White Mischief (40 page)

After this Juanita got on her pony and rode to Nyeri police station. “It was a painful ride,” she said. “I showed them the weals and asked them to put it in the occurrence book. Then I went to live with my uncle.”

Juanita then told Connolly that she didn’t want anything she said to be used against Broughton. She had been very fond of him because of their shared love of horses, and his kindness to her in those first few months that he was in Kenya.

She told Connolly that on the morning of the murder she and Miss Rutt were driven to Karen. Broughton took her to the stables to look at the horses and they passed the bonfire, where Juanita saw the pair of gym shoes lying in the embers.

After lunch June, Juanita, Miss Rutt and Diana drove up to Nyeri. Broughton turned up the next afternoon when Juanita was alone in the house. Broughton seemed to think that she knew that he had done the murder. He told her that the police had followed him all the way from Nairobi, and warned her not to be afraid if they came to the house. He was in a very gloomy mood, but she felt later that he was suddenly determined to fight.

Nine years after her conversation with Connolly, Juanita and I were sitting on the second-storey veranda of the Mombasa Club alongside Fort Jesus, high above the palms and the brilliant blue of the Indian Ocean, eating parrot fish and quails. When I first saw Juanita, sitting in a chair waiting for me, I cast her as “tidy-minded” and slightly stern. She began talking about the need for discipline in the world; the problem of too much procreation; Britain
going down the drain. But my impression changed as we talked. I could see what it was in her that had attracted Connolly and why she was so popular in her own town. We were frequently interrupted by other lunchers, mostly shipping people and harbour officials. Her face was strong and handsome, her figure athletic. To my surprise and in contrast to her otherwise strictly conservative appearance, I noticed that she wore a fine gold chain around her right ankle. I would have judged her forty, although she was almost fifty-five.

She took me to her house, a modern, airy building, painted white inside and out, with large glass windows looking on the outer entrance of Mombasa harbour. All afternoon tankers and freighters drifted past the point, a few hundred yards beyond the garden. For Juanita, an expert on shipping, the setting is perfect. Much of the year she travels on long voyages with her friend, a ship’s captain, and she is at her happiest at sea, she told me, however long the voyage.

Near Juanita’s front door, displayed on a pedestal, was a seed-pod the size of a large melon, dark and polished, an exact image of the vulva, as if sculpted from mahogany. So uncanny was this natural similarity that even the pubic hairs were minutely represented on its surface. Against the wall of the veranda, a few steps away, there stood a full-size ‘Ylang-’Ylang, the most exotic and sweet-smelling tree on earth—the only true base of the truest scent. Juanita had planted it some years ago and it had grown to its full size. Her bedroom, which I glimpsed for a second, had only the bare minimum of décor: a narrow bed covered with a counterpane of an institutional design—small flowers on bright white. It was made up flawlessly, as if awaiting inspection.

As we talked on the veranda, exchanging the binoculars and looking out to sea, Juanita noticed two overdressed prostitutes standing on the cliff. “Shall I rush you down there?” she asked.

I asked her what had happened to her after she had
left home. She replied that she never again saw June, whom she felt was indifferent to her, but she bumped into Carberry one day in the Norfolk Hotel, when she was in the army during the war, aged eighteen. “He said, about the beating, ‘Do you think I was to blame for that?’ I said, ‘I’ve never thought about it.’ He said, ‘Do you think I was cruel to you as a child?’ I said, ‘Cruelty is a difficult word to define.’ He said, i think I was very generous to you since you weren’t my child.’ Then he told me that he was not my father; that my father was Maxwell Trench [Carberry’s partner]. I said, ‘I don’t give a damn whose child I was. You never acted as a parent towards me.’” Since then Dan Trench and Juanita have embraced each other as brother and sister.

Carberry disinherited her when she went to live with her uncle, Gerald Anderson. So Juanita joined the army when she was seventeen and has supported herself ever since.

