White Mischief (37 page)

At six, the silent Somali head servant laid the table for dinner, with the place mats with the hunting scenes, the pickle bottles and the silver salt and pepper pots, and the water jug with the beaded linen cover.

The food was superb. Sherry, as usual, with the soup; filet mignon, carrots and perfect little roast potatoes. There was then a pause, and the pause turned into a wait. The expected savoury did not appear. Her kitchen had recently burned to the ground and a temporary one had been set up across the yard, in the darkness. The Afghan Princess
became impatient and very cross. (To the switchboard operator at Nanyuki she had screamed, “Oh, wash your ears out, you
ber-luddy
man.”) The Swahili word for “where” is
“wapi.”
Now the Princess got up from the table, approached the threshold, and shouted into the darkness,
“Wapi Seconds?”

Out of the African night came an exquisite béchamelled egg with anchovy, in a perfect pastry tart, cooked on a paraffin stove somewhere near the chicken run. All was well, yet I wondered how the Princess had survived, badmouthing these Africans so venomously all these years. In Nanyuki I discovered that she was considered merely eccentric; that she had performed many acts of kindness and that these weighed greatly in her favour.

The Afghan Princess released me the following day, and I left for Lake Naivasha, and the last traces of both Erroll and Broughton, the present estates of Diana Delamere. I rented a house once owned by Kiki Preston, the lady with the silver syringe, in a wild and isolated recess of the lake—a place to write and a base for investigative sorties, where, except for Stefan, the houseboy, I was alone.

Early each morning I would walk along the edge of Lake Naivasha beneath jacaranda and pepper trees and large and ancient thorns, putting up flights of water birds along the shore. When I felt the real heat of the sun I would turn back for the coolness of the fresh paw-paw and pineapple already laid out in the shade for my return. It seemed to me that the surface of the lake had changed, often dramatically, each time I looked back at the water. First it was a mirror lake traversed by gangs of enormously beaked pelicans whose progress left no single impression on the glassy water. A minute later a sudden wind had transformed it into a blustering Scottish loch with a surface current and whitecaps. The light can change with an equal suddenness. At times there is a clarity of detail at great distances when, for example, each branch of a thorn tree
on the far bank is minutely sharp to the eye. Instantly it will become a dull strip of grey, and without a cloud in the sky to account for the change. This can produce mild hallucinations as the middle distance advances and recedes, and you can soon begin to feel oppressed by the strange gloom of this lake, with its isolated houses and its wide lawns that slip into the water as if the lake were slowly flooding. When loneliness was beginning to affect Broughton’s mental stability, how desperate he must have felt in these surroundings.

Two miles around the bay from the garden of my own house, I could just see the top of the white crenellated tower of the Djinn Palace above a clump of trees. It had been restored by a German businessman, and the old Moroccan courtyard with its fountain and mosaics now looked like a well-furnished garden centre. The fountain had been filled in. The woodwork, however, and the mosaic bar had been left intact.

During the war years there was distinguished company on this wild part of the lake. The late Aga Khan lived in the Preston house and Prince Paul of Yugoslavia in the house next door, sharing the same lawn.

That house is now owned by Baron Knapitsch, the trophy hunter. The Baron has shot so many animals, large and small, commemorating each by the horns, that the gentlemen’s cloakroom, taking up the overflow from his cavernous sitting rooms, bristles with the antlers of dik-dik and Grant’s gazelle. The Baron has even arranged two enormous fallen branches in an arch in the garden, to remind him of a monumental pair of elephant tusks.

He invited me for dinner. I bathed and walked across the lawn. He said, “You can’t imagine the game here a few years ago. Wonderful. Incredible.” Diana had been to stay with him in his Austrian castle. He said, “Beautiful woman. No. Really. Beautiful.”

Colvile, he said, had owned 60,000 acres here on Lake Naivasha, 140,000 at Rumuruti and 30,000 elsewhere.
(An estimate near the average: the settlers’ view is that Colvile left 200,000 acres when he died.) The Baron said that Colvile owned 29,000 head of cattle (“Incredible. Even by Brazilian standards. No.”), and that he had given Diana half the rights to his farms when they married.

One day towards the end of my stay I came across what looked like a very promising lead. On one of my journeys around the lake I had met by chance the old Somali servant who had worked for Soames, and for several of Erroll’s friends. His employer suggested I speak to him, primarily because of his age. When his connection with Soames was revealed, it seemed a stroke of extraordinary luck.

With his employer translating, the Somali spoke, at first, with caution. Translation: “He says that during the brief time he was in Kenya, the servants, in general, liked Broughton. But because he was a newcomer, they couldn’t really say.”

After a while he simply said, “Yes, I know a lot about Lord Erroll—Bwana Hay—and … I would like to tell you about him.”

What followed, according to the translation, was a version of the events of January 1941 that was breathtaking in its accuracy. Lapses into hearsay and distortion would have been understandable. But this Somali, forty years later, picked out the prosecution case in great detail, and never put a foot wrong as far as the record is concerned. It was an impressive performance, untainted by the rumour that so often diminished the accuracy of the settlers’ accounts.

The affair had been intensely debated between the Somali and his colleagues at the time, he remembered. It was his personal opinion, having discussed the matter with the other servants, that the old man shot Erroll himself. Were any of these other servants still alive? I mentioned
Abdullah bin Ahmed, Broughton’s head boy, a witness at the trial. Yes, said the Somali, Abdullah was his closest friend and he lived now in Kilifi. He added that he was convinced that Abdullah knew exactly what had happened, but if I went to find him I was not to say that he had told me this. It was Abdullah who had put out the bonfire on Broughton’s instructions, and Abdullah who knew what was burning. Yes, of course the bonfire was discussed between them.

When Broughton left Kenya, he added, Diana had kept Abdullah as a servant, but when she married Colvile, many of the servants, including Abdullah, didn’t approve of the marriage. Colvile was like a Masai, he had a Masai driver. Diana was fine. She wasn’t rubbish, and she never let common people into her house. But Colvile, this Masai, was mean, and all the servants left. This was only the first time Abdullah left. He was later sacked twice for drunkenness, but he always came back.

Diana got on well with Abdullah despite the drinking. Many years ago, after the incidents that temporarily ended Abdullah’s employment, Diana got hold of him, took him back to Kilifi and said, “Work there.” He has been on a pension ever since. It is a very long pension. “Diana,” said the Somali, “is rather like his mother. She doesn’t want Abdullah to get into trouble.” He was certain, he repeated, that Abdullah knew who shot Lord Erroll, but it was up to Abdullah to say. He might be scared to talk, but he, the Somali, would give directions where to find him on the coast.

A few days later, in the intense and airless heat that can sometimes descend on that coast, I drove to Kilifi from Mombasa to look for Abdullah, with a journalist friend of mine from Nairobi, Mary Ann Fitzgerald, as interpreter.

At the Kilifi ferry, waiting to cross, we bought guava juice and cashews and looked at the hulks of the old ferry rafts lying seaward on the mud next to the ford. The rare photograph of Diana and Joss together during their brief
romance was taken on one of these ferries, which at that time were pulled across the creek on a long chain.

We began enquiring for Abdullah near the market place in Kilifi town, only a few hundred yards away from Diana’s coast house, the “Villa Buzzer” (Buzzer being Diana’s nickname for Tom). In a general store almost empty of goods except for a large supply of rosewater, and with a huge paraffin fridge as its centrepiece, we heard that Abdullah did live in the vicinity but that he was an old man and very ill. Two small boys guided our car along mud tracks between buildings made of soft coral stone and tin, mangrove poles and mud, each separated from each other by heaps of rubbish. A palm tree growing in the middle of the street blocked our car, and from there we walked, stopping eventually at a narrow wooden door, almost hidden behind a makeshift wall of building blocks.

Abdullah sat on a chair at the end of a dark corridor of bare cream and white walls, dressed only in a
kekoi,
his naked breast and belly bulging in front of him. Wedged in a wooden grille above the door to his room were his only two visible possessions—a toothbrush and a copy of the Qur’an.

The room was rented, and the bed, the sole piece of furniture in the room, was covered in rags. High up on the wall, almost out of sight, were some cheap Indian prints. At first Abdullah’s speech came in slow, lazy mouthings, very indistinctly, and he was obviously in some pain. My friend gave a long explanation. Abdullah began to look embarrassed, becoming even more listless. Then he produced one crucial hint to the knowledge he possessed. Brdughton, he said, was a good walker, a strong man. But he, Abdullah, was ill, he needed medicine. Would we come tomorrow?

We crossed the creek again and, took the day off, lunching at the Ocean sports club and dining at the old settlers’ retreat, the Mnarani Club at Kilifi. The next morning, we bought pain killers and fruit, then loaded the two
grinning boys into the car. They brought us this time to the market where Abdullah was sitting at the corner of a small clothes stall, wearing a shirt and holding a cane.

Overnight, Abdullah’s manner had developed some resolution. I realised that I had taken it almost for granted that he would talk to me after all the trouble I had taken to find him. And I was wrong. It was quite clear, he said, that we wanted to know all about the Erroll murder. “I’m old,” he said. “She [Diana] is old too, but she’s got money … It is a very heavy matter. I don’t remember anything. I don’t even remember Delves Broughton. I don’t remember him any more. It’s a long time ago. I’ve forgotten.”

Abdullah thanked us for the medicine, and the fruit we had brought for the children. He said, “Please don’t be unhappy that I haven’t said anything.” He put his wrists together, in the gesture of a prisoner, then made the gesture of knifing. This was the price to pay for speaking. “This is a very heavy matter,” he repeated. Abdullah was scared and he was deadly serious. There was no more to be said.

23

LADY DELAMERE

Diana, Lady Delamere, and I first met face to face in the doorway of her London apartment, somewhere behind the Ritz Hotel, in late May of 1981. With a thumping in my heart that I imagined to be audible in the deadly quiet of the carpeted eighth-floor corridor, I had rung on her doorbell. I was on the point of turning back towards the lift, relieved to have any excuse, when the door was opened by a diminutive maid dressed in black, striking, it seemed, a crouched and fearful pose. I later discovered that she was addressed, like Wilks before her, by her surname, Peterson. I gave my name and Peterson disappeared from the doorway. The heart thumping had now turned to hammer blows inside the rib cage, and I began to imagine a bitter poetic justice for my brash intrusion: I would collapse with a massive thrombosis in the doorway as she came to greet me, unable even to mouth the first question. But turning up unheralded had been the only possible way to approach Diana, and even to arrive at this unpromising moment had required some planning.

I had discovered by chance, through her network of English friends, that Diana was coming to England for the York races in May, and would be staying with a friend in Yorkshire. At the end of the second day’s racing, when I imagined she would be well installed, I rang her host and
asked to speak to her. I was told, to my consternation, that she was still in Nairobi. My informant had been wrong.

Now I had to explain, albeit in the most general terms, to her somewhat suspicious host—who was also a Kenya landowner—why I wanted to speak to her. He warned me that she would never talk to me about her life in Kenya, and suggested I write her a formal letter of request. For this he gave me her London address—a significant step forward—in the apartment block behind the Ritz Hotel but, as it turned out. provided the wrong flat number. Earlier in the conversation he had also produced, by way of correcting me, the exact date of her arrival. Having now alerted her protective friends, and thus Diana herself, a whole three weeks too soon, my only hope was to wait and chance my luck at her door on the date in question. Letters and telephone calls, once again, would have ended the affair instantly.

The few daily flights from Nairobi arrive in the morning in London, within an hour or two of each other. When the day came. I picked on the flight with the greatest delay, added an hour or two for jet-lag and siestas and decided that 4 p.m. was the right moment to strike. In the meantime I dragged out a Chinese lunch with a friend, and for further moral encouragement rang my publisher, whom I knew had once been a fierce encyclopaedia salesman. He told me that the door would open and the face would say, “What do you want?” He always used to reply, “That’s exactly what I’ve come to talk to you about.” He said that this had never failed.

To the porters talking in the hall, more as a password than an enquiry. I said, “Lady Delamere” as I passed. One of them replied, “Eighty-two”: I had been on my way to forty-three.

There came to the door, that afternoon, one of the most striking women I have ever seen, wearing an immaculately cut Eton-blue peignoir with blue ribbon bindings along the edges, and with long gold chains strung
from her neck. She was younger-looking than I expected, her face longer and leaner than it had been, the ice-blue eyes as penetrating as ever. Any trace of travel fatigue had disappeared under the perfect make-up, though she was not expecting a guest. Dazzled by this apparition, my memory of this first conversation, as I introduced myself, is almost non-existent. I was an author … certain characters … Kenya … grateful for a few minutes’ talk. Lady Delamere held the door half-way open. She said she had only just arrived; the flight had been exhausting. Also, she never talked about her private life and didn’t think she could be of any help.