by Barbara Vine
Durham was forty-six years old and had been twice married. His first wife, Honoria Filby, died when she was only twenty-seven, leaving him with a son Charles, always called Charlie, and a daughter, Honoria Mary, known as May. Durham married again seven years later in 1917 the daughter of a doctor with a prosperous practice in Norwich. Her name was Irene McAllister and by 1920 she had borne him three children, Edward, Julius and Sonia. This last was something of a vogue name in the late teens and early twenties of the century, due not to Russian influence, the Russian Revolution having taken place in 1917, but to a novel by Stephen McKenna with a heroine and title of that name, published the same year. The little girl, however, was always called Sunny, partly due to her particularly sweet nature and partly to her brother Edward's having made this diminutive of Sonia.
The household, therefore, at the time of the murder was a large one, consisting of Mr and Mrs Durham, Charlie, May, Edward, Julius and Sunny, with their servants, a butler called Thomas Chapman, Mrs Deedes, the housekeeper, Mrs Brown, the cook, two housemaids, a parlourmaid, a kitchenmaid, Sarah Keringle, the children's nurse, and the under-nurse, Bessie Stonebridge. Three gardeners were also employed, John Williams, the head gardener, Thomas Pritchard and Arthur Bailey. The land adjoining Theiston Hall was extensive and included thirty acres of woodland. Pheasants and partridges were preserved and Durham employed a gamekeeper, Robert Jephson, who occupied a cottage on the property next door to that in which John Williams, the head gardener, lived. In the month of May of 1922, the only member of this household not at home was Charlie, he being up at Oxford in his second year at Worcester College. Everyone else was present and the usual number was, in fact, augmented by the presence of guests in Jephson's cottage, for his sister, her husband and their two children were staying with him and his wife as they usually did at this time of the year. This visit served the double purpose of providing them with a holiday and securing help to Jephson in the rather finicking and time-consuming task of collecting the fallen eggs of gamebirds and setting them under hens or already sitting pheasants. The pheasant was a sacrosanct bird in those parts, precious at every phase of its life cycle, and there had been an unpleasant incident some years before when Jephson's predecessor, an elderly man called Brimley, had shot May Durham's pet cat when he caught it taking and decapitating pheasant chicks. Charles Durham had not exactly dismissed the man but had retired him on a small pension, depriving him of the cottage he had lived in for forty years.
May Durham was an extremely good-looking girl of seventeen years and nine months, with fine dark eyes and black hair so long she could sit on it but which she was considering having bobbed in the current fashion. She had been educated at home, her governess having left the previous Christmas, and Charles Durham had intended sending her to finishing school in France but that spring May had met the young Norwich architect, Thierry Watkin. He had asked her to marry him but Durham refused to sanction an official engagement until they had known each other longer. May, therefore, was living at home with little to do but go calling with her stepmother, arrange flowers, play tennis. She seems to have had no hobbies or intellectual interests of any kind and although considered an accomplished pianist never lifted the lid of the piano after her governess left. Her relationship with her stepmother was an uneasy one, though she seemed to have got over the intense, fierce resentment she had shown when her father first re-married. Of her small half-brothers she was fond, playing with them, taking them out and lavishing a good deal of attention on them, so that family friends smiled their approval at the projected marriage with Watkin, seeing May as the maternal type.
Sunny, however, she is said to have disliked. It is hard to imagine a beautiful, healthy, comfortably situated girl of seventeen disliking her two-year-old half-sister, especially as the child was known for her easy disposition and ‘sunny’ temperament. On the other hand, two things about Sunny might, if we are to see May as paranoid, or a near-psychopath, have inspired a pathological dislike in her. She bore an extraordinarily close resemblance to her mother, Mrs Irene Durham, and she was adored by her father to the extent perhaps of displacing May in his affections. Georgina Hallam-Saul, the only writer to have dealt at any length with the Kirby Theiston case, put forward a curious postulation. This is that in the early part of the twentieth century, more specifically from 1910 till about 1940, there was a definite cult of aligning blondeness with beauty, so that a dark-haired woman was considered less well-favoured than a fair one, often irrespective of other claims to beauty such as feature, figure or eye colour. Now May Durham, as has been said, was dark-haired and with very dark colouring, olive skin, brown eyes. She favoured her mother. Charles Durham inclined to fairness, his second wife was a very fair, pale-skinned blonde and their daughter Sunny had golden hair and blue eyes. Miss Hallam-Saul suggests this as a cause of envy and resentment on May's part of her half-sister but Miss Hallam-Saul, of course, is committed to her theory of May as perpetrator.