“June felt nothing when I left. I felt sorry for her in her loneliness. I hated all that drinking but I felt sorry for her. When she lost her looks, all her friends abandoned her. When I heard she was ill in Johannesburg I wrote and offered to come and see her, but I got no reply.” Towards the end, June had spent her days picking up stray dogs in her Rolls-Royce, and she left what remained of her husband’s fortune to a dogs’ home.

I told Juanita about my involvement with the mystery. I was perplexed, I said, that Connolly had headed his notes of his interview with her, “The End of the Trail.” Juanita laughed at that. Then she said quickly, “There is no mystery. He did it. I can tell you that now. He told me himself the following day. He was desperate. They’d been laughing at him. He wanted to unburden himself, poor man. He came up late in the afternoon to Nyeri. Everyone had gone to Nanyuki and I was the only person there. I think that finding nobody there almost broke him.

“We walked down to the stables,” said Juanita, “and
I showed him my horse. He told me then that he had shot Erroll. We walked for a bit. We had tennis courts and I remember going down to the courts when he showed me his hand. I wasn’t aware until then that he was disabled. He told me not to be frightened when the police came, and he told me about the gun, which he said he had thrown into the Thika falls. He thought the police had followed him and had seen him stop there.”

When Broughton filled in her book of likes and dislikes, she remembers he wrote “loneliness” first, and that his hand shook badly on the “A” of “All animals.”

Diana and June returned, said Juanita, and Diana accused Broughton hysterically and loudly of the murder. She had brought with her Erroll’s forage cap and had filled the bedroom with his photographs.

The moment had a great emotional impact on Juanita, and she had asked Broughton no questions. “I felt very protective towards him after that,” she said. “The key to it was loneliness. He had been provoked to do it. There was nothing premeditated about it. They had gone too far. That last dinner was too much and brought home to him that he had really lost. And the fact is that he was in love with Diana.”

Petal Allen, an exact contemporary of Juanita who had been close to the Carberry family, told me in 1980 that she always remembered one strange thing about the Erroll murder, when she too was fifteen years old. Her friend Juanita suddenly stopped talking, and shut up like a clam. Petal, who knew nothing of my conversation with Juanita, continued, “She was going through the stage of loving her palamino pony more than life itself.” Could Juanita have known anything? I asked. “Well, she had heard the grown-ups talking,” Petal said, “and she knew what was going on behind the scenes.”

As the time came for the trial, Broughton left Juanita alone. “I think he knew that he had confided in me and trusted me that I would never let him down,” she said.

Juanita’s evidence would have been enough to convict Broughton, but to the police she assumed naivety. She said she remembered nothing of the bonfire. (She believes now that Broughton may have removed the gym shoes after she had noticed them.) She believes, too, that Diana knew Broughton had done it, but relented and came round to defend him.

“I can remember having it drilled into me by the grown-ups,” said Juanita (“drilling” was the word Wilks, too, had used), “that a man’s life hung on it and that every time I spoke to the police I mustn’t say anything that might hurt him.”

On the day of the murder Juanita had ridden with June and Diana to van Schouten’s, the hairdressers in Nairobi. She had noticed that the armstraps were in place inside the car, but it was an old car, she said, and they may have been poorly attached. Juanita thought that Broughton had hidden in the car, shot Erroll from behind, and held on to the straps until the impact of the car with the murram pit wrenched them off.

Juanita’s protectiveness towards Broughton had prevented her from telling anyone his secret until this moment, thirty-seven years after his death. She had withheld Broughton’s confession from Connolly in 1971 although she had come within a fraction of disclosing it, moving, as it were, from the spirit towards the letter of her secret agreement. How deeply she had buried it in her adolescent psyche—a frightening piece of information entrusted to her by the only adult who had taken her side in the midst of a host of hard-drinking grown-ups, who were constantly pushing her aside and sending her away.

