White Mischief

by James Fox

  The sheer volume and detail of Connolly’s notes still surprise me each time I open the notebooks or examine the unpaid invoices, railway menus and errata slips on which he worked at the puzzles in his fluent, almost miniature handwriting. At one point he attacked the complete cast of characters in his exasperation: The notes illustrate the anguish Connolly felt at the intractability of the puzzle:

  What a Set!

  Shit E

  Crook DB

  Drunk JC

  Villain (sadist) J. Carberry

  ????? Soames

  Murderer Alice de Trafford (Husband in prison)

  Gig. Lizzie L.

  Drunk Portman

  Dotty Gwladys Del.

  Only nice people Pembroke, Paula Long

  Casualties

  Alice de Trafford

  suicide

  “Boy” Long

  drink

  Molly. Countess of Erroll

  drink and drugs

  Guy Repton

  drink

  June Carberry

  drink

  Broughton

  suicide

  Erroll

  murdered

  The earliest entries include extracts from Connolly’s diaries of 1967 and 1968, which already contained some valuable leads. On his trips to Nairobi he usually stayed with Jack Block, the urbane proprietor of Kenya’s best hotels, and his wife, Doria, at their house at Muthaiga. The Blocks were among the few people in Kenya who knew who Connolly was. Pam Scott, with whom he also stayed at Rongai, introduced him throughout his stay as “John O’Connor.” As a result Connolly sulked at her meals—he had also hurt his back—and Pam Scott became exasperated with his silence. “He was like a stuffed pillow propped up against a chair,” she told me later. “He might as well not have been there.” Sir Michael Blundell, leader of a white settlers’ delegation at the Lancaster House Conference on independence in 1960, was under the impression that Connolly was the Editor of The Times.

  With the Blocks Connolly met Lazarus Kaplan, known locally as “Kappie,” Broughton’s former solicitor, and a friend of Jack Block’s called Prince Windishgraetz. The latter told Connolly that Dr. Joseph Gregory, the G.P. who had given evidence in Broughton’s defence, had claimed that Broughton had confessed the murder to him while he was in jail, but that Broughton had decided to deny it vigorously as soon as he saw the court and realised that he might have a chance. Gregory had a remarkable memory for the idiosyncrasies of his patients; he was also known for his fanciful Irish imagination.

  There was an obvious flaw to the Gregory story, at least as Prince Windishgraetz had reported it: why would Broughton go to the great expense of hiring Morris, if he was prepared to plead guilty? But Windishgraetz had touched on other local beliefs which Connolly had recorded. It was thought at the time that Broughton had been very short of money; whatever was left was in trust, and he couldn’t touch it. According to Windishgraetz, before Broughton left England for Kenya, he had met a hard-up English officer and persuaded him for £1,000 to cut some family portraits from their frames and make off with them, for which Broughton claimed the insurance.

  The ruse was successful, and Broughton then suggested that the officer “steal” some family pearls, for which he would also claim the insurance. The officer at first refused. Broughton told him that the pearls would be left in the glove compartment of his car outside a restaurant, and he could please himself. The officer changed his mind, and again Broughton collected the insurance. Windishgraetz described Broughton to Connolly as a man who thought himself above the law; he was bored and now thought he could commit the perfect murder. Jack Block added to this by saying that Lee Harragin, the son of the former Attorney-General who prosecuted the case, had told him that Broughton had gone up to his father after the case and said, “Bad luck, old boy, you knew I did it, and I knew I did it, but you couldn’t prove it.”

  Block said that Broughton was acquitted because Scotland Yard, to whom the spent bullet found in the car had been sent, had said that it was not fired from one of Broughton’s registered guns, but later had wired to say that they had made a mistake. By then it was too late. Broughton had been acquitted.

  Block also told Connolly of a local rumour that pointed to Alice de Janzé as a suspect. A contemporary and neighbour of Alice, Mrs. Eileen Leslie-Melville, had agreed to look after Alice’s house while she went away for a few days, some months after the murder. In her absence her houseboy came to Mrs. Leslie Melville and produced a revolver which, he said, he had found by a bridge, under a pile of stones on Alice’s land. Mrs. Leslie Melville took the gun and said nothing. It lay around in her house for several years afterwards. Quentin Crewe had heard this story, too, from her son, Jock Leslie Melville, and had reported it in his column.

  Connolly met Kaplan, Broughton’s solicitor, on the day after these conversations. Kaplan immediately corrected two of the rumours: Broughton had indeed approached Harragin in the courtroom after the trial, but what he said to him had nothing to do with the case. Kaplan would not divulge what it was. He added that no bullet had been sent to Scotland Yard, but Churchill, the ballistics expert, was asked if a Colt could be “broken.” (Soames had said in evidence, and it was crucial for Broughton, “I think it was a gun that broke, but I am not sure”—describing the weapon that Broughton had used in the shooting practice on his farm. It was believed that in all Colts the cylinder swung out from the frame sideways.) Although the Colt company had sent a wire to say that all Colts had five grooves and a left-hand rifling in the barrel, this particular question had never been put to them. Churchill had replied by cable that there were such Colts which broke for re-loading, but the telegram was not produced in court. There was no proof of authorship and it was rejected as inadmissible.

  Connolly asked Kaplan if Broughton had done it. He replied, “The answer is X minus 1; anybody but Broughton.” He added that there had never been a shooting with less blood and that the murderer must have been an excellent shot. The killer, in his opinion, could have been a jilted girlfriend, or the husband of one, or a political assassin. The police, he said, had been extremely inefficient in gathering the evidence, particularly in their failure to examine the car for fingerprints.

  A poll taken in Kenya among the white population, either now or soon after the trial, would put Broughton as a suspect low down on the list. The most popular choice would be a jealous woman—Alice de Janzé (“the fastest gun in the Gare du Nord”); June Carberry, on the presumption that she, too, had been Erroll’s mistress; Gwladys Delamere; or Diana herself. After that the cognoscenti would cite Mrs. Wirewater (although she was in Cape Town at the time of the murder) or her husband, who may not have been in Cape Town, and who was aware of Erroll’s current affair with his wife. The letters we received from Kenya residents, past and present, after the article appeared, are one source for this contention, and it was both men and women who suspected a woman of the murder. Otherwise the evidence is based on some 150 separate conversations with Kenya residents or exiles.

  Broughton was usually discounted because all the evidence seemed to have been exposed at the trial, with nothing proved against him, and it was easier and more enjoyable to put up other suspects. Moreover, Broughton could be discounted on physical grounds. Yet the idea of a conspiracy has always been popular. Higher on the list than Broughton would be his hired accomplice, either a Somali, or another jealous husband, or a lover of Diana, committing the crime on Broughton’s behalf.

  Finally there was the question of a political assassin. This was first suggested by Morris in the trial in an attempt to show that there were others with a motive to kill Erroll. Erroll had turned against the fascist cause, and now apparently even had overall responsibility for interning Italian fascist sympathisers in the Colony; might he not have been the target for political revenge? Morris mentioned Count Rocco, a famous eccentric who lived in a huge Tuscan villa on Lake Naivasha, as a possible suspect. He had been placed under house arrest and shortly
before the trial his house had been surrounded by police armed with shotguns, on a tip that Rocco was planning to escape by hot air balloon. (He was later interned in South Africa.) Poppy replied in court that Erroll was not responsible for internment, and there the matter rested.

  Connolly then wrote to Diana (Lady) Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists, to ask if political assassination of renegades from the movement had ever been contemplated, or carried out. She replied from France,

  The political motive for the murder seems far-fetched to an almost insane degree doesn’t it. If I believed in political assassination, I can think of a world of candidates for my Charlotte Corday knife, & Lord E. is not one of them. But I don’t.

  An assassin who was not part of the Muthaiga Club inner circle would have had great difficulty in discovering Erroll’s movements that night. To have followed him by car on his various trips, driving at his habitual eighty miles per hour, would surely have attracted attention. It was a line of speculation we never thought worthy of serious investigation.

