Authors: James Fox
Connolly finally met her, before we wrote our article. The unsuspecting hostess in question was clearly innocent of any disloyalty to her friend. Connolly recorded the encounter in his notebook:
1st meeting with—at dinner with Lady Hoare. 14 Selwood Terrace. July 23 (69).
Diana wore a simple summer dress, black and white flower pattern, close fitting, with 5 strand enormous pearl necklace and small diamond clip.
Medium height (not little), short blonde hair, big blue eyes, small aquiline nose. Mouth
not
turned down discontented. Voice
rather metallic, but not at all dead, vibrant with hint of gaity and laughter.
Not
a little woman. Must have been dazzling.
Reminds me of 1. Duchess of Windsor as entertainer and builder-upper of rather stupid elderly husband.
2. Diana Cooper twenty years ago.
3. Figures of the charm school of the 20s and 30s i.e. Doris Castlerosse, Lady Queensberry (Mrs. Follett). But not like her, devitalising.
The kind of woman one associates with Cannes, Scotland, Ascot, St. Moritz as they used to be but not with giving house parties or any particular purpose except pleasure—not at all Bohemian.
Also present the Walter Bells, he an ex-intell. officer (Kenya). Good dinner.
Topics
Her passion for Rome. Stays in the Hôtel de Ville. Top suite (air-conditioned). Likes queers but husband says he has “no time for ‘ginger beers’” as they were called in the army. She stood up for the “nice ones” who tell her if her hair style is correct, notice her clothes, etc.
Opinions
Can’t bear South Africa, nothing would induce her to live there. Loves Kenya, would rather stay there and never leave it than any other country. She has “lovely” farm at Lake Naivasha and house at Kilifi on Mombasa side. D. farms at Elmenteita, and she goes to the coast for her health in the winter. Likes Alan Bobbe’s grill [a Nairobi restaurant]. Didn’t drink
anything
.
Bought a Michonze painting for £600. Took a “little Gainsborough” to be cleaned—“a family thing” (DB?)—a portrait of a young girl (child) with blue collar, white dress.
Anti Wilson, pro Kenyatta. Lord D held forth on African politics with Bell all evening. Talk of Eton. She said to him, “I know you think it’s a very bad sign to have no lobes to your ears, but here’s someone else without them”—meaning me. She took off her pearl earrings and raised her hair to show her ears to me. He calls her “Buzzy.”
Essentially a charmer and manager of men—one could understand being crazy about her thirty years ago if one was the right
sort of man (for her). Faintly common or perhaps merely worldly. Diamonds and sapphires and pearls. They drove me to Victoria to catch my train, very friendly. The snake farm at Kilifi. I said the man looked like D. H. Lawrence on an off day. “A very off day.”
She had been down to the City, was told to “hold on to her blue chips.” Slump would go further. Thought of giving a farewell party at Aspinall’s—did not like cocktail parties—then her friends could gamble if they wanted to. Thought Kennedy business a tragedy. Lord D was very against War. Thought everyone should be taken to see
Oh What A Lovely War!
to know what it was about. All rather Sandy Wilson. She had not been to Jack Block’s house or seen his pictures. Mentioned Chester races. Flies Alitalia—has old boy friend in the company. Loved racing.
In 1979 I saw Diana Delamere on Nairobi racecourse once again, sitting in the Delamere box, a widow now, but looking a lot younger than when I saw her in 1966, and still dressed in Hardy Amies Royal. The husband of her current lady-in-waiting raised his trilby hat at every move she made—at her getting up, her walking down the staircase and crossing the enclosure towards the paddock, then at her return to the box to watch the race. The Delamere box is at the extreme north end of the members’ stand, and she sat in the corner in a red hat, directly opposite the winning post.
She lunched in the members’ restaurant with her entourage, including her stepson and heir to the Delamere estates, Hugh Cholmondeley, now Lord Delamere. When the loudspeaker was switched on, before the first race, a loud and prolonged scream—feedback—was piped into the dining room where we sat. I saw Diana mouthing with bridled irritation as the howl continued, “For
God’s
sake.”