The last I saw of Juanita in Mombasa was in a back street of the town where we had gone, at my request, to find a purveyor of
khat
—the bitter-tasting bark of a young tree shoot widely used on the coast as a stimulant against the enfeebling heat; useful, too, for long hours at the wheel. The sign of the
khat
seller is a small sheaf of shredded
banana leaves hung over the door, like a talisman. Having instructed me in the correct chewing method, she presented me with a small bound sheaf of the bark as a parting gift.

The simplicity of her revelation, the certainty of her description, brought on a sudden feeling of exhaustion, as if the obsession had been short-circuited, and the structure of the mystery had collapsed; a kind of post-partum depression before I had even begun to write. I also felt a rush of euphoria at having come as close as I ever thought I would to the end of the trail.

What Juanita had to say was utterly convincing on many levels: so many strands of the story fitted with her short description of the afternoon with Broughton at Nyeri. Nothing is added for embellishment, and no detail is claimed that she can’t have heard from Broughton. Her fifteen-year-old impressions of Broughton’s state of mind, the loneliness that was about to break him, his horror of being laughed at, the provocations that he had found unbearable, have an added ring of truth—they are separately echoed by others who knew Broughton well at the time, particularly, almost word for word, by the intuitive Paula Long. As Connolly put it:

Such a man can indeed act a part all his life, playing the heavy swell, the grand seigneur, that his money and position have cast him for, yet perpetually rankling from a sense of injury. For a vain man, what insults he had to put up with from the bright young things in this new country. If, indeed, he was besotted with love and jealousy, and treated with arrogant thoughtlessness to boot—“The boy’s being terribly difficult,” “What are you going to do about it?”; “Try and eat something”—how much could he stand?

“He craved sympathy and affection,” said his friend, the Earl of Antrim. Even the hostile Gwladys noticed after Erroll’s funeral, “I felt he would do anything not to be left alone”; the letters from Naivasha complained of “terrible loneliness.” And there is the melancholy entry in
Juanita’s guest-book. He might well have had a phobia about being abandoned. His mother had died when he was two, his father was a distant enemy, his first wife had deserted him. Now his new wife, the young woman with whom he was obsessed, had left him, publicly humiliating him at the same time. Broughton’s pride had prevented him from showing how much he cared about losing Diana. He had spent a lifetime hiding his feelings; jealous scenes, fits of rage and absolute demands would have demeaned him and made him look ridiculous. And there was the laughter—while June and Diana lay in bed together, and during the negotiations in the garden when Erroll went inside to fix a cocktail.

Broughton’s delicate sense of vanity, as he himself described it, could not stand such treatment. Perhaps his later “confessions” were simply attempts to shore up this wounded vanity, to restore his reputation in the London clubs, where they roared with laughter at his marriage to the blonde which lasted only two months. If so, was he badly disturbed, beginning to imagine the act of murder? Or, if he
had
killed Lord Erroll, were the confessions a way of drawing attention to his fine performance in the witness box, which could only be fully appreciated if the truth were known?

More than anything, it is Broughton’s outward show of passivity in the face of such provocation that gives him away. His behaviour, apparently so complaisant, was in truth sadistic. It is as if he imagined that the more accommodating he appeared to be, the more uneasy the lovers might become. By being “so terribly nice about it” he was striking at the heart of their romance, dissipating the excitement of complicity and deceit; by removing all obstacles to their passion he was planting some doubt of its strength in their minds. Attention would be turned away from their drama and towards Broughton’s “sweetness.” Thus Erroll, used to confronting irate husbands, meekly agreed to bring Diana back home by 3 a.m. on the very
night that Broughton had officially handed her over to her lover. This was also meant to humiliate Diana: the couple were now being treated as wayward children.

In the trial Broughton’s only explanation for his behaviour was that he was honouring the marriage pact, and it doesn’t ring true. He is absurdly literal on the subject:

And here, surely, he is going too far?:

Dickinson described Broughton as “jealous and possessive as hell but a bit too damned proud.” In view of this, his extreme passivity suggests an anger so fierce that he must at all costs keep it locked up. even to the point where after the murder, and subsequently in jail, and then in court, he proved the exception to Morris’s dictum, quoted in his memoirs: