White Mischief (39 page)

“Gilbert was sad when I left him for Tom,” she said. “He always said, ‘There’s one person who loves and one who is loved.’” She and Tom built him a special suite at Soysambu, so that he could live there whenever he wanted their company. She was the Little White Bear, Tom the Little Brown Bear, and Colvile was Pooh Bear or “Pooey.”

Diana then sat beside me on the sofa and showed me
the photographs of Soysambu and her life with Delamere—her garden, her horses, the sitting rooms. “I had years of happiness with Tom,” she said. “We used to talk to each other for hours at a time.” When I broached the subject of her celebrated love of jewellery, however, she became defensive.

“I’m not the one who’s mad about jewellery,” she said. “Tom adored it and always used to go into the shop and ask, ‘What’s the bargain of the week?’ If we saw a nice piece he would often say, ‘Halves, baby?’”

And whoever it was who had described her walking down to the jetty covered in jewels, was quite wrong. She never wore jewellery on her fishing boat, she said. Nor could the Somali have seen her dipping in her pool weighed down with bright stones. “I never swim in jewellery … I might wear an ordinary little gold ring. I don’t wear jewellery in the daytime … I might put on a pair of gold earrings at lunchtime. I only really wear jewellery at night.”

She buried Tom Delamere in the little walled cemetery she built on Colvile’s farm at Ndabibi (the Masai word for “place of clover”), alongside Colvile and her only child, who had lived for ten days. She has had fig trees planted and water piped to the cemetery for the flowers, and a dog buried at the foot of each grave. She has reserved her own space between the graves and has written all the inscriptions: for the child, “So short a life”; for Colvile, “If you want a memorial, look around you,” and for Delamere, “So great a man.”

As I left, she stood up close to me, rolled up one black sleeve, in imitation of a prize fighter, and said, “It’ll be this.” We both laughed and she said, “It hasn’t come to that yet, has it?”

Four months later, in September of that year, soon before her return to Nairobi, we met again.

As usual, I arrived in the middle of a crisis. Diana
had somehow knocked her glass of vodka and tonic and a whole tin of cocktail biscuits off the table—the drink had landed on her pleated dress and the biscuits were strewn about the floor. Peterson came to the rescue, but Diana wanted to change. I said the damage didn’t look too bad. “It’s me I’m worried about,” she said. She reappeared in a dress of blue and white flowers, and now sapphires as well as diamonds. She and Peterson had been discussing the racehorse Shergar, unbeaten until that day.

“It’s an odd thing to discuss,” said Diana, “but
she’s
interested. We don’t think Shergar should have been entered for the St. Leger. Don’t you agree, Peterson? I hate to see a good horse beaten.” Peterson made no sound.

At first I was under suspicion. That week a series on the Erroll murder was running in my old newspaper in Nairobi, written by a visiting American journalist and based, according to the writer himself, largely on our
Sunday Times
article. It contained nothing new, and I convinced Diana that I had nothing to do with it. But it was an unfortunate coincidence. She said the writer was going to get “a very sore ear” when she returned to Nairobi.

In the meantime Diana’s memory had been awakened, it seemed, in the process of our meetings, and, although she did not relax her warnings of legal sanctions, we talked on. It was then that I admired her judgment. It was clear to her that the book would be written—that I was committed to it—but instead of accepting the advice of her friends to show me the door, I felt she must have decided that to talk to me could only improve the book from her point of view. There, of course, she was right. When I suggested that, if she were to read a draft, she would object to any mention of the Erroll murder, she replied, “It’s not that I mind about. It’s the way it’s presented.”

In that delicate atmosphere there were many questions I left unasked. My persistence in returning to the subject in the four hours we spent together already seemed to me to be straining Diana’s hospitality. Yet what she did tell
me was illuminating. First, she made two denials: Broughton and June did not come to the Claremont Road House later on the murder night, she said, and Broughton’s attempted blackmail of her had nothing to do with the jewels, although she would not say what the subject of the blackmail was.

I asked about her trip to Nyeri, immediately after the murder. I was surprised, I said, that she had been out of the house when Broughton arrived from Nairobi. She couldn’t remember why she and June were out, but she remembered the police arriving the previous night. She was distraught, and in bed, but she came down to meet them. “They asked me. ‘What do you think happened?’ and I answered automatically, ‘He was a very fast driver and I think he must have crashed and been killed.’

“The last thing I ever said to Joss was, ‘Darling, please drive carefully.’ His last words to me were, ‘Carefully, darling, but not slowly.’” She believed that Broughton hid in the bushes at the end of the drive, asked to talk to Erroll, at some point asked to be dropped off and then shot him. “He knew the country well. We’d ridden over it many times,” she said.

I said, “I’ve always been fascinated by …”

Diana broke in and said, to my surprise, “Jack Soames. It was very funny really that I shot better than Jock. He wasn’t a good shot but it’s not difficult if you’re sitting in the seat beside someone.”

She repeated her regret at not understanding Broughton’s mood better: “We were such a foolly crowd not to know what he was up to.” In jail, she said, he was just the same as ever. The only time he got angry was when Diana agreed to give back the Erroll pearls to Walter Shapley, the lawyer acting for Erroll’s estate. “Joss had given them to me and told me never to take them off,” said Diana. “Everyone was being horrible about it. They didn’t even belong to the estate, they had been Molly’s.”

Why, I asked, did June Carberry drive in her dressing
gown to get a jewel box from Erroll’s house, as soon as the news of his death came through? Diana said, “It was not a jewel box. Sometimes in life a guardian angel comes to the rescue, and that was one of those extraordinary moments.” June, she said, had gone to get a notecase which contained all the love letters that Diana had written to Joss. The irony was that the night before she had asked Joss to burn them. “He said, ‘No, darling, I want to keep them.’ I thought, I’ll teach him a lesson,’ and I hid the notecase in a box of face tissues.” When the police came they took all Erroll’s correspondence, she said, but they never found her letters.

She agreed that she and June had joined forces to defend Broughton, but when it was over she hardly saw her again. “I was so surprised. People were perfectly bloody to me after the trial. Many people actively cut me at the time and became friends later. Gwladys never spoke to me again. I couldn’t understand why people were so violently against me. Some were genuinely upset that the thing would bring down bad feeling on Kenya in a war. Others were just jealous about anything and anybody. It was much more fashionable to be sorry for Jock. The fact that I pulled myself together and went to the trial every day looking as tidy as I could infuriated some people. I remember the faces … I don’t want to think about it.”

She herself went soon after the murder to Erroll’s house to get his two dogs, and a third dog that Fabian Wallis—Erroll’s homosexual friend from Happy Valley—had left there before going to Abyssinia. She was very hurt when Wallis sent a message forbidding her to keep the dog and ordering her to deliver it to a friend of his. In the end Fabian Wallis was broke and sad, living in a guest house in Nairobi. His friends organised a subscription to buy him an electric blanket. Diana said, “There’ll be no subscription. I’ll buy him one.”

We turned to Broughton again and I said that if he was guilty, his performance in the witness box was a
masterpiece of deception and sang-froid. He was very proud of that performance, she said, and then she told me that the remark to Harragin as he walked out of the courtroom had been simply, “I’m a very good actor.” Morris, she said, had thought Broughton guilty.

Towards the end, before he left for England, Broughton became unbalanced, and was tortured with nightmares and various fears. Diana believed that he killed one of Erroll’s dachshunds after the trial, out of a jealousy for Erroll which never left him, even after Erroll’s death. The final break with Broughton began when Colvile came across an unposted letter that Broughton had written to Vera, saying that he wanted to come back to her, but couldn’t remarry her “for tax reasons.” Colvile had copied it, mailed the original to Vera, and kept a copy.

The last time she saw Broughton was in a lawyer’s office in Nairobi, and it was then that she accused him of murder. “He wanted me to go back to England with him,” said Diana. “I didn’t want to go but I wanted to say it in front of a lawyer. I told him I didn’t want to go back because I believed he had killed Joss. He said nothing. He simply walked out of the room.”

For years after Joss’s death she felt nothing. “I have always regretted that with Joss it could never have come down to reality. It was so sublime and so perfect, but it couldn’t last. I knew that.”

The rumour that she and Joss had a row on the night of the murder was far from the truth. It was, she repeated, her eternal regret that she had never fought with Joss in their brief affair. “If you’ve never had a row, it leaves you much too vulnerable,” she said.

Diana and I had now moved into her kitchen. Taking some snacks from the fridge she said, “Peterson said to me today, ‘I bought you an egg in May and you haven’t eaten it.’ In
May
.” (It was now mid-September.) It was clear that this was one of Diana’s very rare visits to a kitchen. As we sat down to some biscuits and cheese at a
small Formica table, she asked me what sort of cutlery we should use. Afterwards she approached the sink and, despite my protests, started to wash up. She poured almost half a cupful of washing-up liquid on to one plate and began dabbing at it with a brush. She said, “I only do it about twice a year. I rather enjoy it. I don’t know what everyone’s making such a fuss about.”

Before I left she told me that she had visited a clairvoyant in the summer near the racecourse at Ascot. “The first thing she said was, ‘I’m glad I’m not you.’ She said, ‘You’ve had some terrible times in your life but you’ve always pulled yourself up,’ and then she said, ‘Your friends take from you, but if you’re in danger they wouldn’t help you’ I did have a question to ask her: ‘Will it happen again?’ [referring to the troubles in her life] but after that I didn’t want to ask it. The only thing I wanted was a large stiff drink. I just thought I should tell you.”

24

THE END OF THE TRAIL

One of the last entries in Connolly’s notebooks is headed “The End of the Trail.” These were his notes of an interview in 1971 with Juanita Carberry, June’s stepdaughter, who was fifteen years old at the time of the murder. It wasn’t quite the end of the trail, as it turned out. But he had come remarkably close to it, and it was only Juanita’s reticence that had kept him a few steps away.

In the spring of that year Connolly went to the last day of an exhibition of paintings with the title “The Death of Lord Erroll” at the Upper Grosvenor Gallery in London. The paintings were mostly expressionist renderings of the photographs in our magazine layout. The titles, too, were taken from the text: “One of the better nights”; “I think wistfully of Madeira now,” and so on. The artist, Tom Hill, had taken the idea for his series directly from our article, and had sent Connolly an invitation.

On his way out, Connolly glanced at the visitors’ book, and noticed Juanita’s name, with a forwarding address. When she got a letter from Connolly, Juanita rang him at the
Sunday Times,
and drew a blank: whoever she spoke to had never heard of him. But she persisted and they finally met at the Queen’s Elm pub in the Fulham Road, on September 17th, 1971.

Connolly’s notes describe the meeting:

JC late. Small, close cropped, medium colouring, nice quiet voice. Works as a steward on tankers. Knows many languages, fluent Swahili etc. Lunched at
Le Français,
drinks milk, orders in French. Impressions: great integrity, sensibility, observation etc.

Juanita had talked first about her family; how June liked to pass her off as her sister, and to boast that Juanita could outdrink any man in Kenya—though she only drank milk—until on the visits to Eden Roc and Cannes. Juanita began to be attractive to June’s boyfriends and the boasting stopped. She hated Carberry and his cruelty. He had always told her that he was disappointed that she hadn’t been born a male. At Seremai, Carberry had built a “children’s wing,” remote from the house, whose only occupant was Juanita, “He used to make me race across Mombasa bay in the tidal wind against a boy who was a strong swimmer. He took bets on the races, but the father of the boy was allowed to have a boat alongside—that was his father’s condition. In the South of France he would take bets on me. If I won I got 100 francs, and if I lost I got a beating. I became a good speed swimmer.” He would make Juanita. aged thirteen, dive from the highboard. “You need very strong muscles,” said Juanita, “otherwise you fall backwards. I would go up there and I would start blubbering because I was terrified, and equally I wanted to go.” Juanita remembered one terrifying day when Carberry ordered her to swim ashore from his yacht which was moored in Kilindini harbour, a notorious feeding ground for sharks. She swam once around the boat, then grabbed the gunwale, pleading to be let back on board. Carberry stamped on her fingers.

She said that Carberry used to tie tin cans to the horses’ tails, which made them panic and run into trees, and once she remembers him tying a cat to a drill with centrifugal weights and spinning it round until its, head split open.

Juanita’s Grimm’s fairy-tale childhood came to an end when she ran away after the worst of the many beatings meted out by her father. One day at Nyeri she received a
letter from a girlfriend. June demanded to read it, presuming it to be from a male suitor—and Juanita threw it on to the fire, unopened. She overheard her parents devising her punishment: she was to be beaten with a “kiboko” until she stopped screaming. She said she didn’t know how long the beating lasted, because her efforts were concentrated on depriving her father of the pleasure of hearing her cry.