Even though I expected a flat rejection, or worse, if ever I brought up the Erroll case in her presence, there was always a slender hope that one day in the right circumstances she might talk, however briefly, to a serious historian of the subject. That possibility had to be carefully
protected. It would have been convenient but in some ways dishonest for me to write that Diana refused to talk to me if my request had been made in an unsuitable setting.
The racecourse was not the place for it. She was too exposed there. One doesn’t after all lobby members of the Royal Family at Ascot. The telephone was no good, either. You could lose it all, for ever, in a few seconds. Our first contact had to be a face to face meeting. And it had to take place on the reporter’s most ancient battleground: the front doorstep. But approaching her in her own stronghold at Soysambu looked impossible from the road. There was a distant gate in the middle of the African plain, a sentry box and a steel barrier across the road, and from these the track disappeared across the bush and over the horizon. For an unwelcome reporter to announce himself on a field telephone from a remote sentry box would plainly have been absurd. Another eighteen months were to pass before Diana and I finally met.
22
ABDULLAH AND THE AFGHAN PRINCESS
Before travelling up-country I drove out of Nairobi to Karen on a still and hot afternoon, to look at the murder site again, in the hope that the terrain itself might reveal some clue to the events of that fatal morning. I knew the drive well from previous years: out of the Nairobi suburbs along a straight road that passed Nairobi racecourse and Jamhuri Park where I had once covered the annual Agricultural Show and, much impressed, watched Kenyatta declaiming and waving his fly whisk, leading the massed chants of “
Harambee
” (“Pull together”) in the days of “nation building” after independence.
The Karen and Ngong roads, at whose junction the Buick was found, are now surfaced with tarmac; this and St. Andrew’s Church, a wood and stone building which stands a few yards from the old murram pit, are the only visible changes in the immediate vicinity. When you look at the site, you are immediately struck by the sharpness of the turn the Buick made as it passed the junction and veered towards the murram pit. The first impression I had was that Erroll had swerved to the right to avoid an oncoming car on the wrong side. Yet it is also possible that after the right turn and the shots, Erroll slumped forward on to the wheel, and his foot left the clutch, causing the
car to swing into the grass in a tight curve. There was always that lack of any clear-cut evidence at the scene of the crime.
The land between the junction and the Broughtons’ old house is a large meadow used for cattle pasture, divided by the road that Erroll drove down and along which Broughton may have walked back. Struck by the distance between the house and the junction (2.4 miles is farther than it sounds), I was at first convinced that the murderer must have been waiting for Erroll at the junction, and that he must have been a hired assassin rather than a member of the Karen household. Of one fact there could be no doubt, at least—that if the murderer were Broughton or anyone else in the house, he or she took a lift with Erroll on the outward journey. What I saw put a great emphasis on Broughton’s ability to cover that distance at the speed required to meet June Carberry’s alibi. (Diana was overheard to say at the trial by Harragin’s secretary, “He’s not nearly such an old crock as he’s making out.”)
The Broughtons’ house now lay behind heavily constructed steel gates and it looked locked and empty. Its present owner was Kenyatta’s former son-in-law, Udi Gecaga, at one time a director of the English mining conglomerate, Lonhro. He told me that the driveway and the entrance to the house had since been switched from one side of the house to the other, otherwise nothing in the house had been altered.
I took off one afternoon from Wilson airport, heading north—in a small aeroplane you are airborne and climbing six or seven seconds after the brakes are released—and flew across the hilly, rich-looking plantations of the Kikuyu, then past Nyeri Hill, whose summit shot by just below the wing-tip. Its tree-covered cone is a milestone for low-flying aviators and marks almost exactly the border between the Kikuyu settlements and the great Masai cattle plains that reach from here nearly to Lake Rudolph. Flying low along this broad valley between Mount Kenya and the
Aberdare range, over the great expanse of the smooth greensward that sweeps in a long, gentle rise into the foothills of that mountain, must be one of the most exhilarating trips you could make in a small plane.
The pilot, David Allen, is a professional game warden; the other passenger was his wife, Petal, daughter of Sir Derek Erskine. We came down on the grass strip outside the garden of their house, which faces Mount Kenya and is a few miles from Soames’s old farm, near Bergeret. That evening we fished for trout on a wooded river under tall and un-nameable African trees, and were casting again soon after sunrise the following morning.
Some years earlier, on a hurried reporting trip I had made to Nairobi, Sir Derek Erskine had told me a story about Broughton and a horse of Erskine’s called Pantaloon—a story which had seemed significant and which I had always wanted to follow up. In the meantime Erskine had died. But the rest of his family, who had provided me with limitless hospitality on this trip, remembered it clearly. It transpired that Sir Derek had committed his memories to tape soon before he died, including those of Broughton and Pantaloon. That night his widow, Lady Erskine, offered to play me the recording.
Although Broughton had his own stable of horses, she told me. Pantaloon was a particularly fine-looking animal, always flattering to its rider, and on the morning before the murder Broughton, who had often told Erskine that he would like to buy the horse, asked to borrow it until the following Sunday. That day Broughton was alone in Nairobi, waiting for the result of the inquest. Diana and June Carberry had gone to Nyeri. Erskine described the Sunday afternoon when Broughton returned the horse, around 4 p.m. He was one of the few people who knew the real cause of Erroll’s death.
Jock Broughton rode up to our stables looking extremely weary on a very tired and weary looking Pantaloon. I was very shocked
to see this. Jock more or less tumbled off Pantaloon and staggered into our house. We asked him if he would like a cup of tea and he said, “No, I’ve been for a very long ride which started at half-past nine this morning. I’ve had nothing to eat and I would like some gin.” My wife brought him a bottle of gin and a tumbler and he drank off a tumbler just as if it had been water.
Then he said to me, “Have you heard anything about Joss?”
I said, “Well, nothing except that he is dead.”
“But what on earth happened?” said Jock. “Could it have been a heart attack?”
And I said, “Yes, most certainly, it could have been a heart attack.”
“But,” he said, “he was so well on Friday night, what could have brought on the heart attack?”
And I said, “That is quite easy to answer. It was caused by a bullet through the back of his neck.”
I watched Jock very carefully as I used these words, and from that moment on there were no doubts in my mind as to who had murdered Joss Erroll.
What makes this conversation all the more significant is a remark Broughton made the previous day, before the murder had been announced, to Kenneth Coates, a junior police officer. He told him, “I am public suspect number one now.”
Now, two years after that, a great friend of mine, Arthur Orchardson. who used to ride for me and was Kenya’s leading rifle shot, was riding out by the murrain pit when he came across what looked like a rusty weapon. He dismounted and picked it up and there was a pistol which he brought to me and showed it to me and immediately we decided that this had better be done away with and we buried it where it could never be found again.
At lunch with the Erskines two days later, I met a woman known as the Afghan Princess, a woman who seemed utterly English, who told me that she remembered Lord Erroll. She had been in this district all her life and her late husband had been A.D.C. to that same Duke
of Gloucester who had irritated Njonjo, the Attorney-General. Together they had lived out the Emergency, staying put on their remote farm after most of the whites had abandoned the country for the town. “He shot one,” said the Princess, referring respectively to her husband and a Mau Mau fighter, “at the bottom of the garden.”
When the Princess invited me to stay the night I packed up and went with her, although I had no idea how much she knew. She lived in the same district, near an outpost for retired settlers known locally as “Blood Pressure Ridge.” Her mother was from a ruling Afghan family and had married her father, an Englishman, in India. Thus the Princess was a true “Anglo-Indian,” although to speak to her she might have spent all her life in the southern counties of England. Down the drive came a pack of ten or twelve of the fiercest and loudest dogs imaginable. The Princess was a breeder of Rhodesian Ridgebacks, so-called because the hackles along their spines are permanently raised.
It was immediately clear that the Princess knew almost nothing about Erroll: her only quote which I thought worth recording was “Erroll was good at everything.” Nevertheless, she was extremely hospitable, although the Ridgebacks occupied all the seating space, and it seemed unwise to ask them to move. Only the Princess’s chair was empty, and I sat in it. Her daughter-in-law, who lived with her, said, “That is
her
chair. Just thought I’d let you know. Don’t suppose it matters for tea.”