  Connolly left Nairobi in 1967 convinced, like Kaplan, that Broughton was innocent. And in his notebook two years later, on May 18th, 1969, when we were already well into our researches, he wrote, “His [Broughton’s] birthday is the same as mine. We Virgos are not men of blood. I don’t think he did it, and I don’t think he thought so either.” Much depended on a knowledge of Broughton’s character, of which we knew little at the outset, and he continued to be one of our suspects. But if he had committed the murder, it was done with a skill that seemed beyond him; he would have been blessed with astonishing luck, too, and had somehow managed to leave not a clue behind.

  What had happened to him, we wondered, in the months after his acquittal? Had he maintained the same weary composure, the confident air of innocence that had been the hallmark of his extraordinary performance in the witness box?

  Of all the strands of information that Connolly had picked up in Nairobi, the most intriguing was the emergence of the “English officer” mentioned by Prince Windishgraetz, the man who had apparently helped Broughton to carry out insurance frauds on his own possessions. Diana’s pearls had been stolen in Cannes in 1939, from the glove compartment of a car outside a restaurant, and in the same year Broughton’s pictures were taken from Doddington. Broughton was in England at the time. But that Windishgraetz should know about either of these events was at first a mystery.

  We discovered from a British newspaper report that both Scotland Yard and an insurance company had made some enquiries in Nairobi, alerted, apparently, by the frequent mention of pearl necklaces in the trial. If they suspected any connection with the pearls that Diana had lost in Cannes, they drew a blank.

  Two sets of pearls had been mentioned in the trial. The first was the necklace that Erroll had given Diana, and which Broughton noticed her wearing as she lay in bed with Mrs. Carberry on the morning of January 18th. After Erroll’s death a lawyer acting for the Erroll estate insisted on their return. Diana gave up this precious gift from her lover very reluctantly. She felt the Erroll estate had no right to claim them, particularly since Erroll had inherited them from his last Countess, Molly, and passed them on to Diana.

  The other set of pearls, according to Broughton, had been bought in equal shares, in London, by Diana and himself. They were mentioned in the trial because, for some reason, Broughton had often brought up the subject of who should buy out the pearls from whom at the moments of greatest tension between them, notably at 3:30 a.m. on the night when Diana had been out alone with Erroll. Broughton would always turn the discussion into an argument. This had puzzled Harragin, the prosecutor, and he had used these discussions about pearls merely to demonstrate that Broughton was lying about his true feelings. A discussion about jewellery seemed to Harragin to be a mild and trivial topic compared with the anguish of losing one’s wife.

  Yet there was nothing trivial about a string of pearls, least of all to Diana. Pearls were the very symbol of her elevation, the inalienable proof of success that transformed not only the neck but the woman herself from a Lenare beauty into a baroness or a countess. She was only the part owner of this string of pearls. Broughton testified in the trial that he had offered her the choice: buy him out or give them back. Was this an attempt feeble though it seemed, to persuade Diana to change her mind about Erroll? Was there some connection between these harsh and, for Diana, difficult discussions and the other Nairobi rumour—for which there was, admittedly, no evidence at this point—that Broughton had rescinded on the marriage pact and the promise of £5,000 a year in order to put pressure on Erroll to give Diana up, and that Erroll’s response had been to panic, telling Diana that the affair was over and that for her own good she should return to her husband? In this scenario, Diana might with some justification have turned on Erroll—the first man she had ever loved—with a truly vicious fury.

  Early on in our quest, rumour and hearsay confused our ability to separate the two strands of pearls. But as a subject, the pearls acquired a magic fascination for Connolly as a key to the mystery. Was it not conceivable that Broughton’s English officer, if he was in Nairobi at the time, might have been an accomplice to the murder as well? We had our suspicions about who this might have been, although so far we had nothing to go on but rumour.

