue.” It was written by a newsroom
reporter on December 11th, 1942, soon after Broughton’s death.

Memo Re: Sir Delves Broughton

The Manchester office tell us that they have heard this story from a local man for what it is worth.

It is to the effect that Sir Delves Broughton who died in Liverpool the other day and whose inquest will be held on Monday. December 14th, was concerned with the Doddington Park robbery a few years ago. At the time of the robbery three pictures were missing, supposed to be valuable.

The pictures were never recovered and the insurance company were not quite happy about the whole thing, but paid up apparently to Sir Delves Broughton.

It is now suggested that since the murder case of the Earl of Erroll in Nairobi—Sir Delves Broughton was acquitted—someone in Nairobi has told the police that Sir Delves Broughton was very “sticky” to newspapers about the whole affair.

It is also suggested that when Sir Delves Broughton returned to Liverpool recently Scotland Yard were interested about the picture robbery and were on his track. It is not known whether Yard men interviewed him or not but his death is believed to be suicide. It is expected that some kind of white-washing verdict will be made at the inquest on Monday.

It was time for another lunch with Poppy at the Metropole Hotel, Brighton. Now he told us that the insurance company which had paid out to Broughton for the stolen pictures from Doddington and the pearls missing from Miss Caldwell’s car had been alerted by the press reports of the Nairobi trial, particularly by the squabbles between Jock and Diana about pearls. But the insurance company’s enquiries came to nothing: they found themselves pursuing, instead, the Erroll pearls. This, however, alerted Poppy. His informers in the Karen house reported continuous arguments on the subject. He had also seen a letter from Broughton to Diana, threatening to implicate her in a fraud unless she came back to him and returned with him to
England on the next boat. Diana was wondering what to do about Broughton’s threats, so Poppy was expecting a visit. But it was not Diana who came to see him. It was Hugh Dickinson.

Dickinson told Poppy that he had “something to get off his chest.” At the end of the interview, he signed the following statement

In the June before the War. Sir Delves Broughton came to me in London and said he wanted to talk over with me a proposition he had in mind. He said that the then Diana Caldwell must in no circumstances know of the proposition he was about to make to me. He suggested I should take the pearls which she was wearing and that he had bought for approx. £6.000, as an investment and which he had lent to her and which he had insured for approx. £12,000. The reason he gave for this was that he was hard up and she was also the same and that he thought I was a likely person to try and help as he knew I was extremely fond of her. I told him I’d think the matter over, as I could not possibly give an answer at once. He approached me later and again I stalled him. Later on he said that he knew we were all going in a party to the South of France and he thought that would be a golden opportunity. I said I would if a suitable opportunity occurred, but would make no promises.

In the South of France I was staying at Juan les Pins and she and X [Mark Pilkington] were staying at the Carlton in Cannes. The three of us together, with about half a dozen other people, had drinks in the Carlton before going to have dinner at a restaurant about 20 miles away. She and X were staying the night at another hotel, and so her luggage was put into the car while we were standing around waiting. When it had all been put in we motored in either two or three cars to dinner. In the middle of dinner, which was rather hilarious. I got up and walked out and removed her dressing case from X’s car to mine and then returned to finish the meal. After dinner all dispersed and I drove down to a quiet place on the sea shore, opened the dressing case, put the pearls in my pocket and threw the rest into the sea. The next day I buried them and they stayed there until the day before I left to come to England, where I buried them again until I got in touch with DB. He told me to buy a deed box. put them in
it and deliver the box to him at his solicitors, and, to avoid curiosity, to say when I handed them over, “Here’s the box you said you would keep for me.” I did this, but do not know the name of the solicitors. After a short lapse, he came to me and said that he had some pictures which he wanted removed from Doddington as they were extremely well-insured and he told me that if I refused to do this, he would ask his solicitors to ask Scotland Yard to investigate the box which I had left there, and I felt compelled to fall in with his wishes.