It seems clear that May seldom chose to be accompanied by the little girl when out in the garden or the grounds while the little boys were always acceptable company on a walk or a visit to the various pet animals the Durham family kept – a pony, the sheepdog who had his kennel out in the stable yard, the guinea fowls in their run, the Old English rabbits. However, on this particular Tuesday morning in May 1922, when May Durham set off with Edward and Julius to show them for the first time the kittens to which her cat (successor to the one shot by Brimley) had given birth a week before, she also took Sunny. This was the second brood of kittens the cat had produced and, like the first time, she had chosen to have them, not in the lying-in quarters prepared for her by May Durham in May's own bedroom, but in the hollowed-out trunk of an oak tree.
What happened during that visit no one knows. Now no one will ever know. May's account was simply that she lost Sunny. The cat, though gentle with its owner, scratched Edward when he touched it and for a few minutes all May's attention was given to him, comforting him and wiping away the blood with her handkerchief. The tree where the cat's litter was was on the edge of the woods, not too far from the house but separated from it by the stable block and paddock. According to May, she believed Sunny to be sitting on a log next to Julius, but when she turned round, Julius was still there and Sunny had disappeared.
Julius Durham, now sixty-six years old, remembers nothing of that day. He was only three. His brother, Edward, eighteen months his senior, recalls details of that morning, though he admits that much of what he ‘remembers’ may be derived from what he was later told.
‘May's cat scratched me on the hand. I suppose it was the first real pain I had ever felt. I don't remember blood, only May hugging me and telling me to be brave. Of course I was bawling and screaming. May tied her handkerchief round my hand and then I think we all started looking for Sunny but, as you know, we couldn't find her.’
May seems not to have been too worried. She thought the child had gone back to the house on her own, rather a curious conclusion for her to have come to considering Sunny was only just two and seldom walked any distance without being carried. And when she got back to the house with the boys, she made no inquiries about Sunny. The reason she gave the police for not doing so was that, in the distance, in the lane which linked the stable yard with that part of the grounds where the gardener's and gamekeeper's cottages were, she saw Bessie Stonebridge, the under-nurse, talking to a woman and with them was a small girl she took for Sunny. In fact, this child was not a girl but a boy, nephew of the gamekeeper, and the woman was his mother. May Durham was short-sighted and it was vanity that stopped her wearing glasses.
It was therefore more than an hour later that Sunny was missed. The Durhams were giving a tennis party that afternoon and the young people of the neighbourhood were invited to play and their parents to watch. Pritchard had freshly marked out the court and May was with him checking the height of the net (one tennis racquet's vertical height plus the measurement of the head held horizontally)
when the nurse Sarah Keringle came to her to say it was time for Miss Sunny's luncheon. May, aghast, admitted she thought the child was with Bessie but Bessie, for the past half-hour, had been in the nursery with the two little boys.
A search for Sunny was mounted, the searchers initially being Charles Durham, John Williams and Arthur Bailey. They were later joined by Mrs Durham and May. The first guest to arrive for the party – no one at Theiston Hall except Edward and Julius had had any lunch – was Thierry Watkin, and he too joined in the search. Sunny, however, could not be found and Charles Durham phoned the local police. To Thierry Watkin fell the unenviable task of turning away the party guests as they came.
The police arrived promptly enough, a village constable and later a sergeant from Norwich. They set about interviewing everyone who might have seen Sunny, beginning with the indoor and outdoor servants at Theiston Hall and proceeding to Theiston Kirby village. No one admitted to having seen her since eleven that morning. The occupants of Theiston Hall were obliged to go to bed that night without news of Sunny's whereabouts.
Next morning the child's body was found by Jephson's dog no more than fifty yards from the log where she had been sitting next to her brother. The body was in a shallow grave made by scooping up the leaf mould, a task that could easily have been done with the bare hands. Her throat had been cut.
There was no doubt it was murder. The mode of death put accident out of the question. Norfolk CID came and questioned May. Sarah Keringle had told them that when Miss May came for the children she had been wearing a blue print cotton frock but later, when checking the height of the tennis net, had changed it for a linen skirt and black and white jumper. Why, the police asked, had she changed her dress before checking the net, why not after luncheon and before the party? May said there had been blood on the blue dress from Edward's scratched hand. It was then that the police took May to Norwich to the police station.
She spent one night there and was released next day. Chief Inspector John Finch had satisfied himself by then that Edward had been scratched by May's cat and that Sunny's killer would not have got a few spots of blood on his or her clothes but would have been liberally splashed with it. He and his men next turned their attention to the village and the various men living there known to be less respectable than their neighbours – one, for instance, who had spent a night in jail on a drunk and disorderly charge; another who was a known poacher. Needless to say, there was no one in Kirby Theiston who had ever remotely been suspected of child molestation, let alone the brutal murder of a child.
It was at this late stage that they finally came to question those relatives of Jephson who were guests in his cottage. An extraordinary aspect of the Kirby Theiston murder was that although Finch was told on the day of the discovery of Sunny's body that Jephson had his sister, his brother-in-law and his two-and-a-half-year-old nephew staying with him, he showed no interest in them and made no attempt to talk to them until five days after Sunny disappeared. When he did come to question them their visit was over and they were about to return to their own home at Sindon Road in Essex.
Robert Jephson's sister was named Adele and her husband was Albert March.
Two years before, the Marches had also lost a child, also a girl, also two years old – their daughter, Kathleen. This fact, it seems, was unknown to Chief Inspector Finch and his questions did not elicit it. Miss Hallam-Saul, in her examination of the Kirby Theiston case, does not mention it. Her mention of the March family is confined to two paragraphs in the chapter on the characters and antecedents of the outdoor servants at Theiston Hall.
In his collection of murder case histories, Murder in East Anglia, James Moore-Whyte gives pride of place to the Kirby Theiston mystery but he does not refer to the Marches beyond this slight reference in the following paragraph:
Chief Inspector Finch asked permission of Mrs Jephson, the gamekeeper's wife, to search the cottage. The hunt was on for bloodstained clothing and the knife which was the murder weapon. Mrs Jephson told Finch he could search all he liked as she and her husband would not be there for an hour or two. They were going to Norwich with her brother and sister-in-law who had been staying with them, to see them off at the station.
What questions, then, did French ask Albert and Adele March? Only, apparently, if they had ever seen the child Sunny and if they had ever seen anyone suspicious hanging about the grounds. To both they replied in the negative, left the house and were never questioned again.
Sunny Durham's killer was never found. Irene Durham believed her stepdaughter responsible, citing May's uncontrollable jealousy as motive. Herself on the verge of a mental breakdown – she had been pregnant when Sunny was killed and miscarried a week later – Irene struck May in the face when the girl tried to offer her sympathy and told her husband she and May could no longer continue to live under the same roof. There had been no positive engagement with Thierry Watkin, though something more than an understanding, but Watkin did not renew his proposals. He called only once after the day of the tennis party and shortly afterwards left the neighbourhood. Gradually it became obvious that the village believed May had killed her half-sister and had never been brought to trial only through lack of proof. One day she was stoned by a group of boys in the village and had stitches inserted in her forehead.
Did her father think her guilty? Instead of a finishing school in France, May was sent to a sanatorium near Brunnen in Switzerland, her health, it was suggested, having given way under the strain. Prior to this there had been no hint of May being phthisic, but it was of tuberculosis she died five years later, having passed the previous four in Melbourne in the company of her father's sister, Miss Mary Durham. Or did the Durham family somehow manage to hush up the fact that May, in fact, committed suicide?