  In the meantime Connolly studied the whereabouts of each of the main characters, by day and by hour where possible, from the moment the Broughtons’ aeroplane touched down in Nairobi on November 12th, 1940. He made countless lists, charts and timetables, particularly of the fatal hours from the end of the dinner party on January 23rd to the early hours of the morning, when June Carberry reported Broughton’s second visit to her door. June’s times were suspect and seemed to be based on either guesswork or deception. Connolly also seized on the fact that there was at least one hour unaccounted for in the movements of Broughton and June. Nobody had seen them between 10:30, soon after the dinner, when Broughton said something to Dickie Pembroke about a game of bezique, and close to midnight when Jacko Heath invited them both to a supper party in the dining room. June claimed that between these times they were both sitting in the most public part of the Club, near the bar, drinking brandy. Captain “Long John” Llewellin, one of the witnesses who over heard Broughton’s complaining remarks about Diana, placed this conversation at around midnight.

  It was 12:30 by the time Gerald Portman finally persuaded them to join the supper party, and according to June they didn’t leave the Club for another hour after that. Perhaps the missing hour was of no interest to the police, and yet after the dinner party, and Erroll’s departure with Diana, Broughton and June Carberry would certainly have been the focus of gossip and speculation. Surely one of the many witnesses would have mentioned seeing the couple drinking together. For ourselves the discovery was of no immediate significance and we filed it away. But was it June and not Broughton who needed an alibi? Connolly noted, “June’s alibi depends on Broughton’s visits as much as his does, and according to him, he never made them.” If she were not to be believed, if she herself had done the deed or been an accomplice to it or was covering up for someone else, the only reliable times that night would come from Llewellin, who confirmed that the couple left the Muthaiga Club at about 1:30; Waiweru, Erroll’s houseboy, who said that Erroll and Diana left his house at Muthaiga around 2 a.m.; and the milk boys, who found the car at between 2:50 and 3 a.m.

  June and Broughton were driven back from the Muthaiga Club by a chauffeur, either his own or June Carberry’s. Broughton’s driver was never called among the many African witnesses, and there were rumours that he had disappeared the following day. Only Wilks could supply the crucial evidence. She had been up and about, making hot water bottles and providing quinine for June, until at least 3 a.m. on the murder night. But was she still alive, and where would one begin to look for her? We presumed that she had returned to South Africa after the case, perhaps to her home town of Durban. I sent a telex t
o the Sunday Times stringer in Durban, Humphrey Tyler, who worked for the Cape Argus, asking him to make what enquiries he could. Three weeks later he replied that he had drawn a blank. He had managed to trace a building Wilks may once have lived in along the Durban sea-front, but it had been demolished for redevelopment. Tyler agreed to continue his search, concentrating on that particular neighbourhood.

  Connolly would write out the times again and again, as if the very act of repetition would produce something new. Unable to sort out the puzzle in his conscious hours, his subconscious, stirred by great anxiety and frustration, took on the work at night, beaming up garbled but none the less detailed scenarios.

  His wife, Deirdre, was woken one night by terrible cries from her husband and found him wrestling with an invisible assailant. Once calmed down Connolly, with admirable professionalism, reached for his notebook and made the following entry:

  CC’s nightmare—approaching a small hut—time about 10—7 minutes to three. Inside is a victim/killer known to him whom he is going to liquidate—but it must be done before 3 a.m.—when he gets to the hut the victim seizes him, brandishing a knife. There has been a mistake—either the clock is slow or the time set was a trap. CC is just about to be killed when he screams for help, flailing about the bed. The scream was loud and like a dog or a wolf howling (corroborated by D). Not heard by Elizabeth Bowen [the writer, a guest in the house] in her room. Time: about 3:30 a.m.

  There were two recognisable ingredients in Connolly’s nightmare. He had made some notes just beforehand about a kiosk, briefly mentioned in the trial, which stood near the road somewhere between the house at Karen and the murder spot. He thought at one point that it might have sheltered a murderer lying in wait for Erroll. Three-thirty a.m. was also a highly significant time (as were the ten minutes before 3 a.m.—the estimated period within which Erroll’s death occurred). It was the moment when June claimed that Broughton had paid his last call on her, and it was the moment, too, when she said she heard Diana’s dog barking. Connolly became fixated on the barking of the dog and made a long entry in his notebook of the court evidence on the subject headed “Dog Talk.” Harragin had begun this part of his examination of June Carberry with the question, “Is there a dachshund in the house?”