Charles Durham died in 1939, his second wife, Irene, in 1962, his son, Charlie, five years after his stepmother. The son Irene gave birth to in 1925, christened Colin Jonathan, was killed climbing in the Himalayas in 1964. Only Edward and Julius Durham survive of the Durham family of Theiston Hall. The house is now a conference centre. John Williams, the head gardener, died in 1932; Thomas Pritchard in 1942; Arthur Bailey in 1946, and Sarah Keringle in 1952. Bessie Stonebridge married, became the mother of four children of her own and now, as Mrs Dryburgh, aged eighty-one, lives with her married daughter in Aberdeen. Of the other indoor servants, only the kitchenmaid, Margaret Otter, survives. At eighty, a single woman, she still lives in the neighbourhood of Norwich. Robert and Kitty Jephson, a childless couple, died within months of each other in 1970. Adele March died at the age of ninety a month before this was written, having survived her first husband, Albert, by fifty-five years and her second husband, William Bacon, by sixteen.
Kathleen March was two when she disappeared. So was Sonia ‘Sunny’ Durham. Each was in the care of a young girl and each young girl thereafter carried a stigma through life, the stigma of a universal, whispered belief that she was a child-killer. But the common factor in these cases surely is Albert March, known to have crossed the bridge at Sindon Weir round about the time of his child's disappearance, known to have been at Theiston Hall at the time of the disappearance of Sunny Durham. In the ten years between 1920 and 1930 – from a year after March's marriage, that is, until the year of his death – no fewer than five female children between eighteen months and five years disappeared in the north-Essex/south-Suffolk area. March had received a head wound while in France in the war of 1914–18 and this had left him liable to crushing headaches of the migraine type. Had it also caused brain damage of another kind, so that while afflicted with this almost intolerable head pain he was driven to commit acts for which he was in no way personally responsible and which he forgot once the headache was past?
I laid down these sheets of manuscript as shocked and moved as Daniel Stewart would have had me but not for the reasons he would have expected. It is true that I took in the burden of what he was saying, that all the evidence now pointed to Albert March having been guilty
of Kathleen's murder and that therefore Vera must be exonerated, but I took it in with indifference; I had never thought Vera capable of killing a child.
What touched my feelings with a cold finger, what made me lay down the pages and find myself staring unseeing into the past, was the name Jonathan Durham. A Jonathan Durham had been Tony Pearmain's best man and had later married one of my fellow bridesmaids the way best men are supposed to but seldom do. Was it the same Jonathan Durham? It must be. I remember he was a climber and that he came from somewhere in Norfolk. And he would have been the right age. Here indeed was the stealthy convergence of human lots. I remember him well as I remember everything about that day, Eden's wedding day.
Sweet-pea colours we bridesmaids wore and I was the one in pale purple. The sugar-pink one was called Evelyn Something and it was she who later married Jonathan. Eden had refused to wear slipper satin which was the fashion and had a billowing dress made (she told Vera and me) out of twenty yards of white tulle. She spent the night before the wedding at Laurel Cottage and Vera was the first to see her dressed in this amazing confection with its tight bodice and sleeves and huge skirt. A girl who worked for a local hairdresser (and who lived with her parents in Inkerman Terrace next door to the house that had been the Marches') came at nine in the morning to do her hair first and then Vera's. My hair, being very long and straight, didn't need doing. The night before, it had been quite like old times, Francis sleeping in the room on the other side of the landing, Eden and I sharing her room, the beds still as far removed from each other as possible. When she opened one of the drawers in the dressing-table to hunt about for a pair of eyebrow tweezers, guilt got hold of me and I wondered if she had ever noticed my incursions into her privacy, if I had left a long, brown hair behind or the marks of none-too-clean twelve-year-old fingers. But it was soon apparent that she had discarded every cosmetic and perfume that dressing-table had contained. She had gone up the scale now and nothing but top-rank French toiletries would do for her. But her sophistication did not extend to the appointments of the room. Before she got into bed, she unhooked the Peter Pan photograph from the wall.